Moving images, over the years, played a decisive role in shaping and reshaping the public discourses on political issues as well as articulating the dominant political narrative of the present and of the times past. Often, this complex process influences people’s understanding of different aspects in the socio-political realm. In a visual age, characterised by an abundance of moving and still images, politics and history are widely presented, consumed and negotiated through multiple visual forms. Even though the new forms of visual expressions in the digital age democratised the visual scape to a more significant extent, the flow of images is controlled and regulated by the historic bloc through its robust institutional network and other channels of power. One of the key aspects here is the politics of visibility and invisibility. Films are historically used as a medium of propaganda, legitimisation tool, and most importantly normalising a distorted view of history – all directly or indirectly related to the question of visibility and invisibility.
Jacques Ranciere conceptualises the idea of “distribution of the sensible” which he defines as, “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (Ranciere 2013). Films certainly influence distribution of the sensible. From a visual politics perspective, while engaging with moving images, the spectator’s inquiry into how the visual imagines history and how it conceals and legitimises a distorted historical narrative, backed by the interests of the dominant class, is significant in the subsequent discourse that follows critical viewing of films. Roland Bleiker in the context of “distribution of the sensible” looks at, “how in any given society and at any given time, there are boundaries between what can be seen and not, felt and not, thought and not, and, as a result, between what is politically possible and not” and how images “frame or reframe the political, either by entrenching existing configurations of seeing, sensing and thinking, or by challenging them” (Bleiker 2018). Films, particularly those directly confront mainstream historiography and defy the dominant political narratives, demand intellectual scrutiny in the broader context of visual histories. For full text see the following link
