Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency

Description

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'etre 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. Title Page 0. A THEORY OF CINEMA THAT CAN ACCOUNT FOR INDIAN CINEMA 1. ‘BOLLYWOOD’ 2004 2. WHEN WAS BOLLYWOOD? 3. THE CINEMA-EFFECT 1 4. THE CINEMA-EFFECT 2 5. ADMINISTERING THE SYMBOLS OF AUTHENTICITY PRODUCTION 6. ‘YOU CAN SEE WITHOUT LOOKING’ 7. ‘PEOPLE–NATION’ AND SPECTATORIAL RIGHTS 8. THE DETOUR OF THE NATION 9. THE INDIAN EMERGENCY 10. THE PROBLEM 11. THE MECHANISM 12. BHUPEN KHAKHAR’S LIST 13. MANI KAUL AND THE ‘CINEMATIC OBJECT’ 14. GAUTAM GHOSE’S ‘MAABHOOMI’ 15. THE CINEMA-EFFECT Bibliography Index