Section: Events

Seminar Series -

Film as Infrastructure

Title
Film as Infrastructure: Colonial and early Independent India, 1920s-1950s
Speaker(s)
Speaker: Ravi Vasudevan # Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Smuts Visiting Research Fellow, Cambridge
Date and Time
17th May 2012 16:0017th May 2012 17:30
Location
Seminar room 5, CMB, 15a George Square
URL
http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/events/seminar_series/2011_2012/film_as_infrastructure

Infrastructures for film commonly relate to the apparatus for their distribution, delivery and exhibition, ranging from physical forms of carriage to internet file transfer, and exhibition through theatre halls, mobile vans, in public parks and in tents, in classrooms, factories, cultural centres, clubs, offices, televisions and personal computers. If all this composes the material and social infrastructure of film, film itself arguably functions as infrastructure for imprinting, storage, retrieval, manipulation, and recombination. Drawing on the idea of film's indexicality, the way material from the world can be imprinted, leave a physical trace, on film stock, this presentation will consider film as an infrastructure crucial to the transformation of human perceptual and cognitive organisation. Focusing on the later colonial and early independent regimes in India, we will consider such issues across a body of practices, ranging from the transnational modelling of film as developmental instrument, through local governmental and corporate sponsorship, and into the realm of the colonial amateur film.


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