Vergangene Veranstaltungen

Lecture

Moinak Biswas (Jadavpur University, Kolkata)

This talk will address the recent phenomenon of Indian regional films where serious content is treated in relation to locality and collective life, and trace the tendency back to the work of early masters of Indian art cinema. It would like to explore the nature of contemplation where individual-centric plots are missing.

Lecture

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.

Lecture

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, and transnational urbanism have generated a cartographic diversity in the cinematic imagination of globalised India.

Lecture

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 the Communist Party of India.

Lecture

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 a network of gender, performance, labor, and mobility. The aspiration is to move away from ideological readings of Indian cinema to push for a history and theorization of gendered performance.

Lecture

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 will focus on Malegaon video-cinemas as one striking instance of the often subaltern and piratical cultural-economic emergences from India that scuttle universal paradigms to forge southern trajectories of self-expression and global enterprise.

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 conversion to sound (1931 to 1935). Since many audio discussions at the time centered on the problem of noise in sound recording and projection, the talk will approach the transition to sound through the lens of a spectrum of noise and meaning through which the audiovisual was understood. Analyzing ads for competing film sound technologies that made claims about swadeshi (or indigenously developed) recording equipment, I will use the lens of „imaginary media,“ as theorized by media archaeologists, to focus on „impossible“ machines such as the locally developed tropically sensitive sound machines advertised in film magazines of the period.