Journal of the Moving Image: Indian and South Asian cinema and media studies

Image from Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Anil Sharma, 2001). 

For more on this film, read "Beyond Partition: The Political Horizons of Contemporary Indian and Korean War Films" by Bhaskar Sarkar

Film Studies For Free just came across a really good e-journal that it hadn't bumped into before: Journal of the Moving Image, an annual publication of the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. 

It was launched in print format in 1999, but its print and online versions now co-exist. As its mission statement puts it,

JMI seeks to represent critical work on the state of contemporary screen cultures. There are many regions in the world with large viewing populations, often with vast production infrastructures for film and television; but corresponding institutions or forums for critical engagement with such audio-visual regimes are still highly inadequate. JMI seeks to address a broad set of issues ranging from formal properties of the moving image to the social foundation of its production, transmission and reception. There will be a special focus on India and South Asia, and on issues of transnational media transactions, but we would like to offer a wider range of discussion on film and television from various parts of the world made from different perspectives.

FSFF wanted to share its contents with you promptly, so direct links to all items so far online are pasted in below, with the most recent issue first. The first three issues of JMI are also being prepared for online publication. 

There are some excellent items here (you might try out Ravi Vasudevan's The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ just for starters). So FSFF heartily recommends that you subscribe to JMI ready for its next issue in December. 

(Also, please check out, if you haven't yet, FSFF's own related entry: "Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies)

JMI, Number 8, December, 2009

• Editorial Note

• Preserving Film (on Film) in a Digital Age Josef Lindner

• Together against the Mafia: Godard, Scorsese, Bit Torrent Sebastian Lutgert

• Cinema’s Floating Point Matt Hanson

• Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship Nishant Shah

• Photoshop Landscapes: Digital Mediations and Bollywood Cities Madhija Mukherjee

• Special Feature Conjunction and Flow: The Gendered Temporalities of (Media) Disasters Kumkum Sangari

JMI, Number 7, December, 2008

• Editorial Note

• Querying the ‘Traditional’ Roots of Silent Cinema in Asia  Kaushik Bhaumik

• Beyond Partition: The Political Horizons of Contemporary Indian and Korean War Films Bhaskar Sarkar

• The Subject of Representation in Korean Cinema: Two Limit Cases  Earl Jackson, Jr.

• Meet John Doe’s Order: Piracy, Temporality and the Question of Asia  Lawrence Liang

• Missing in the Original: Twin Dragons Remade in India S.V. Srinivas

• Theorizing New Asian Cinemas: Problems of the Historicist Approach Manas Ghosh

• Student Paper New Urban Spaces: Films of Tsai Ming-liang Michelle Baitali Bhowmik

• Special Feature The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ Ravi Vasudevan

JMI, Number 6, December, 2007

• Editorial Note

• An Aesthetic for Film Sound in India? Ashish Rajadhyaksha

• Communication and Signification: Voice in the Cinema M. Madhava Prasad

• Early Indian Talkies: Voice, Performance and Aura Madhuja Mukherjee

•  Musical Contests: Reflections on Musical Values in Popular Film Amlan Das Gupta

• Speaking through Troubled Times Moinak Biswas

• Seeing through the Sound: Certain Tendencies of the Soundtrack in Satyajit Ray's Films of the 1970s Anindya Sengupta

• Student Papers Sound Memories: In Search of Lost Sounds in Indian Cinema Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and  Sound of Horror: Sound and Dread in Hindi Cinema Shubham Roy Choudhury

• Special Feature  Space, Interiority and Affect in Charulata and Ghare Baire Supriya Chaudhuri

JMI, Number 5, December, 2006

• Editorial Note

• The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous ‘Exhibition’ Capital Ashish Rajadhyaksha

• Acceleration and Conflicts: Comments on the Cinematic Object in the 1990s and After Jeebesh Bagchi

• Persistence of the Feudal: Star and Film Form in Post 1970s Telugu Cinema S V Srinivas

• Mourning and Blood-Ties: Macbeth in Mumbai Moinak Biswas

• Live(li)ness and Network Publics in Post-Liberalization Indian Popular Films Abhijit Roy

• Memories of Development: The Fantastic Non-Presence of Kolkata in Post-Liberalization Bangla Cinema Sovan Tarafder

• The Middle Class: Consuming and Consumed: The Romance of Bombay Cinema Neha Chadha

JMI, Number 4, November, 2005

• Editorial Note

• The Apparatus and its Constituencies: On India’s Encounters with Television Abhijit Roy

• Panoramas of Asia and the Electronic Hearth: Michael Palin’s Connections John Hutnyk 

• The Subjects of News Television M. Madhava Prasad

• Kyunki Main Bhi Kabhi Tulsi Thi : Opening and Using the Black Box of Primetime Telereality Ipsita Chanda

• Media Trials and Courtroom Tribulations : The Battle of Images, Words and Shadows in the 13 December Case Suddhabrata Sengupta

• Television, Nationalism and Indian Cricket in the Era of Global Media Manas Ghosh

• Development (without) Communication: Viewing Doordarshan Methodologically Dipankar Sinha

• 'Reading' Television: Towards a Definition of Audio-Visual Literacy Nilanjana Gupta

• Remote Control Nationalism: Media politics in Guyana Atticus Narrain

"Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies

Kajol and Shahrukh Khan in  Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge / The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride (Aditya Chopra, 1995)

With a wary eye on the fast-approaching (in many places at least) and not-so-mellow fruitfulness of a new academic year, Film Studies For Free today brings you its handy guide to online introductions to popular Hindi cinema.

Not all of the wonderful, openly accessible resources linked to below the embedded video are designed for those new to this core academic film studies subject, but all are clearly written, and thus very accessible, as well as highly informative to those at many different stages in their scholarly fascination with this most popular of world cinemas.

Talking of fascination, a nice place to start might be Jonathan Torgovnik's wonderful online portfolio of photographs: Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon Press, 2003).

 

The Seductive World of Indian Cinema (2007)

Discussion between author Anupama Chopra, leading filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and Bollywood expert and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU Tejaswini Ganti. The discussion is moderated by Richard Allen, Chair of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts.

• A Guide to South Asian Cinema, ImagineAsia: British Film Institute, 2002
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Gregory D. Booth, 'Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema', Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 54, 1995: 169-190
• Devon Burk, 'What's A Kiss: The Unchaste Chastity of Bollywood', The Virginia Review of Asian Studies, Vol. XI, Fall 2008
• Corey Creekmur, 'The Devdas Phenomenon', Philip's fil-ums, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Patrick Colm Hogan, 'Hindi Cinema as a Challenge to Film Theory and Criticism', Projections, Volume 3, Number 2, Winter 2009 , pp. v-ix(1)
• Aniruddha Dutta, 'Nation, Liberalisation And Film Songs: Technology And Hybridisation In Contemporary Hindi Film Music', Wide Screen Journal, 1.16, April 2009
• Faiza Hirji, 'When Local Meets Lucre: Commerce, Culture and Imperialism in Bollywood Cinema', Global Media Journal 4.7, Fall 2005
  
• Wendy F. Hsu, 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, July 2003
• Tabish Khair, 'The ironies of Bollywood', 16:9,  7.31, April 2009
• Mark Lorenzen and Florian Arun Taeube, 'Breakout from Bollywood? Internationalization of Indian Film Industry', DRUID Papers, 07-06
• Philip Lutgendorf with Corey Creekmur, Philip's Fil-Ums: Notes on Indian popular cinema, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Vijay Mishra, 'Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy', Asian Studies Institute, 2006
• Anna Morcom, 'The Cinematic Study of Hindi Film Songs', Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema (Ashgate Publishing, 2007) 
• Shammi Nanda,'Censorship and Indian Cinema: The Case of War and Peace', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 38, November 2002
• Sheila J Nayar, 'The values of fantasy: Indian popular cinema through Western scripts', Journal of Popular Culture; Summer 1997; 31, 1  
• Ally Ostrowski, 'Found in Translation: From Hollywood Hits to Bollywood Blockbusters', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 11, No. 2 October 2007
• Heidi Pauwels, '“The Woman Waylaid at the Well” or Paṇaghaṭa-līlā An Indian Folk Theme Appropriated in Myth and Movies', Asian Ethnology, Volume 69, Number 1, 2010, 1–33
• Aswin Punathambekar and Anandam Kavoori, 'Introduction', Global Bollywood, edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (NYU Press, 2008)
• Anjali Ram, 'Framing the feminine: diasporic readings of gender in popular Indian cinema', Women's Studies in Communication, March 22 2002
• Shakuntala Rao, 'The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India', The Communication Review, 10: 57–76, 2007
• Amrita Sen, 'Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions', Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009)
• Brian Shoesmith, '[Review of] Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008', Screening the Past, Issue 25, 2009
• Sangita Shresthova, 'Strictly Bollywood? Story, Camera and Movement in Hindi Film Dance', MSc e-thesis, Princeton, 2003
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex, 2010 
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited buy Iain Robert Smith, Scope, Issue 15, 2010
• Lakshmi Srinivas, 'The active audience: spectatorship, social relations and the experience of cinema in India', Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 24: 155–173, 2002

Cinephilia celebrated and explored in IndianAuteur

Image from The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) by Ritwik Ghatak (Adrian Martin's favourite Indian film)

A Film Studies For Free quickie first-off today, just to bring you news of the new issue (no. 7: November 25- December 25) of the IndianAuteur  E-magazine. In particular, FSFF wanted to flag up its fascinating series of articles on film festivals and cinephilia, crowned by a truly fantastic interview with one of the most prodigiously talented and productive cinephile film-writers out there, Adrian Martin.

You can read the issue online by clicking here; and you can download it by clicking here (for the .zip file). The magazine's great e-archive of past issues is here. Below, FSFF has pasted the table of contents of direct links to all those articles from the new issue which available online:

AUTEUR

The Legend of Herr Zolka: Anuj Malhotra

COVER STORY

Paradise Lost: Kshitiz Anand

Cinephilia in India: Nitesh Rohit

Porgramming a film festival: Sachin Gandhi

Seeing is Believing: Supriya Suri

Cinephile, Adjectiv- Cinephilia in Romania : Anamaria Dobincuic

Winds From The East: Sagorika Singha

Multiplexes, Multi-Million AND Multi-Wood: Anuj Malhotra (there's a problem loading this page so far)

Interview

Adrian Martin

A Heart of Gold: Pakeezah and the Hindi Courtesan Film

Click on the image of Meena Kumari, above, to link to the 'Chalte Chalte' sequence in Pakeezah (music by by Ghulam Mohammed, lyrics by Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi, Kamal Amrohi, Kaif Bhopali, sung by Lata Mangeshkar).

One of the favourite films of Film Studies For Free's author is Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah/Pure Heart (1971), a magnificent Hindi melodrama and one of the most accomplished and beautiful films in the transnational 'courtesan with a heart of gold' film genre.

As one of FSFF's favourite scholarly film weblogs is Michael J. Anderson's Tativille, you can possibly imagine how delighted it was to find that the centrepiece feature of Indian Auteur's third issue is Anderson's remarkable essay on Pakeezah. (IndianAuteur is an excellent online journal edited by Nitesh Rohit, Supriya Suri and others).

What better way to celebrate the felicitous conjunction of all of these elements, then, or to encourage FSFF readers to explore them all, than a little list of Friday links to online and freely accessible studies touching on Pakeezah, Kamal Amrohi, Meena Kumari (pictured above) and the Hindi Courtesan Film.

• Michael J. Anderson, 'Body and Soul: Pakeezah and the Parameters of Classical Indian Cinema', IndianAuteur, Issue 3, May 2009
• Bart Barendregt, 'The changing art of seduction: ritual courtship, performing prostitutes, erotic entertainment', International Institute for Asian Studies, Newsletter 40, Spring 2006
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Jolanda Djaimala Boejharat, 'Indian courtesans: from reality to the silver screen and back again', International Institute for Asian Studies, Newsletter 40, Spring 2006
• Gregory D Booth, 'Making a Woman from a Tawaif: Courtesans as Heroes in Hindi Cinema', New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 9, 2 (December, 2007): 1-26
• Gregory D Booth, 'Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema', Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 54, 1995: 169-190
• Wendy F. Hsu, 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, July 2003
• Anandam P. Kavoori and Christina Joseph, 'Nagina Conversations with a snake', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 86-91
• Coonoor Kripalani, 'What's Love Got to Do WIth It? – Bollywood Courtesans & Hollywood Prostitutes', Inter-Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2002 (Scroll down to Chapter 6)
• Neepa Majumdar, 'Doubling, stardom, and melodrama in Indian cinema: the "impossible" role of Nargis', Post Script, June 22 2003
• Vijay Mishra, 'Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy', Asian Studies Institute, 2006
• Aswin Punathambekar, We Are Like This Only: Desis and Hindi Films in the Diaspora, MSc e-thesis, MIT, 2003
• Anjali Ram, 'Framing the feminine: diasporic readings of gender in popular Indian cinema', Women's Studies in Communication, March 22 2002
• Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
• Sangita Shresthova, 'Strictly Bollywood? Story, Camera and Movement in Hindi Film Dance', MSc e-thesis, Princeton, 2003
• Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, 'The Prostitution Questions(s): (Female) Agency, Sexuality and Work', re/productions: Issue#2, April 1999
• Valentina Vitali, 'The Families of Hindi Cinema: A Socio-Historical Approach to Film Studies', Framework, Vol. 42, 2000
• Leda Ward, 'Images of a Decolonizing India: Bollywood’s Tawai’f and the Postcolonial Muslim', e-Thesis, Barnard College, Dance Department, Columbia University, Fall 2008