Leftword

Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid

From Bollywood to the Emergency

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Language: English

456 Pages

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Price INR 650.0 USD 32.5

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About the Book

Nowhere has the cinema made more foundational a public intervention than in India, and yet the Indian cinema is consistently presented as something of an exception to world film history. What if, this book asks, film history was instead written from the Indian experience? Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid reconstructs an era of film that saw an unprecedented public visibility attached to the moving image and to its social usage. The cinema was not invented by celluloid, nor will it die with celluloid’s growing obsolescence. But ‘celluloid’ names a distinct era in cinema’s career that coincides with a particular construct of the twentieth-century state. This is not merely a coincidence: the very raison d’être of celluloid was derived from the use to which the modern state put it, as the authorized technology through which the state spoke and as narrative practices endorsing its authority as producer of the rational subject. Arguing that there was a ‘spectatorial pact’ around the attribution of state authority to the celluloid apparatus, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid explores the circumstances under which social practices surrounding the celluloid experience also included political negotiations over its authority. While modern states everywhere have put the cinema to varied and by now familiar uses, in India we had the politicization of key tenets associated with the apparatus itself. Indian cinema throws significant new light on the uses to which canonical concepts such as realism could be put, and on the frontiers at which cinematic narrative could operate.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

See more by Ashish Rajadhyaksha

CINEMA | CINEMA | CULTURAL STUDIES

Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid

From Bollywood to the Emergency

About the Book

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

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