ConTrust Research seminar „India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia“ With S. V. Srinivas The rapid transformation of films into media content in the 21st century is coeval with the proliferation of screens, and sites of engagement with moving images. Interestingly, the media ecology in which […]
ConTrust Research seminar „India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia“ With Moinak Biswas It was commonly believed that with the development of modern forms, Indian cinema will present a fuller notion of the individual. We have had reasons to question that equation between modernity and individualization. […]
Meheli Sen (Rutgers University, New Jersey) This talk looks at genre cinema particularly the horror film-to situate it within India’s contemporary media cultures. In the face of totalitarian discourses that detine the nation-state, Meheli Sen suggests that regional-language horror offers a salubrious environment to register difference and dissent in potent and unexpected ways.
Ranjani Mazumdar (Jamaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) The complicated workings of various kinds of production infrastructures typically shape cinema’s topographical motivations and sense of scale. Through a comparative analysis of a set of films shot in and around Bombay with films shot in iconic locations outside India, I will establish how the aesthetic drives of vertical, horizontal, […]
Manishita Dass (Royal Holloway, University of London) The talk explores some of the methodological challenges and insights that Dass has encountered and gained, respectively, while working on Left Luggage, her book-in-progress about the cinematic legacies of the vibrant left cultural movement spearheaded in the 1940s by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural wing of […]
Priyadarshini Shanker (University of North Carolina, Wilmington) This talk intervenes in three prevailing frameworks of Indian film and media studies – auteurist approaches, history of film movements, and digital media studies – through three case studies that centralize the optics of feminist performances. Shanker proposes corporeal intervention that potentially recasts the historiography of Indian cinema as […]
Ruchir Joshi (film-maker, columnist and writer based in Calcutta) This program includes two essay films Memories of a Milk City (1991) and Tales of Planet Kolkata (1993) by Ruchir Joshi, an Indian film-maker, cultural writer, and novelist based in Kolkata. Shot on 16 mm, both films reimagine the form of the essay film to propose new […]
Bhaskar Sarkar (University of California, Santa Barbara) Even as techno-nationalist fantasies fuel India’s dreams of superpowerdom, inserting the country into a universal narrative of global ascension via market liberalization, this talk begins from the premise that contemporary India’s most inventive instances of home- spun entrepreneurialism remain outside the ambit of such top down mythologies. The presentation […]
Lecture Neepa Majumdar (University of Pittsburgh) Using film excerpts, ads for sound recording and projection equipment, sound technicians’ columns, as well as reports by and about salesmen-technicians, such as the Americans Wilford Deming Jr. and C. Willman, this talk will present debates about audio technologies and sonic cultures circulating in India during the period of cinema’s […]