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Bombay Cinema An Archive of the City Ranjani Mazumdar PRESS |
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$67.50 cloth |
The urban experience in India through the lens of popular Bombay cinema. Cinema is not only a major industry in India, it is a powerful cultural force. But until now, no one has undertaken a major examination of the ways in which films made in Bombay mediate the urban experience in India. In Bombay Cinema, Ranjani Mazumdar takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding Bombay cinema as the unofficial archive of the city in India. In this analysis of the cinematic city, Mazumdar reveals a complex postnationalist world, convulsed by the social crisis of the 1970s and transformed by the experience of globalization in the 1990s. She argues that the upheaval of postcolonial nationalism led to Bombay cinema’s articulation of urban life in entirely new terms. Specifically, the place of the village in the imaginary constitution of anticolonial nationalism gave way to a greater acknowledgment, even centrality, of urban space. Bombay Cinema takes the reader on an inventive journey through a cinematic city of mass crowds, violence, fashion, architectural fantasies, and subcultural identities. Moving through the world of gangsters and vamps, families and drifters, and heroes and villains, Bombay Cinema explores an urban landscape marked by industrial decline, civic crisis, working-class disenchantment, and diverse street life. Combining the anecdotal with the theoretical, the philosophical with the political, and the textual with the historical, Bombay Cinema leads the reader into the heart of the urban labyrinth in India, revising and deepening our understanding of both the city and the cinema. “Bombay Cinema is an exciting and important contribution to a field that has, to date, been under researched and under theorized. Lively, provocative and richly suggestive, it will also serve as a surefire incentive to watch those films all over again.” —Screen “Bombay Cinema takes us through the cinematic city as character, as spectacle, as spatial dynamic, as performative motor and above all as an invaluable archive of urban experience in contemporary India. Mazumdar develops her work thoroughly and consistently, such that contemporary Bombay cinema is easily accessible to the general reader and the academic scholar alike. Bombay Cinema is lucid, provocative, stylish and substantial. It is an illuminating scholarly study that spares no effort to bring Bombay cinema out of the academic closet.” —The Book Review India “Drawing on scholarship in film and literary criticism, cultural studies, architecture and urban design and on interviews with actors, directors and screenplay writers, Ranjani Mazumdar's groundbreaking book explores the complex relationship between Hindi cinema and the city and applies the resulting insights to innovative readings of a number of important films of the past four decades . . . a landmark study—carefully researched, well organized and offering refreshingly uncondescending and strikingly insightful discussions of mainstream films—that deserves to be read by anyone interested in India's popular cinema or its contemporary urban life.” —Journal of Asian Studies “Mazumdar's experience as a filmmaker allowed her to offer significant readings of not just the narratives and character development in the films, but of the cinematography, mise-es-scene, and other technical and performance aspects of production. As scholar and a filmmaker, Ranjani Mazumdar effectively combined her two disciplines in the book, which is accessible and useful to scholars of South Asia and film.” —Journal of Popular Culture “This is a fascinating book about the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) and its place and role in Indian cinema. Ranjani Mazumdar has provided us with a lucid picture of the city and its relationship with cinema. This book is a much needed contribution in understanding the role of Hindi films in the cinematic city. The book also challenges the idealisation of the Indian village as constructed by the Indian nationalist movement.” —Information, Society, and Justice “Mazumdar has a great capacity to discuss Indian cinema, with a brilliant grasp of its political, historical and esthetic developments, but equally she is well attuned to the interests and ruptures in the academic discourse of film and cinema studies.” —Film International “Ranjani Mazumdar makes an eloquently convincing claim to indispensability within this increasingly claustrophobic field with a book that takes the Bombay cinema as ‘perhaps the major reservoir of the urban experience in India.’ Bombay Cinema will be of significant interest to student and scholars in South Asian urban and visual studies, world cinema studies, anthropology, and media and cultural studies. When read in concert with the films it explores, it will serve as an excellent teaching text for advanced undergraduate courses, as well as providing ample conceptual grist for the graduate seminar mill.” —Visual Anthropology Review “Bombay Cinema is methodologically challenging in its deployment of moments rather than discursive formations of film as text. The book also refuses to read film alone, but interprets the medium alongside the detailed insights of people involved in making them, and with the recent history of Bombay, within which the film industry is located. In Mazumdar's evocative reading of the films she engages with, the cinematic city becomes the space of critique of the nation, the site of the ruin of the modern nationalist project.” —Contemporary South Asia Ranjani Mazumdar is an independent filmmaker and associate professor of film studies at the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. 312 pages | 44 halftones | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 1. Rage on Screen Conclusion: After Life |
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$24.50 paper