[csaa-forum] Technological Networks and Obsolescence in Contemporary Bombay Cinema: public lecture by Prof Ranjani Mazumdar

[Ramon Lobato]

>> Technological Networks and Obsolescence in Contemporary Bombay Cinema <<

A public lecture by Dr Ranjani Mazumdar
Professor of Cinema Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

5pm-6pm Monday 31st July @ RMIT Council Chamber (1.2.17)
Building 1, Level 2, 124 La Trobe St Melbourne
All welcome

This lecture looks at the role of media and communication technologies
in the imagination
of urban spaces in contemporary Bombay cinema. If surveillance
practices and their
resultant structuring becomes one part of this imagination (No Smoking
2007, LSD 2010,
Ugly, 2013), we also see the role of the internet and social media in
the framing of spatial
encounters in small town India (Masaan 2015). A fascination for
‘obsolete’ technology
frames another order of space linked to the recent past (Gangs of
Wasseypur 2012, Miss
Lovely 2012, Dum Lagake Haisha, 2015), while documentary films like
John and Jayne
(2005) invoke the call centre imagination within a fractured urban
subjectivity. In these
films, the themes of violence, love, tragedy and comedy are enacted
within a spatial
terrain triggered by new media technologies. Taken together these
films offer a new
geography of the experiential changes unraveling in contemporary India.

Ranjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts
& Aesthetics,
Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications focus on urban cultures,
popular cinema,
gender and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An
Archive of the
City (2007) and co-author with Nitin Govil of the forthcoming The
Indian Film Industry.
She has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and her productions include Delhi
Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (Co-Directed). Her current
research focuses on
globalization and film culture, the visual culture of film posters and
the intersection of
technology, travel, design and colour in 1960s Bombay Cinema.

Enquiries: ramon.lobato at rmit.edu.au