Editorial

With every passing year, there is a mounting evidence of the inextricable links between what was once the cinema and a host of other media forms. This situation presents an interesting set of challenges to students of contemporary cinema, often requiring them to mobilise a range of methodologies and to step out of the comfort zones of language, form and textuality. Today, the film historian too is not exempt from the need to engage the dispersal of the moving image and of a shared and stable universe of cultural forms. So Bazin’s question ‘what is cinema?’ remains central to a cinema studies that is intermedial and interdisiplinary.

The historical evolution of cinema and its leakage beyond traditional spaces of exhibition has been a recurring theme on the pages of BioScope. Our latest issue covers different periods, topics, regions and objects. From archival research to close reading of filmic and other texts and ethnography, the authors draw on very different methodologies for their analysis to offer valuable insights into established as well as emerging areas of study. These include the history of the film script, production cultures of our film industries, the intersections of old and new technologies of the moving image, mobility of images and accrual of meaning in circulation, cross-media flows as well the growing interface between regimes of spectatorship.

Rakesh Sengupta’s essay on the relatively under-researched area of screenwriting speaks to BioScope’s commitment to historical analyses of cinema. It marks a departure from ethnographic work on production cultures by Tejaswini Ganti (2012) and Anand Pandian (2015), which focus on contemporary practices. In his examination of the early talkie in Calcutta and Bombay, Sengupta argues that the practice and discourse of screenwriting is generated intermedia. Examining their autobiographical writings, he notes that early screenwriters worked in Parsi theatre before they began their film careers. Insofar as they were writers, they were indeed a privileged category of creative workers. Furthermore, writers themselves saw ‘little or no discontinuity between their practices on the stage and screen’. At the same time, these writers belonged to a milieu in which screenwriting pedagogy was symptomatic of ‘interdependent film and print cultures of the day’. Indeed, the craft was, among other things, a product of self-help manuals aimed at amateur writers.

Abhija Ghosh’s history of Indian film societies in the 1960s and 1970s focuses on cinephilia of a uniquely celluloid kind. Unlike its digital counterpart, which Moinak Biswas (2007) draws attention to, the cinephilia nurtured by film societies was at once predicated on the scarcity of celluloid film prints and the labour that went into procuring films for exhibition. Film society cinephilia, she argues, was focussed on the material object, and celluloid form, of cinema. It was no mean achievement to procure cans of film and transport them to the locations of screenings. The cinephiliac sensibility, according to an entire generation of film society members that included Satyajit Ray, was not easily disseminated to ever-increasing groups of viewers; and they understood the absence of such a discerning audience to be the reason for the degenerate commercial cinema produced in India. The film society was therefore made up of a paradoxical combination, motivated at once by pedagogic intent and by the felt need to limit access to the very cinema that India lacked.

Navaneetha Mokkil explores the fraught relationship between the cinema and new technologies, which are not only more ubiquitous today but also far more difficult to discipline. Her essay juxtaposes the Malayalam film Drishyam and the ‘Kiss of Love’ protest against moral policing that came a year later (2014). Drishyam, in addition to being a major commercial success in Malayalam was remade in Telugu, Tamil and Hindi. Mokkil argues that the film is a conservative reaction to the proliferation of new image-making technologies, the mobile phone in particular. The dangers posed by the unauthorised production and circulation of images to (middle class) young women by mobiles phones is contrasted to the safety of cinema and cable television that carefully regulate the display of female bodies. Uncannily enough, the film anticipates the Kiss of Love protest’s provocative gesture of displaying female (and, as it turned out, queer) sexuality. The predictable opposition to the protest, the author argues, was founded on the discomfort with the ‘leakiness of the feminine body in an economy of digital media practices’. Cinema and television are seen to be unlike these practices because they contain the obscene image in spatial and temporal domains hidden from the public even as they remain accessible to sections of it.

Nadja-Christina Schneider’s essay flags the importance of image making in the business of surrogacy. Complicated by highly publicised instances of celebrity couples and single men alike taking recourse to and promoting surrogacy, this frontier of commodification and gendered labour has multiple linkages with media industries and practices. Schneider discusses documentary images on the one hand and media savvy medical professionals on the other that frame gestational surrogacy in India. Ongoing discussions on surrogacy, notes the author, have tended to invisibilise gendered labour of the surrogate mother and the repressive conditions in which she works. Instead, the surrogate mother is represented as the owner of a womb that is offered on rent to tide over economic hardship. At the two ends of the surrogacy market, we therefore have the invisible surrogate mother and the hypervisible celebrity parent. Ironically, both sets of labouring bodies—separated as they are by a yawning class divide—are imaged as beneficiaries of a rental economy. At the heart of this futuristic economy is the medical expert, sometimes the hero and in other times the villain of documentaries on surrogacy, who runs the post-industrial factory of surrogacy by ensuring a steady supply of paid ‘volunteers’ who are closely supervised to ensure the safe delivery of babies.

Silpa Mukherjee’s essay takes us to the item number, which like images of female bodies on social media that Mokkil discusses is yet another contemporary hypersexualised text. It too is embedded in complex networks of production and regulation. Based on interviews with industry professions, Mukherjee highlights some of the defining features of production and aesthetics of this set-piece. Arguably the most striking and derided of Indian popular cinema’s ‘attractions’ and, by extension, narrative logic, the item number is characterised by a register of verisimilitude that is excessive and loud, even by the standards of the rest of the film. Often directed by choreographers, this segment of the film is marked by the ‘deliberate “prettification” of gritty real spaces both on and off screen’. Mukherjee’s richly detailed account of the design and assembly unpacks the constituent elements of the item number and the specialised skills that go into its production. It also locates the item number in the larger production culture of the Mumbai industry that is shaped by multiple players including union organisers and political parties.

The fieldwork section presents an investigation into the movement of cinema across formats, screens and geographical regions by S. V. Srinivas, V. H. C. V. Megha Shyam, Raghav Nanduri, Vasundhara Singhal and Vishnu Dath R. Carried out simultaneously in four different states and on YouTube, the project examines the distribution and exhibition of big budget Tamil and Telugu productions—regional blockbusters—that circulate in multiple language versions in theatrical circuits as well as online. The (regional) blockbuster, the authors argue, was made possible by the very conditions that facilitated the growth of the market for Hollywood films in India: dubbing and digitisation of distribution and exhibition. Evidence for the emergence of a countrywide film market, they contend, is not to be found in the dominance of Hindi or English languages on screens but the increasing availability of regional and international films in multiple Indian languages.

Regrettably, we have not been able to include any book reviews in this issue of BioScope. We are in the process of streamlining our review process and will be back with our reviews section in the next issue.