Making Meaning in Indian Cinema

Making Meaning in Indian Cinema

Product ID: 8605

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Author: Ravi S Vasudevan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 317
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195658671

Description

This volume examines the phenomenon of popular Indian cinema from the silent films of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters, and will appeal to the specialist as well as the general reader interested in a serious study of Indian films.

This volume examines the phenomenon of popular Indian cinema from the silent films of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters. Individual essays engage with the political implications of popular cinema by exploring it—through formal and narrative analysis, archival resources and oral testimony—as an arena for contests of political identity, social regulation and aesthetic hierarchies. How does the imaginative world of a popular film invite an audience to reflect on its relationship to social and political power? How do censorship, the civic administration, public lobbies, film criticism and fan clubs shape the contexts in which we see films and the value that we give them?

Such issues are examined across a range of key films that include the DMK's 'Parasakthi'; the Bengali 'Harano Sur', Mehboob Khan 'Andaz; Raj Kapoor's 'Awara; the Classic 'Deewar' (which introduced Amitabh Bachchan); Mani Ratnam's Roja; Raj Kumar Santoshi's Damini; Shankar's Kadaalan/Hum Se Hai Muquabla; Yash Chopra's 'Darr and Abbas-Mustan's ‘Baazigar.’

Given the relative death of critical material in this field, this volume will appeal to the specialist as well as the general reader interested in a serious study of Indian films.

Reviews :
Growing out of a seminar of Indian Cinema. . . this volume of essays is intellectually stimulating and impressive in its range of materials and approaches.'
—The Telegraph

Contents


Introduction

CHAPTER I
THE SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICS OF THE CINEMATIC INSTITUTION
Policing Silent Film Exhibition in Colonial South India
'Parasakthi': Life and Time of a DMK Film

CHAPTER II
THE 1950s: MELODRAMA AND THE PARADIGMS OF CINEMATIC MODERNITY
Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture
The Couple and Their Spaces: 'Harano Sur' as Melodrama Now

CHAPTER III
THE POLITICS OF FILM FORM IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
Signs of Ideological Re-form in Two Recent Film: Towards Real Subsumption?
Narrating Seduction: Vicissitudes of the Sexed Subject in Tamil Nativity Film
'Kaadalan' and the Politics of Resignification: Fashion, Violence and the Body
Avenging Women in Indian cinema
From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The 'Angry Man' and the Psychotic' Hero of Bombay Cinema


CHAPTER IV
INDIAN FILM, FILM THEORY AND DEMOCRACY
Viewership and Democracy in the Cinema
Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity