Radio-Television-Film

This article interrogates the immense popularity of Fast & Furious (Justin Lin, 2009), the fourth fi lm in the Fast franchise, with US Latino viewers when it was released, exploring both the fi lm industry's targeting of Latinos in recent years and the potential of and limitations inherent to foregrounding a "bilingual aesthetic" in a franchise known for an ethos of racelessness. Comparisons to the short fi lm Los Bandoleros (Vin Diesel, 2009), included with Fast & Furious on the commercial DVD, highlight borders that still exist when major US studios construct a seemingly multicultural narrative for global audiences.

One of the most pervasive aspects of Delhi’s post-liberalization
psychopathology has been everyday violence against women. The
city’s rape culture was given an exceptionally sharp global focus after
the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Recent
Hindi cinema has begun to engage with some aspects of the capital’s
misogynist urban ethos. In this paper, I look at how the Delhi subgenre
of the “multiplex film” has engaged with rape culture, misogyny, and
urban anxiety through a close textual and discursive analysis of two
recent films—NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015) and Pink (Aniruddha Roy
Chowdhury, 2016). Specifically, I identify how the December 16 “trigger
event” and Delhi’s notorious misogyny are finding newer modes of
representation through the interplay of genre and exhibition space. In
what ways do these films position and imagine the “multiplex viewer”?
New engagements with the figure of the consuming middle-class
woman and the public discourses that surround her sexual safety and
navigation of space have taken a central position in understanding
the present urban psychosis of the capital. I suggest that these films
and the forms of spectatorial identification that they privilege are
intricately linked to the gendered spatial politics of the multiplex.

This paper looks at the gendered architecture and industrial design of the most predominant fused space of urban entertainment in contemporary India: the mallitplex. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in one of South Delhi’s most successful mega malls: Select City Walk, along with extensive interviews across several departments (design and interiors, security, business development, marketing, staff recruitment and training, food and beverage etc.) of India’s foremost multiplex chain, PVR Cinemas, this paper shows how gendered ‘safe’ space is industrially constructed, maintained and circulated in the public imagination. The ‘safety’ of the middle-class consuming woman is crucial to the industrial design of the mall and the multiplex, and its architecture is meant to regulate a specific kind of gendered behavior/code of conduct. Through an unpacking of the various elements of the industrial design of this mall and the multiplex, I argue that the space is entirely predicated upon the two age-old pillars of classed, caste-based, and gendered national anxiety in India: ‘security’ and ‘hygiene.’

This article charts the pandemic-engendered configurations of moviegoing cultures, leisure, and collective spectatorship in the Indian subcontinent and locates it within the discourses of personal risk, public anxiety, and industrial exclusion that have historically permeated the cinema hall. The pandemic marks a significant moment in the remaking of collective spectatorship and must be contextualized within the two-decades-long transition from single screens to multiplexes already underway in the Indian exhibition landscape. Through an account of the industrial developments in film exhibition in the last year and a half of pandemic time across two catastrophic waves of Covid-19, I offer some preliminary insights into the ways in which these shifts signal towards the cultural production of a new spectatorial body amenable to novel forms of bio-surveillance and datafication of self.

How do key players in Bombay's screen industries-producers, directors, writers, and business developers-understand, imagine, and navigate the dizzying new world of streaming platforms in India? Tracking the emergence of symbiotic relationships between new streaming platforms and established media professionals, I discuss how a restructuring of industry dynamics is elemental to the processes of cultural legitimation of new streaming tastes and the reconfigurations of the relationships between texts, industries, and audiences. Through case studies of a few prominent creative professionals associated in various capacities with global and local streaming platforms, I sketch the multiple linkages between contemporary streaming cultures and the structural histories of both film and television in the subcontinent. Ultimately, this article argues that media workers' self-reflexivity and theorizations about the industry-in-digital transit help us not only grasp the heterogeneity of this moment, but also trace notions of value and taste in Bombay's emerging digital media ecologies.