The Definitive Biography Of One Of Indian Cinema S Most Unusual Iconic Figures In 1935, A Young Blonde Girl Made Her First Appearance On The Indian Screen. Riding Like The Devil, Swinging On Chandeliers, Sporting A Mask And Tight-Fitting Shorts And Brandishing A Whip, She Drove Audiences Into Raptures. The Film Was Hunterwali, The Girl Fearless Nadia. For More Than A Decade After That She Remained One Of The Top Indian Film Stars As She Wielded Revolvers, Ran Along The Roofs Of Rushing Trains, Beat Up Men And Played With Lions. The Fearless Nadia Films, A Shimmering Mixture Of Action, Eroticism And Progressive Ideas, Were Unlike Anything Indian Audiences Had Seen So Far. Coming At A Time When India Was Struggling For Independence, These Films Also Carried Subtle Nationalist Propaganda As Fearless Nadia, The Daughter Of A British Soldier, Became The Cult Cinematic Symbol Of The Indian Freedom Struggle. How Did A Blonde With European Features Become A Celebrated Stunt Queen In Popular Indian Cinema? How Could An Indian Actress Of The 1930S Become A Rage With Feminists In The West At The Turn Of The Millennium? Dorothee Wenner S Absorbing Biography Traces The Nadia Story From Her Birth In Australia, Her Stint As A Shop Assistant, A Secretary, A Chorus Girl And A Variety Performer In A Circus To Her Unprecedented Stardom And Its Aftermath. In The Process, She Also Vividly Brings To Life A Fascinating Era Of Indian Cinema In Which Passionate Film-Makers Overcame Tremendous Financial, Technical And Logistical Odds To Create Celluloid Magic.

Popular Indian Cinema is clearly a worldwide phenomenon. But what often gets overlooked in this celebration is this cinema’s intricate relationship with global dynamics since its very inception in the 1890s. With contributions from a range of international scholars, this volume analyses the transnational networks of India’s popular cinema in terms of its production, narratives and reception. The first section of the book,Topographies, concentrates on the globalised audio-visual economies within which the technologies and aesthetics of India’s commercial cinema developed. Essays here focus on the iconic roles of actors like Devika Rani and Fearless Nadia, film-makers such as D G Phalke and Baburao Painter, the film Sant Tukaram, and aspects of early cinematography. The second section, Trans-Actions, argues that the ‘national fantasy’ of Indian commercial cinema is an unstable construction. Essays here concentrate on the conversations between Indian action movies of the 1970s and other genres of action and martial arts films; the features of post-liberalisation Indian films designed to meet the needs of an ‘imagined’ global audience in the 1990s; and the changing metaphor of ‘the vamp’ as portrayed through desirous women in films with examples of the Anglo-Asian, the westernized Indian woman of ‘low character’, and the contemporary figure of the ‘heroine’. The final section, Travels, focuses on the overseas reception of Indian cinema with ethnographic case studies from Germany, Guyana, the USA, South Africa, Nigeria and Britain. The contributors highlight various issues concerning modernity, racial/ethnic identity, the gaze of the ‘mainstream Other’, gender, hybridity, moral universes, and the articulation of desire and disdain.

Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! maps out the early culture of cinema stardom in India from its emergence in the silent era to the decade after Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. Neepa Majumdar combines readings of specific films and stars with an analysis of the historical and cultural configurations that gave rise to distinctly Indian notions of celebrity. She argues that discussions of early cinematic stardom in India must be placed in the context of the general legitimizing discourse of colonial "improvement" that marked other civic and cultural spheres as well, and that "vernacular modernist" anxieties over the New Woman had limited resonance here. Rather, it was through emphatically nationalist discourses that Indian cinema found its model for modern female identities. Considering questions of spectatorship, gossip, popularity, and the dominance of a star-based production system, Majumdar details the rise of film stars such as Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Lata Mangeshkar, and Nargis.

In the past stars have been studied as cogs in a mass entertainment industry selling desires and ideologies. But since the 1970s, new approaches have reopened debate, as film and cultural studies try to account for the active role of the star in producing meanings, pleasures, and identites for a diversity of audiences. Stardom brings together for the first time some of the major writing of the last decade which seeks to understand the phemomenon of stars and stardom. Gathered under four headings - The System, Stars and Society, Performers and Signs, Desire and Politics - these essays represent a range of approaches drawn from film history, sociolgy, textual analysis, audience research, psychoanalysis, and cultural politics. They raise important issues about the politics of representation and the cultural limitations and possibilities of stars.

Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry. The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks. Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.

A sweeping cultural history of India’s largest city A place of spectacle and ruin, Mumbai exemplifies the cosmopolitan metropolis. It is not just a big city but also a soaring vision of modern urban life. Millions from India and beyond, of different ethnicities, languages, and religions, have washed up on its shores, bringing with them their desires and ambitions. Mumbai Fables explores the mythic inner life of this legendary city as seen by its inhabitants, journalists, planners, writers, artists, filmmakers, and political activists. In this remarkable cultural history of one of the world's most important urban centers, Gyan Prakash unearths the stories behind its fabulous history, viewing Mumbai through its turning points and kaleidoscopic ideas, comic book heroes, and famous scandals—the history behind Mumbai's stories of opportunity and oppression, of fabulous wealth and grinding poverty, of cosmopolitan desires and nativist energies. Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. Examining Mumbai's role as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention, he looks at its nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century emergence as a fabled city on the sea. Different layers of urban experience come to light as he recounts the narratives of the Nanavati murder trial and the rise and fall of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. Starry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, land sharks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization. Shedding light on the city's past and present, Mumbai Fables offers an unparalleled look at this extraordinary metropolis.

Exceptionally popular during their time, the spectacular American action film serials of the 1910s featured exciting stunts, film tricks, and effects set against the background of modern technology, often starring resourceful female heroines who displayed traditionally male qualities such as endurance, strength, and authority. The most renowned of these "serial queens" was Pearl White, whose career as the adventurous character Pauline developed during a transitional phase in the medium's evolving production strategies, distribution and advertising patterns, and fan culture. In this volume, an international group of scholars explores how American serials starring Pearl White and other female stars impacted the emerging cinemas in the United States and abroad. Contributors investigate the serial genre and its narrative patterns, marketing, and cultural reception, and historiographic importance, with essays on Pearl White's life on and off the screen as well as the "serial queen" genre in Western and Eastern Europe, India, and China. Contributors are Weihong Bao, Rudmer Canjels, Marina Dahlquist, Monica Dall'Asta, Kevin B. Johnson, Christina Petersen, and Rosie Thomas.

Bombay before Bollywood offers a fresh, alternative look at the history of Indian cinema. Avoiding the conventional focus on India's social and mythological films, Rosie Thomas examines the subaltern genres of the "magic and fighting films"—the fantasy, costume, and stunt films popular in the decades before and immediately after independence. She explores the influence of this other cinema on the big-budget masala films of the 1970s and 1980s, before "Bollywood" erupted onto the world stage in the mid-1990s. Thomas focuses on key moments in this hidden history, including the 1924 fairy fantasy Gul-e-Bakavali; the 1933 talkie Lal-e-Yaman; the exploits of stunt queen Fearless Nadia; the magical neverlands of Hatimtai and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp; and the 1960s stunt capers Zimbo and Khilari. She includes a detailed ethnographic account of the Bombay film industry of the early 1980s, centering on the beliefs and fantasies of filmmakers themselves with regard to filmmaking and film audiences, and on-the-ground operations of the industry. A welcome addition to the fields of film studies and cultural studies, the book will also appeal to general readers with an interest in Indian cinema.

Meet the wonder women of Indian history! They flew planes, swam across oceans, led armies, performed stunts, built cities and captured historic moments on camera, despite being constantly told to stay home, because that’s what ‘good girls’ did. These were women who dared to dream and worked hard to turn their dreams into reality, who shaped their own destinies and refused to let anyone tell them what to do. Featuring the amazing adventures of Janaki Ammal, Rani Abbakka, Nadia Wadia, Sarla Sharma Thakral, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and many others, Unstoppable is a collection of 75 power-packed stories of the extraordinary Indian women who broke the rules to change the world around them for the better.

Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: A Critical Overview is a comprehensive work defining and encapsulating concepts, issues and applications in and around the use of sound in film and the cinema, media/broadcast and new media. Over thirty definitive full-length essays, which are linked by highlighted text and reference material, bring together original research by many of the world's top scholars in this emerging field. Complete with an extensive bibliography, Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media provides the most comprehensive and wide-ranging consideration of this subject yet produced.