Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form

‘No Country for Old Women’: Female Aging in Bollywood

“…These films had imbibed much of their form from the declining Parsi theatre which was founded on the Persian mode of storytelling— dastangoi (in Persian, dastan means story). They inherited from Parsi theatre four basic elements of the dastan tradition—‘ razm (warfare), bazm (assembly of singing, dancing and seducing), tilism (magical effect or artifact created by a sorcerer) and aiyyari (chicanery, trickery, disguise)’ (Vasudevan, 2011, p. 37). Interestingly, these dastan elements that appear initially in Parsi theatre and later in Hindi films, had originated from the dastan tradition of 19th century Lucknow (Vasudevan, 2011).…”

‘Welcome to selfiestan’: identity and the networked gaze in Indian mobile media

“…In the past 20 years, there has emerged a significant body of work on the cultural influence of darshan in the development of modern visual media in India. This scholarship spans from the popularity of 19th-century calendar illustrations of Hindu gods (Pinney, 2004) to the depictions of gods, celebrities, and social hierarchies in 20th- and 21st-century cinema (Dwyer, 2006; Dwyer and Patel, 2002; Kapur, 2000; Prasad, 1998; Sinha, 2013; Taylor, 2003; Vasudevan, 2011), television (Mankekar, 1999), and video (Brosius, 2003). Madhava Prasad (1998) notes, for example, a transposition of the mechanics of darshan from the temple to the movie theater in his examination of the ‘organization of the look’ (p. 74) in the feudal family romance genre of Hindi cinema from the 1940s to 1960s.…”

“…‘Contrary to the voyeuristic relation, in the darsanic relation, the object gives itself to be seen and in so doing, confers a privilege upon the spectator’, Prasad explains, thereby emphasizing an exchange between viewer and image, rather than the viewer’s immersion within the image (p. 75–76). Building on Prasad’s work, Ravi Vasudevan (2011) contends that ‘instead of seeing the discourse of darshan framing cinematic narration, we need to think of darshan as being enframed and reconstructed by it’. For Vasudevan, popular film in India has tended to ‘reinscribe’ darshan within its codes, creating possibilities for the darshanic within both the film narrative and the viewer’s relationship to the film:Here, the localized deployment of filmic techniques in the micro-narration of a scene … alert us to how characters and spectators are being cinematically positioned in relation to the darshanic.…”

Wrinkles in Time: Ageing Costume in Hindi Film

“…Implicit in the song is the helplessness before time and circumstances of those not empowered to renew and recreate themselves (to all intents and purposes, those without access to such prodigious wardrobes). 10 With the delivery of the immaculate costume as the mark of service due to the star (in keeping with his or her status and power), the new costume has long been an intrinsic component of the Indian film celebrity, whose persona incorporates distinct elements of divinity (Dwyer, 2006; Lutgendorf, 2006; Vasudevan, 2011). The emphatic ageing of costumes, alongside the use of newly made ones, ‘worked’ in as much as it enabled the confrontation of old and new, of vulnerability and power, that animated the scenarios that the films were intended to explore.…”