Related Papers
The contemporary moment has seen growing aggregates of urban populations accommodate and get entwined increasingly into 'technologized' models of experience. The 'technological' is now seamlessly ensconced into the basic material flesh of the city's quotidian everyday life (Sundaram 2010). As the 'ordinary' today is peppered and constituted by humdrum technological objects, a foundational transformation in our sensorium is precipitated – newer regimes of materiality are inaugurated as our bodies are perpetually girdled by a new object-world. In this new changing experience of the material everyday, the technological also becomes a primary precinct in which negotiations with the supernatural (and the uncanny) get staged. The technological increasingly serves, in different ways, as the evidentiary archive for the supernatural, its site of production, and the premiere mis en scene of its performance within Hindi cinema. This paper closely chases the transformations in the contemporary horror film, focusing especially on Ragini MMS (2011) and 13B (2009) to understand how the spectral today gets densely intermeshed with the digital. Clearly distinct from the earlier Ramsay brothers productions, as well as the later moment that Sangita Gopal has bracketed as 'New Horror', these films locate the site of horror entirely within the technological. This paper argues that the technological is not merely the site through which the spectral articulates itself but also its thematic raison'd etre in a rapidly changing contemporary digital moment. While Ragini MMS explores the idea of the spectral 'poor image' – a ghostly MMS that haunts its own makers; 13B presents a television set that gets inhabited by mortified bodies of an earlier time who play out a daily soap that echoes and predicts the future of the family watching it. Low-Res Horrors: Grainy Images and the Technological Uncanny Journal Title: Wide Screen Vol. 5, No.1, February 2014 ISSN: 1757-3920 URL: //widescreenjournal.org Published by Subaltern Media, 153 Sandringham Drive, Leeds LS17 8DQ, UK
Indian cinematic traditions have always relied on eclectic ways of figuration that combine signs and affects of desire and abomination. That is, incarnations often emerge at critical interfaces between good/bad, Indian/western, self/other, virtue/vice, myth/reality, and so on. Such figures are products of discontinuous assembling processes that cut through dyadic arrangements and pass the same character/body/identity via different, often contradictory, moral economies and sign systems. These many-armed, complex modes of figuration carry a special tenacity in Indian cinema for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because the template of classical realist narration usually has had limited authority over its proceedings. Perpetually caught between the home and the world, between elation and agony, such cinematic entities carry in them the diverse, contending energies of the overall assembling arena of Indian modernity itself. The essays in this volume consider the issue of figuration in the broadest sense, including formations that are supra-individual, animalistic, divine and machinic.
Abstract: Since the 2000s, Bombay cinema has engaged in a nostalgic re-telling of its history through the industrial practice of film remakes and retro films. We see an industrially produced nostalgia for the past that commemorates Bombay cinema history. Such recovery of the past elicits questions on the 'invisible' histories of film practices, particularly the Band C-circuit films, produced in Mumbai. The origin and definition of these films remain ambivalent – and despite accounting for a sizeable portion of annual film productions, these films remain underground as a 'bad object'. I focus on the slippery category of C-grade cinema and its exponential rise in Bombay. I then focus on Ashim Ahluwalia's cinephilic engagement with the industrial story of the C-circuit in Miss Lovely (2012) and argue that the film uses a hybrid formal structure of a multiplex fringe film that fuses documentary elements with long-form fictional narrative and embodies the contestations of industrial histories of the Bombay film cultures.
In this article, I attempt to understand the emergence of a new form of masculinity, class character and gendered bodies of Bengali film heroes during the 1980s and 1990s. The article reads the industrial, technological and aesthetic determinants of this figuration of action heroes in the 1980s–1990s and demonstrates how through this figuration, the representations of class in popular Bengali cinema attained a complex phase.
In 2004, with Sasura Bada Paisawala, a vernacular film industry was re-born in India. While numerous Bhojpuri music videos had been extremely popular among the working class Bhojpuri speakers, it was the visibility Bhojpuri films achieved via theatrical exhibition that infused new energy into film production. This paper investigates the emergence of this third phase of Bhojpuri Cinema. In doing so, it traces the historical trajectory of the segment of film exhibition within which Bhojpuri film industry emerged – the decrepit theatres, marked by the absence of any female audience. Therefore, this paper observes the resonance across two simultaneities: i) the reconfiguration of the sites of public leisure around the middle class woman, and ii) the reconfiguration of the film genres around the absence of female audience. Therefore, gender and space come to regulate each other around the key public sites within the cities, of which cinema has long been a vital component. In tracing the history of exhibition-led trade imaginaries within the film economy, then, we can situate fringe and mainstream genres in relation to the specific demography they targeted. The film text, after all, does not exist independent of the overall habitus that stages the encounter between the text and audience. This paper investigates the gendered vocabulary of this habitus, and the key shifts within the production-exhibition dynamics across the history of cinema in north India. By consolidating this analytical strand, I offer the category of the ‘rearguard’ – a site-specific exhibition-led trade sector of cinema. I then go on to situate the multiplex-mall within this history, not as an unprecedented departure, but a complex that amplified already existing tendencies, hierarchies and exclusive social practices. As the pre-eminent site within the data-mapped network, the multiplex led a far more consolidated economy and thus freed up numerous sites of alternative filmgoing practices, of which Bhojpuri Cinema became the most visible component.
While Hindi cinema has often been critically engaged as a narrative form while ‘writing’ the nation, the role of Hindi horror genre in imagining this nation is under-explored. Hindi cinema itself emerged in a charged environment of nascent nationalist politics, and early Indian filmmakers saw themselves and their on-screen projections as part of the patriotic scheme. However Post-Independence wars with Pakistan and China, and the eruption of various separatists’ movements in the North-East, Sikh’s Khalistan movement and Kashmiri Muslims engendered narratives and counter-narratives to the state-sponsored scientific secularist discourse. In this article I trace how the Hindi horror genre with its evolving narrative strategies has itself been an area of conflicting ideas and ideologies in imagining the Indian state. Lying at the intersections of myths, ideology and dominant socio-religious thoughts, the Hindi horror genre reveals three major strands: the secular conscious, the traditional cultural and the Hindutva ideological, roughly corresponding to the way the nation has been imagined at different times in Post-Colonial India. Moving beyond establishing theoretical framework, I intend to demonstrate how the Hindi horror genre with its sub-sets provides us with the means to contemplate the nation and its representation.
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in BIOSCOPE: SOUTH ASIAN SCREEN STUDIES, January 2013 by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright © 2013 Screen South Asia Trust