Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India
Lalitha Gopalan
Price
1150
ISBN
9789354421051
Language
English
Pages
480
Format
Paperback
Dimensions
140 x 217 mm
Year of Publishing
2021
Territorial Rights
Restricted
Imprint
Orient BlackSwan

Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to expand the scope of film studies that have focused so far on the dominance of Bollywood. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging less studied works that deserve critical attention.

Through close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style, this book draws attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ and considering the change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a complete picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.

Written with a cinephile's enthusiasm for world cinema, the book addresses scholars of cinema studies, media studies, and readers who are curious about the shape that media and mediums are taking in current times.

Lalitha Gopalan is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film, affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies, South Asia Institute, and Core Faculty in the Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, USA.
Part I
1. Opening
2. Minding the Gap
3. Slowing Down
Part II
4. Bombay Noir
5. Tamil New Wave
6. Road Movie
7. Untitled: Amitabh Chakraborty’s Cinema
8. Time Out
Bibliography
Index

‘Lalitha Gopalan's sustained engagement with contemporary Indian cinema breaks new grounds by enabling us to comprehend distinct trends in digital cinema through its innate quality of continually affecting the material, processual, and aesthetical. The rare insight she provides at the intersection of years of fieldwork, research, pedagogy, and curation, in dissecting and theorizing the mercurial at the heart of the dark and slow cinemas of the new millennium fills a deeply felt void and is a gift for teachers, scholars, and students across disciplines.’

Swarnavel Eswaran, Associate Professor, Department of English and the School of Journalism, Michigan State University.

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