ABSTRACT
This volume points to the limits of models such as regional, national, and transnational, and develops ‘network’ as a conceptual category to study cinemas of India. Through grounded and interdisciplinary research, it shows how film industries located in disparate territories have not functioned as isolated units and draws attention to the industrial traffic – of filmic material, actors, performers, authors, technicians, genres, styles, sounds, expertise, languages, and capital, across trans-regional contexts -- since the inception of cinema. It excavates histories of film production, distribution and exhibition, and their connections beyond regional and national boundaries, and between places, industrial practices, and multiple media.
The chapters in this volume address a range of themes such as transgressive female figures; networks of authors and technicians; trans-regional production links and changing technologies, and new media geographies. By tracking manifold changes in the contexts of transforming media, and inter-connections between diverse industrial nodal points, this book expands the critical vocabulary in media and production studies and foregrounds new methods for examining cinema.
A generative account of industrial networks, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, production studies, media sociology, gender studies, South Asian studies, and cultural studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|73 pages
The female star, traveling figures and transgressions
chapter 1|14 pages
Fatma Begum, South Asia’s first female director
chapter 2|13 pages
The ‘problem of respectable ladies joining films’
chapter 3|13 pages
Sabita’s journey from Calcutta to Bombay
chapter 4|16 pages
Travels of the female star in the Indian cinemas of the 1940s and 50s
chapter 5|15 pages
Bringing bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema
part II|71 pages
Networks of circulation, production, and imaginings
chapter 6|13 pages
Film exhibition in Hyderabad in the 1930s
chapter 8|13 pages
Circumambient geographies of cinema
chapter 10|13 pages
Traversing The Evil Within (1970)
part III|88 pages
Media geographies, agencies, and technologies