About the Book
The melodramatic public draws on melodrama as a key conceptual apparatus to understand how entertainment cinema in India drew audiences into complex passages of historical change. As the seeming consensus of the 1950s about nation-building unraveled in the 1970s, and globalization introduced new economic and territorial compulsions, Indian cinema offered compelling testimony to debates about economic advancement, social justice, inter-community conflict, and urban lifestyles.
Melodrama provided a narrative architecture and an expressive form which connected the public and the private, as well as the personal and the political, in ways which engaged audiences emotionally. In continuous dialogue with cinematic 'others'-within American cinema, in Indian popular cinema, and in a realist art cinema-mainstream melodrama also underwent significant mutations. This book explores the dynamics of form and narrative strategy across a wide repertoire of film practices. These include the pioneer D.G. Phalke, popular 'auteur' Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt, industry moguls Aditya and Yash Chopra, mainstream innovators Mani Rarhnam, Kamalahasan, and Ram Gopal Verma, and art and documentary cinema icons Satyajit Ray and Anand Patwardhan.
The book concludes with the contemporary global moment associated with 'Hollywood'. It considers changes in state policy and industrial organization, and the impact of digital technologies, new economies of consumption, and wider export markets on Indian film culture.
About the Author
RAVI VASUDEVAN works at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and is co-initiator of Sarai, the Centre's programme on media and urban research. He has taught Film Studies at universities in India and the USA, and held fellowships at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and Princeton. His articles have been widely published, anthologized, and translated. He is editorial advisor to Screen, founding editor of Bio Scope (a journal of South Asian screen studies), and has edited making Meaning in Indian Cinema (2000).
Contents
Acknowledgements
xiii
Introduction
1
Indian Cinema Today
And yesterday
4
2
The Thematics of Melodrama
8
3
The shifting Agenda of Film Studies in India
10
The melodramatic public
16
I:
DEBATES IN MELODRAMA STUDIEIS
17
The Archaeology of Melodrama in Euro-American Theatre and Cinema
Melodrama as Generalized mode of Cinematic Narration
20
Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema
26
The post-Colonial Question: Melodrama vs Realism
28
5
Deconstructing the Universal and the National
31
II:
THINKING ABOUT MELODRAMA IN INDIAN CINEMA
34
6
Pre-Cinema Histories
7
Film form: The Heterogeneous Popular Format
38
Melodramatic Interventions
42
9
'Horizontal' and 'Vertical' Articulations
46
Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood
56
PART I
Melodramatic and other Publics
65
67
Narrative Forms and Modes of Address in Indian Cinema
Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form
74
Critical Discourses in the 1950s
75
Popular Narrative Form
81
Visual Figures
82
Appropriations and Transformations of 'Modern' Codes
86
The Street and the Dissolution of social Identity
88
Iconic Transactions
89
Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism
94
The Popular Cultural Politics of the Social Film
95
The Cultural Politics of Address in a 'Transitional' Cinema
98
Indian Popular Cinema Genres and Discourses of Transformation
102
Dominant Currents in Contemporary Criticism
105
The Politics of Indian melodrama
108
Iconicity, Frontality, and the Tableau Frame
110
The Reconstruction of the Icon
112
Darshan
114
Tableau, Time, and Subjectivity
118
The political Terms of Spectatorial Subjectivity
125
Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian Conflict in popular Cinema
130
Community Typology and public Form in popular Cinema
131
Phalke and the Typological Discourse of Early Cinema
137
The Social Film: Community Typage/ Modernity/Psychology
141
The Historical Film: Differentiating Historical and Contemporary Publics
145
The Transcendental Location of Stellar Bodies
150
Raj Kapoor
151
Nana Patekar
157
A Modernist Public: The Double-Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray
163
Ray's Films: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and a History of the Present
166
The Modernism of the Trilogy
168
The Unfinished Agenda of History
181
Charulata (1964)
183
The Contemporary
191
Aranyer Din Ratri (1969)
192
Jana Aranya (1975)
PART II CINEMA AND TERRITORIAL IMAGINATION IN THE SUBCONTINENT: TAMILNADU AND INDIA
199
INTRODUCTION
201
The Formation of a pan-Indian Market: Inter-Regional Translatability in the Cinema of Social Reform
202
Differentiated Territories of a Sub continental Cinema Before and After Nation-State Formation
205
VOICE, SPACE, FORM: The symbolic and Territorial Itinerary of Mani Rathnam's Roja (1992)
213
Kashmir and Tamilnadu
The politics of Identity
219
Tamilness as Intractable Edifice
221
The Connotations of place
223
The Recalibration of Popular
224
Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics
229
Plot Synopsis
Towards a Modern Identity: The Basic Narrative Structure
231
The Representation of Inter-Community Differences
233
Journalistic Effects and Truth Claims: The pattern of Public Events
234
The navigation of Sectarian Difference: Community and Sexuality
245
Self-Alienation in the Constitution of Decommunalized Space
251
Melodramatic Identification: The Claims of self-Sacrifice
253
Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama in the Age of Digital simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan, 1999)
259
Plot synopsis
A New History?
262
Publicizing an Unofficial History
266
Narrative Form: Dropping the Quotation
268
Reading Hindutva Masculinity
269
'Lifting the Mogul Pardha'
271
Melodrama: performativity and Expressivity
272
Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation
277
PART III
MELODRAMA MUTATED AND DIFFERENTIATED: NARRATIVE FORM, URBAN VISTAS, AND NEW PUBLICS IN A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
291
293
The Urban Imagination
Differentiated Film Publics
296
Public: Bollywood, Globalization, and Genre Diversification
299
Selves Made Strange: Violent and performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema 1974-2003
303
In Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas Zanjeer, Deewar, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Kabhi Kbhie; Tarang, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Alberto Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai
306
Our Violent Times: the Morphology of Bodies in Space
312
Ankur, Tezaab, Parinda, Nayakan
Diagnnosing the Sources of violence
318
Naseem Zakhm, Maachis, Baazigar Darr; Bombay Hamara Shehar, Ram Ke Naam, War and peace, I Live in Behrampada
Intimations of Dispersal: The poetry and Anxiety of a Decentred World
322
Dahan, Egyarah Mile, A Season Outside, When Four Friends Meet, Jari Mari: Of cloth and other stories
Social Transvestism and the Open-Ended Seductions of Performance: The work of Aamir Khan
325
Satya: The Politics of Cinematic and Cinephiliac performativity
329
The Contemporary Film Industry-I: The Meanings of 'Bollywood'
334
Bollywood, Mark 1: The Transformation of the Bombay Film Economy
339
Bollywood, Mark 2: Multi-Sited Histories of Indian Cinema
346
11
The Contemporary Film Industry-II: Textual Form, Genre Diversity, and Industrial Strategies
362
Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch-I: Father India and Emergence of the Global Nation
Mothers, Communities, Nations
363
Fathers, Social Order, State Form
366
The Symbolic Functions of the Father: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995)
367
The Multicultural Father Deceased and Reincarnated: Kal Ho Na Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2004)
375
Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch-II: The Emergence of Genre Cinema
383
Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995)
384
Bhoot (Ran Gopal Varma, 2003)
387
Ek Hasina Thi (Sriram Raghavan, 2003)
389
Beyond or Within Bollywood?
392
Conclusion and Afterword
398
The Cinematic public - I: Melodrama
The Cinematic public -II: Cinema and Film After the Proliferation of Copy Culture
406
Bibliography
415
Index
437
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