{"title":"Song-and-Dance Sequence","authors":"Usha Iyer","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026051","url":null,"abstract":"The song-and-dance sequence, on account of being a staple item, a routine ‘attraction’ in the popular cinema of the Indian subcontinent, has been extensively and rigorously theorised in the scholarship on this cinema. The preponderance of song-and-dance sequences across the many film cultures of South Asia has been deeply generative in challenging theories of narrative construction and cohesion, and resultant ideological analyses; postulations about cinematic genre and authorship; canons of realist and experimental cinema; and indeed any attempt to propose a singular ontology of film. Unlike in Hollywood, in popular South Asian cinemas, the musical is not a separate genre with a set of formal and ideological markers. Rather, song-and-dance sequences are embedded in the omnibus, genre-defying masala (spice mix) film form that combines melodrama, music, dance, fight sequences and comedy. They also feature as attractions in more marked genres, including historical, horror, war and gangster films, and in mythological and devotional genres specific to the subcontinent (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009; Bhaskar, 1995; Booth, 2000; Creekmur, 2006; Dudrah & Gehlawat, 2019; Gopal & Moorti, 2008; Gopalan, 2012; Sarkar, 2010; Sen, 2017; Thomas, 2015). In other words, song-and-dance sequences have been constitutive of the identity of the commercial film form in the Indian subcontinent. This renders genre-specific scholarship on the Hollywood musical useful but not adequate for the study of the production, reception and circulation of South Asian film music and dance. The term ‘song-and-dance sequence’ is variously used by journalists, critics and scholars to describe musical numbers that feature singing and a range of physical movements from what critics routinely described as ‘running around trees’ to choreographed dance. Scholarship on popular South Asian cinemas employs a range of terms, including filmigit (Arnold, 1991), song-dance (Gopal & Moorti, 2008), song picturisation (Gopal, 2015), film song and song-and-dance sequence, and has generated extensive and vital discussions of these musical interludes as productive interruptions, engines for virtual tourism, fashion and body cultures, and for the production of public and private pleasures (Gopal, 2011a; Gopalan, 2002; Mazumdar, 2007). A concerted focus on dance disarticulates the song-and-dance sequence, often treated as a combined entity, and has propelled in my study of Hindi film dance specifically, a movement-based taxonomy that charts differences between ‘song sequences’ (featuring no dance moves), ‘songand-dance sequences’ (ranging from intermittent rhythmic movement in ‘narrative","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"174 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82942573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social Media Platforms","authors":"Aswin Punathambekar, Sriram Mohan","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026180","url":null,"abstract":"In January 2019, Indian yoga guru and businessman Swami Ramdev filed a defamation suit in the Delhi High Court seeking global injunctions against videos posted about him by users on Facebook, Google Plus, YouTube and Twitter. The judgement in the case opened with this statement – ‘for the sake of convenience, the defendants and their various websites, social media platforms, URLs, weblinks etc. are collectively referred to as “platforms”’ (Swami Ramdev & ANR versus Facebook, Inc. & ORS., 2019; emphasis ours). It was a striking illustration of the extent to which the term ‘platform’ has come to stand in for an entire digital media ecology: massive tech companies like Facebook, specific platforms like YouTube, web-based protocols and a wide range of user practices across this terrain. While the slipperiness of the term ‘platform’ is often appropriated by digital media companies to evade public oversight and stringent regulation, that same slipperiness was being deployed against them by Ramdev’s attorneys. In addition to the thorny issues of content take-down orders, free speech and digital sovereignty, cases like this offer glimpses into the extent to which digital platforms and user practices have come to shape South Asian public culture(s) in recent years. It is also worth noting the incredible range of media sectors (print, television and digital), media forms and representational practices (textual, televisual and sonic) and affective regimes (from ‘Indianness’ to ‘innovation’) that converge on social media platforms. After all, while Ramdev’s empire was built by cultivating a vast devotional television audience, maintaining its reach and influence seems to rest on his ability to control what can or cannot be said about him on social media platforms. Social media platforms – let’s take Facebook or WhatsApp as two dominant examples from South Asia – are not static entities. Their continual reconfiguration in response to changes in regulatory regimes, telecommunication infrastructures, business partnerships, political alliances, mobile devices and user practices makes them highly unstable objects (Helmond et al., 2019). Grappling with the unfolding social, cultural and political impact of social media platforms thus calls for an approach that is historically grounded and takes into account both intermedial and inter-sectoral dynamics at work. More broadly, for media and cultural studies scholars, this entails contending with keywords and concepts including data, algorithms and artificial intelligence in order to understand how representation, culture and identity have acquired new valences in an era of digitalisation. The challenge is as much about","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"162 1","pages":"170 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84961491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Analogue and Digital","authors":"Ravi Sundaram","doi":"10.1177/09749276211028958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211028958","url":null,"abstract":"As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the hegemony of a digital universe in India seems without limit. The digital now stands in for a larger environment, ranging from media culture, climate monitoring, governance, surveillance technologies, medicine and the entire landscape of the political. This sense of media as a constitutive plural, transcending medium specificity or geography makes our task doubly difficult. From its emergence in the 1990s, media culture began relentlessly digitising from the first decade after the millennium. By the next decade, global digital infrastructures spread rapidly in India and much of the non-Western world, aided by better bandwidth and the increasing use of smartphone mobile interfaces. This linear story hides the remarkable hybridity of the digital world, existing in conjunction with analogue. In his remarkable essay, ‘On the Superiority of the Analog’ Brian Massumi, suggested that analogue’s variable impulse allowed it to cross ‘from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat into pain. Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 135). For Massumi, analogue’s expression was topological, the digital had potentialities of the virtual only through an ‘analogue’ expression. Massumi’s focus is on the continuity of transformation, where topology is the ‘science of self-varying deformation’ (2002, p. 134). Here Massumi closely follows Deleuzian metaphysics, which stress the continuity of the virtual in contrast to the discrete in the digital. The quantified forms of the digital fail to measure up to the strengths of the analogue, which better approximates the process of becoming and its indeterminacy. As Sterne (2016) points out the designation of the analogue as a ‘not-digital’ sphere in the 1980s has been hugely problematic; blurring a rich traffic between technologies. In fact, says Sterne, ‘reality is just as analog as it is digital; and conversely, that it is just as not-digital as it is not-analog’ (p. 41). Massumi’s essay aligns with arguments on the transductive being of technicity (Simondon, 1958/1980). In transductive arguments, technical objects are ontogenetic, defined by evolution and indetermination, existing in associated environments or milieus. The topological impulse has become a larger drive in a calculative infrastructure so important to contemporary capitalism. Some scholars have argued that becoming topological is a larger impulse of contemporary culture, the normalisation of continuity, life measured according to capacities for change (Lury et al., 2012). Topological culture is relational and interconnected. The ‘ordering of continuity’, Lury et al. argue, ‘makes itself felt ‘in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating’ (2012, p. 4). In this context, the sharper oppositions of analogue","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"14 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84853148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Piracy","authors":"Lawrence Liang","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026177","url":null,"abstract":"Film piracy is a terrain where traditional concerns of film studies with the formal properties of cinema overlap with legal concerns about the status of film as property. If the former focuses on the aesthetic, diegetic and affective qualities of film as a medium, the latter is concerned with the illicit technological reproduction of the medium. From laws prohibiting camera recordings, region control of DVDs and the use of sniffer dogs to track pirated discs, piracy attests to the dynamic and opposing relations between two major trends that define cinema in our time: the technological and the legal. The property rights of cinema have been traditionally secured through legal controls of the material object of cinema (prints, cassettes, etc.), but there is an inherent tension in cinema’s striving for a juridical form, with transformations in the materiality of the medium unsettling possibility of any stable property regime. Thus even as more complicated systems of rights management and licensing in copyright law are created to ensure the smooth flow of films across the world, the ordered flow of cinema is constantly frustrated by technologies that enable the reproduction of a 20 million dollar film on a 20 rupee CD. This split was also reflected in a traditional division of labour between scholarship in film, law and the political economy of media. Piracy has blurred these lines and in the South Asian context there has been a particularly rich tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of film, technology and legal studies. Research on film piracy has been less interested in the legal concerns over what piracy is and more interested in the cultural and technological questions about what piracy does (Bagchi, 2006; Liang, 2008; Sundaram, 2011). Scholarship on piracy in South Asia has focused on questions of modernity and infrastructure and the intertwined worlds of livelihood, survival and leisure. Piracy, in these accounts, becomes a mode through which excluded social worlds make their way into the cultural sphere through innovative techno-practices and lay claim to cultural participation not through a logic of developmental paternalist access granted by the state but as a form of defiant access. While official rhetoric pits film piracy against the film industry as though it were an ahistorical evil that comes from outside, scholarly works on film piracy have demonstrated that piracy has always been an inevitable part of the development of the film industry. Jane Gaines demonstrates that copying was central to the practice of the early industry and the history of early competition was marked by a frantic race by the","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":"141 - 143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77669142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bollywood","authors":"L. Hoek","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026141","url":null,"abstract":"The bus to Jahangirnagar trundles through the narrow road connecting Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka with the town of Savar. Metal gates are set into either side of the walled boundaries along the road, bearing the names of garment factories. Behind these, fields betray that Savar was until recently a village. It isn’t only garments workers who walk this road every day. Buses and cars full of students pass along this road on their way to Jahangirnagar University, the high modernist campus from the 1960s set into Savar’s verdant landscape. Pasted to the urine-stained walls are bright posters promising ‘permanent solutions to sexual problems’ alongside instant cures for acne and skin brighteners, direct from Kolkata Herbal (Figure 1). The only images on the posters are","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"43 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75075311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Photography","authors":"Sabeena Gadihoke","doi":"10.1177/09749276211031050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211031050","url":null,"abstract":"The need to define a unique cultural identity has plagued accounts of photography in the region. I will suggest the need to focus on a more complex experience, tracking how photography developed through the circulation of photographs and photographers, as part of complicated global flows, alliances and collaborations, regional networks and exchanges, and the ‘make-do’ culture of technical innovation, repair and recycling. I also place emphasis on how photographic practice works in connection with other media, be it in photographic production, circulation, or display. In the process, I hope these stories located in South Asia will reframe thinking about photography as it has been recounted in European and North American histories. Today, the smartphone revolution of the 21st century has created an entirely new constituency of camera-proficient users without the pre-requisites of computer literacy. As we witness people across class, caste and gender taking ‘selfies’ or making pictures using Apps and posting them on social media, it is hard to imagine that photography once had a more exclusive history in the region. Lens-based practices arrived in South Asia almost simultaneously with North America and Europe, but there was never a ‘Kodak moment’ as self-owned cameras were limited to the elite. In contrast, proprietor-owned studios became aspirational and phantasmatic spaces to be photographed in. Early scholarship on popular vernacular practices emphasised a corporeal and affective engagement with hybrid images as opposed to a more distanced modernist imagination in the ‘West’ (Pinney, 1997, 2004). But professional photography grew in diverse directions in the subcontinent that included multiple practices and genres such as photo-journalism, documentary, industrial and commercial work as well as intermedial art works. Photography as a global form participated in the making, remaking and unmaking of identities, often through coordinates that extended beyond the borders of the ‘nation state’. Thus Sunil Janah who began his career as a photographer for publications of the Communist Party of India such as People’s War entered into a collaboration with Life photographer Margaret Bourke White (Rahman, 2010). Other visitors such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Gedney or Werner Bischof also made iconic images in and of India (Gaskell & Gujral, 2018). A fascinating archive of publicity photographs and production stills discovered recently is that of the German cinematographer Josef Wirsching, who was involved from 1934 in setting up the major film studio, Bombay","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"137 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79355544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remix","authors":"Kuhu Tanvir, Ramna Walia","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026438","url":null,"abstract":"As a term, ‘remix’ has predominantly been associated with music, gesturing towards the act of mixing the elements of an existing musical record to create a renewed version of it. Thus, at its very core, remixing is a material practice; be it the disc-scratching that DJs fall back on to introduce an electric scratching sound to songs, or actually separating elements of a song wherein the melody, the beats, the lyrics that have formed a cohesive union in the original are stripped from the whole, and readied for new combinations and thus new musical objects, remixes are all physical practices. By definition, therefore, a remix is reliant upon an existing sonic media object, leaning not just on its elements but on its memory. While some of the practices associated with the remix have been a part of the sonic landscape of the subcontinent ever since the arrival of sound in the 1930s, the most distinct iteration of the remix emerged in the early 1990s as a subgenre of what was developing then as Indie-pop. As a culturally hybrid product that mixed the musical form of popular Bombay film music, Indian folk music and Western electronic sounds such as electro, rap and reggae, the remix became popular not just within the subcontinent but also with the South Asian diaspora, particularly in Britain, largely due to the popularity of British–Indian DJ Bally Sagoo. Sagoo first gained attention in 1991 with his album Magic Touch that comprised remixes of Pakistani qawwali maestro Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s repertoire. His next venture – Bollywood Flashback – was ostensibly the first popular album to remix songs from old Hindi films. He also recorded an album dedicated to remixes of Kishore Kumar’s songs. Following Sagoo, DJs who remixed songs usually retained the original lyrics and the basic melody of the song. The entire emphasis was on recreating a new rhythm, accompanied by instrumentation that insiders within the music industry nebulously described as ‘modern’, or ‘western’, referring not just to them being contemporary media objects, but also signalling their departure from the aesthetic of both film and folk songs of India. The western influence was further highlighted with the addition of rap bridges that consisted of lyrics in English and other non-Indian languages. Most remixes retained the original tune and lyrics, but there were some distinctions: some remixes added beats to the existing vocals by playback singers, while some actually re-recorded the songs with new, and often less-known singers. In working with","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"173 1","pages":"166 - 169"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85022249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：