Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema

Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema
Author: Monika Mehta
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2012-08-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0292742517

India produces an impressive number of films each year in a variety of languages. Here, Monika Mehta breaks new ground by analyzing Hindi films and exploring the censorship of gender and heterosexuality in Bombay cinema. She studies how film censorship on various levels makes the female body and female sexuality pivotal in constructing national identity, not just through the films themselves but also through the heated debates that occur in newspapers and other periodicals. The standard claim is that the state dictates censorship and various prohibitions, but Mehta explores how relationships among the state, the film industry, and the public illuminate censorship's role in identity formation, while also examining how desire, profits, and corruption are generated through the act of censoring. Committed to extending a feminist critique of mass culture in the global south, Mehta situates the story of censorship in a broad social context and traces the intriguing ways in which the heated debates on sexuality in Bombay cinema actually produce the very forms of sexuality they claim to regulate. She imagines afresh the theoretical field of censorship by combining textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative fieldwork. Her analysis reveals how central concepts of film studies, such as stardom, spectacle, genre, and sound, are employed and (re)configured within the ambit of state censorship, thereby expanding the scope of their application and impact.

Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema

Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema
Author: Monika Mehta
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2011-12-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0292726929

Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Minnesota, 2001.

A Companion to Indian Cinema

A Companion to Indian Cinema
Author: Neepa Majumdar
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2022-08-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1119048265

A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema's widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a range of films and film experiences that include commercial cinema, art cinema, and non-fiction film. Even as scholarship on earlier decades of Indian cinema is challenged by the absence of documentation and films, the innovative archival and field work in this Companion extends from cinema in early twentieth century India to a historicized engagement with new technologies and contemporary cinematic practices. There is a focus on production cultures and circulation, material cultures, media aesthetics, censorship, stardom, non-fiction practices, new technologies, and the transnational networks relevant to Indian cinema. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students of film and media studies, South Asian studies, and history, A Companion to Indian Cinema is also an important new resource for scholars with an interest in the context and theoretical framework for the study of India's moving image cultures.

Sirens of Modernity

Sirens of Modernity
Author: Samhita Sunya
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2022-07-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520379535

Opening Credits "Akira Kurosawa" : a retrospective prologue -- Introduction : "Romance, comedy, and somewhat jazzy music" -- Problems of translation : world cinema as distribution history -- moving toward the "City of love": Hindustani lyrical genealogies -- Homosocialist co-productions : Pardesi (1957) contra Singapore (1960) -- Comedic crossovers and Madras money-spinners : Padosan's (1968) audiovisual apparatus -- Foreign Exchanges : transregional trafficking through Subah-O-Sham (1972) -- Special features.

Gender, Sexuality, and Indian Cinema

Gender, Sexuality, and Indian Cinema
Author: Srija Sanyal
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2023-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 152751238X

This edited volume offers a comprehensive understanding of the queer space in tandem with the transforming socio-cultural-political relationships in a country that exhibits diversified shades of ideologies and history – that is, India. The featured essays deal with the presence of queerness in visual media, particularly in films and the digital arena, from multilingual and multicultural perspectives, thus creating an exhaustive discourse encompassing argument and analysis. This book aims to depict the plurality and complexity of the Indian scenario, fostering mass acceptance of queerness, a rare scholastic endeavour.

Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies

Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies
Author: Kai Merten
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839432944

The book brings together experts from Media and Communication Studies with Postcolonial Studies scholars to illustrate how the two fields may challenge and enrich each other. Its essays introduce readers to selected topics including »Media Convergence«, »Transcultural Subjectivity«, »Hegemony«, »Piracy« and »Media History and Colonialism«. Drawing on examples from film, literature, music, TV and the internet, the contributors investigate the transnational dimensions in today's media, engage with local and global media politics and discuss media outlets as economic agents, thus illustrating mechanisms of power in postcolonial and neo-colonial mediascapes.

Seeing Things

Seeing Things
Author: Kartik Nair
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2024-02-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520392299

In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "failures" as clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. By combining close analysis with extensive archival research and original interviews, Seeing Things reveals the spectral materialities informing the genre's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence.

Film Studies

Film Studies
Author: Glyn Davis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2015-02-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131762338X

Film Studies: A Global Introduction reroutes film studies from its Euro-American focus and canon in order to introduce students to a medium that has always been global but has become differently and insistently so in the digital age. Glyn Davis, Kay Dickinson, Lisa Patti and Amy Villarejo’s approach encourages readers to think about film holistically by looking beyond the textual analysis of key films. In contrast, it engages with other vital areas, such as financing, labour, marketing, distribution, exhibition, preservation, and politics, reflecting contemporary aspects of cinema production and consumption worldwide. Key features of the book include: clear definitions of the key terms at the foundation of film studies coverage of the work of key thinkers, explained in their social and historical context a broad range of relevant case studies that reflect the book’s approach to global cinema, from Italian "white telephone" films to Mexican wrestling films innovative and flexible exercises to help readers enhance their understanding of the histories, theories, and examples introduced in each chapter an extensive Interlude introducing readers to formal analysis through the careful explication and application of key terms a detailed discussion of strategies for writing about cinema Films Studies: A Global Introduction will appeal to students studying film today and aspiring to work in the industry, as well as those eager to understand the world of images and screens in which we all live.

Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct

Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct
Author: Megan Watkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131774540X

Pedagogy is often glossed as the ‘art and science of teaching’ but this focus typically ties it to the instructional practices of formalised schooling. Like the emerging work on ‘public pedagogies’, the notion of cultural pedagogies signals the importance of the pedagogic in realms other than institutionalised education, but goes beyond the notion of public pedagogies in two ways: it includes spaces which are not so public, and it includes an emphasis on material and non-human actors. This collection foregrounds this broader understanding of pedagogy by framing enquiry through a series of questions and across a range of settings. How, for example, are the processes of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ realised within and across the pedagogic processes specific to various social sites? What ensembles of people, things and practices are brought together in specific institutional and everyday settings to accomplish these processes? This collection brings together researchers whose work across the interdisciplinary nexus of cultural studies, sociology, media studies, education and museology offers significant insights into these ‘cultural pedagogies’ – the practices and relations through which cumulative changes in how we act, feel and think occur. Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct opens up debate across disciplines, theoretical perspectives and empirical foci to explore both what is pedagogical about culture and what is cultural about pedagogy.

India's New Independent Cinema

India's New Independent Cinema
Author: Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2016-06-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317290739

This is the first-ever book on the rise of the new wave of independent Indian films that is revolutionising Indian cinema. Contemporary scholarship on Indian cinema so far has focused asymmetrically on Bollywood—India’s dominant cultural export. Reversing this trend, this book provides an in-depth examination of the burgeoning independent Indian film sector. It locates the new 'Indies' as a glocal hybrid film form—global in aesthetic and local in content. They critically engage with a diverse socio-political spectrum of ‘state of the nation’ stories; from farmer suicides, disenfranchised urban youth and migrant workers to monks turned anti-corporation animal rights agitators. This book provides comprehensive analyses of definitive Indie new wave films including Peepli Live (2010), Dhobi Ghat (2010), The Lunchbox (2013) and Ship of Theseus (2013). It explores how subversive Indies, such as polemical postmodern rap-musical Gandu (2010) transgress conventional notions of ‘traditional Indian values’, and collide with state censorship regulations. This timely and pioneering analysis shows how the new Indies have emerged from a middle space between India’s globalising present and traditional past. This book draws on in-depth interviews with directors, actors, academics and members of the Indian censor board, and is essential reading for anyone seeking an insight into a current Indian film phenomenon that could chart the future of Indian cinema.