This paper examines the spectral nature of the genre of Malayalam soft-porn that emerged in the late 1980s but has now disappeared with rapid changes in the industry. I argue that the memory of soft-porn bleeds into the present, as if in an attempt to negotiate retroactively with the end of the celluloid era and to recoup the memory of the form that has been pronounced dead and gone by the end of 2000s. By examining the modes through which cinematic memory carries the charge of the immanent past into the contemporary moment both in terms of narrative strategies and the physical space of the cinema, I look at S.P. Theater in Trivandrum, the film Kanyaka Talkies and the installation Kuliyum Mattu Scenukalum by Priyaranjan Lal, all of which reflect the form of soft-porn as remnants of the past that haunt the present in significant ways. S.P. Theater, located in the outskirts of the city of Trivandrum, insistently maintained its status as a popular destination for soft-porn aficionados even after the form had fizzled out in the industry. On the other hand, the film Kanyaka Talkies traces the life of a fictional soft-porn theater that was converted to a Church. One of the crucial moments in the film features the installations that would later become part of Lal’s Kuliyum Mattu Scenukalum to reflect the inner contradictions in the built space of the Church/Theater. Between the fictional rendering of the soft-porn theater in the film, and its “real” variant in the form of S.P. Theater, I argue that the current cinema-scape is marked by a lingering ghostly presence of a recently deceased film form.
Labour discourses in the film industry are often couched in the language of ‘welfare’ and an effort to maintain harmony among different filmmaking sectors. But such arrangements do not proffer equal participation or bargaining rights to everyone in the industry. Focusing on the Malayalam language film industry based in Kerala, this article examines how the film industry’s apprenticeship and unpaid labour arrangements affect below-the-line labour and less influential job profiles on a film set. In corollary, I also explore how labour and bargaining rights are conceptualized differently by film organizations based on their ideological positions. Using a mixed-methods approach, including media ethnography and interviews with members of different trade guilds who form part of Malayalam cinema’s professional, technical and service sectors, I demonstrate how structural inequalities in the film industry are overlooked while the cine-worker’s agency is co-opted by a neoliberal system that masquerades as welfare.
This article maps the intricate ways televisual spaces build a sense of community and access to transnational networks of solidarity. Taking the programme Pravasalokam or ‘The World of Expatriates’ as a specific instance, this article tracks the imagination of ‘Gulf’ and the affective community who responds to such transnational television programmes. The show has been described as a ‘part-reality’ show on account of the fact that it hybridizes the formula for reality television by adding a component of investigative journalism. India has a substantial expatriate population in the Gulf countries, most from the state of Kerala. The show tracks down missing expatriate workers in the Gulf at the request of family members who have lost contact with them. Pravasalokam therefore acts surgically, as if to restore life to the previously geographically stable family. In effect, Pravasalokam, I argue, is a symptom of a larger condition of the transnational family, wherein the risk of disconnection always looms large despite the myriad possibilities of communication in the digital age.
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