Addressing the spectator of a 'third world' national cinema: the Bombay 'social' film of the 1940s and 1950s

Vasudevan, Ravi

doi:10.1093/screen/36.4.305

Cited by 83 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…As specialized, live interfaces with film in a time of what Reiss (2013) calls "digital overabundance," film festivals can come as close as audiences can get to the rarefied experience of an "original" work of art in an age of digital reproduction (Benjamin 1968). 1 In the Indian context, this auratic encounter takes on culturally distinct resonances because of the ways in which film viewing has been conceptualized as taking on a "darshanic" quality, evoking a devotional encounter between viewer and screen (Vasudevan 1995;Rangan 2010). Film festivals, because they concentrate viewing in time and space, intensify this "spiritual" dimension of film viewing.…”

Section: Film Festivals and The Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Precarity, Innovation, and Survival in the Indian Film Festival Sector

Karlekar

2023

Rethinking Film Festivals in the Pandemic Era and After

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Despite the vast expansion in the film festival sector in India since the early 2000s, most festivals have remained financially precarious. This is true of more mainstream festivals with industry support as well as of myriad activist and “alternative” festivals on the margins. In addition, the country’s Hindu nationalist government has subjected all cultural spaces to increased scrutiny and policing. As the virus affected India and the Indian government enforced a national lockdown, festival organizers had to adapt rapidly. In order to survive, they looked both to global strategies and specific local histories of exhibition and circulation. In this chapter, I map the festival sector in India in the midst of crisis and explore the divergent strategies for survival adopted by festival organizers. I focus closely on the “frontline” strategies implemented by two community-based, activist film festivals that have adopted distinct, yet successful, models for navigating the pandemic. Already adept at negotiating multiple forms of precarity, they connected with new global audiences while redefining ideals of “community.” This chapter explores what these festival experiments tell us about how the festival as medium might change politically, economically, and cinematically, even beyond the pandemic.

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Section: Film Festivals and The Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Precarity, Innovation, and Survival in the Indian Film Festival Sector

Karlekar

2023

Rethinking Film Festivals in the Pandemic Era and After

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“…Despite their divergent production contexts, however, all three films share a cinematic language, answering to corresponding cinematic expectations, which we can label, in a generic fashion, 'Bollywood'. The investment in melodrama (Vasudevan 1995(Vasudevan , 2002 and the interruption of narrative by song and dance sequences (Gopal and Moorti 2005;Gopalan 2002) are key features of this shared language, as is their participation within popular cinema's long-established tradition of using the Kashmir Valley as a space for pastoral escape, metropolitan fantasy, and the blossoming of heterosexual romance (Kabir 2005). Thanks to the 1960s films, the Valley had evolved into a visual register for 'modern love'.…”

Section: Bollywood and Kashmir Kashmir In Bollywoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Kashmiri as Muslim in Bollywood's ‘New Kashmir films’

Kabir

2010

Contemporary South Asia

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“…Vasudevan suggests that in Hindi cinema, looking revolves around the exercising of authority through taking or rejecting the look (the deity position), with the woman's look being equivalent to that of the devotee. Both Devdas (1955) and Pyaasa contain sequences where the woman's look at the man is presented as engaging in darsan, with the employment of continuity editing, iconicity and the tableau, together with devotional music and lamps, constructing the hero as a divine image (Vasudevan, 1995). There is also a beach scene in Awara, where the woman's desiring look at the man is coded in a similar fashion.…”

Section: The Indian Cinema Of the 1950'smentioning

confidence: 99%

Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film

Heide¹

2002

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writer and critic; Baharudin Latif, film critic; and to Raja Ahmad Alauddin, film director and academic, for our stimulating conversations in Malaysia and Australia. I particularly want to thank Raimy Ché-Ross for valuable assistance in translating the dialogue of the un-subtitled Malaysian films and for perceptive comments on the cultural significance of aspects of these films. Finally, my gratitude to Professor Philip Bell, University of New South Wales, for the faith he retained in me over the many years that it took for my research project to assume its present form; furthermore, Professor Bell improved the arguments herein by his comments and questions. I am grateful to Allen & Unwin for allowing me to use four diagrams from Wang Gungwu's Community and Nation in chapter 2. The photos for figures 5, 10 and 11 were taken by Julia van der Heide. The other illustrations have been provided courtesy of the National Film Corporation Malaysia (FINAS) and the National Archives of Malaysia.

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Addressing the spectator of a 'third world' national cinema: the Bombay 'social' film of the 1940s and 1950s

Cited by 83 publications

References 0 publications

Precarity, Innovation, and Survival in the Indian Film Festival Sector

Precarity, Innovation, and Survival in the Indian Film Festival Sector

The Kashmiri as Muslim in Bollywood's ‘New Kashmir films’

Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film

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