Cinema came within the ambit of academia in India through the writings in the Journal of Arts and Ideas in the 1980s, and the establishment of the first Film Studies Department at Jadavpur University in the early 1990s. In the last two decades, we have seen the commencement of the first full-fledged Ph.D. program in Film Studies and Visual Culture in the Department of Film Studies, The EFL University, the introduction of Film and Literature, Film and Media Courses as optional papers or electives at postgraduate level in various Universities, and the offering of Film Studies as an optional subject at the undergraduate level in West Bengal and Kerala among others. The steady rise in the activity of teaching and research in Film Studies has been shaped and supported by such activities as the publication of the masterly Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, a stream of articles in e-journals and books on Hindi and, to a lesser extent, other Indian language films and the society shaped by cinema, online film archives such as Indiancine.ma, archives of digitised printed material such as the Filmindia Magazine, ICC and other governmental reports and documents, besides the huge volume of films available as CDs, DVDs, BluRay discs, via YouTube and on OTT platforms. From the time of research based on limited possibilities of viewing and accessing films on celluloid, and working with scant printed sources, to the present time when a plethora of films and film-related material is available at our finger-tips, research on cinema has witnessed a sea-change.
While research on cinema today is not the same as before, the way we interact with cinema today has also drastically changed. The move from analogue to digital has brought about a change in its production, distribution, exhibition practices, and nature of audience engagement, and in the process, has created new and dynamic forms of participatory culture through what Jonathan Gray calls “media paratexts”. Further, the phenomenon of social media that took over an individual’s private and public life impacted the ways in which we related to the arts, particularly one as popular as cinema. Following Henry Jenkins’ work on participatory culture, convergence culture, and transmedia storytelling, that discusses the effect of social media on media industries, including cinema, we are aware of the immutable linkages between the two.
The present seminar invites papers that use the possibilities of the digital era for their research on Indian cinema, and also to reflect on the same. Also, how has the media ecology today impacted knowledge production and dissemination of Indian cinema? We wish to emphasise that the term ‘Indian cinema’ used throughout this CFP refers to films made in all the filmmaking languages and regions of India; hence papers are invited on filmmaking and film-going/viewing practices in any language or region in India.
Papers could be broadly in the areas of:
- Indian film historiography in the digital era
- Sociological impact of digitality in cinema and other media
- Multi-medial/multimodal/intersemiotic studies of Indian films
- Political economy of contemporary Indian cinema
- Changing gender norms and practices in Indian cinema
- Social media and cinema
- The impact of the digital on particular film cultures and film ‘woods’
- Genre cinema/Genre hybridity in the digital era
- Documentary film and its new avatars such as mockumentary, docufiction etc.
- Ancillary activities such as memes, videography, postering and other promotional practices
- Changing forms of film reception and spectatorship Or any other related theme
Deadline for submission of abstracts: June 15th, 2024
Please email your abstracts of 300 words in Times New Roman, Font 12 to talkingfilmsonline@gmail.com along with a bio-note of not more than 200 words.
Selected papers related to gender and Indian cinema will be published in an international journal.
Other selected papers will be published in book form to be brought out by a reputed international publisher.
