12 March 2012
Early Indian cinema explored in lecture
Nowadays, it is famous for lavish Bollywood productions, but the development of documentary film in colonial and post-Independence India will be discussed during a public lecture at the University of Dundee this week.
Eminent film historian Professor Ravi Vasudevan, of the Centre for Developing Societies, Delhi, and University of Cambridge, will discuss and show examples of how the government, corporations and the colonial elites all attempted to spread their message via the medium of cinema in one of the most tumultuous times in India's history.
His lecture, 'Film as infrastructure: non-fictional film histories in colonial and early independent India, 1920s-1950s' takes place at the Dalhousie Buildng from 4-6pm on Wednesday, 14th March.
It reflects a wider research project to chronicle the distribution of film during those years, and addresses educational, industrial training, travel and cultural film that was screened outside traditional cinemas or alongside newsreel, documentary shorts and advertising films at theatrical outlets.
Professor Vasudevan said the presentation will highlight several key conceptual conceptual issues.
"These include governmental policies and practices, documentary and short film practices, which were called independent but involved significant corporate sponsorship, and amateur film produced by colonial elites in the wake of the introduction of more affordable cameras and projectors from the early 1920s.
"The aim is to explore governmental technologies of communicative power, the particular place of film in such a technological spectrum, and how film provides material and archival engagement that exceed its instrumental deployment."
Ravi Vasudevan is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and co-initiated Sarai, the Centre's research programme on media experience and urban history. he has taught Film Studies at universities in India and the USA, and held fellowships at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies, Princeton, and Cambridge.
His articles on cinema have appeared in a variety of disciplinary journals, and have been anthologized and translated. He is one of the founder editors of the new journal Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, and author of 'The Melodramatic Public: film form and spectatorship in Indian cinema'.
His lecture takes place at Room 2F13 in the Dalhousie Building, and is open to members of the public.
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Grant Hill
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