Sirens of Modernity : World Cinema via Bombay / Samhita Sunya.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sunya, Samhita, Author.

Series:

Cinema Cultures in Contact Series

Cinema Cultures in Contact ; 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion picture industry--India--Mumbai--History.

Motion picture industry.

Motion pictures, Hindi--India--Mumbai--History and criticism.

Motion pictures, Hindi.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (270 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

University of California Press 2022

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical. if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War–era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases—flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions—this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

“Akira Kurosawa” A Retrospective Prologue

Introduction “Romance, Comedy, and Somewhat Jazzy Music”

Part One. Establishing Shots: World Cinema in Tongues

1. Problems of Translation: World Cinema as Distribution History

2. Moving toward the “City of Love”: Hindustani Lyrical Genealogies

Part Two. Star-Crossed Overtures: Cinephilia in Excess

3. Homosocialist Coproductions: Pardesi (1957) contra Singapore (1960)

4. Comedic Crossovers and Madras Money-Spinners: Padosan’s (1968) Audiovisual Apparatus

5. Foreign Exchanges: Transregional Trafficking through Subah-O-Sham (1972)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jul 2022)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780520976788

0520976789

OCLC:

1338019349