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- Volume 11, Issue 2, 2019
Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Women at Work: The Cultural and Creative Industries, Dec 2019
Women at Work: The Cultural and Creative Industries, Dec 2019
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Cinema and the mask of capital: Labour debates in the Malayalam film industry
More LessLabour discourses in the film industry are often couched in the language of ‘welfare’ and an effort to maintain harmony among different filmmaking sectors. But such arrangements do not proffer equal participation or bargaining rights to everyone in the industry. Focusing on the Malayalam language film industry based in Kerala, this article examines how the film industry’s apprenticeship and unpaid labour arrangements affect below-the-line labour and less influential job profiles on a film set. In corollary, I also explore how labour and bargaining rights are conceptualized differently by film organizations based on their ideological positions. Using a mixed-methods approach, including media ethnography and interviews with members of different trade guilds who form part of Malayalam cinema’s professional, technical and service sectors, I demonstrate how structural inequalities in the film industry are overlooked while the cine-worker’s agency is co-opted by a neoliberal system that masquerades as welfare.
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The gendered film worker: Women in cinema collective, intimate publics and the politics of labour
More LessAlthough Indian cinema studies as a discipline has long been involved in various theoretical elaborations of film production, not until recently has it engaged with the question of the gendered nature of film work. In this piece, I attempt to develop a framework centred around the politics of labour to provide a useful case to highlight how thoughtful engagement with these categories provides immense value for both contemporary film scholarship and feminist histories of media. In trying to situate Women in Cinema Collective, the first collective of women film workers to be formed in India, in the larger history of labour politics and women workers collectives of the recent past, I try to disaggregate a larger episteme of women’s work that emerges across the flexible labour economies of the neo-liberal present. Through examining the Women in Cinema Collective’s social media campaigns, advocacy work, petitioning and legal counselling, I argue that Women in Cinema Collective emerges as a tenuous collective whose work moves across the porous boundaries of a new social movement, workers collective and an autonomous women’s group.
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The disavowal of dance as labour in popular Hindi cinema
More LessIn this article, I analyse screendance texts from Hindi cinema to introduce a theoretical framework called the ideology of amateurism which, I argue, made space within the narrative of the Hindi film for the ‘ideal’ Indian woman to dance publicly while simultaneously disavowing modernity. Through an analysis of selected film dance texts, I show how this turned the dancing heroine into the restorer of the moral order of the narrative. I argue that this ideology of amateurism amounted to a denial of dance labour, which was a necessary precondition for the cultural legitimation of the viewers’ desire for the screendancer in particular and a disavowal of the desire for modernity in general. Following this, I show how with the liberalization of the Indian economy and the rise of neoliberalism, and interestingly, also the replacement of the erstwhile ‘union-dancers’ on-screen Bollywood film dance texts today not only acknowledge the labour of screendance but promotional materials lay out the ‘labouring process’. This, I suggest, is symptomatic of the emergence of a new work order and the entry of a new class into this sphere. I read this in conjunction with the rise of dance as an established profession, as seen through the mushrooming of Bollywood dance schools, in order to show how the ideology of amateurism is challenged through a reconfiguration of work practices in neoliberal economies.
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Speaking with Suhasini Mulay: A short story about a long strife
More LessThis article is connected to my project concerning the Indian film industry, questions of work and women’s labour; and, this interview-based article grows from my ongoing audio-visual documentary work tentatively titled The Shadow and The Arc Light. It enables me to reflect upon my previous book project, and takes shape in the light of contemporary feminist historiography. Suhasini Mulay began her career as an actor with Bhuvan Shome (Mrinal Sen 1969), and thereafter, shifted to filmmaking and obtained technical training from McGill University, Montreal. Upon her homecoming she initially worked with the International Film Festival of India, and later assisted Satyajit Ray (for Jana Aranya [1975]) and Mrinal Sen (for Mrigayaa [1976]). While Mulay has made documentaries, and also acted in Bhavni Bhavai (Ketan Mehta 1980), she eventually resumed full-time acting in 1999. As narrated by her, she endured hierarchical, gendered and precarious work conditions, which inform us about the arduous production milieu. Through such conversations, I propose gender as a lens for studying film history, and underscore filmmaking as labour; as well, analyse the nature of filmic work. I aspire to demonstrate how women involved in various capacities, negotiate networks of media forms and capital, and persist perilously.
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Para and Protima: A tête-à-tête1
By Anubha YadavThis short speculative text explores the relationship between the corporeality of a screenwriter and the materiality of a physical space, including its imaginary losses and effects on women’s creative collaborations. In this text, I draw from the information that Begum Para and Protima Dasgupta were spending a lot of time together in Bombay, living under the same roof, when their creative partnership blossomed and gave the industry a production house, a director-producer, a screen star and more than a few films. Although this text takes the form of creative writing, it is based on historical and archival research.
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Shanta Apte’s Jau Mi Cinemat?
By Aarti WaniJau Mi Cinemat? written by Shanta Apte (1916–64), a prominent singer–actress with a career spanning nearly three decades in the Marathi film industry, has only recently come to the critical attention of film scholars. A translation of the book will be a valued addition to the archive of film and gender studies. With a view to making a beginning in that direction, this piece contextualizes the book followed by a translation of two of its chapters.
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Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, Debashree Mukherjee (2020)
More LessReview of: Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, Debashree Mukherjee (2020)
New York: Columbia University Press, 443 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-23119-618-5, p/bk, ₹699
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