Cognitive Film Theory (CFT) illuminates how cinematic techniques redistribute cognitive labor from literary interiority to viewer inference, emotional calibration, and cultural memory reconstruction in Tamil historical film adaptations. This article demonstrates how Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan: I and II (2022–2023) masterfully engineer cognitive–cultural remediation via schema disruption, restricted alignment, affective ellipsis, and trauma-inflected narrative fragmentation elevating Kalki Krishnamurthy’s epic into a dynamic participatory memory site for contemporary Tamil spectatorship. By integrating Bordwell’s cue-based comprehension, Smith’s alignment/allegiance framework, and Tan’s emotion templates with Erll’s remediation theory and Caruth’s trauma narratology, the analysis of four pivotal scenes unveils Ratnam’s formal strategies that powerfully cue viewer-driven meaning-making in Ponniyin Selvan scholarship. The study propels adaptation studies forward by operationalizing the cognitive–phenomenological dimension of historical cinema and reconfiguring regional Indian film analysis as a vibrant dialogue among mediated memory, embodied spectatorship, and cultural identity formation. These findings establish Ponniyin Selvan as a paragon of audiovisual media as “memory machines,” adeptly remediating collective historical consciousness through active viewer participation.
Theodar et al. (Fri,) studied this question.