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‘New Bollywood’ has arrived, but its postmodern impulse often leaves film scholars reluctant to theorise its aesthetics. How do we define the style of a contemporary Bollywood film? Are Bollywood films just uninspired Hollywood rip-offs, or does their borrowing signal genuine innovation within the industry? Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this book reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the twenty-first century. Equipping readers with an alternative method of reading contemporary Indian cinema, the book takes Indian film studies beyond the standard theme of diaspora, and exposes a new decade of aesthetic experimentation and textual appropriation in mainstream Bombay cinema. A bold celebration of contemporary Bollywood texts, this book radically redefines Indian film and persuasively argues for its seriousness as a field of cinematic studies.

This book is part of a series which aims to explore the area of ‘screen music’. Volume topics include multimedia music, music and television, Hollywood film music, and the music of Bollywood cinema. Music and other sound effects were central to a whole host of media forms throughout the twentieth century, either as background, accompaniment, or main driving force. Such interactions will continue to mutate in new directions with the widespread growth of digital technologies. Despite the expansion of research into the use of music and sound in film, the investigation of sonic interactions with other media forms has been a largely under-researched area. This book provides a study of how music and other sounds play a central part in our understandings and uses of a variety of communications media. It focuses on four areas of sound and music within broader multimedia forms — music videos, video game music, performance and presentation, and production and consumption — and addresses the centrality of such aural concerns within our everyday experiences.

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.

The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor broadly refers to as “the Death Question” – have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Thanatology Studies, to which fields it seeks to make a valuable contribution, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars considers the Gothic’s engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death’s challenges to all systems of meaning, and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality, and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual, and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies, and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting, and the “afterlife” of the self.

Mumbai is not usually considered a holy city. Yet for many, if not most, people who live there, the neighborhood streets are shared with local gods and guardian spirits. This innovative ethnography examines the link between territory and divinity in India’s most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled urban environment, where over half the population lives in unauthorized housing, or "slums," space is scarce and anxiety about housing pervasive. Consecrating space—first with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognition—is one way of staking a claim. But how do subaltern communities make their gods visible, and thus efficacious, in the eyes of others? And what are the implications for urban space when sacred icons exert powerful ideological effects in public? These are the questions at the heart of this book, which brings an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroaches on downtown streets, to the “tribal art” practices of an indigenous group facing displacement, to the work of image production at two Bollywood film studios. The book advances debates on postcolonial citizenship and urbanism in South Asia. And in proposing a new theory of darshan, or visual worship, it will stand as a creative intervention in the study of India's religious traditions—as well as of its modern ideological formations.

What haunts the city? Why is there so much pessimism in our urban lives? How does this physical and psychological insecurity of relentless competition and a desire to succeed against all odds proliferate into cinema? Dark Fear, Eerie Cities analyses a wide array of films made in the early 21st century to offer a philosophical and psychoanalytical critique of the transforming cinematic imagery. It traces the trajectory of Hindi cinema from the pre-1990s feudal family ideal to the contemporary construction of the new middle class’s subjectivities against a postcolonial backdrop. Keeping in mind the effects of globalization, market liberalization and the emergence of new forms of media and their consumption, the book provides a theoretical perspective to cinematic transformations. Paunksnis presents an interdisciplinary study of a genre of cinema in which crime thrillers and horror films are aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions of our contemporary times.

In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet, love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life—a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. This book seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa. Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people's ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, this book is a vivid and compelling look at love's role in African society.

This book analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multimedia cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, the book explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry's geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, the book is a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the United States, this book offers empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, the book develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries—film, television, marketing, and digital media. The book's transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.

How is cosmopolitan modernity performed in a liberalizing India? From the spectacular celebrity culture of dance television reality shows and Bollywood films to dance-making in the movie and TV studios, dance halls, rehearsals, and auditions in obscure corners of Mumbai and Kolkata, this book explores the voices, aspirations, and dance practices of a new generation of dancers and choreographers. As the old system of dance pedagogy is broken down by the growth of media, migration, and a deepening democracy, the concept of ‘remix’ has replaced it. It explains, in a word, both the new practices of bodily knowledge transmission and the new aesthetics of Indian dance. This book situates Bollywood dance and dance reality shows at the centre of the changing visual culture in India, and illuminates new and original intersections of ideas from the fields of anthropology, dance studies, philosophy, media studies, gender studies, and postcolonial theory. It tells the story of the transformation of Indian dance by drawing from the deep wells of theories from these fields, but also from the vantage point of intimate ethnographic eyes.

Beginning in the 1930s, men, and a handful of women, came from India's many communities — Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others — to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in the words of some, “the original fusion music”. They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name “Bollywood,” but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, “behind the curtain” — the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres. This book offers an account of the Bollywood film-music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In an insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, the author explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film-music industry. On the basis of a set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creators and performers. The author also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s–90s, as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India.

This book analyzes the role of popular blockbuster films made by Bollywood in the making, unmaking and remaking of modern India. It explains that Bollywood films are India’s most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. It argues that Bollywood’s blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation’s dispersed anxieties and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes “India.” The book provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. It covers themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community, and shows how these capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. It reveals the cinema’s social impact across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-star genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. It includes studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009). Overall it conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.

Discussing the gradual transformation of Indian popular cinema into a ‘global entertainment’, this book examines the direction, the existing codes, the system employed, and the meaning that emerges from the examination of several Indian films. Comparing the method employed by Indian popular cinema with those of Hollywood classical films, the book identifies the divergences and the traditional methods that make Bollywood unique. In particular, this book examines the narrative conventions prevalent in Indian popular cinema in relation with classical Hollywood cinema to gain a better understanding of the narratives in Indian films. It traces the narrative strategies employed by popular cinema in contrast to the traditional ones employed by the arts in India to determine the underlying logic. The book examines a significant body of films to understand how popular cinema narrativizes the dominant social discourse throughout specific historical periods.