Report


Book Description




Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema


Book Description

India produces an impressive number of films each year in a variety of languages. Here, Monika Mehta breaks new ground by analyzing Hindi films and exploring the censorship of gender and heterosexuality in Bombay cinema. She studies how film censorship on various levels makes the female body and female sexuality pivotal in constructing national identity, not just through the films themselves but also through the heated debates that occur in newspapers and other periodicals. The standard claim is that the state dictates censorship and various prohibitions, but Mehta explores how relationships among the state, the film industry, and the public illuminate censorship's role in identity formation, while also examining how desire, profits, and corruption are generated through the act of censoring. Committed to extending a feminist critique of mass culture in the global south, Mehta situates the story of censorship in a broad social context and traces the intriguing ways in which the heated debates on sexuality in Bombay cinema actually produce the very forms of sexuality they claim to regulate. She imagines afresh the theoretical field of censorship by combining textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative fieldwork. Her analysis reveals how central concepts of film studies, such as stardom, spectacle, genre, and sound, are employed and (re)configured within the ambit of state censorship, thereby expanding the scope of their application and impact.




Children, Cinema and Censorship


Book Description

Children make up one of cinema's largest audiences, yet from its infancy cinema has in the minds of moral watchdogs accompanied penny papers, comic books and mobile phones as a threat to children's health, morality and literacy. Mobilising original research, and writing with energy and wit, Sarah J. Smith explores the recurring debates in Britain and America about how children use and respond to the media. She focuses on a key example: the controversy surrounding children and cinema in the 1930s. Arguing that children are agents in their cinema viewing, not victims, she uncovers children's distinct cinema culture and reveals the ways in which they subverted or circumvented official censorship to regulate their own viewing of a variety of films, including "Frankenstein" and "King Kong". In an era when children are seen to be 'at risk' in so many ways, this involving book is a refreshing and illuminating read for all those interested in its subject.




The Melodramatic Public


Book Description

What does it mean to say Indian movies are melodramatic? How do film audiences engage with socio-political issues? What role has cinema played in the emergence of new economic forms, consumer cultures and digital technologies in a globalizing India? Ravi Vasudevan addresses these questions in a wide-ranging analysis of Indian cinema.




Censorium


Book Description

In the world of globalized media, provocative images trigger culture wars between traditionalists and cosmopolitans, between censors and defenders of free expression. But are images censored because of what they mean, what they do, or what they might become? And must audiences be protected because of what they understand, what they feel, or what they might imagine? At the intersection of anthropology, media studies, and critical theory, Censorium is a pathbreaking analysis of Indian film censorship. The book encompasses two moments of moral panic: the consolidation of the cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, and the global avalanche of images unleashed by liberalization since the early 1990s. Exploring breaks and continuities in film censorship across colonial and postcolonial moments, William Mazzarella argues that the censors' obsessive focus on the unacceptable content of certain images and the unruly behavior of particular audiences displaces a problem that they constantly confront yet cannot directly acknowledge: the volatile relation between mass affect and collective meaning. Grounded in a close analysis of cinema regulation in the world's largest democracy, Censorium ultimately brings light to the elusive foundations of political and cultural sovereignty in mass-mediated societies.




Intimate Relationships in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture


Book Description

This edited volume is an inquiry into the representation of intimate relationships in a diverse array of media including cinema, arts, literature, picture books, advertising and popular music. It examines artistic portrayal of intimate relationships as a subversion of the boundaries between the representable and the non-representable, the real and the surreal, the visceral and the ideal, the embodied and the abstracted, the configured and transfigured. The essays focus on artistic mediation of intimacy in diverse relationships, including heterosexual, same-sex, familial, sibling' , political, and sadomasochistic. The collection offers new interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives on current trends in the study of popular representations of intimacy; representations that affect and formulate people's most personal inspirations, desires, angsts, dreams and nightmares in an increasingly alienated, industrialized world.




Mass Communication and Journalism in India


Book Description

In addition to making a comprehensive survey of journalism, other mass media, and public relations in India, Mehta discusses such issues as freedom of the press, press laws, and developments in the international regulation of the media. His book is also a bibliography and a sourcebook of information on advertising codes; accreditation rules for media representatives and other information on Indian media and journalism.




Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema


Book Description

The largest film industry in the world after Hollywood is celebrated in this updated and expanded edition of a now classic work of reference. Covering the full range of Indian film, this new revised edition of the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema includes vastly expanded coverage of mainstream productions from the 1970s to the 1990s and, for the first time, a comprehensive name index. Illustrated throughout, there is no comparable guide to the incredible vitality and diversity of historical and contemporary Indian film.




Filming the Gods


Book Description

Filming the Gods examines the role and depiction of religion in Indian cinema, showing that the relationship between the modern and the traditional in contemporary India is not exotic, but part of everyday life. Concentrating mainly on the Hindi cinema of Mumbai, Bollywood, it also discusses India's other cinemas. Rachel Dwyer's lively discussion encompasses the mythological genre which continues India's long tradition of retelling Hindu myths and legends, drawing on sources such as the national epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; the devotional genre, which flourished at the height of the nationalist movement in the 1930s and 40s; and the films made in Bombay that depict India's Islamicate culture, including the historical, the courtesan film and the 'Muslim social' genre. Filming the Gods also examines the presence of the religious across other genres and how cinema represents religious communities and their beliefs and practices. It draws on interviews with film stars, directors and producers as well as popular fiction, fan magazines and the films themselves. As a result, Filming the Gods is a both a guide to the study of film in religious culture as well as a historical overview of Indian religious film.




Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies


Book Description

The collapse of empires has resulted in a remarkable flourishing of indigenous cultures in former colonies. The end of the colonial era has also witnessed a renaissance of creativity in the postcolonial world as modern writers embrace their heritage. The experience of postcoloniality has also drawn the attention of academics from various disciplines and has given rise to a growing body of scholarship. This reference work overviews the present state of postcolonial studies and offers a refreshingly polyphonic treatment of the effects of globalization on literary studies in the 21st century. The volume includes more than 150 alphabetically arranged entries on postcolonial studies around the world. Entries on individual authors provide brief biographical details but primarily examine the author's handling of postcolonial themes. So too, entries on theoreticians offer background information and summarize the person's contributions to critical thought. Entries on national literatures explore the history of postcoloniality and the ways in which writers have broadly engaged their legacy, while those on important topics discuss the theoretical origin and current ramifications of key concepts in postcolonial studies. Cross-references and cited works for further reading are included, while a comprehensive bibliography concludes the volume.