Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema
2013; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-9922
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Studies and Conflicts
ResumoSangita Gopal Conjugations: Marriage and Form in Cinema The University of Chicago Press, 2011; 240 pages; $22.50The director Shekhar Kapur recently suggested that Indian cinema is no longer medium of masses, as it has often been described, but is increasingly medium of elites.44 In her fascinating book titled Conjugations: Marriage and Form in Cinema, Sangita Gopal documents this transition in Hindi language cinema, more widely known by term Bollywood. Gopal's monograph is an attempt to trace coterminous shifts in Hindi cinema's aesthetic and industrial practices from period in first decades after India's independence in 1947 to contemporary period since India began to dismantle its socialist economy in 1991. Moreover, she uses shifts in films' depiction of romantic as a lens through which to demonstrate classic Hindi cinema has morphed into (2).Gopal observes that while classic Hindi cinema, driven by political and economic pressures, was characterized by a self-imposed homogeneity of genre, New embodies a multiplicity of genres, even as it takes on the trappings of a culture (3). But despite all this diversity, Gopal suggests that New has chosen to focus increasingly on postnuptial couple, in contrast to classic cinema's primary concern with depiction of pre-nuptial couple's negotiation of social obstacles to their union. Whereas couple's right to was contingent and contested in classic Hindi cinema, this is now taken for granted in cinema of economically liberalized, post-1991 India. This shift in couple form reflects changes within society but is also enabled by changes in industrial practices -including organization of film industry, mode of exhibition, and adoption of new technologies.The monograph is extremely ambitious in its scope and is, for most part, quite successful at achieving what it sets out to do. Gopal excels in those chapters in which she documents shift from old to new through use of structured comparisons. In these she explicitly connects changes in aesthetics to changes in industrial practices or technology, all while keeping her language accessible. This is most successfully accomplished in her intriguing discussions of evolution of Horror genre and rise of multi-plot film (Chapters 3 and 4 respectively). These are without doubt most compelling chapters in book and could even stand alone as part of a reading list for a course either on or in a more general film studies course. They expertly document not only historical shift in Bollywood's aesthetics, but also provide powerful and accessible analyses of how changes in social and industrial context come to be reflected in shifts in aesthetic forms.Two other chapters are almost as successful. In Chapter 2, entitled Family Matters, Gopal provides an insightful account of Hindi film industry's transition from a collection of disorganized family businesses to a corporatized industry along with a convincing analysis of how has portrayed relationship between romantic and patriarchal family. But while each of these discussions is focused and interesting, link between two parts of chapter seems underdeveloped. Chapter 5, Bollywood Local, documents adoption of practices and aesthetics of by regional language cinema in eastern Indian state of West Bengal. This is another generally convincing chapter although some of argument could have used more substantiation-the claim, for example, that film Choker Bali's use of first stirrings of India's nationalist movement as a backdrop is intended to provide merely a setting rather than having any narrative significance. …
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