In this episode, film studies scholar Dr. Ranjani Mazumdar joins us for a deep dive into film posters, the anti-hero, travel in celluloid, and the history of Bombay cinema.

‘In Perspective’ is The Swaddle’s podcast series where academics reveal little-known facts about Indian history, society and culture. 

Notes:

00:01:08:17- How did the film poster emerge in 20th century India? How has its artistic value and role in film publicity evolved since then?

00:03:05:23- Has the role of the movie poster diminished today? 

00:06:56:11- How did the cinema of the 1960s capture globalization in India and the anxieties that came with it?

00:12:27:12- What led to the rise of the vamp in Bombay cinema and what led to her merging with the heroine in the 1990s?

00:18:35:22- How did the ‘angry young man’ of the 1970s evolve into the psychotic anti-hero in the 1990s?

00:25:37:13- What do the interiors of consumerist family films of the 1990s tell us about the imagination of urban spaces and cities  at that time and the anxieties surrounding it? 

00:32:41:10- What role does cinema play in how we memorialize traumatic events that India has experienced collectively, especially in terms of the way the Babri Masjid demolition has been depicted in Indian cinema?