Browsing by Subject "Bollywood"

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    Ali Husain Mir Interview
    (Hindi-Urdu Flagship) Hindi-Urdu Flagship
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    Cinema as architectural event : the pleasurable anxieties of the multiplex culture in India
    (2018-05) Chattopadhyay, Tupur; Kumar, Shanti; Staiger, Janet; Schatz, Thomas; Mallapragada, Madhavi; Ali, Kamran Asdar
    My dissertation examines the gendered architectural space of the cinema hall in India through the different stages of its evolution from the earliest single-screens to the contemporary multiplex. My project critically analyses this transformation by connecting the spatial politics of the film theater to the gendered, classed, and caste-based ideas about ‘hygiene’ and ‘safety’ that have long circulated in the Indian imagination. I base my research on an extensive ethnography of the country’s most successful multiplex chain, PVR Cinemas, across several departments like design, security, business development, digital technology, staff recruitment and training along with site-specific case studies conducted in Delhi’s old single-screen cinemas. My research reconceptualizes notions of ‘public space’ and locates Indian cinema within the gendered architectural environment of its exhibition. In doing so, this project illuminates why the “malltiplex” (mall and multiplex), predicated upon producing, maintaining and circulating ‘safe’ and ‘clean’ spaces for women has come to dominate every aspect of film culture in India across production, narrative content, distribution, and exhibition. Ultimately, my project is a map of the encounter between new architectures for public “safety” and cinematic culture in the postcolonial South Asian city
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    A Conversation with Shabana Azmi
    (Hindi-Urdu Flagship, 2010-10-20) Hindi-Urdu Flagship
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    Dedh Ishqiya : obscuring the female-bond
    (2014-08) Giles, Charlotte Helen Graziani; Hyder, Syed Akbar
    Through his Bollywood film, Dedh Ishqiya, Abhishek Chaubey addresses matters of comfort and discomfort through the use of typically heteronormative conventions in film. The Bollywood film Dedh Ishqiya, tells the story of a wealthy widow’s search for a new poet husband in the setting of an Urdu poetry gathering (mushaira). She is accompanied and supported by her female friend and handmaiden, Munniya. Their two supposed lovers, Khalujaan and Baban, are thieves, out to steal the love and wealth of these women. However, unbeknownst to these men, the women are lovers themselves and they too are out to steal the love and wealth of a suitor so that they may run away together. Director and co-writer, Abhishek Chaubey, uses conventions drawn from the Sufi, Urdu, and bhakti poetic and literary aesthetic worlds. He builds up an aura of comfort through the use of these conventions. But, he focuses on the complex, but platonic female (sakhi) -bond. Chaubey uses the sakhi bond, as well as other conventions, to draw the viewer into a seemingly heteronormative and conventional (therefore, comfortable) film. But this viewer is then brutally let down when the film subverts those conventional tropes in favor of a non-heteronormative romance. Chaubey does this by referencing Ismat Chughtai’s short story, Lihaaf, and Ridley Scott’s film, Thelma and Louise in his film. Both story and film take the female-bond and complicate it in a way that forces the viewer to examine their own conceptions of comfort, especially those related to sexuality and romance. This thesis focuses on the process of building up comfort through a heteronormative-use of conventions, and then the breaking down of that comfort by referencing Lihaaf and Thelma and Louise.
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    SAGAR: South Asia Graduate Research Journal, Volume 11
    (2003) University of Texas at Austin; Buck, Tracy; Burton Estes, Raymond; Knapczyk, Peter; Sayers, Matthew R.