Untimely Bollywood

2009-05-27 Performing Arts

Author : Amit S. Rai
Release : 2009-05-27
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 33X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Untimely Bollywood by : Amit S. Rai

Download or read book Untimely Bollywood written by Amit S. Rai. This book was released on 2009-05-27. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines, Bollywood cinema is a genre that foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation. In Untimely Bollywood, Amit S. Rai argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema are emblematic of the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India. Through analyses of contemporary media practices, Rai shifts the emphasis from a representational and linear understanding of the effects of audiovisual media to the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of media events. He uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage as a model for understanding the complex clustering of technological, historical, and physical processes that give rise to contemporary media practices. Exploring the ramifications of globalized media, he sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces in order to manage the risky excesses of power and sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy. Rai recounts his experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal: the sensory experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, thus creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. Expanding on the notion of media contagion, Rai traces the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.

Haunting Bollywood

2017-03-01 Performing Arts

Author : Meheli Sen
Release : 2017-03-01
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 580/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Haunting Bollywood by : Meheli Sen

Download or read book Haunting Bollywood written by Meheli Sen. This book was released on 2017-03-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haunting Bollywood is a pioneering, interdisciplinary inquiry into the supernatural in Hindi cinema that draws from literary criticism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, history, and cultural studies. Hindi commercial cinema has been invested in the supernatural since its earliest days, but only a small segment of these films have been adequately explored in scholarly work; this book addresses this gap by focusing on some of Hindi cinema’s least explored genres. From Gothic ghost films of the 1950s to snake films of the 1970s and 1980s to today’s globally influenced zombie and vampire films, Meheli Sen delves into what the supernatural is and the varied modalities through which it raises questions of film form, history, modernity, and gender in South Asian public cultures. Arguing that the supernatural is dispersed among multiple genres and constantly in conversation with global cinematic forms, she demonstrates that it is an especially malleable impulse that routinely pushes Hindi film into new formal and stylistic territories. Sen also argues that gender is a particularly accommodating stage on which the supernatural rehearses its most basic compulsions; thus, the interface between gender and genre provides an exceptionally productive lens into Hindi cinema’s negotiation of the modern and the global. Haunting Bollywood reveals that the supernatural’s unruly energies continually resist containment, even as they partake of and sometimes subvert Hindi cinema’s most enduring pleasures, from songs and stars to myth and melodrama.

Bollywood and Postmodernism

2015-06-24 Performing Arts

Author : Neelam Sidhar Wright
Release : 2015-06-24
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 565/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Bollywood and Postmodernism by : Neelam Sidhar Wright

Download or read book Bollywood and Postmodernism written by Neelam Sidhar Wright. This book was released on 2015-06-24. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'New Bollywood' has arrived, but its postmodern impulse often leaves film scholars reluctant to theorise its aesthetics. How do we define the style of a contemporary Bollywood film? Are Bollywood films just uninspired Hollywood rip-offs, or does their borrowing signal genuine innovation within the industry?Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this innovative study reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the 21st century. Equipping readers with an alternative method of reading contemporary Indian cinema, Bollywood and Postmodernism takes Indian film studies beyond the exhausted theme of diaspora, and exposes a new decade of aesthetic experimentation and textual appropriation in mainstream Bombay cinema. A bold celebration of contemporary Bollywood texts, this book radically redefines Indian film and persuasively argues for its seriousness as a field of study in world cinema.

The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and Popular Culture

2013-10-18 Literary Criticism

Author : Karen J. Renner
Release : 2013-10-18
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 732/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and Popular Culture by : Karen J. Renner

Download or read book The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and Popular Culture written by Karen J. Renner. This book was released on 2013-10-18. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'evil child' has infiltrated the cultural imagination, taking on prominent roles in popular films, television shows and literature. This collection of essays from a global range of scholars examines a fascinating array of evil children and the cultural work that they perform, drawing upon sociohistorical, cinematic, and psychological approaches. The chapters explore a wide range of characters including Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter series, the possessed Regan in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, the monstrous Ben in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, the hostile fetuses of Rosemary’s Baby and Alien, and even the tiny terrors featured in the reality television series Supernanny. Contributors also analyse various themes and issues within film, literature and popular culture including ethics, representations of evil and critiques of society. This book was originally published as two special issues of Literature Interpretation Theory.

Cinematic Independence

2022-02-22 History

Author : Noah Tsika
Release : 2022-02-22
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 094/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Cinematic Independence by : Noah Tsika

Download or read book Cinematic Independence written by Noah Tsika. This book was released on 2022-02-22. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cinematic Independence traces the emergence, demise, and rebirth of big-screen film exhibition in Nigeria. Film companies flocked to Nigeria in the years following independence, beginning a long history of interventions by Hollywood and corporate America. The 1980s and 90s saw a shuttering of cinemas, which were almost entirely replaced by television and direct-to-video movies. After 1999, the exhibition sector was again revitalized with the construction of multiplexes. Cinematic Independence is about the periods that straddle this disappearing act: the decades bracketing independence in 1960, and the years after 1999. At stake in both instances is the postcolony's role in global debates about the future of the movie theater. That it was eventually resurrected in the flashy form of the multiplex is not simply an achievement of commercial real estate but also a testament to cinema's persistence--its capacity to stave off annihilation or, in this case, come back from the dead"--

Popular eBooks

Untimely Bollywood

Haunting Bollywood

Bollywood and Postmodernism

The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and Popular Culture

Cinematic Independence

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