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Author: Madhuja Mukherjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000448924
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry. The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks. Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.
Author: Madhuja Mukherjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000448924
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Get Book Here
Book Description
Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry. The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks. Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.
Author: Sharmistha Gooptu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136912177
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Covering the years spanning cinema’s emergence as a popular form in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century, this book examines the main genres and trends produced by this cinema, and leads up to Bengali cinema’s last phase of transition in the 1980s. Arguing that Bengali cinema has been a key economic and social institution, the author highlights that the Bengali filmic imaginary existed over and above the imaginary of the Indian nation. This book argues that a definitive history of Bengali cinema presents an alternative understanding to the currently influential notion of the Hindi film as the ‘Indian’ or ‘national’ cinema. It suggests that the Bengali cinema presents a history which brings to the fore the deeply contested terrain of ‘national’ cinema, and shows the creation of the ‘alternative imaginary’ of the Bengali film. The author indicates that the case of the Bengali cinema demonstrates the emergence of a public domain that set up a definitive discourse of difference with respect to the ‘all-India’ Hindi film, popularly classified as Bollywood cinema, and which pre-empted its subsumption within the more pervasive culture of the Bombay Hindi cinema. As the first comprehensive historical work on Bengali cinema, this book makes a significant contribution to both Film and Cultural Studies and South Asian Studies in general.
Author: Sayandeb Chowdhury
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9354352715
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
'There is none like Uttam and there will be no one to ever replace him. He was and he is unparalleled in Bengali, even Indian cinema.'-Satyajit Ray, Oscar-winning Indian film-maker Actor and screen icon Uttam Kumar (1926–1980) is a talismanic figure in Bengali public life. Breaking away from established codes of onscreen performance, he came to anchor an entire industry and led the efforts to reimagine popular cinema in mid-20th-century Bengal. But there is pitifully less knowledge about Uttam Kumar in the learned circles-be it about his range of style and performance; the attractions and problems of his cinema; his roles as a producer and patriarch of the industry; or his persona, stardom and legacy. The first definitive cultural and critical biography of this larger-than-life figure engages meaningfully with his life and cinema, revealing the man, hero and actor from various, often competing, vantages. The conceptual aim is to locate a star figure within a larger historical and cultural context, and to enquire into how a towering image was mobilised for an ever-greater, wholesome, popular and even, at times, radical and progressive entertainment. A complimentary métier of this work is to explore why and how this star persona would go on to reconstitute the bhadrolok Bengali visual and cultural world in the post-Partition period. But above all, this is the story of a clerk who became an actor, an actor who became a star, a star who became an icon and an icon who became a legend.
Author: Sangeeta Datta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317356098
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
An iconic filmmaker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray’s legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle-class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of hetero-patriarchal power structures. From the very outset, Ghosh displayed a strong feminist sensibility which later evolved into radical queer politics. This volume analyses his films, his craft, his stardom and his contribution to sexual identity politics. In this first scholarly study undertaken on Rituparno Ghosh, the essays discuss the cultural import of his work within the dynamics of a rapidly evolving film industry in Bengal and more largely the cinematic landscape of India. The anthology also contains a conversation section (interviews with the filmmaker and with industry cast and crew) drawing a critical and personal portrait of this remarkable filmmaker.
Author: Rini Bhattacharya Mehta
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857288970
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
This book is a collection of incisive articles on the interactions between Indian Popular Cinema and the political and cultural ideologies of a new post-Global India.
Author: Srimati Mukherjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131730991X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
Historically, Indian cinema has positioned women at the intersection of tradition and a more evolving culture, portraying contradictory attitudes which affect women’s roles in public and private spheres. Examining the work of three directors from West Bengal, this book addresses the juxtaposition of tradition and culture regarding women in Bengali cinema. It argues the antithesis of women’s roles, particularly in terms of ideas of resistance, revolution, change, and autonomy, by suggesting they convey resistance to hegemonic structures, encouraging a re-envisioning of women’s positions within the familial-social matrix. Along with presenting a perception of culture as dynamic and evolving, the book discusses how some directors show that with this rupturing of the traditionally prohibitive, and a notion of unmaking and making in women, a traditional inclination is exposed to align women with ideas of absence, substitution, and disposability. The author goes on to show how selected auteurs in contemporary Bengali cinema break with certain traditional representations of women, gesturing towards a culture that is more liberating for women. Presenting the first full-length study of women’s changing roles over the last twenty years of Bengali cinema, this book will be a useful contribution for students and scholars of South Asian Culture, Film Studies and Gender Studies.
Author: Rochona Majumdar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553900
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Co-Winner, 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for the Best Writing on Cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust Shortlisted, 2022 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association Longlisted, 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak—the leading figures of Indian art cinema—became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.
Author: Sumita S. Chakravarty
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292789858
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
Although Indian popular cinema has a long history and is familiar to audiences around the world, it has rarely been systematically studied. This book offers the first detailed account of the popular film as it has grown and changed during the tumultuous decades of Indian nationhood. The study focuses on the cinema’s characteristic forms, its range of meanings and pleasures, and, above all, its ideological construction of Indian national identity. Informed by theoretical developments in film theory, cultural studies, postcolonial discourse, and “Third World” cinema, the book identifies the major genres and movements within Bombay cinema since Independence and uses them to enter larger cultural debates about questions of identity, authenticity, citizenship, and collectivity. Chakravarty examines numerous films of the period, including Guide (Vijay Anand, 1965), Shri 420 [The gentleman cheat] (Raj Kapoor, 1955), and Bhumika [The role] (Shyam Benegal, 1977). She shows how “imperso-nation,” played out in masquerade and disguise, has characterized the representation of national identity in popular films, so that concerns and conflicts over class, communal, and regional differences are obsessively evoked, explored, and neutralized. These findings will be of interest to film and area specialists, as well as general readers in film studies.
Author: Sharmistha Gooptu
Publisher: Roli Books Private Limited
ISBN: 8193704959
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
Sharmistha Gooptu is a founder and managing trustee of the South Asia Research Foundation (SARF), a not-for-profit research body based in India. SARF’s current project SAG (South Asian Gateway) is in partnership with Taylor and Francis, and involves the creation of what will be the largest South Asian digital database of historical materials. She is also the joint editor of the journal South Asian History and Culture (Routledge) and the Routledge South Asian History and Culture book series.
Author: Gary D. Rhodes
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496853229
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
Contributions by Vlad Dima, Laura Hatry, Alicia Kozma, Lynette Kuliyeva, Madhuja Mukherjee, Frank Percaccio, Gary D. Rhodes, Courtney Ruffner Grieneisen, Marlisa Santos, Michael L. Shuman, and Robert Singer Movie posters, regardless of their country of origin, have become indelibly linked with the films they represent, often assuming a status as visual encapsulations of films within collective memory. Long after their initial role in promotion is complete, these posters endure as iconic images, etched into film history and cultural consciousness. One can hardly hear mention of Steven Spielberg’s landmark production Jaws, for example, without immediately picturing the evocative poster art of Roger Kastel. Film by Design: The Art of the Movie Poster is a groundbreaking and comprehensive exploration of the international and Hollywood movie poster as a dynamic artistic and cultural formation. Drawing inspiration from such prominent genres as horror, science fiction, and noir, the twelve essays in this collection provide insightful analyses of the movie poster as a vital component of the cinematic landscape from the silent era to the contemporary period. Crucially, this anthology rejects the notion of movie posters as mere historical artifacts or advertising tools and instead examines them as integral parts of a broader aesthetic framework interwoven into their respective film narratives. Each chapter, whether focusing on controversies, close-ups, or Cuba, is accessible to scholars, students, and fans alike. Through its intervention in film studies, Film by Design reveals the movie poster to be an ever-evolving medium, firmly grounded in both theory and practice, while serving as an essential and enduring element within the realm of film art.
