The events associated with the exhibition included a one-credit microseminar taught at the Simpson Center. Included here is the course description and reading list for the microseminar.
Course Title:
Collecting Cinema: Visual Culture, Film History, and the Archive of Indian Cinema (Autumn 2024)
Course Description:
This one-credit graduate level seminar is tied to an October 25th symposium of scholarly talks based on a personal collection of film memorabilia donated by American cinephile and writer Lyle Pearson to the University of Washington. We will explore three themes connected to the materials in the collection pertaining to the 1970s.
First, we will consider how salient categories in Indian film historiography – art cinema, commercial cinema, middle cinema, and regional cinema – were shaped by that decade’s public and cinematic events as documented in the collection. How did film societies, film festivals, state institutions, and the public and cinematic events of the decade define the dominant categories of Indian cinema? What were the aesthetic and social aims formulated for each of these categories of fiction filmmaking in the subcontinent?
Second, we consider the iconography and design elements of song books and other forms of film publicity. In so doing, we ask how distinct idioms of visuality, some modernist and text-and-typography focused, and others that foreground body, gesture, and emotion, reflect and refract prevailing distinctions between art and commercial cinema. We also explore the changing history of the design aesthetic of film publicity in the subcontinent, and the extent to which film publicity might be seen as a part of the landscape of popular visual culture in the subcontinent.
Finally, we consider paper ephemera’s relation both to vernacular cultural memories of the cinema and to formal celluloid film archives in India, especially given the current surfeit of digital traces of the past. Here, we explore the relation between access, resource scarcity, piracy, absent or beleaguered archival initiatives, and the ways in which ephemeral film materials generated through collectors and collecting, enable scholars to fill in gaps in film history, or to explore facets of film experience undocumented through conventional archives.
Course Materials:
Each session will consider a combination of scholarly readings, documents from the period (the 1970s), artifacts/materials from the collection, and movies. The readings will include published essays by symposium speakers Navaneetha Mokkil, Usha Iyer, and Salma Siddique.
Schedule of Readings
For other primary source documents and artifacts from the collection, please see the Modules section of the course website.
Thursday October 3: Cinema in the 1970s
1.Navaneeta Mokkil, “Queer Encounters”
2.Rachona Majumdar, “Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures”, ch. 2
3.Rosie Thomas, “Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity”
4.Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, “Region/Regional Cinema”
Watch: Satyajit Ray, Pratidwandi/The Adversary (1970, Bengali).
Thursday October 10: Ephemera, Film Archives, and Film History
1.Salma Siddique, “Archive Filmaria”
2.Usha Iyer, “Dancing Woman”, Ch.3
3.Ramesh Kumar, “Alas, Nitrate didn’t wait”
4.Timothy Cooper, “Migratory Surfaces”
Watch: Shyam Benegal, Bhumika/The Actress (1977, Hindi)
Thursday October 17: Film Publicity and its Design Aesthetic
1.Rachel Dwyer and Divya Patel, “Cinema India”, Ch. 3
2.Chrisopher Pinney, “Notes on the Epidemiology of Allure”
3.Deepali Dewan, “The Painted Photograph in India”
4.MSS Pandian, “Living Pictures”
Watch: Ramesh Sippy, Sholay/Embers (1975, Hindi).