A very old machine : the many origins of the cinema in India / Sudhir Mahadevan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mahadevan, Sudhir, 1973- author.

Series:

SUNY series, horizons of cinema.

SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--India--History.

Motion pictures.

Motion picture industry--India--History.

Motion picture industry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (258 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany, New York : SUNY Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan shows how Indian cinema's many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was (and is) understood, experienced, and present in everyday life in myriad ways. Employing methods of media archaeology, close textual analysis, archival research, and cultural theory, Mahadevan digs into the history of photography, print media, practices of piracy and showmanship, and contemporary everyday imaginations of the cinema to offer an understanding of how the cinema came to be such a dominant force of culture in India. The result is an open-ended and innovative account of Indian cinema's "many origins."

Contents:

Contents; Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; The Argument; Imaginaries; The Structure of the Book; Part I: Obsolescence; 1. The Nineteenth-Century Indian Techno-Bazaar; From Novelty to Apparatus: Photography's Material Cultures; Formal Expertise and Informal Know-How; Proto-Global Influences: The Scalar and Spatial Logic of Empire; Conclusion; 2 Traveling Showmen, Makeshift Cinemas: The Bioscopewallah and Early Cinema; Phantasmagoria Shows; Lantern Slides, Kinetoscopes, and Junk Films; Mobile cinema and Visual Education; A Recycled Modernity

Part II: Mechanical Reproduction and Mass Culture3 Copyright and Cultural Authenticity: The Politics of Mechanical Reproduction in South Asia; Introduction; Empire and the Impossibility of Originality; From Genius to Genus; Turning the Tables: The Nationality of the Image; Cultural Patrimony Meets "Popular" Culture; 4 The Cinema as Mass Culture: The Melodramas of Mechanical Reproduction; Phalke the Craftsman; The Craftsman in the Meshes of Pirate Networks; Cinema as Mass Culture in Postcolonial India; Postscripts: Reminiscing the Age of Prints; Part III: Intermediality

5 The Emergence of Topicality: Snapshot Cultures and Newspaper PhotojournalismBicycle Photography; The Ethnographic and the Picturesque Image; Photo-Illustrations and Film; Mimesis or Exemplarity? Crime Films and Photographs and the Legacy of Topicality; Black Sheep (1953); 6 Politics across Media: The Partition of Bengal (1905) and the Cinematic City; Cinema and Urban Space: From Imperial Ritual to Nationalist Politics; Cinema and the Standardization of Time; The Emblematic and the Tidal Crowd; Facing the Crowd; Conclusion; Part IV: Archives

7 The Abundant Ephemeral: The Protocols of Popular Film Historiography in IndiaCinema Cinema (1979); Film Hi Film (1983); 8. Postscript; Notes; Works Cited; Filmography; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781438458304

1438458304

OCLC:

941695516