cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Papers

Wide Screen Special Issue: A Century of Indian Cinema
Edited by Kartik Nair and Kuhu Tanvir

Indian Cinema: A Hundred Years, A Hundred Cinemas

Indian Cinema has overwhelmingly been thought and written of as the sum of its stars, songs, and studios, which come together on-screen in melodramas about life and death, love and marriage. For this special issue of Wide Screen, we invite papers that prospect the cinematic terrain beyond these big-budget, mass-audience, song-and-dance spectacles. This is not simply to fill in the blanks of film history, but to critically expand our understanding of the diverse practices, pleasures, and publics that have constituted ‘cinema’ in the subcontinent over the past century.

Contributors are invited to reflect on the many films, filmmakers and filmgoers that have participated in (and perhaps even thrived outside) the territory of India’s popular cinema(s). This is an opportunity to focus on moving images in excess of the hallowed melodramatic mode: special-effects driven devotionals, horror films, wrestling pictures and revenge thrillers, rape dramas and sex-ed films. Equally, we encourage contributions that focus on the material infrastructures through which India’s popular cinemas have been made and moved: activities of production, circuits of distribution, sites of exhibition, and forms of consumption.

Possible topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Film Genres and Film Cycles: student films, insurgency videos, propaganda films, newsreels, documentaries, as well as the genres mentioned above
• Cinematic Subcultures Across Regions and Languages
• Cinematic Afterlives in the Digital Era: Parody, Archive, Tribute videos
• ‘B’ and ‘C’ Grade directors and actors
• Fan activities and publications
• Film Criticism: English and Vernacular Presses, Blogs
• Exhibition: Morning Shows, Video Parlors....
• The Global Before Globalization: Indian cinema’s transactions with international personnel, styles, and audiences

Send paper abstracts (300 words) by 15 December, 2012 to kartiknair@gmail.com or kuhutanvir@gmail.com