40+ Essays on Film, Moving Image, and Digital Media in the Sarai Readers

Framegrab image of early action heroine "Fearless" Nadia (née Mary Ann Evans) in Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936). Read Rosie Thomas's 2007 article on this film.

Today, Film Studies For Free focuses on, and links to, some remarkable film and digital media studies essays commissioned and edited by the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.

The Sarai Programme was initiated in 2000 by a group consisting of internationally renowned cinema scholar Ravi S. Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram (both fellows at CSDS) and the members of the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), a Delhi based group of media practitioners, documentarists, artists and writers.

Sarai's mission is to act as a platform for discursive and creative collaboration between theorists, researchers, practitioners and artists actively engaged in reflecting on contemporary urban spaces and cultures in South Asia. Its areas of interests include media research and theory, the urban experience in South Asia: history, environment, culture, architecture and politics, new and established media practices, media history, cinema, contemporary art, digital culture, the history and politics of technology, visual/technological cultures, free and open source software, social usage of software, the politics of information and communication, online communities and web-based practices.

The below collection of articles -- painstakingly drawn from the numerous, openly accessible Sarai Readers produced by the collective -- reflect the above interests, but have been curated here by FSFF because of their particular, potential relevance to scholars of cinema and related moving image and digital media studies.

• Rehan Ansari, 'On Mushtaq Gazdar's "History of Pakistani Cinema"’, Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Kaushik Bhaumik, 'Fear in Neo-Kaliyuga Epistemic Troubles in Techno-Smrti Times', Sarai reader 08: Fear
• Franco La Cecla, Stefano Savona and Piero Zanini, 'Light from the Box', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Saayan Chattopadhyay, 'Framing Frontiers: The Suspended Step towards Visual Construction of Geopolitical Borders', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Keti Chukhrov, 'Glamour as a Form of Culture in Post-Soviet Russia', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Rana Dasgupta, 'Beyond the Apocalypse: An Unfinished Meditation on Ethics', Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
• Tushar Dhara, 'The Khushboo Case File: Reverse Culture Jamming', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Deb Kamal Ganguly, 'Pixels of Memory on the Hypertextualised 'I’', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Shohini Ghosh, 'Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Nanna Heidenreich and Nicole Wolf, 'Conversation on Locating Conflict', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Menso Heus, 'Innovating Piracy: The Bare Act of Stealing, and Shaping the Future', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Lawrence Liang, 'Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Geert Lovink, 'Surveillance, Performance, Self-Surveillance: Interview with Jill Magid', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Geert Lovink, 'The Typewriter of the Illiterate: Interview with János Sugár', Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
• Kristian Lukic, 'Let us Become Children! Training, Simulations and Kids', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Lev Manovich, 'New Media: A User’s Guide', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Ranjani Mazumdar, 'Cracks in the Urban Frame The Visual Politics of 9/11', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Ranjani Mazumdar, 'Ruin And The Uncanny City Memory, despair and death in Parinda', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Media Researchers @ Sarai, 'Complicating the City: Media Itineraries', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Rahul Mukherjee, 'A Reply to Terrorism on a Wednesday: A Citizen Vigilante’s Prescriptions for Governing Terrorism', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Batul Mukhtiar, 'Journey through a Disaster: A Filmmaker’s Account of the Gujarat Earthquake, 2001', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media 
• Kartik Nair, 'Fear on Film The Ramsay Brothers and Bombay’s Horror Cinema', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Sandhya Devesan Nambiar, 'Factoring Fear: Investigations into Media(ted) Fear', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Warren Neidich, 'The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence 
• Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Warporn Warpunk! Autonomous Videopoesis in Wartime', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Manuel Ramos Martínez, 'Betrayed Borders: Double Agents and the Crisscrossing of Conflicts', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Pooja Rangan, 'Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood As a Signifying Practice', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Raqs Media Collective, 'Dreams and Disguises, As Usual [on Fantômas]', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Janko Röttgers, 'P2P: Power to the People', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Chandak Sengoopta, 'Art without Frontiers? Satyajit Ray and the Constraints of Universality', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Debjani Sengupta, 'Mechanicalcutta: Industrialisation, new media in the 19th century', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life 
• Bhrigupati Singh, 'Screening Injustice: Race, violence and media flows', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Radhika Subramaniam, 'Urban Physiognomies', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Ravi Sundaram, 'Recycling Modernity: Pirate electronic cultures in India', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Anand Vivek Taneja, 'Begum Samru and the Security Guard', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Kuhu Tanvir, 'Myth, Legend, Conspiracy Urban Terror in Aamir and Delhi-6', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Hansa Thapliyal, 'Evictions - Projections Watching Dharmendra in Suburban Lagos', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Rosie Thomas, 'Miss Frontier Mail: The Film That Mistook Its Star for a Train', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Ravi S. Vasudevan, 'An Imperfect Public Cinema and citizenship in the "third world"', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Ravi S. Vasudevan, 'The Exhilaration Of Dread Genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary urban action films', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Ravi Vasudevan, 'Disreputable and Illegal Publics Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Slavoj Žižek in conversation with Shuddhabrata Sengupta, 'From Anxiety to Enthusiasm', Sarai Reader 08: Fear 

More about → 40+ Essays on Film, Moving Image, and Digital Media in the Sarai Readers

Participations: screen dance, moviegoing in the 1930s and 40s, and the reception of gay films

Image from 3 Idiots (Rajkumar Hirani, 2009), a film referred to in Ann David's article 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'

Film Studies For Free is happy to announce that a new issue of Participations, a journal devoted to developing the broad field of study of cultural and media audiences, is now available online.

The table of contents is reproduced below. The issue includes an excellent selection of articles devoted to the topic of audience responses to screen dance, but there are also notable essays, among others, on moviegoing in the USA in the 1930s and 40s, 'bad films', and the reception of 'gay movies' in Sydney.

Particip@tions: Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010)


Special Edition: Screen Dance Audiences – why now?

• Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds (Guest Editors - Special Edition): 'Special Issue Introduction'
• Harmony Bench: 'Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media'
• Ann David: 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'
• Karen Pearlman: 'If a dancing figure falls in the forest and nobody see her...'
• Matthew Reason: 'Thinking about Audiences: a dance film-maker's perspective.  An interview with Alex Reuben'
• Karen Wood: 'An investigation into audiences' televisual experience of Strictly Come Dancing'

Articles

• Mike Chopra-Gant: 'Dirty movies, or: why film scholars should stop worrying about Citizen Kane and learn to love bad films'
• Anouk Lang: '"A Dirty Little Secret": Taste Hierarchies and Richard and Judy's Book Club'
• Scott McKinnon: 'Taking the Word 'Out' West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces'
• Jennifer Radbourne, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow: Empowering Audiences to Measure Quality'
• Becky Walter: The L Word fan fiction reimagining intimate partner violence'

Reviews

• Sarah D. Goode: Understanding and Addressing Sexual Attraction to Children: A Study of Paedophiles in Contemporary Society.  Routledge (2010).
• Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vondreau (eds.): The Youtube Reader.  National Library of Sweden (2009)

More about → Participations: screen dance, moviegoing in the 1930s and 40s, and the reception of gay films

Journal of the Moving Image: Indian and South Asian cinema and media studies

Image from Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Anil Sharma, 2001). 

For more on this film, read "Beyond Partition: The Political Horizons of Contemporary Indian and Korean War Films" by Bhaskar Sarkar

Film Studies For Free just came across a really good e-journal that it hadn't bumped into before: Journal of the Moving Image, an annual publication of the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. 

It was launched in print format in 1999, but its print and online versions now co-exist. As its mission statement puts it,

JMI seeks to represent critical work on the state of contemporary screen cultures. There are many regions in the world with large viewing populations, often with vast production infrastructures for film and television; but corresponding institutions or forums for critical engagement with such audio-visual regimes are still highly inadequate. JMI seeks to address a broad set of issues ranging from formal properties of the moving image to the social foundation of its production, transmission and reception. There will be a special focus on India and South Asia, and on issues of transnational media transactions, but we would like to offer a wider range of discussion on film and television from various parts of the world made from different perspectives.

FSFF wanted to share its contents with you promptly, so direct links to all items so far online are pasted in below, with the most recent issue first. The first three issues of JMI are also being prepared for online publication. 

There are some excellent items here (you might try out Ravi Vasudevan's The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ just for starters). So FSFF heartily recommends that you subscribe to JMI ready for its next issue in December. 

(Also, please check out, if you haven't yet, FSFF's own related entry: "Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies)

JMI, Number 8, December, 2009

• Editorial Note

• Preserving Film (on Film) in a Digital Age Josef Lindner

• Together against the Mafia: Godard, Scorsese, Bit Torrent Sebastian Lutgert

• Cinema’s Floating Point Matt Hanson

• Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship Nishant Shah

• Photoshop Landscapes: Digital Mediations and Bollywood Cities Madhija Mukherjee

• Special Feature Conjunction and Flow: The Gendered Temporalities of (Media) Disasters Kumkum Sangari

JMI, Number 7, December, 2008

• Editorial Note

• Querying the ‘Traditional’ Roots of Silent Cinema in Asia  Kaushik Bhaumik

• Beyond Partition: The Political Horizons of Contemporary Indian and Korean War Films Bhaskar Sarkar

• The Subject of Representation in Korean Cinema: Two Limit Cases  Earl Jackson, Jr.

• Meet John Doe’s Order: Piracy, Temporality and the Question of Asia  Lawrence Liang

• Missing in the Original: Twin Dragons Remade in India S.V. Srinivas

• Theorizing New Asian Cinemas: Problems of the Historicist Approach Manas Ghosh

• Student Paper New Urban Spaces: Films of Tsai Ming-liang Michelle Baitali Bhowmik

• Special Feature The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ Ravi Vasudevan

JMI, Number 6, December, 2007

• Editorial Note

• An Aesthetic for Film Sound in India? Ashish Rajadhyaksha

• Communication and Signification: Voice in the Cinema M. Madhava Prasad

• Early Indian Talkies: Voice, Performance and Aura Madhuja Mukherjee

•  Musical Contests: Reflections on Musical Values in Popular Film Amlan Das Gupta

• Speaking through Troubled Times Moinak Biswas

• Seeing through the Sound: Certain Tendencies of the Soundtrack in Satyajit Ray's Films of the 1970s Anindya Sengupta

• Student Papers Sound Memories: In Search of Lost Sounds in Indian Cinema Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and  Sound of Horror: Sound and Dread in Hindi Cinema Shubham Roy Choudhury

• Special Feature  Space, Interiority and Affect in Charulata and Ghare Baire Supriya Chaudhuri

JMI, Number 5, December, 2006

• Editorial Note

• The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous ‘Exhibition’ Capital Ashish Rajadhyaksha

• Acceleration and Conflicts: Comments on the Cinematic Object in the 1990s and After Jeebesh Bagchi

• Persistence of the Feudal: Star and Film Form in Post 1970s Telugu Cinema S V Srinivas

• Mourning and Blood-Ties: Macbeth in Mumbai Moinak Biswas

• Live(li)ness and Network Publics in Post-Liberalization Indian Popular Films Abhijit Roy

• Memories of Development: The Fantastic Non-Presence of Kolkata in Post-Liberalization Bangla Cinema Sovan Tarafder

• The Middle Class: Consuming and Consumed: The Romance of Bombay Cinema Neha Chadha

JMI, Number 4, November, 2005

• Editorial Note

• The Apparatus and its Constituencies: On India’s Encounters with Television Abhijit Roy

• Panoramas of Asia and the Electronic Hearth: Michael Palin’s Connections John Hutnyk 

• The Subjects of News Television M. Madhava Prasad

• Kyunki Main Bhi Kabhi Tulsi Thi : Opening and Using the Black Box of Primetime Telereality Ipsita Chanda

• Media Trials and Courtroom Tribulations : The Battle of Images, Words and Shadows in the 13 December Case Suddhabrata Sengupta

• Television, Nationalism and Indian Cricket in the Era of Global Media Manas Ghosh

• Development (without) Communication: Viewing Doordarshan Methodologically Dipankar Sinha

• 'Reading' Television: Towards a Definition of Audio-Visual Literacy Nilanjana Gupta

• Remote Control Nationalism: Media politics in Guyana Atticus Narrain

More about → Journal of the Moving Image: Indian and South Asian cinema and media studies

"Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies

Kajol and Shahrukh Khan in  Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge / The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride (Aditya Chopra, 1995)

With a wary eye on the fast-approaching (in many places at least) and not-so-mellow fruitfulness of a new academic year, Film Studies For Free today brings you its handy guide to online introductions to popular Hindi cinema.

Not all of the wonderful, openly accessible resources linked to below the embedded video are designed for those new to this core academic film studies subject, but all are clearly written, and thus very accessible, as well as highly informative to those at many different stages in their scholarly fascination with this most popular of world cinemas.

Talking of fascination, a nice place to start might be Jonathan Torgovnik's wonderful online portfolio of photographs: Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon Press, 2003).

 

The Seductive World of Indian Cinema (2007)

Discussion between author Anupama Chopra, leading filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and Bollywood expert and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU Tejaswini Ganti. The discussion is moderated by Richard Allen, Chair of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts.

• A Guide to South Asian Cinema, ImagineAsia: British Film Institute, 2002
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Gregory D. Booth, 'Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema', Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 54, 1995: 169-190
• Devon Burk, 'What's A Kiss: The Unchaste Chastity of Bollywood', The Virginia Review of Asian Studies, Vol. XI, Fall 2008
• Corey Creekmur, 'The Devdas Phenomenon', Philip's fil-ums, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Patrick Colm Hogan, 'Hindi Cinema as a Challenge to Film Theory and Criticism', Projections, Volume 3, Number 2, Winter 2009 , pp. v-ix(1)
• Aniruddha Dutta, 'Nation, Liberalisation And Film Songs: Technology And Hybridisation In Contemporary Hindi Film Music', Wide Screen Journal, 1.16, April 2009
• Faiza Hirji, 'When Local Meets Lucre: Commerce, Culture and Imperialism in Bollywood Cinema', Global Media Journal 4.7, Fall 2005
  
• Wendy F. Hsu, 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, July 2003
• Tabish Khair, 'The ironies of Bollywood', 16:9,  7.31, April 2009
• Mark Lorenzen and Florian Arun Taeube, 'Breakout from Bollywood? Internationalization of Indian Film Industry', DRUID Papers, 07-06
• Philip Lutgendorf with Corey Creekmur, Philip's Fil-Ums: Notes on Indian popular cinema, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Vijay Mishra, 'Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy', Asian Studies Institute, 2006
• Anna Morcom, 'The Cinematic Study of Hindi Film Songs', Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema (Ashgate Publishing, 2007) 
• Shammi Nanda,'Censorship and Indian Cinema: The Case of War and Peace', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 38, November 2002
• Sheila J Nayar, 'The values of fantasy: Indian popular cinema through Western scripts', Journal of Popular Culture; Summer 1997; 31, 1  
• Ally Ostrowski, 'Found in Translation: From Hollywood Hits to Bollywood Blockbusters', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 11, No. 2 October 2007
• Heidi Pauwels, '“The Woman Waylaid at the Well” or Paṇaghaṭa-līlā An Indian Folk Theme Appropriated in Myth and Movies', Asian Ethnology, Volume 69, Number 1, 2010, 1–33
• Aswin Punathambekar and Anandam Kavoori, 'Introduction', Global Bollywood, edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (NYU Press, 2008)
• Anjali Ram, 'Framing the feminine: diasporic readings of gender in popular Indian cinema', Women's Studies in Communication, March 22 2002
• Shakuntala Rao, 'The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India', The Communication Review, 10: 57–76, 2007
• Amrita Sen, 'Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions', Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009)
• Brian Shoesmith, '[Review of] Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008', Screening the Past, Issue 25, 2009
• Sangita Shresthova, 'Strictly Bollywood? Story, Camera and Movement in Hindi Film Dance', MSc e-thesis, Princeton, 2003
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex, 2010 
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited buy Iain Robert Smith, Scope, Issue 15, 2010
• Lakshmi Srinivas, 'The active audience: spectatorship, social relations and the experience of cinema in India', Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 24: 155–173, 2002

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