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"Kapse, Anupama"
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Melodrama as Method
Here the very lack of material acts as the driving force that spurs film historians to assess cinema's place within a broader institutional framework encompassing a slew of interconnected concerns: modernity, capital, technology, global film traffic, colonialism, genre-formation, and archives of print and visual culture, notwithstanding the academy's own late arrival into this scenario. [...]because I thought I had nothing, I ended up with a vast amount of material once I overcame the initial stumbling block of what constituted an archive: song booklets, publicity materials, film posters, newspaper advertisements, interviews-oral and informal modes of remembrance (including my grandmother's coy account of watching her first movie in a darkened room reserved exclusively for society ladies). Newspaper advertisements provide ample evidence of the importance of such set pieces, flagging them as the primary material of the melodramatic landscape.5 In addition, the silent film had to devise means that incorporated existing modes of musical performance into cinema's new aesthetics. Gallant Hearts prefers the long take in its relatively spare chase sequences, choosing to focus instead on tableaus of elaborate swordfights; the camera avoids cuts, lingering on costumes and the mise-en-scene, refusing mechanisms that would speed up or resolve the action quickly.6 The appeal of such adaptation is discernible even by a quick glance at advertisements in major newspapers such as The Bombay Chronicle, The Times of India, The Hindu, and The Statesman, all which unfailingly highlight their thrill, telling audiences to wait for Lord Shiva's divine manifestation in Raja Harischandra or for the daredevilry of the swordfights in Gallant Hearts.7 Such information needed a new vocabulary to convey its aesthetic, technological, and affective novelty as well as its strong nationalist agenda.
Journal Article
Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space
In this cross-cultural history of narrative cinema and media from the 1910s to the 1930s, leading and emergent scholars explore the transnational crossings and exchanges that occurred in early cinema between the two world wars. Drawing on film archives from around the world, this volume advances the premise that silent cinema freely crossed national borders and linguistic thresholds in ways that became far less possible after the emergence of sound. These essays address important questions about the uneven forces-geographic, economic, political, psychological, textual, and experiential-that underscore a non-linear approach to film history. The \"messiness\" of film history, as demonstrated here, opens a new realm of inquiry into unexpected political, social, and aesthetic crossings of silent cinema.
eBook
Afterword: The Long Arabesque: Economies of Affect between South Asia and the Middle East
The term Arabesque has often been used as a verbal shorthand for an ornate pattern of interlaced flowers, leaves, or animal motifs. This essay attempts to retrace a longer affective history of the Arabesque in a contemporary Perso-Arabic context, made possible by the emergence of the cinema. Paying particular attention to trade routes that developed between Bombay, Persia, and the Middle East, it makes a polemical case for the long history of the Arabesque as a repertoire of Persianate or brown cultural sounds, images, tales, or motifs that circulate in the Global South and thrive by competing with or appropriating tropes from Western Orientalism. I argue that the mobility of the cinema across India, Iran, and beyond inaugurated systems of cultural exchange and collaboration that went beyond the mere figural understanding of the Arabesque. Sound cinema and, more recently, digital media formats are capable of expanding the frontiers of the Arabesque in unprecedented ways, allowing for new forms of play with physical space, as well as aural and temporal articulations of long-shared Persianate idioms addressed to a global collective imagined as brown.
Journal Article
Double Trouble: SRK, Fandom, and Special Effects 1
[...]they do not suffer from a lack of knowledge.21 Rather, their aesthetic proclivity and knowledge configure a pure and childlike form of entertainment aligned with folkloric sensibilities.A shotreverse-shot between screen and spectator inserts Chutki en scene as the direct recipient of Dixit's gaze.[...]the female fan is equipped with abilities that can metaphorically \"smash\" the screen to experience fandom as a greater form of subjectivity.The stereotype of a raging adolescent male endowed with technical virtuosity is deliberately mobilized to compensate for the age and diminished personality of the star.[...]Gaurav incarnates a bisexuality that operates at the cusp oftwo genders and two ages, dimensions that are crucial for dramatizing his superior capability as a fan, even as he succumbs to the protocols of being a rasika.The end result is a strangely eye-catching hybrid of a younger, plumper SRK with Brad Pitt's engorged jaw and Shah Rukh Khan's lean dimples.Since prosthetic faces lack the translucent, sanguine hue of human skin, the task of illuminating and crafting the movement of human facial muscles fell upon hundreds of VFX technicians and artists, who simulated the light, skin tone, texture, movement, and expression painstakingly for each shot in post-production.
Journal Article
Introduction
Crowning SRK as the King of Bollywood is not just a way of signposting Bombay as the largest film producer of the world, it is a way to draw attention to the secret power Indian film stars enj oy, a means for acknowledging South Asian stardom as an area ofeconomic and cultural surplus.[...]a vital task ofthis dossier is to unpack the textual, aesthetic, industrial, and affective intensities that undergird \"the-biggest-star-you'venever-heard-of \" soubriquet.Ostensibly, Fan was conceived as a determined rejection of the masala form; in effect, however, it congeals as a lament for that (now defunct ?) formal system.[...]fittingly, all five essays wrestle with questions of recall-the older star/fan/celebrity culture, Hindi cinema's primordial use of the double, older idioms of romantic love aligned to the song sequence and to looking, etc.-even as they illuminate what remains startlingly new and unexpected in Fan.The double allows the film to explore the logics of original/ copy, singularity/interchangeability, and liveness/mediation that dominate the proliferating circuits of contemporary star habitation.[...]as a film where SRK plays a double lead, Fan jettisons the deep centrality of heterosexual romance in Bombay cinema.[...]in some cases, SRK has returned money to distributors to compensate for flops.
Journal Article