Reading the Memories in Glenn D’cruz’s Film Vanitas (2022)

Authors

  • Shyamasri Maji

Abstract

Vanitas, a documentary film by Glenn D’Cruz, a Melbourne based Anglo-Indian, is a tribute to his late father Antonie Joseph ‘Anto’ D’Cruz. It falls into the corpus of Anglo-Indian works dealing with colonial nostalgia and postcolonial identity. One of the striking features of this film is its thematic focus on presenting a father-son narrative, wherein Glenn narrates his father Anto D’Cruz hardships and disillusionments as an Anglo-Indian immigrant in London in the 1960s and thereafter in Australia where he died in 1983. This film is an experimental cultural text that uses animation technology, old photographs and select objects of the dead father to present a memory narrative. This article examines their significance through a close reading of the film.

Keywords: colonial nostalgia, transgenerational memory, collective memory, hauntology, memorabilia, mourning

Author Biography

  • Shyamasri Maji

    Shyamasri Maji is an Assistant Professor in English at Durgapur Women’s College, affiliated to Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, in West Bengal, India. She received her PhD degree in English from the Department of English and Culture Studies, the University of Burdwan. Her doctoral thesis is titled Anxiety of Representation in Select Anglo-Indian Writers (2018). Her research articles in Anglo-Indian Studies have been published in international journals such as Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature, International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies and Economic & Political Weekly. She is the recipient of an Independent Research Fellowship 2018-2019 at Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata. Under this fellowship programme she completed a short-term project on Indian documentary films on the Anglo-Indian Community. She can be reached at [email protected]

Downloads

Published

2024-12-27