Explores the diverse aspects of Ashish Avikunthak's work, whose films are art as resistance.For more than 25 years, Indian filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak has been making self-financed films that have robustly resisted capital and market logic. Starting from his early 16mm short films Etcetera (1997) and Kalighat Fetish (1999) to longer feature length works that he has made in the past decade-Rati Chakrayuh (2013), The Kali of Emergency (2016), Vrindavani Vairagya (2017), and several more projects in various stages of production. His body of work now amounts to seven short films and seven feature length works.These essays rigorously interrogate, contextualize, theorize, and interpret Avikunthak's multi-decade sustained artistic output. The current global assertion of authoritarianism and one-dimensional interpretations of cultural history and practice provide a timely and essential historical moment in which to dialogue with Avikunthak's films because his cinema consciously contests totalizing historical and artistic narratives and constructs frameworks of existential uncertainty and fragmentation that force us to reflect on the increasing political, economic, social, and climate chaos that is infusing and shaping our early 21st century global ontology.

Critically engages with Indian experimental cinema, one of the few books to do so

IntroductionErin O'Donnell (East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA) and Sarunas Paunksnis (Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania)1. Circles of Thanatos is Ashish Avikunthak's Cinema: Can Dying be Death?Arka Chattopadhyay (IIT Gandhinagar, India)2. Suicide and the EroticBrinda Bose (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)3. Familiar Tongue, Unfamiliar Speech: On Ashish Avikunthak's 'Bengali' FilmsAnindya Sengupta (Jadavpur University, India)4. Discourse Against Time: The Barthesian Fragment in Ashish Avikunthak's Shadows FormlessAparna Frank (New York University, USA)5. Machine for the Gods: Avikunthak's Oeuvre and the Form of Cinematic UnitySwayam Bagaria (Johns Hopkins University, USA)6. Rituals of the Experimental in the Cinema of Ashish AvikunthakHrishikesh Ingle (The English and Foreign Languages University, India)7. Signification in Ashish Avikunthak's CinemaGopalan Mullik (Presidency University, India)8. Angénieux to Infinite: Geometric Optics to Tantra Prayoga in Avikunthak's Aural-OpticalAmrit Gangar (Independent Scholar)9. The Theatrical Image in Ashish Avikunthak's FilmsArnab Banerji (Loyola Marymount University, USA)10. Gallery Encounters: Film Form and Spectatorship in Films of Ashish AvikunthakArup Ratan Samajdar (University of Calcutta, India)11. Durée, Ordinary and the Affect in Ashish Avikunthak's FilmsBasab Mullik (Johns Hopkins University, USA)12. Ashish Avikunthak's Cinema of Dissent in an Authoritarian AgeErin O'Donnell (East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA)13. Outside the 'Epistemological' Fold: Decolonial Praxis of Ashish AvikunthakSarunas Paunksnis (Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania)14. An Interview with Ashish AvikunthakErin O'Donnell (East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA) and Sarunas Paunksnis (Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania)Index