Escaping the DVD dispositif: John Abraham and the historical exhibition

Delving into the many aesthetic, political and production conditions that surround and occupy John Abraham’s radical epistolary film Amma Ariyan (1986), this article places the disappearances of the activists and figures, in and outside the screen, in the context of the film’s conspicuous absence from public parlance. As it argues, relying essentially on the idea of the collective and cinema-event, this film mostly escapes the individual mode of exhibition/cinematic experience and the latter’s dispositif . The cine-political implications of such choices and events are explored further through an array of literary, philosophical and cinematic references.