Studies in South Asian Film & Media - India–Europe Film Connections, Apr 2024

In the wake of such blockbuster films as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) film-related travel from India has become an important economic factor in the tourist industry in Switzerland, to the point where the luxury suite in one of the most prestigious five-star hotels in the country is now dedicated to the style and memory of pioneer producer Yash Chopra. Tracing the romance between commercial Hindi cinema and Switzerland from the 1980s to 1990s onwards, the Chopra suite in the Viktoria Jungfrau hotel in Interlaken can also be read as an indicator of an important cultural constellation: a composite style in visual and design culture.

This article examines the use of locations in a cross-section of contemporary Bombay films. The complicated workings of various kinds of production infrastructures typically shape cinema’s topographical motivations and sense of scale. Through a comparative analysis of films shot in and around Bombay with a film shot in a location outside India, I establish how the aesthetic drives of vertical, horizontal and atmospheric urbanism have generated a cartographic diversity in the cinematic imagination of contemporary India. The focus is on suspense films and their creative use of location shooting to invoke physical and psychological expressions of space. These are small-budget films where scale and navigational possibilities are managed carefully. In Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly (2013), the hunt for a kidnapped child unveils a gritty urban terrain and the failed dreams of its damaged protagonists. Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped (2016) showcases the slow breakdown of a man who inadvertently gets locked into an apartment on the 35th floor of an empty, half-constructed, high-rise building with no electricity, food or water. Unlike Ugly and Trapped, which speak to Bombay’s constant play with feelings of desperation and survival, Badla (2019) transports us to the cold, wintry landscape of Scotland to create an atmosphere for a psychological exposition of crime and revenge.

This is a methodological article consisting of two parts – the first part, demonstrates the methodologies of online research done towards annotating the multiple European locations in the Bollywood film Jab Harry Met Sejal (JHMS) made in 2017, followed by a second part that provides a commentary on the ideological subtext of the film gleaned from the online research work done. The presentation of online work consists of matching material available on the web – film location websites, imdb.com, images, maps and texts in the main with the imagery presented in the film. This seeks to emphasize the remarkable possibilities of using basic online research to analyse film content to a degree of considerable density and complexity, a development that improves day by day. Indeed, the ‘surface’ reading of locations as imagery when matched with other online resources such as Wikipedia entries on various aspects of film imagery allow for a very rich interpretation of the underlying ideational and ideological intention of films.

Review of: The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization, Francis Cody (2023)

Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 260 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-22682-472-7, p/bk, $27.50

Media and the Constitution of the Political: South Asia and Beyond, Ravi Vasudevan (ed.) (2022)

New Delhi: Sage Publications and Spectrum, 335 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-35479-076-8, p/bk, ₹795

Review of: Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable, Iftikhar Dadi (2022)

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 238 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-29575-081-1, p/bk, $32

Review of: Body on the Barricades: Life, Art, and Resistance in Contemporary India, Brahma Prakash (2023)

Delhi: LeftWord Books, 210 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-39201-810-7, p/bk, $18

Review of: Migration, Mobility and Sojourning in Cross-cultural Films: Interculturing Cinema, Ishani Mukherjee and Maggie Griffith Williams (2021)

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 166 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-49858-768-6, h/bk, $105

Review of: Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, Samhita Sunya (2022)

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 270 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-52037-953-4, p/bk, $34.95