Stark Electric Jesus, a 12 minute experimental short by Hyash Tanmoy and Mrigankasekhar Ganguly, is a feverish onslaught of images. The short is inspired by a poem of the same name, written by Malay Roy Choudhury, a Bengali poet who founded the 1960s era “hungryalist” movement, which was somewhat akin to the Beat poetry movement in the US. None of the poem’s text appears in the film, but the poem’s passionate language of suffering and disruption, in such lines as “my skin is in blazing furore” and “a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex,” suffuses the film’s imagery, directly inspiring pictures such as quivering spikes attached to the screaming skull of the bespectacled, martyred protagonist.
The film is also a response to India’s Section 377, the (recently overturned) colonialist era law which outlawed homosexual acts. In one shot, a figure holds a balance scale, weighing two pans of papier maché penises, apparently comparing the “good” desires to the “wrong” desires. The protagonist is shown unhappily attempting to endure a heterosexual encounter. Later on, lesbian and gay couples are seen copulating in a secret, underground chamber.
The film hurtles by as a seething sequence of fleeting images of erotic touch, decapitations of chickens, close up shots of crabs, and indigenous magicians, engaged in rites in which they cover themselves with paint, plaster and mud. The shots are all very short, around 2 seconds or less, creating the feeling of a Rimbaudesque hallucination in which fleeting yet lurid images crowd in on the brain. Some of the shots are accompanied by ambient sound but many are silent, giving a disorientating sense of overlapping, discontinuous levels of reality.
On closer examination, the sequences reveal an inner logic: a shot of fire is followed by a shot of a woman seen through the heat of the fire, a goddess figure lasciviously eating a phallic object, a man writing the word “sex,” a pulsing shot of a goddess figurine, a shot of the man having sex, a water well with a pumping motion, a crab shell ornament on the woman’s breast, a real crab, etc. The jarring disjunctions of the rapid cuts disguise the poetic, associative logic which runs through the film, linking together images of desire, guilt, and suffering. As the viewer’s eyeballs spin, the underlying themes operate on us subliminally.
The young protagonist’s glasses might be a symbol for his culturally inherited worldview, and at one point we look through his glasses to view a raucous, rowdy group of young women, smoking, singing and dancing together. Later, we see him without the glasses, looking like a Kali figure, covered with red balloon breasts which leak blood.
Like the Hungryalist poets, Tanmoy and Ganguly have constructed a film as a visceral outcry, a hallucinatory and overwhelming experience of turbulent suffering and redemption. What the film lacks in technical polish, it more than makes up for with the immediacy and disorientating power of its tumult. While the film doesn’t in any way downplay the suffering involved, it strikes a blow for the cause of liberation: sexual, personal, emotional, and artistic.
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