Download or read book The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani written by Laleen Jayamanne and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-22 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laleen Jayamanne examines the major works of leading Indian film director, Kumar Shahani, and explores the reaches of modernist film aesthetics in its international form. More than an auteur study, Jayamanne approaches Shahani's films conceptually, as those that reveal cinema's synaesthetic capabilities, or "cinaesthesia." As the author shows, Shahani's cinematic project entails a modern reformulation of the ancient oral tradition of epic narration and performance in order to address the contemporary world, establishing a new cinematic expression, "an epic idiom." As evidenced by his films, constructing cinematic history becomes more than an archival project of retrieval, and is instead a living history of the present which can intervene in the current moment through sensory experiences, propelling thought.

Download or read book Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India written by Lalitha Gopalan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.

Download or read book The Becoming Room written by Meg Harris Williams and published by Phoenix Publishing House. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contents of this book represent a series of experiments in dramatizing Bion's A Memoir of the Future, the primary one being an unfinished film begun in India in the 1980s and directed by Kumar Shahani, 'epic' artfilm maker, most of whose films have been produced in Hindi. The film was inspired and initiated by Bombay psychoanalyst Udayan Patel, and sponsored by the Roland Harris Educational Trust. The cast of actors included Jalal Agha, Tom Alter, Robert Burbage, Nicholas Clay, Neil Cunningham, Carol Drinkwater, Peter Firth, Nigel Hawthorne, Shona Morris, Jonathan Page (as a child), Angela Pleasence, Juliet Reynolds, and Alaknanda Samarth.The filmscript and a commentary are here included, together with a narrative poem written for Alaknanda Samarth who played the Ayah of Bion's childhood, and a playscript written for Tom Alter who played the Father. The play is due to be first performed in Bombay and Delhi in February 2016.An appendix reprints a psychoanalytic study of the Memoir by Donald Meltzer, who was closely involved in the production of the original film.The book is illustrated by screenshots from the film and the ebook contains video extracts.

Download or read book Populism and Its Limits written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Populism and Its Limits is a response to the evaluative and celebratory approaches to populism in social sciences and humanities. It seeks to study the phenomenon of populism, thoroughly consider its limits and, if possible, proposes ways out to other kinds of commitment in life, living and politics. It aims to formulate responses that take on the spurious and non-dialectical dissociation between thought and action, intellect and emotion, the people and the elite.

Download or read book Kumar Shahani written by Kumar Shahani and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifty-one essays compiled in this book were written over a forty-year period by India's leading independent filmmaker. They provide new insights into a turbulent era in modern India's cultural history. Although known primarily as a filmmaker, Kumar Shahani has taught, spoken and written on a variety of subjects over this period, that include the cinema, but also politics, aesthetics, history and psychoanalysis. In these essays Shahani addresses diverse political issues, aesthetic practice, questions of artistic freedom and censorship. There are also personal essays on filmmakers and artists including his teachers and colleagues. Shahani's often polemical positions, as they occur in several previously unpublished essays and presentations, are essential contributions to film and cultural histories of the Indian cinema as well as of the New Cinema worldwide. The book includes a comprehensive introductory essay, "Kumar Shahani Now," by Ashish Rajadhyaksha.

Download or read book Assured Self Restive Self written by Prasanta Chakravarty and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-30 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times. A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living. Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self – stoic or heroic, political and creative – come into being during crisis? While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.

Download or read book Bollywood and its Other s written by V. Kishore and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we define the globalized cinema and media cultures of Bollywood in an age when it has become part of the cultural diplomacy of an emerging superpower? Bollywood and Its Other(s) explores the aesthetic-philosophical questions of the other through, for example, discussions on Indian diaspora's negotiations with national identity.

Download or read book Critical Cinema written by Clive Myer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice purges the obstructive line between the making of and the theorising on film, uniting theory and practice in order to move beyond the commercial confines of Hollywood. Opening with an introduction by Bill Nichols, one of the world's leading writers on nonfiction film, this volume features contributions by such prominent authors as Noel Burch, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, Brian Winston and Patrick Fuery. Seminal filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis also contribute to the debate, making this book a critical text for students, academics, and independent filmmakers as well as for any reader interested in new perspectives on culture and film.

Download or read book The Cinema Book written by Bloomsbury Publishing and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cinema Book is widely recognised as the ultimate guide to cinema. Authoritative and comprehensive, the third edition has been extensively revised, updated and expanded in response to developments in cinema and cinema studies. Lavishly illustrated in colour, this edition features a wealth of exciting new sections and in-depth case studies. Sections address Hollywood and other World cinema histories, key genres in both fiction and non-fiction film, issues such as stars, technology and authorship, and major theoretical approaches to understanding film.

Download or read book Salaam Bollywood written by Vikrant Kishore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the journey of popular Hindi cinema from 1913 to contemporary times when Bollywood has evolved as a part of India’s cultural diplomacy. Avoiding a linear, developmental narrative, the book re-examines the developments through the ruptures in the course of cinematic history. The essays in the volume critically consider transformations of the Hindi film industry from its early days to its present self-referential mode, issues of gender, dance and choreography, Bombay cinema’s negotiations with the changing cityscape and urbanisms, and concentrate on its multifarious regional, national and transnational implications in the 21st century. One of the most comprehensive volumes on Bollywood, this work presents an analytical overview of the multiple histories of popular cinema in India and will be useful to scholars and researchers interested in film and media studies, South Asian popular culture and modern India, as well as to cinephiles and general readers alike.

Download or read book Gender Media and Modernity in the Asia Pacific written by Catherine Driscoll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers a range of cultural studies perspectives on the ways gender and modernity intersect in media produced in the Asia-Pacific region. It spans different ideas about modernity in the region, different approaches to cultural analysis, and different media forms: from Taiwanese lifestyle television to avant-garde Indian cinema, from the emergence of a Chinese youth culture in online social networks to the alienation of country girls as imagined by Australian soap opera, and from the fantastic politics of migrating bodies in Korean cinema to the masculine mimicry of fighting women in South-East Asian action movies. Together, these essays explore the ways that media both records and helps produce images and experiences of modernity and the integral role gender plays in those processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Download or read book Humanities Provocateur written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original collection is a far cry from the demand on the literary humanities to offer the soothing hum of theory to a world of breaks, crises and pain. Instead, it exemplifies a way ahead for the critical humanities.... -Arjun Appadurai, New York University 'Doing the Humanities' comes to life in this passionate, provocative set of experiments in descriptive poetics. Failure, fantasy, freefall are reconceived as forms of aesthetic achievement across the creative arts.... -Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford ....This timely volume inspires a collective undertaking to learn 'to do' the humanities through the untimeliness of a work of art. A humanities that remains attentive to this form of techné will prove indispensable to remaking the world in the aftermath of a pandemic. -Premesh Lalu, University of the Western Cape ....exhilarating in the democratic breadth of its interests, the emotional fervour of its commitments and its yoking of systemic criticism to the work of poetic language. -Helen Small, University of Oxford How can the humanities make an intervention in such a time as this, when life as we have known it hangs in pandemic balance since the spring of 2020-and when contagion calls for distancing and isolation, while loneliness cries out for the solace of touch? Perhaps only by being, at once, fearless, critical, sorrowing, exultant, enraged, intimate. Humanities, Provocateur brings you fourteen essays and two creative pieces by established as well as younger scholars and writers from America, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa and South Asia, in a bracing invitation to a freefall of reading. They travel from classical literatures and philosophy to twentieth-century writing, cinema and critical-imaginative thinking, grouped whimsically around a set of provocations-Gleaning, Perforation, Caprice, Paraphernalia, Descent, Flux, Flesh, Ephemera-and welcome you to argue, to cherish or to distrust. Taking sharp, sparkling twists and turns in thought and style, this eclectic collection of writings incites you to be intellectually adventurous and destitute at the same time. And, invoking Dante, to never be afraid, for our fate is our gift.

Download or read book Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi Volume 2 written by John Docker and published by Kerr Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elsie Levy was born in the Jewish East End of London, came to Sydney with her family when she was 14, and joined the Communist Party of Australia when she was a young woman. In this book, her son explores her disaporic Jewish identity, both English and Australian, and in the process journeys into Jewish cultural histories. We meet important cultural figures such as Leonard Woolf, Freud, Schnitzler, Veza Canetti and Ida Rubinstein. This journey leads also to English anti-Semitism, including, shockingly, Bloomsbury. In turning to Communism and marrying out, Elsie Levy became one of history's undutiful daughters.

Download or read book Hollywood Heroines written by Laura L. S. Bauer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a topical resource that provides a comprehensive look at the most influential women in Hollywood cinema across a wide-range of occupations rarely found together in a single volume. Unlike other anthologies, Hollywood Heroines: The Most Influential Women in Film History is a hybrid of film history and industry information with an exclusive focus on prominent women. This reference work includes more commonly discussed categories of important women in Hollywood film history, such as directors and actresses, and reaches beyond them to encompass women working as cinematographers, casting directors, studio heads, musical composers, and visual and special effects supervisors. The wide range of filmmaking crafts covered in the book provides an acute view of the industry and increases the visibility of and quality of representation for women working in Hollywood. By bringing the experience of these influential women to light, Hollywood Heroines joins a growing movement that endeavors to dismantle harmful, long-standing industry myths that perpetuate the systemic underrepresentation of women and the devaluation of women's stories in the Hollywood film industry.

Download or read book Documentary Films in India written by Aparna Sharma and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces the diverse practices of three non-canonical practitioners: David MacDougall, Desire Machine Collective and Kumar Shahani. It offers analysis of their documentary methods and aesthetics, exploring how their oeuvres constitute a critical and self-reflexive approach to documentary-making in India.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema written by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 659 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Art Cinema and India s Forgotten Futures written by Rochona Majumdar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-Winner, 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for the Best Writing on Cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust Shortlisted, 2022 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association Longlisted, 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak—the leading figures of Indian art cinema—became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.