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CSAS Lecture Series | Film’s Mise-en-Scène as Labor’s Social Space

Priya Jaikumar, Associate Professor, Division of Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Friday, April 12, 2019
4:00-5:30 PM
Room 110 Weiser Hall Map
Cinema’s heterogeneous artifactual status—as a regulated and profit-making commodity, technological apparatus, representational medium and employment opportunity—links the changing look of contemporary Hindi cinema’s mise-en-scène to the current commodification of land and leisure, the technologization of environment, and the shifting social range of Bollywood’s workers in globalizing India. Conceiving of filmed space as a tensile relationship between a film’s onscreen space and its defining social spaces, which together constitute a film’s visual appearance and its institutional materiality, I look at the ways in which Bollywood’s backgrounds register India’s politico-economic transitions. The composition and appearance of a film’s backgrounds encode socio-economic histories of India’s transition from an era of economic protectionism to the current phase of privatization and the commodification of everyday life. Based on my interviews with professionals who work on producing Hindi cinema’s locations and backgrounds, conducted in the months leading up to the national elections that put Narendra Modi in power in 2014, this talk proposes a spatial film historiography to account for the complex spatialities of a media form and society, when both are in transition.

Priya Jaikumar is Associate Professor at the Division of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Her talk will draw on her forthcoming book, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space, in production with Duke University Press.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Email us at csas@umich.edu.
Building: Weiser Hall
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Art, Asia, Film, India
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Center for South Asian Studies, International Institute, Asian Languages and Cultures