{"title":"Melodrama","authors":"Ravi S. Vasudevan","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026065","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"97 1","pages":"125 - 128"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76027658","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":"Fan","authors":"Masayuki, Inaba, Masayuki Inaba","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026075","url":null,"abstract":"Academics have created typologies to divide association football (soccer) fans into categories based upon the assumed ‘authenticity’ of their fandom practices. One of the main requirements of ‘authentic’ fandom has been assumed to be match attendance. The goal of this paper was to critically assess this assumption through considering how fans themselves talk about the significance of match attendance as evidence of ‘authentic’ fandom. In light of the fact that the voices of English non-league fans on the ‘authenticity’ debate have so far been overshadowed by the overbearing focus of much previous research on the upper echelons of English soccer, an e-survey was conducted with 151 members of an online community of fans of English Northern League (NL) clubs (a semi-professional / amateur league based in North East England). Findings revealed that opinion was divided on the constituents of ‘authentic’ fandom and match attendance was not deemed to be the core evidence of support for a club by 42% of the sample. Elias (1978) suggested that dichotomous thinking hinders sociological understanding and it is concluded that fan typologies are not sufficient for assessing the ‘authenticity’ of fan activities.","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":"83 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78502581","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":"Obsolescence","authors":"Sudhir Mahadevan","doi":"10.1177/09749276211030765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211030765","url":null,"abstract":"Planned obsolescence as a model for manufacturing ensures repetitive consumption by artificially limiting the lifespan of a product and forcing the customer to purchase upgraded versions frequently. In South Asia, the resistance to obsolescence found its expression most noticeably in film exhibition, exemplified in the persistence of traveling cinemas in South Asia well into the post-independence period, often with the aid of vintage and retrofitted movie projectors. These traveling cinemas allowed exhibitors with limited resources to take the cinema to audiences in rural areas. Vestigial optical devices from the 19th century, variants of the zoopraxinoscope, survive in the peepshow device of the ‘Bioscope’, in both non-mechanical and retrofitted forms that incorporate DVD and VHS players and loudspeakers. The lifecycles of ‘junk’ or damaged and worn film prints are extended as slum film exhibitors rescue every scrap of exposed footage discarded by studios or film theatres and revivify them as part of their screening programmes. Obsolescence is mitigated at the level of machinic assemblages (projector–film–projectionist), interfaces (projectionist–screen–audience) and infrastructures (tent–projector–screen–seating) that constitute the experience of the cinema (Mahadevan, 2015). To be sure, tent cinemas or bioscope shows have always been ‘minor’ practices, in the sense of being scaled down analogues, as well as disseminators in more modest circumstances, of theatrical, cinematic mass entertainment. But they point to challenges, such as sufficient access to capital to establish a more permanent footing in the film business, that were encountered by most South Asia film entrepreneurs. These challenges persist today. Contemporary film-makers in Lahore, ethnographer Gwendolyn Kirk discovered, use vintage 35mm cameras from the 1940s, reel-to-reel tape players from the 1960s and handwritten rather than typed scripts for their shoots because PCs and digital cameras remain unaffordable (Kirk, 2016). Second, the absence of local manufacture of film technologies ensured the persistence and survival of older models of film cameras and projectors, alongside newer ones. This is especially true for photography as ‘antique’ wet-plate processes from the mid-19th century could be found as late as the 1910s in the bazaars of Calcutta, and manual exposure cameras dating to the 1870s were being used in fairgrounds well into the 1990s. Third, the infrastructures for minor practices can be generated from below and from above, by the state and by pirate forces. By the 1980s, video editing devices found their way from the Indian state-run TV network Doordarshan, to wedding videographers via Delhi’s grey markets, who in turn remediated the aesthetics of cinema as well as the photo-album in their videos (Tiwary, 2018). The story of the mitigation of obsolescence in South","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"134 - 136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84575600","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":"Bazaar","authors":"Kajri Jain","doi":"10.1177/09749276211028962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211028962","url":null,"abstract":"The term ‘bazaar’ exists in uneasy translation, as do the physical and conceptual spaces it denotes. In Hindi, Urdu and Bangla (from Persian) it means a marketplace, or the market in general; in English it connotes an exotic ‘oriental’ market or informal sale, usually for charity. Its salience to South Asian media and cultural forms bears these colonial connotations of cultural difference and informality (Jain, 2007, 2012). Here its earliest association was with ‘bazaar art’: paintings and prints for a vernacular public, notably those produced around Calcutta’s Kalighat Kali Temple from the 1820s (GuhaThakurta, 1992). Kalighat paintings are particularly beloved to artists and scholars; featuring anti-elite or anti-Brahmin satire and themes from everyday life as well as religious icons, they had a critical edge lacking in later prints. But ‘bazaar’ also carries a much wider valence as the colonial descriptor for a vernacular realm of ‘native’ commerce, distinct from the official colonial economy. This usage has shaped the bazaar’s character as the key economic, social-political and aesthetic infrastructure for a range of vernacular forms, extending beyond paintings and prints to theatre, cinema, festivals, temples, museums, monuments, theme parks and now social media. The distinctive character of the bazaar was enshrined in the 1882 Indian Companies Act, which placed British governance of domestic bazaar firms under Hindu and Muslim personal law rather than corporate law (Birla, 2009). The bazaar was thus designated as a realm of pre-colonial religion and ‘custom,’ even as domestic trading communities played an essential comprador role as intermediaries in the colonial economy. Perpetuating ‘customary’ forms of power, sociality and commerce in the service of colonial exploitation, the bazaar became the colonial economy’s ‘constitutive outside’ (Derrida, 1988). This paradoxical position of the bazaar, as simultaneously different from and integral to the colonial economy, explains several features of the vernacular cultural forms whose financing, production and circulation emerged from – and continue to perpetuate – the bazaar’s mercantile ethos. This is not the hegemonically bourgeois, Protestant milieu within which mass culture, mass media and their theorisations developed in Europe and North America. However, it cannot be separated from the latter either, for these are co-constituted fields with ongoing, albeit uneven, interactions. So the bazaar is not urban, secular and modern rather than rural, religious and customary. It is better understood as a site of circulation between life-","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"35 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81441523","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":"Darshan(a)","authors":"M. Prasad","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026138","url":null,"abstract":"Darshan or ‘(the act of) seeing’ derives from the Sanskrit root दृश् (drs): ‘to see’. Many words related to vision and visual culture take off from this root. Thus, drishya (scene; literally ‘the seen’), from which we say that film is a drishyamadhyama or visual medium. Drishti, the visual ability (or sometimes the evil eye), dooradrishti (farsightedness) and doordarshan as a literal translation of television. In Telugu, film direction is known as darsakatvam (which may be closer in meaning to mis-en-scene) and the viewer is a darsak(a) in some languages. Darshan is also employed in everyday speech to mean meeting (someone), e.g. sandarshan translates as interview. Physical appearance is sometimes styled darshan as in the expression ‘naam bade aur darshan chote’. And then there are the darshana-s, the ancient schools of thought or philosophical systems of the subcontinent. The term and its derivates are thus part of the common vocabulary of Indian film culture. The usage that appeared to hold special promise for Indian film and visual studies, however, was the one related to temple worship. The objective of going to a temple is described as ‘taking darshan’ and involves on the part of the deity the act of ‘giving darshan’. Thus, a significant aspect of the discourse of darshan is that the deity ‘gives itself to be seen’. This ‘giving itself to be seen’ is also a characteristic of theatrical spectacle as contrasted by Christian Metz to the inherent voyeurism of the cinematic image (Prasad, 1998, pp. 100–102). Paul Willemen’s ‘fourth look’ adds a twist to this by suggesting that the screen looks back at the spectator, acknowledging and playing to his/her presence (Willemen, 1994), which may be said to happen in Indian popular cinema in a sense that Willemen did not intend, in the scenes of ‘star entry’ featuring ‘an elaborately staged play with star recognition’ (Srinivas, 2009, p. 100). It is the persistence of frontality as a feature of Indian cinematic spectacle that led film studies to seize upon this term drawn from the discourse of Hinduism. Thus, Ravi Vasudevan refers to Eck’s and Babb’s studies of darshana in his well-known analysis of the scene in Awaara (1951) involving a series of visual transactions between the moral look of Raj’s childhood friend and that of his mother. He shows how the look not only captures Raj but also extends a moral hold over the other world of crime that he inhabits. Darshana involves not only seeing but also being seen by the deity: ‘the prominence of the eyes of the Hindu divine images also reminds us that it is not only the worshiper who sees the deity, but the deity sees the worshipper as well’ (Eck, 1985, pp. 6–7).","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"53 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76349990","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":"Hollywood","authors":"N. Govil","doi":"10.1177/09749276211026070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09749276211026070","url":null,"abstract":"Hollywood’s experiences in South Asia reflect a dramatic encounter between the practical realities of industry and the imaginative possibilities of alterity. This entanglement of finance and fantasy stretches back to global Hollywood’s early heyday. In the 1930s, for example, Hollywood’s imperial adventure films sought to engage South Asia as actual territory and narrative theme, following up on the popularity of ‘sepoy stories’ in the 1910s. Among the most popular of the 1930s films was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), which was also one of Adolf Hitler’s favourites, elevated by his belief that the film’s embrace of colonial and racial superiority could be instructive for the SS (Faber, 2008). Der Führer would be surprised to know that it was actually the Indian rebel’s threat in the film – ‘we have ways to make men talk’ – that would live in infamy as Hollywood’s preferred performance of despotic cruelty. Usually rendered in an exaggerated mock German accent – ve haf vays of making you talk! – the insurgent Mohammed Khan’s speech came to signify not only Nazi brutality but barbarism in general, which for much of Hollywood’s history, emerged as a threat from the East. The film’s production history gives us a sense of how South Asia functioned as a real and diegetic space. As part of an industry-wide interest in foreign production and the boast-worthy authenticity of geographical validation, the film’s producers originally sent their cinematographers to India to shoot location footage for Lives, only to find that film stock deteriorates more rapidly in the tropical environment. The studio then decided to shoot the scenes in the hills surrounding Hollywood where Native Americans masqueraded as Indians (again). We can see here the role that South Asia played in ‘orienting’ Hollywood within histories of racialised global capitalism from empire to entertainment. From the beginning, Hollywood tried to engage South Asia according to a story that it had already told elsewhere. With robust US ticket sales creating profitable returns on investments in technology, talent and theatres, further consolidating the monopolistic power of a small number of American studios, Hollywood took advantage of comparatively undercapitalised production facilities around the world during the interwar period. Its expansive array of film genres from intimate family melodrama to lavishly expansive epics was anchored in frameworks of racial exclusion, gendered disenfranchisement, heteronormativity and the prioritisation of individual over collective accomplishment as the guarantor of class mobility. Hollywood’s industrial","PeriodicalId":51959,"journal":{"name":"Bioscope-South Asian Screen Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"98 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82199398","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}
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