Notes on the media experience of last rites in quarantine during the second wave of COVID-19 in I... more Notes on the media experience of last rites in quarantine during the second wave of COVID-19 in India in April 2021.
Scholarship on watching movies on cellphones is still at a nascent stage with newer devices offer... more Scholarship on watching movies on cellphones is still at a nascent stage with newer devices offering radically different ways of accessing film content. Thus far, research is largely limited to Western countries, even though mobile industries of developing countries are expanding dramatically. This paper examines the exhibition and consumption of popular Hindi films in the mobile phone landscape in India. Discourse on watching media on cellphones has focused on the lack of immersion as a shortcoming of the cellphone as a screen which is not only very small, but also offers endless distractions (Evans 2011). This criticism is rooted in the most traditional aspects of Apparatus Theory which desires and in fact imagines an ideal spectator who is unwaveringly immersed in the fiction of the film. I argue that not only was there never a perfectly undistracted spectator even in the darkened movie theater, but that immersion as a category is inadequate to understand the massive changes in visual culture that are enabled by the cellphone as a screening device. I demonstrate how cellphones pull cinema into an action oriented mode of viewership (Acuado & Martinez 2014). The Indian media terrain is especially suited to illustrate the altered contours of film spectatorship, because unlike developed countries, both the film and the mobile phone industries in India have a thriving pirate underbelly that co-exists with and constantly undermines the “official” industry. In studying the intersections between cinema, mobility and piracy, I hope to illustrate how the cellphone has shaped a viewing culture that is marked by poor quality images, pirated media and regularly failing signals and coverage, leading to a fragmentation of the film object into songs, clips, dance sequences, GIFs etc.—this fragmentation isn’t mourned but is celebrated for the possibilities of access that it opens up.
The 21st century is only ten years old, yet it has already created an identity for itself – that ... more The 21st century is only ten years old, yet it has already created an identity for itself – that of a crumbling modernity. The collapsing World Trade Centre has become the defining image of the decade, if not of the century, bringing terrorists out of their ‘Afghan caves’ and into the heart of the city, ushering in a terrorised urban existence. Hindi cinema, like cinema across the world, has tried a variety of ways to define this fear, to understand the figure of the terrorist and, of course, to link and de-link terrorism and the ordinary Muslim. In the recent past, two Hindi films that have dealt with the issue of urban terror are Rajkumar Gupta’s Aamir and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6. In this essay, I would like to argue that despite stemming from a common purpose – to present an alternative view point to the existing discourse on terrorism and Islam’s relationship with it in the 21st century – the two films achieve something decidedly different and, in fact, have opposite i...
It takes a master to tell the story of two nations that haven’t seen eye-to-eye in decades throug... more It takes a master to tell the story of two nations that haven’t seen eye-to-eye in decades through a grove of lemon trees. Eran Riklis, the director of the Israeli film Lemon Tree, speaks to Wide Screen about this haunting film, his relationship with the Israeli and Palestinian governments, with the people, the need to tell a story and the bitter-sweetness of Lemon Tree.
Capturing history, or interpreting it, has meant many things over the years, ranging from melodra... more Capturing history, or interpreting it, has meant many things over the years, ranging from melodrama-driven accounts, to brutally realist narratives to absurdist ‘fragmented’, ‘non-stories’. This paper deals with Guillermo del Torro’s use of the fantastic in Pan’s Labyrinth to allegorise the Spanish Civil War on the one hand, but more importantly, to explore and expand the field of the historical narrative in cinema.
Time magazine called her an Asian Hero, noted that she was the first Indonesian actress to be on ... more Time magazine called her an Asian Hero, noted that she was the first Indonesian actress to be on a jury at the Cannes Film Festival, and then seemed almost to congratulate her on sharing that jury space with the likes of Sharon Stone, Michelle Yeoh and ‘other Hollywood glitterati’. Indonesian star Christine Hakim is not perturbed by this Hollywood-centric outlook, her focus is far more on the development of film-craft in Asia. While she was in New Delhi for the Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival, she spoke to Wide Screen about Asian cinema, young directors, working women and other things that occupy this Asian Hero.
In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-... more In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-cams, CCTV etc – is crucial to Dibakar Benerjee's self-conscious bouquet film, Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Love, Sex and Deception). Use of digital technology is central to LSD's othering of itself and heightening its reality effect. In the adoption of digital cameras and digital aesthetics, the film aspires to a pristine notion of ‘truth’ that exposes the masquerade of celluloid (which the film stages as a staple of ‘Bollywood’). The deliberation on surveillance and voyeurism stages the body as the site where the effect of surveillance apparatus and its violence is most visible. Digital cameras are able to boast a physical proximity to the body that the bulky 35 mm camera cannot achieve, thus crucially altering the way the body is represented and consequently, the way the audience consumes and decodes the image. In this, the film also engages with the persistent idiom of family melodramas that has dominated the cinematic landscape of popular Bombay cinema. Distancing itself from the asexual presentation of love that popular Bombay cinema is (in)famous for, LSD mediates love through the contemporary's signature hunger for access, particularly visual access. The argument that the film makes is that digital technology has access to spaces that are devoid of the romance of ‘fiction’ and are in fact inhabited by a pervading violence. However, it simultaneously also spotlights the technology itself as the medium that engenders this violence, makes it manifest, visible, documented and ultimately erasable.
This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essentia... more This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essential part of the memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes, video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate archives of cinema. Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” ( Steyerl, 2009 ), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,” bringing them into the fold of history. I argue ...
A federal justice agent, Benjamín Espósito, becomes spellbound by and subsequently entangled in t... more A federal justice agent, Benjamín Espósito, becomes spellbound by and subsequently entangled in the investigation of the brutal rape and murder of a young woman in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. Espósito vows to find the killer and bring him to justice.
Jayson Beaster-Jones and Natalie Sarrazin (Eds), Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice... more Jayson Beaster-Jones and Natalie Sarrazin (Eds), Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017, 212 pp., USD 49.95 (Paperback), ISBN 9781138929364.
Scholarship on watching movies on cellphones is still at a nascent stage with newer devices offer... more Scholarship on watching movies on cellphones is still at a nascent stage with newer devices offering radically different ways of accessing film content. Thus far, research is largely limited to Western countries, even though mobile industries of developing countries are expanding dramatically. This paper examines the exhibition and consumption of popular Hindi films in the mobile phone landscape in India. Discourse on watching media on cellphones has focused on the lack of immersion as a shortcoming of the cellphone as a screen which is not only very small, but also offers endless distractions (Evans 2011). This criticism is rooted in the most traditional aspects of Apparatus Theory which desires and in fact imagines an ideal spectator who is unwaveringly immersed in the fiction of the film. I argue that not only was there never a perfectly undistracted spectator even in the darkened movie theater, but that immersion as a category is inadequate to understand the massive changes in visual culture that are enabled by the cellphone as a screening device. I demonstrate how cellphones pull cinema into an action oriented mode of viewership (Acuado & Martinez 2014). The Indian media terrain is especially suited to illustrate the altered contours of film spectatorship, because unlike developed countries, both the film and the mobile phone industries in India have a thriving pirate underbelly that co-exists with and constantly undermines the “official” industry. In studying the intersections between cinema, mobility and piracy, I hope to illustrate how the cellphone has shaped a viewing culture that is marked by poor quality images, pirated media and regularly failing signals and coverage, leading to a fragmentation of the film object into songs, clips, dance sequences, GIFs etc.—this fragmentation isn’t mourned but is celebrated for the possibilities of access that it opens up.
South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 13, issue 1, 2015
In this article, I will argue that the use of... more South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 13, issue 1, 2015
In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-cams, CCTV etc – is crucial to Dibakar Banerjee's self-conscious bouquet film, Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Love, Sex and Deception). Use of digital technology is central to LSD's othering of itself and heightening its reality effect. In the adoption of digital cameras and digital aesthetics, the film aspires to a pristine notion of ‘truth’ that exposes the masquerade of celluloid (which the film stages as a staple of ‘Bollywood’). The deliberation on surveillance and voyeurism stages the body as the site where the effect of surveillance apparatus and its violence is most visible. Digital cameras are able to boast a physical proximity to the body that the bulky 35 mm camera cannot achieve, thus crucially altering the way the body is represented and consequently, the way the audience consumes and decodes the image. In this, the film also engages with the persistent idiom of family melodramas that has dominated the cinematic landscape of popular Bombay cinema. Distancing itself from the asexual presentation of love that popular Bombay cinema is (in)famous for, LSD mediates love through the contemporary's signature hunger for access, particularly visual access. The argument that the film makes is that digital technology has access to spaces that are devoid of the romance of ‘fiction’ and are in fact inhabited by a pervading violence. However, it simultaneously also spotlights the technology itself as the medium that engenders this violence, makes it manifest, visible, documented and ultimately erasable.
This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essentia... more This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essential part of the memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes, video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate archives of cinema. Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” (Steyerl, 2009), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,” bringing them into the fold of history. I argue that its illicit, often incomplete, sometimes erroneous and ephemeral material then poses a challenge to the state archive’s performance of stability and its attempt to control cinematic history.
Notes on the media experience of last rites in quarantine during the second wave of COVID-19 in I... more Notes on the media experience of last rites in quarantine during the second wave of COVID-19 in India in April 2021.
Scholarship on watching movies on cellphones is still at a nascent stage with newer devices offer... more Scholarship on watching movies on cellphones is still at a nascent stage with newer devices offering radically different ways of accessing film content. Thus far, research is largely limited to Western countries, even though mobile industries of developing countries are expanding dramatically. This paper examines the exhibition and consumption of popular Hindi films in the mobile phone landscape in India. Discourse on watching media on cellphones has focused on the lack of immersion as a shortcoming of the cellphone as a screen which is not only very small, but also offers endless distractions (Evans 2011). This criticism is rooted in the most traditional aspects of Apparatus Theory which desires and in fact imagines an ideal spectator who is unwaveringly immersed in the fiction of the film. I argue that not only was there never a perfectly undistracted spectator even in the darkened movie theater, but that immersion as a category is inadequate to understand the massive changes in visual culture that are enabled by the cellphone as a screening device. I demonstrate how cellphones pull cinema into an action oriented mode of viewership (Acuado & Martinez 2014). The Indian media terrain is especially suited to illustrate the altered contours of film spectatorship, because unlike developed countries, both the film and the mobile phone industries in India have a thriving pirate underbelly that co-exists with and constantly undermines the “official” industry. In studying the intersections between cinema, mobility and piracy, I hope to illustrate how the cellphone has shaped a viewing culture that is marked by poor quality images, pirated media and regularly failing signals and coverage, leading to a fragmentation of the film object into songs, clips, dance sequences, GIFs etc.—this fragmentation isn’t mourned but is celebrated for the possibilities of access that it opens up.
The 21st century is only ten years old, yet it has already created an identity for itself – that ... more The 21st century is only ten years old, yet it has already created an identity for itself – that of a crumbling modernity. The collapsing World Trade Centre has become the defining image of the decade, if not of the century, bringing terrorists out of their ‘Afghan caves’ and into the heart of the city, ushering in a terrorised urban existence. Hindi cinema, like cinema across the world, has tried a variety of ways to define this fear, to understand the figure of the terrorist and, of course, to link and de-link terrorism and the ordinary Muslim. In the recent past, two Hindi films that have dealt with the issue of urban terror are Rajkumar Gupta’s Aamir and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6. In this essay, I would like to argue that despite stemming from a common purpose – to present an alternative view point to the existing discourse on terrorism and Islam’s relationship with it in the 21st century – the two films achieve something decidedly different and, in fact, have opposite i...
It takes a master to tell the story of two nations that haven’t seen eye-to-eye in decades throug... more It takes a master to tell the story of two nations that haven’t seen eye-to-eye in decades through a grove of lemon trees. Eran Riklis, the director of the Israeli film Lemon Tree, speaks to Wide Screen about this haunting film, his relationship with the Israeli and Palestinian governments, with the people, the need to tell a story and the bitter-sweetness of Lemon Tree.
Capturing history, or interpreting it, has meant many things over the years, ranging from melodra... more Capturing history, or interpreting it, has meant many things over the years, ranging from melodrama-driven accounts, to brutally realist narratives to absurdist ‘fragmented’, ‘non-stories’. This paper deals with Guillermo del Torro’s use of the fantastic in Pan’s Labyrinth to allegorise the Spanish Civil War on the one hand, but more importantly, to explore and expand the field of the historical narrative in cinema.
Time magazine called her an Asian Hero, noted that she was the first Indonesian actress to be on ... more Time magazine called her an Asian Hero, noted that she was the first Indonesian actress to be on a jury at the Cannes Film Festival, and then seemed almost to congratulate her on sharing that jury space with the likes of Sharon Stone, Michelle Yeoh and ‘other Hollywood glitterati’. Indonesian star Christine Hakim is not perturbed by this Hollywood-centric outlook, her focus is far more on the development of film-craft in Asia. While she was in New Delhi for the Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival, she spoke to Wide Screen about Asian cinema, young directors, working women and other things that occupy this Asian Hero.
In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-... more In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-cams, CCTV etc – is crucial to Dibakar Benerjee's self-conscious bouquet film, Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Love, Sex and Deception). Use of digital technology is central to LSD's othering of itself and heightening its reality effect. In the adoption of digital cameras and digital aesthetics, the film aspires to a pristine notion of ‘truth’ that exposes the masquerade of celluloid (which the film stages as a staple of ‘Bollywood’). The deliberation on surveillance and voyeurism stages the body as the site where the effect of surveillance apparatus and its violence is most visible. Digital cameras are able to boast a physical proximity to the body that the bulky 35 mm camera cannot achieve, thus crucially altering the way the body is represented and consequently, the way the audience consumes and decodes the image. In this, the film also engages with the persistent idiom of family melodramas that has dominated the cinematic landscape of popular Bombay cinema. Distancing itself from the asexual presentation of love that popular Bombay cinema is (in)famous for, LSD mediates love through the contemporary's signature hunger for access, particularly visual access. The argument that the film makes is that digital technology has access to spaces that are devoid of the romance of ‘fiction’ and are in fact inhabited by a pervading violence. However, it simultaneously also spotlights the technology itself as the medium that engenders this violence, makes it manifest, visible, documented and ultimately erasable.
This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essentia... more This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essential part of the memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes, video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate archives of cinema. Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” ( Steyerl, 2009 ), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,” bringing them into the fold of history. I argue ...
A federal justice agent, Benjamín Espósito, becomes spellbound by and subsequently entangled in t... more A federal justice agent, Benjamín Espósito, becomes spellbound by and subsequently entangled in the investigation of the brutal rape and murder of a young woman in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. Espósito vows to find the killer and bring him to justice.
Jayson Beaster-Jones and Natalie Sarrazin (Eds), Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice... more Jayson Beaster-Jones and Natalie Sarrazin (Eds), Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017, 212 pp., USD 49.95 (Paperback), ISBN 9781138929364.
Scholarship on watching movies on cellphones is still at a nascent stage with newer devices offer... more Scholarship on watching movies on cellphones is still at a nascent stage with newer devices offering radically different ways of accessing film content. Thus far, research is largely limited to Western countries, even though mobile industries of developing countries are expanding dramatically. This paper examines the exhibition and consumption of popular Hindi films in the mobile phone landscape in India. Discourse on watching media on cellphones has focused on the lack of immersion as a shortcoming of the cellphone as a screen which is not only very small, but also offers endless distractions (Evans 2011). This criticism is rooted in the most traditional aspects of Apparatus Theory which desires and in fact imagines an ideal spectator who is unwaveringly immersed in the fiction of the film. I argue that not only was there never a perfectly undistracted spectator even in the darkened movie theater, but that immersion as a category is inadequate to understand the massive changes in visual culture that are enabled by the cellphone as a screening device. I demonstrate how cellphones pull cinema into an action oriented mode of viewership (Acuado & Martinez 2014). The Indian media terrain is especially suited to illustrate the altered contours of film spectatorship, because unlike developed countries, both the film and the mobile phone industries in India have a thriving pirate underbelly that co-exists with and constantly undermines the “official” industry. In studying the intersections between cinema, mobility and piracy, I hope to illustrate how the cellphone has shaped a viewing culture that is marked by poor quality images, pirated media and regularly failing signals and coverage, leading to a fragmentation of the film object into songs, clips, dance sequences, GIFs etc.—this fragmentation isn’t mourned but is celebrated for the possibilities of access that it opens up.
South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 13, issue 1, 2015
In this article, I will argue that the use of... more South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 13, issue 1, 2015
In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-cams, CCTV etc – is crucial to Dibakar Banerjee's self-conscious bouquet film, Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Love, Sex and Deception). Use of digital technology is central to LSD's othering of itself and heightening its reality effect. In the adoption of digital cameras and digital aesthetics, the film aspires to a pristine notion of ‘truth’ that exposes the masquerade of celluloid (which the film stages as a staple of ‘Bollywood’). The deliberation on surveillance and voyeurism stages the body as the site where the effect of surveillance apparatus and its violence is most visible. Digital cameras are able to boast a physical proximity to the body that the bulky 35 mm camera cannot achieve, thus crucially altering the way the body is represented and consequently, the way the audience consumes and decodes the image. In this, the film also engages with the persistent idiom of family melodramas that has dominated the cinematic landscape of popular Bombay cinema. Distancing itself from the asexual presentation of love that popular Bombay cinema is (in)famous for, LSD mediates love through the contemporary's signature hunger for access, particularly visual access. The argument that the film makes is that digital technology has access to spaces that are devoid of the romance of ‘fiction’ and are in fact inhabited by a pervading violence. However, it simultaneously also spotlights the technology itself as the medium that engenders this violence, makes it manifest, visible, documented and ultimately erasable.
This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essentia... more This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essential part of the memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes, video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate archives of cinema. Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” (Steyerl, 2009), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,” bringing them into the fold of history. I argue that its illicit, often incomplete, sometimes erroneous and ephemeral material then poses a challenge to the state archive’s performance of stability and its attempt to control cinematic history.
Page 1. directoryof world cinema EDITED By LorEnzo J. TorrES HorTELAno Page 2. Volume 7 directory... more Page 1. directoryof world cinema EDITED By LorEnzo J. TorrES HorTELAno Page 2. Volume 7 directory of world cinema spain Edited by Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA Page 3. Directory of World ...
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Papers by Kuhu Tanvir
In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-cams, CCTV etc – is crucial to Dibakar Banerjee's self-conscious bouquet film, Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Love, Sex and Deception). Use of digital technology is central to LSD's othering of itself and heightening its reality effect. In the adoption of digital cameras and digital aesthetics, the film aspires to a pristine notion of ‘truth’ that exposes the masquerade of celluloid (which the film stages as a staple of ‘Bollywood’). The deliberation on surveillance and voyeurism stages the body as the site where the effect of surveillance apparatus and its violence is most visible. Digital cameras are able to boast a physical proximity to the body that the bulky 35 mm camera cannot achieve, thus crucially altering the way the body is represented and consequently, the way the audience consumes and decodes the image. In this, the film also engages with the persistent idiom of family melodramas that has dominated the cinematic landscape of popular Bombay cinema. Distancing itself from the asexual presentation of love that popular Bombay cinema is (in)famous for, LSD mediates love through the contemporary's signature hunger for access, particularly visual access. The argument that the film makes is that digital technology has access to spaces that are devoid of the romance of ‘fiction’ and are in fact inhabited by a pervading violence. However, it simultaneously also spotlights the technology itself as the medium that engenders this violence, makes it manifest, visible, documented and ultimately erasable.
memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad
pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes,
video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees
a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate
archives of cinema.
Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” (Steyerl,
2009), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its
role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed
and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,”
bringing them into the fold of history. I argue that its illicit, often incomplete, sometimes erroneous and
ephemeral material then poses a challenge to the state archive’s performance of stability and its attempt
to control cinematic history.
In this article, I will argue that the use of digital capture in its myriad forms – webcams, spy-cams, CCTV etc – is crucial to Dibakar Banerjee's self-conscious bouquet film, Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Love, Sex and Deception). Use of digital technology is central to LSD's othering of itself and heightening its reality effect. In the adoption of digital cameras and digital aesthetics, the film aspires to a pristine notion of ‘truth’ that exposes the masquerade of celluloid (which the film stages as a staple of ‘Bollywood’). The deliberation on surveillance and voyeurism stages the body as the site where the effect of surveillance apparatus and its violence is most visible. Digital cameras are able to boast a physical proximity to the body that the bulky 35 mm camera cannot achieve, thus crucially altering the way the body is represented and consequently, the way the audience consumes and decodes the image. In this, the film also engages with the persistent idiom of family melodramas that has dominated the cinematic landscape of popular Bombay cinema. Distancing itself from the asexual presentation of love that popular Bombay cinema is (in)famous for, LSD mediates love through the contemporary's signature hunger for access, particularly visual access. The argument that the film makes is that digital technology has access to spaces that are devoid of the romance of ‘fiction’ and are in fact inhabited by a pervading violence. However, it simultaneously also spotlights the technology itself as the medium that engenders this violence, makes it manifest, visible, documented and ultimately erasable.
memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad
pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes,
video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees
a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate
archives of cinema.
Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” (Steyerl,
2009), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its
role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed
and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,”
bringing them into the fold of history. I argue that its illicit, often incomplete, sometimes erroneous and
ephemeral material then poses a challenge to the state archive’s performance of stability and its attempt
to control cinematic history.