Making Meaning

Making Meaning

Author: David BORDWELL

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674028538

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David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.


Bombay Hustle

Bombay Hustle

Author: Debashree Mukherjee

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0231551673

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From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial and compelling role in the life of modern India. Bombay Hustle presents an ambitious history of Indian cinema as a history of material practice, bringing new insights to studies of media, modernity, and the late colonial city. Drawing on original archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach, Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s–1940s. In the decades leading up to independence in 1947, Bombay became synonymous with marketplace thrills, industrial strikes, and modernist experimentation. Its burgeoning film industry embodied Bombay’s spirit of “hustle,” gathering together and spewing out the many different energies and emotions that characterized the city. Bombay Hustle examines diverse sites of film production—finance, pre-production paperwork, casting, screenwriting, acting, stunts—to show how speculative excitement jostled against desires for scientific management in an industry premised on the struggle between contingency and control. Mukherjee develops the concept of a “cine-ecology” in order to examine the bodies, technologies, and environments that collectively shaped the production and circulation of cinematic meaning in this time. The book thus brings into view a range of marginalized film workers, their labor and experiences; forgotten film studios, their technical practices and aesthetic visions; and overlooked connections among media practices, geographical particularities, and historical exigencies.


Studying Indian Cinema

Studying Indian Cinema

Author: Omar Ahmed

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0993238491

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This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the author analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise-en-scene. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).


Fashioning Bollywood

Fashioning Bollywood

Author: Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-12-19

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0857852973

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The Hindi film industry, among the most prolific in the world, has delighted audiences for decades with its colourful, exquisite and sometimes startling costumes. But are costumes more than just a source of pleasure? This book, the first in-depth exploration of Hindi film costume, contends that they are a unique source of knowledge about issues ranging from Indian taste and fashion to questions of identity, gender and work. Anthropological and film studies approaches combine to analyze costume as the outcome of production processes and as a cinematic device for conveying meaning. Chapters lead from the places where costume is planned and executed to explorations of characterization, the actor body, spectacles of fashion, to the imagining of historical or fantasy worlds through dress, to the power of stardom to launch clothing styles into the public domain. As well as charting the course of film costume as it parallels important trends in cultural history, the book considers the future of Hindi film costume, in the context of new strains of filmmaking that stress unvarnished realism. Fashioning Bollywood will appeal to students and scholars of Indian culture, anthropology and fashion, as well as anyone who has seen and enjoyed Hindi films.


The Melodramatic Public

The Melodramatic Public

Author: R. Vasudevan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 0230118127

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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.


Studying Indian Cinema

Studying Indian Cinema

Author: Omar Ahmed

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1800347383

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This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the author analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise-en-scene. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).


Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas

Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas

Author: K. Moti Gokulsing

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 741

ISBN-13: 113677291X

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India is the largest film producing country in the world and its output has a global reach. After years of marginalisation by academics in the Western world, Indian cinemas have moved from the periphery to the centre of the world cinema in a comparatively short space of time. Bringing together contributions from leading scholars in the field, this Handbook looks at the complex reasons for this remarkable journey. Combining a historical and thematic approach, the Handbook discusses how Indian cinemas need to be understood in their historical unfolding as well as their complex relationships to social, economic, cultural, political, ideological, aesthetic, technical and institutional discourses. The thematic section provides an up-to-date critical narrative on diverse topics such as audience, censorship, film distribution, film industry, diaspora, sexuality, film music and nationalism. The Handbook provides a comprehensive and cutting edge survey of Indian cinemas, discussing Popular, Parallel/New Wave and Regional cinemas as well as the spectacular rise of Bollywood. It is an invaluable resource for students and academics of South Asian Studies, Film Studies and Cultural Studies.


A Companion to Indian Cinema

A Companion to Indian Cinema

Author: Neepa Majumdar

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 1119048265

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A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema's widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a range of films and film experiences that include commercial cinema, art cinema, and non-fiction film. Even as scholarship on earlier decades of Indian cinema is challenged by the absence of documentation and films, the innovative archival and field work in this Companion extends from cinema in early twentieth century India to a historicized engagement with new technologies and contemporary cinematic practices. There is a focus on production cultures and circulation, material cultures, media aesthetics, censorship, stardom, non-fiction practices, new technologies, and the transnational networks relevant to Indian cinema. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students of film and media studies, South Asian studies, and history, A Companion to Indian Cinema is also an important new resource for scholars with an interest in the context and theoretical framework for the study of India's moving image cultures.