Synopses & Reviews
What does it mean to say Indian movies are melodramatic? How do film audiences engage with socio-political issues? What role has cinema played in the emergence of new economic forms, consumer cultures, and digital technologies in a globalizing India? The Melodramatic Public analyzes melodrama as a narrative architecture and expressive form which connects the public and the private, the personal and the political, in ways that draw film audiences into complex passages of historical change. Vasudevan explores film form and narrative strategy across a wide repertoire of film traditions, including popular classics and canonical art works. Topics include the contemporary global moment associated with the category “Bollywood,” changes in state policy and industrial organization, and the impact of digital technologies, new economies of consumption, and wider export markets on Indian film culture.
Review
“Here, finally, is the definitive and authoritative study of melodrama we have been hoping for. The Melodramatic Public is not only the most comprehensive book to redirect our understanding of Indian popular cinema, carefully tracing its manifold roots and conducting a painstaking archaeology of the genre, but Vasudevan also redraws the map. He proceeds from a genuinely global perspective, while nonetheless persuasively making the case for regionally specific and local factors in the history of modern popular culture.”--Thomas Elsaesser
“One of the pioneers of film studies in India, in this long-awaited book, locates Indian popular cinema in a world context and offers a thoroughly revised understanding of melodrama as a global aesthetic with a rich Indian history. The authors deep familiarity with world cinema traditions shines forth and illuminates local questions and challenges prevailing theories.”--M. Madhava Prasad
“Vasudevans innovative concept of the ‘imaginary public, developed across these essays through close analysis of Indian cinemas melodramatic practices and the socio-cultural conditions of their operation, recasts our understanding of the relation between text and context and offers a welcome new approach not only to the application of ‘melodrama to Indian filmmaking but to theorization of cinema itself.”--Christine Gledhill
Synopsis
What does it mean to say Indian movies are melodramatic? How do film audiences engage with socio-political issues? What role has cinema played in the emergence of new economic forms, consumer cultures and digital technologies in a globalizing India? Ravi Vasudevan addresses these questions in a wide-ranging analysis of Indian cinema.
About the Author
Ravi Vasudevan works at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India and is co-initiator of Sarai, the Centres program on media and urban research. He has taught Film Studies at universities in India and the United States, and has held fellowships at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and Princeton University. His articles have been widely published, anthologized, and translated. He is editorial advisor to Screen, co-founder of BioScope, a journal of South Asian screen studies, and has edited Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (2000).
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Melodramatic Public * PART I: MELODRAMATIC AND OTHER PUBLICS * Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form * The Cultural Politics of Address in a 'Transitional' Cinema * Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian Conflict in Popular Cinema * A Modernist Public: The Double Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray * PART II: CINEMA AND TERRITORIAL IMAGINATION IN THE SUBCONTINENT: TAMILNADU AND INDIA * Voice, Space, Form: the Symbolic and Territorial Itinerary of Mani Rathnams Roja (1992) * Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics * Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan, 1999) * PART III: MELODRAMA MUTATED AND DIFFERENTIATED: NARRATIVE FORM, URBAN VISTAS AND NEW PUBLICS IN A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT * Selves Made Strange: Violent and Performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema 1974-2003 * The Contemporary Film Industry I: The Meanings of 'Bollywood' * The Contemporary Film Industry II: Textual Form, Genre Diversity and Industrial Strategies * Conclusion and Afterword