Page 88 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

“More Sexpression Please!” 73

familial community (shomaj), with their mass audience “out there.” I will
show how collective moral claims on the female body to conform to a
particular aesthetics of propriety and piety translate into strategies of
comportment to remain out of touch with the mass audience. Second, I
will argue that the very aesthetic boundaries placed on the public avail-
ability of women also produce the figure of erotic appeal in Bangladeshi
cinema. From the material heterogeneity of cinema, producers cut and
paste a fantasmatic and desirable heroine on screen, composed of the
attributes of various female artists. In the intersection between technol-
ogy and the female body, fragmentation thus provides the technological
possibilities for the availability of the female to their audience as well as
sets its limits. Before elaborating these two points, I will first provide an
ethnographic account of Jenny and Shima’s work in the Bangladesh film
industry.

Shima and Jenny: Voice and Body in
the Bangladesh Film Industry

“Action!” cried the film director. His cameraman ran the noisy Arriflex 2C
camera. The assistant director beside him strained to make himself audible
over the violent purring of the dilapidated old Arriflex. “Eh, shut up!
There’s nothing you can do to me. I’ll show you what I can do to you!!” he
hollered at the two actors in the middle of the crammed set. The assistant
director read the dialogue from the pages of the script on his clipboard and
screamed the sentences at the actors in flat tones. The actors Sumit Hassan
and Jenny repeated the lines with elaborate facial expressions. Their bodies
were being recorded, not their voices. The clamor on set, emanating from
the actors’ lips, the assistant director’s screaming, the churning Arriflex,
the chatting lightmen, the heavy generator, the assorted enthused onlook-
ers, and the scribbling anthropologist pressed against the plywood walls of
the set, none of it was being recorded by any device except the human ear.
Only the celluloid in the Arriflex recorded the encounter between the two
lovers that was being performed by the Bangladeshi film stars Sumit
Hussain and Jenny.
Jenny was a Bangladeshi cinema actress of some renown. Unlike Sumit,
who had graced the Dhaka stage and who had only recently experienced a
decline in his acting career, forcing him to take on side roles in action
flicks, Jenny was at home on the sets of Bangladeshi B-quality movies. She
had risen to action movie star status on a wave of cheaply made action
movies that controversially incorporated short pornographic sequences.