Locating Popular Cinema (Book Project Abstract)
Locating Popular Cinema: The Geopolitics of Transnational Film Practices examines filmmaking practices behind popular transnational films from the 1950s to the present in neocolonial and neoliberal political contexts. Through decolonial analyses of films from different geopolitical contexts, including the Americas, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, I expand conversations in transnational film and industry studies. Specifically, I show how uneven power dynamics in film and scholarly labor structure transnational films.
The films I engage—including The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Slumdog Millionaire, Snowpiercer, Memento, Ghajini (2005; 2008), Devdas (1955; 1979; 2002), Dev.D, and La sirga—could be categorized in many ways: national cinema, world cinema, remakes, co-productions, or festival films. I challenge this kind of categorical logic by analyzing these films from multiple sites.
I look at the industrial sites of production, distribution, exhibition, reception, stardom, marketing, and branding, in addition to formal analyses of filmic texts. Power’s shifting and multifaceted character is often made static when the filmic text is the sole site of analysis. Thus, my project roots formal analysis contextually and in relation to multiple analytical points of entry.
While chapters one and two of Locating Popular Cinema contextualize anxiety around the question of the critical and theoretical weight of the transnational turn in film studies and suggest that the transnational turn does in fact hold critical and theoretical water, the chapters that follow move beyond this question and highlight new theoretical, epistemological, and political stakes for the study of transnational cinema.
I conclude Locating Popular Cinema by turning to local, regional, and international film festivals as border sites for collective identity formation, knowledge production and circulation, and the neoliberal consolidation of the marketplace through the growing functions festivals now perform. I unpack what a deeper engagement with local, regional, and international film festivals reveals about the border from which María Lugones’s “oppressing resisting relation” emerges.
The films I engage—including The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Slumdog Millionaire, Snowpiercer, Memento, Ghajini (2005; 2008), Devdas (1955; 1979; 2002), Dev.D, and La sirga—could be categorized in many ways: national cinema, world cinema, remakes, co-productions, or festival films. I challenge this kind of categorical logic by analyzing these films from multiple sites.
I look at the industrial sites of production, distribution, exhibition, reception, stardom, marketing, and branding, in addition to formal analyses of filmic texts. Power’s shifting and multifaceted character is often made static when the filmic text is the sole site of analysis. Thus, my project roots formal analysis contextually and in relation to multiple analytical points of entry.
While chapters one and two of Locating Popular Cinema contextualize anxiety around the question of the critical and theoretical weight of the transnational turn in film studies and suggest that the transnational turn does in fact hold critical and theoretical water, the chapters that follow move beyond this question and highlight new theoretical, epistemological, and political stakes for the study of transnational cinema.
I conclude Locating Popular Cinema by turning to local, regional, and international film festivals as border sites for collective identity formation, knowledge production and circulation, and the neoliberal consolidation of the marketplace through the growing functions festivals now perform. I unpack what a deeper engagement with local, regional, and international film festivals reveals about the border from which María Lugones’s “oppressing resisting relation” emerges.
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