The Hindi film industry, among the most prolific in the world, has delighted audiences for decades with its colourful, exquisite and sometimes startling costumes. But are costumes more than just a source of pleasure? This book, the first in-depth exploration of Hindi film costume, contends that they are a unique source of knowledge about issues ranging from Indian taste and fashion to questions of identity, gender and work. Anthropological and film studies approaches combine to analyze costume as the outcome of production processes and as a cinematic device for conveying meaning. Chapters lead from the places where costume is planned and executed to explorations of characterization, the actor body, spectacles of fashion, to the imagining of historical or fantasy worlds through dress, to the power of stardom to launch clothing styles into the public domain. As well as charting the course of film costume as it parallels important trends in cultural history, the book considers the future of Hindi film costume, in the context of new strains of filmmaking that stress unvarnished realism. Fashioning Bollywood will appeal to students and scholars of Indian culture, anthropology and fashion, as well as anyone who has seen and enjoyed Hindi films.

From Jack the Ripper to Frankenstein, Halloween customs to Alexander McQueen collections, Fashioning Horror examines how terror is fashioned visually, symbolically, and materially through fashion and costume, in literature, film, and real life. With a series of case studies that range from sensationalist cinema and Slasher films to true crime and nineteenth-century literature, the volume investigates the central importance of clothing to the horror genre, and broadens our understanding of both material and popular culture. Arguing that dress is fundamental to our understanding of character and setting within horror, the chapters also reveal how the grotesque and horrific is at the center of fashion itself, with its potential for instability, disguise, and carnivalesque subversion. Packed with original research, and bringing together a range of international scholars, the book is the first to thoroughly examine the aesthetics of terror and the role of fashion in the construction of horror.

This book offers an introduction to popular Hindi cinema, a genre that has a massive fan base but is often misunderstood by critics, and provides insight on topics of political and social significance. Arguing that Bollywood films are not realist representations of society or expressions of conservative ideology but mediated texts that need to be read for their formulaic and melodramatic qualities and for their pleasurable features like bright costumes, catchy music, and sophisticated choreography, the book interprets Bollywood films as complex considerations on the state of the nation that push the boundaries of normative gender and sexuality. The book provides a careful account of Bollywood’s constitutive components: its moral structure, its different forms of love, its use of song and dance, its visual style, and its embrace of cinephilia. Arguing that these five elements form the core of Bollywood cinema, the book investigates a range of films from 1947 to the present in order to show how films use and innovate formulaic structures to tell a wide range of stories that reflect changing times. The book ends with some considerations on recent changes in Bollywood cinema, suggesting that despite globalization the future of Bollywood remains promising. By presenting Bollywood cinema through an interdisciplinary lens, the book reaches beyond film studies departments and will be useful for those teaching and studying Bollywood in English, sociology, anthropology, Asian studies, and cultural studies classes.

Bollywood in Britain provides the most extensive survey to date of the various manifestations and facets of the Bollywood phenomenon in Britain. The book analyzes the role of Hindi films in the British film market, it shows how audiences engage with Bollywood cinema and it discusses the ways the image of Bollywood in Britain has been shaped. In contrast to most of the existing books on the subject, which tend to approach Bollywood as something that is made by Asians for Asians, the book also focuses on how Bollywood has been adapted for non-Asian Britons. An analysis of Bollywood as an unofficial brand is combined with in-depth readings of texts like film reviews, the TV show Bollywood Star (2004) and novels and plays with references to the Bombay film industry. On this basis Bollywood in Britain demonstrates that the presentation of Bollywood for British mainstream culture oscillates between moments of approximation and distancing, with a clear dominance of the latter. Despite its alleged transculturality, Bollywood in Britain thus emerges as a phenomenon of difference, distance and Othering.

From Bombay to Bollywood analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multi-media cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, Aswin Punathambekar explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry’s geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, Punathambekar has produced a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the U.S., this book offers empirically-rich and theoretically-informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, Punathambekar develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries--film, television, marketing, and digital media. Offering a path-breaking account of media convergence in a non-Western context, Punathambekar’s transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.

In Where Histories Reside Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema. In this bold “spatial” film historiography, Jaikumar outlines factors that shape India's filmed space, from state bureaucracies and commercial infrastructures to aesthetic styles and neoliberal policies. Whether discussing how educational shorts from Britain and India transform natural landscapes into instructional lessons or how Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) presents a universal human condition through the particularities of place, Jaikumar demonstrates that the history of filming a location has always been a history of competing assumptions, experiences, practices, and representational regimes. In so doing, she reveals that addressing the persistent question of “what is cinema?” must account for an aesthetics and politics of space.

A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema's widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a range of films and film experiences that include commercial cinema, art cinema, and non-fiction film. Even as scholarship on earlier decades of Indian cinema is challenged by the absence of documentation and films, the innovative archival and field work in this Companion extends from cinema in early twentieth century India to a historicized engagement with new technologies and contemporary cinematic practices. There is a focus on production cultures and circulation, material cultures, media aesthetics, censorship, stardom, non-fiction practices, new technologies, and the transnational networks relevant to Indian cinema. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students of film and media studies, South Asian studies, and history, A Companion to Indian Cinema is also an important new resource for scholars with an interest in the context and theoretical framework for the study of India's moving image cultures.

Fashion in India is distinctly unique, in its aesthetics, systems, designers and influences. Indian Fashion is the first study of its kind to examine the social, political, global and local elements that give shape to this multifaceted center. Spanning India's long historical contribution to global fashion to the emergence of today's vibrant local fashion scene, Sandhu provides a comprehensive overview of the Indian fashion world. From elite high-end to street style of the masses, the book explores the complex realities of Indian dress through key issues such as identity, class, youth and media. This ground-breaking book does not simply apply western fashion theory to an Indian context, but allows for a holistic understanding of how fashion is created, worn, displayed and viewed in India. Accessibly written, Indian Fashion will be a fantastic resource for students of fashion, cultural studies and anthropology.

Musicians, both fictional and real, have long been subjects of cinema. From biopics of composers Beethoven and Mozart to the rise (and often fall) of imaginary bands in The Commitments and Almost Famous, music of all types has inspired hundreds of films. The Encyclopedia of Musicians and Bands on Film features the most significant productions from around the world, including straightforward biographies, rockumentaries, and even the occasional mockumentary. The wide-ranging scope of this volume allows for the inclusion of films about fictional singers and bands, with emphasis on a variety of themes: songwriter–band relationships, the rise and fall of a career, music saving the day, the promoter’s point of view, band competitions, the traveling band, and rock-based absurdity. Among the films discussed in this book are Amadeus, The Blues Brothers, The Buddy Holly Story, The Commitments, Dreamgirls, The Glenn Miller Story, A Hard Day’s Night, I’m Not There, Jailhouse Rock, A Mighty Wind, Ray, ’Round Midnight, The Runaways, School of Rock, That Thing You Do!, and Walk the Line.With entries that span the decades and highlight a variety of music genres, The Encyclopedia of Musicians and Bands on Film is a valuable resource for moviegoers and music lovers alike, as well as scholars of both film and music.

Costume is an active agent for performance-making; it is a material object that embodies ideas shaped through collaborative creative work. A new focus in recent years on research in the area of costume has connected this practice in vital and new ways with theories of the body and embodiment, design practices, artistic and other forms of collaboration. Costume, like fashion and dress, is now viewed as an area of dynamic social significance and not simply as passive reflector of a pre-conceived social state or practice. This book offers new approaches to the study of costume, as well as fresh insights into the better-understood frames of historical, theoretical, practice-based and archival research into costume for performance. This anthology draws on the experience of a global group of established researchers as well as emerging voices. Below is a list of just some of the things it achieves: 1. Introduces diverse perspectives, innovative new research methods and approaches for researching design and the costumed body in performance. 2. Contributes towards a new understanding of how costume actually 'performs' in time and space. 3. Offers new insights into existing practices, as well as creating a space of connection between practitioners and researchers from design, the humanities and social sciences.