[ecrea] South Asian Film & Media 9.1 published

Intellect is pleased to announce that Studies in South Asian Film & 
Media 9.1 is now available! To find out more about the journal issue, 
click here >> https://bit.ly/2NExl4g

Content

Iconic imagination: Listening to, and looking back at, the piano in 
early Hindi cinema

Authors: Andrew Alter And Jasmine Dean
Page Start: 3

This article identifies and analyses a selection of Hindi films between 
1942 and 1991 in which pianos are used for songs. The number of such 
films is not great and thus the piano is theorized as cameo – it arrives 
on-screen and in the soundtrack with a clear purpose in order to 
reference a set of symbols from outside the film’s narrative. 
Consequently, it represents not only a nostalgia for the recent colonial 
condition, but also a host of cultural ideologies associated with 
westernization. By compiling the list and analysing this set of films, 
we attempt to more clearly understand the symbolic meanings indexed 
through the picturization, and to contribute to a theorization of 
musical symbolization in film.

Of goddesses and women: Towards a super-empowered female hero

Authors: Vartikka Kaul
Page Start: 21

This article explores the representation of Indian female superheroes in 
selected Indian comic books that have been published in recent years 
(1998–2016). It argues that these superheroines are actively engaged in 
negotiating and challenging gender stereotypes and cultural formulations 
of the female body. Through these representations, a transgressive 
agency of a female superhero is being constructed in a popcultural space 
where idealized mythological and nationalistic framing from popular 
Indian comic book traditions, such as the Amar Chitra Katha comic book 
series, was previously the norm.

‘Lonely night watchman’s art’: Circuits of exclusion, C-grade film and 
hybrid aesthetics of Miss Lovely

Authors: Ramna Walia
Page Start: 35

Since the 2000s, Bombay cinema has engaged in a nostalgic re-telling of 
its history through the industrial practice of film remakes and retro 
films. We see an industrially produced nostalgia for the past that 
commemorates Bombay cinema history through its stars, narrative 
strategies, art direction, costumes and remixes of old songs and dances. 
Such recovery of the past elicits questions on the ‘invisible’ histories 
of film practices, particularly the B- and C-circuit films, produced in 
Mumbai. The origin and definition of these films remain ambivalent – and 
despite accounting for a sizeable portion of annual film productions, 
these films remain underground as a ‘bad object’. I focus on the 
slippery category of C-grade cinema and its exponential rise in Bombay. 
I then focus on Ashim Ahluwalia’s cinephilic engagement with the 
industrial story of the C-circuit in Miss Lovely (2012) and argue that 
the film uses a hybrid formal structure of a multiplex fringe film that 
fuses documentary elements with long-form fictional narrative and 
embodies the contestations of industrial histories of the Bombay film 
cultures.

Book Reviews

Authors: Suhaila Meera And Namrata Rele Sathe And Harleen Singh
Page Start: 59

Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema, Ruth Vanita (2018)
NAYAR (2017)
New Feminisms in South Asia: Disrupting the Discourse Through Social 
Media, Film, and Literature, Sonora Jha and Alka Kurian (eds) (2018)
---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please
use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------