scholarly journals The 'Bollywoodization' of Popular Indian Visual Culture: A Critical Perspective

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-285
Author(s):  
Keval Joseph Kumar
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Worldwide Web ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
Classical Traditions

The roots of popular visual culture of contemporary India can be traced to the  mythological films which D. G. Phalke provided audiences during the decades of the ‘silent’ era (1912-1934).  The ‘talkies era of the 1930s ushered in the ‘singing’ /musical genre which together with Phalke’s visual style, remains the hallmark of Bollywood cinema. The history of Indian cinema is replete with films made in other genres and styles (e.g. social realism, satires, comedies, fantasy, horror, stunt) in the numerous languages of the country; however, it’s the popular Hindi cinema (now generally termed ‘Bollywood’) that has dominated national Indian cinema and its audiovisual culture and hegemonized the entire film industry as well as other popular technology-based art forms including the press, radio, television,  music, advertising, the worldwide web,  the social media, and telecommunications media. The form and substance of these modern art forms, while adapting to the demands of the new media technologies, continued to be rooted in the visual arts and practices of folk and classical traditions of earlier times.

scholarly journals The 'Bollywoodization' of Popular Indian Visual Culture: A Critical Perspective

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-285
Author(s):  
Keval Joseph Kumar
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Worldwide Web ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
Classical Traditions

The roots of popular visual culture of contemporary India can be traced to the  mythological films which D. G. Phalke provided audiences during the decades of the ‘silent’ era (1912-1934).  The ‘talkies era of the 1930s ushered in the ‘singing’ /musical genre which together with Phalke’s visual style, remains the hallmark of Bollywood cinema. The history of Indian cinema is replete with films made in other genres and styles (e.g. social realism, satires, comedies, fantasy, horror, stunt) in the numerous languages of the country; however, it’s the popular Hindi cinema (now generally termed ‘Bollywood’) that has dominated national Indian cinema and its audiovisual culture and hegemonized the entire film industry as well as other popular technology-based art forms including the press, radio, television,  music, advertising, the worldwide web,  the social media, and telecommunications media. The form and substance of these modern art forms, while adapting to the demands of the new media technologies, continued to be rooted in the visual arts and practices of folk and classical traditions of earlier times.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

Broadcasting Mainline Protestantism: The Chicago Sunday Evening Club and the Evolution of Audience Expectations from Radio to Television

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-264
Author(s):  
Michael Stamm
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Television Broadcasting ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mainline Protestantism ◽  
Public Entity ◽  
Sunday Evening ◽  
Mainline Protestant

AbstractThis article analyzes the broadcast activities of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club (CSEC), a mainline Protestant organization founded in 1908 and still active today. The CSEC began broadcasting its weekly meetings on the radio in 1922 and on television in 1956. Drawing on archival organizational records from the CSEC and from listener correspondence, this essay traces how the club's use of the new media of particular historical moments shaped its history as a public entity.This study makes two claims. First, it argues that, though evangelicals and fundamentalists took to radio and television broadcasting with greater vigor, mainline Protestant groups did as well, and the persistence of a group like the CSEC offers a way to understand the challenges that broadcasting presented to religious organizations. Second, this article shows how audience expectations for religious programming evolved from radio to television. For many listeners, radio offered what they told the CSEC was a spiritual and even miraculous experience, and they marveled at being able to tune in to religious services from their homes. Television, however, prompted remarks often focused on visual style, and the club found itself struggling to compete with the newly emerging group of religious television programs not only on denominational terms (many were evangelicals and fundamentalists) but also on aesthetic terms. In contrast to radio, as many viewers wrote to the CSEC, television seemed to provide not a singular “experience” but rather spectatorial access to events taking place elsewhere. In the context of competition from the more telegenic programming of evangelicals and fundamentalists, these shifting audience expectations shaped both the history of the CSEC as a public entity and the broader history of mainline Protestantism in the mass media.

Unruly Cinema

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rini Battacharya Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
First Century ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Systematic Exposition

Unruly Cinema is a meta-history of Indian cinema’s emergence and growth in correspondence with the colonial, postcolonial, and the neoliberal state. Indian popular cinema has grown steadily from the largest national film industry to a global cultural force. Between 1931 and 2000, Indian cinema overcame Hollywood’s domination of the Indian market, crafted a postcolonial national aesthetic, resisted the high modernist pull of art cinema, and eventually emerged as a seamless extension of India’s neoliberal ambitions. The major agent of these four shifts was a section of the Hindi cinema produced in Bombay, which came to be named and marketed as Bollywood in the twenty-first century. Through a systematic exposition of four historical periods, this book shows how Bollywood’s current dominance is an unlikely result of unruliness, that is, of a disorganized defiance of norms. Perpetually caught between an apathetic and adversarial government and an undefined public, Indian commercial cinema has thrived simply by defying control or normalization. The aesthetic turns of this cinema are guided by counter-effects, often unintended and always unruly.

South Indian Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 303-313
Author(s):  
Krishna Sankar Kusuma
Keyword(s):  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
South Indian ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
Southern Film

Cinema scholars often refer to Hindi cinema as Indian cinema. India has diverse languages, cultures, and a long history of Cinema of its own. Regional cinema in numbers, as well as quality, competes with any cinema in the world. The study is an attempt to present the case of five film industries in the southern part of India, which includes Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Tulu language films. The southern film industries is theorized as 'South Indian cinema' as they share similar features, yet each one of them is unique. South Indian cinema has often been looked down upon as it is cheap and vulgar. The research also explores the gender dimensions in both the industry as well as on-screen presentation. This chapter aims to provide a theoretical and philosophical interpretation of South Indian cinema.

Is a New Worldwide Web Possible? An Explorative Comparison of the Use of ICTs by Two South African Social Movements

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herman Wasserman
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
New Media ◽  
South African ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Treatment Action ◽  
Treatment Action Campaign ◽  
Worldwide Web ◽  
Information And Communication

Abstract:In this article the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), especially new media technologies such as e-mail and the Internet, by postapartheid South African social movements is explored. Following a discussion of the use of these technologies by activist groupings in international contexts, a typology suggested by Rheingold (2003) is used as a framework for comparing two South African social movements: the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF).

Introduction

Dancing Women ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Usha Iyer
Keyword(s):  
Historical Account ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
Hindi Film

The Introduction sets up the primary analytic frameworks of this book, plotting, through the opening example of the spectacular dance number, “Muqabla humse na karo,” issues of labor, collaboration, and technology that film dance activates. Through attention to gesture, movement vocabulary, training, fame, and erasure, this chapter posits the need for a corporeal history of Hindi cinema that is peopled by many laboring bodies. Such a history takes into account acclaimed and invisibilized performers and celebrates a range of dancing women as co-choreographers of female mobility. The Introduction also provides a brief history of dance in pre-playback Hindi film, and a historical account of responses to the cine-corporeal transformations wrought by dance in Indian cinema.

A Media Interpretation of the Negative Impact of Cloud Technologies

2016 ◽  
pp. 403-420
Author(s):  
Michael S. Tang ◽  
Arunprakash T. Karunanithi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cloud Technologies

This chapter presents a media studies interpretation of the impact of Cloud communication technologies on traditional academic achievement. According to social media critics following the “medium is the message” theory of Marshall McLuhan, the hidden “message” in the new Cloud communication education technologies conflicts with the old message of the printed textbook, the traditional medium of communication in education since the printing press in the 16th and 17th centuries. The chapter begins with a brief history of media technologies in education to gain understanding into the nature of this conflict and follows with a review of research and studies that document the conflict's cause and consequences with the conclusion that a major factor in the proliferation of any new media communication technology is its commercial value. Moreover, because new technologies in education are driven by commercial interests, its pedagogical value becomes secondary resulting in what social media and other critics view as the dumbing down of the American student. These social media critics contend that not only have American students been declining intellectually, computer technologies, including the Cloud Internet communication technologies are the direct cause of this decline, raising the question, “is education technology an oxymoron?” Given this analysis of media communication technologies' impact on education, the authors then offer a possible way out of the current situation by proposing a more human factors approach towards Cloud technologies based on constructivist educational and cognitive styles theory.

Turn Me On, Dead Media

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 531-551
Author(s):  
Jacob Smith
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Conservative Christian ◽  
History Of ◽  
Iconic Status

In an era of CD-Rs and MP3 sound files, the vinyl phonograph record has attained iconic status as the quintessential old analog media form. An analysis of the theory and practice of “backmasking” reveals how a discourse of the occult “re-newed” the old medium of recorded sound one hundred years after its invention. Little scholarly attention has been paid to debates in the 1980s about the alleged presence of backmasking: the term given to the process whereby messages were thought to be placed in popular phonograph records such that their full meaning could be discovered only when the record was played in reverse. The backmasking controversy provides an example of the re-enchantment of an old medium, not through the work of avant-garde artists but conservative Christian preachers, anticult lecturers, and high school teachers, whose antimedia discourse was culturally productive far beyond their local origins or narrow intentions. To appreciate the multiple sources and unintended results of the backmasking panic, this article makes use of scholarly work on new media, the sociology of religion, the history of occult discourses surrounding the electronic media, debates about subliminal advertising, and the cultural history of recorded sound. By thus placing backmasking within these various historical and cultural frames, we are better able to understand how vernacular media theory and the grassroots public performances of traveling showmen constructed a sense of astonishment often associated with media technologies only when they are new.

scholarly journals Expansion and Contraction: The Play Spaces of Todd and the Vampire

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-170
Author(s):  
Erin Heisel
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Production Processes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The World ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
The Relationship

What happens when the music production processes and spaces of a traditionally live art form such as opera are digitized? What is the relationship between community and isolation for artists when their workspace is lifted from the theatre—with its interpersonal connections—and placed in the virtual world? What opportunities and what risks does this pose for performers? Are there parallels to other art forms that developed or expanded as the result of new media technologies? This article will explore these issues by considering the production processes of the animated YouTube opera/movie Todd and the Vampire, composed and created by Ronen Shai, with contributions by musicians and visual artists working simultaneously, but independently, around the world. How does this piece utilize technology to challenge and transcend traditional notions of space and identity? What are the implications of this somewhat disembodied process for performers, audiences, and for the art form itself?

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