Bibliographic record
Abstract
Locating “South Asian diasporic cinema as an interstitial cinema located between Hollywood and Bollywood” ( Desai 2004 , vii), this chapter situates Deepa Mehta’s film Videsh [ Heaven on Earth ] (2008) as “accented cinema”, that is, cinema defined by aesthetic response to an entire “performance of identity” (Naficy 2001, 282) that can be read both as authorial texts and “as sites for intertextual, cross-cultural, and translational struggles over meanings and identities” (Marks 2000, 7). Born in 1950 in Amritsar, a city on India’s border with Pakistan, and relocated to Canada after her marriage, Deepa Mehta is one of the few feminist filmmakers who provides filmic spaces in which women are not objectified and they can be heard and seen as individuals with agency. By “feminist” film, I mean a film enunciated from a woman’s point of view that not only represents how power and violence pervade sexual and familial relationships but also unveils the consciousness or self-reflexivity of women and displays a political counter-practice that deconstructs the narrative and visual pleasures personalized for the male spectator of mainstream cinema. Engaging with Luce Irigaray’s notions on cine-psychoanalytic investigation – as theoretical tools, this chapter analyses Mehta’s Heaven on Earth not only to understand the representation of on-screen female consciousness and the issues of abjection, sexuality, longing and desire, both as they are read and represented in cinema, but also to explore how cinema itself participates in the production of certain gendered understandings and enactments of religio-cultural traditions, social changes and transitions. This chapter also explores Mehta’s use of fantasy, which induces critical gaze and creates dialectical spectatorship, inviting the viewer to analytically engage with what they see, both in form and content. Since fantasy is a genre appropriate for subverting boundaries, whether the boundaries are geographical or generic, this chapter will explore the transgressive and subversive aspects of fantasy in Mehta’s Heaven on Earth in order to explicate that if the category of the real is not fixed, then all assumptions of truth are also unstable and can be challenged and subverted. Last but not least, this chapter examines how Deepa Mehta by way of imag(in)ing female subjectivity and addressing the spectator as female in her film transforms and/or innovates cinematic codes and conventions that display a critical awareness of the asymmetrical power relations between the sexes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".