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Lahore Cinema: Backcover

Lahore Cinema
Backcover
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table of contents
  1. Series Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Preface
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. A Note on Translation and Transliteration
  8. Introduction: The Lahore Effect
  9. 1. Between Neorealism and Humanism: Jago Hua Savera
  10. 2. Lyric Romanticism: Khurshid Anwar’s Music and Films
  11. 3. Cinema and Politics: Khalil Qaiser and Riaz Shahid
  12. 4. The Zinda Bhaag Assemblage: Reflexivity and Form
  13. Notes
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index
  16. Series List

“Imaginative, thoroughly researched, and evocatively written, this book is set to become a key reference and classic in the field of South Asian film and media studies.” Lotte Hoek, author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh. “By focusing on films, their themes, the cultural milieu, and the fantasy world of modern desire, the book offers us a history of 1960s Pakistan. Dadi’s analysis of form, technique, and narrative is a pioneering contribution to the nascent field of cinema studies in Pakistan.” Kamran Asdar Ali, author of Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947–1972. “At last, a book that utters Lahore and Bombay in the same breath! Dadi tracks the cinematic movement of aesthetic forms and political consciousness beyond the spatial borders of nations and the temporal limits of decades.” Debashree Mukherjee, author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City. Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced between 1956 and 1969—the long sixties—in Lahore, Pakistan, following the Partition of 1947. These films drew freely from Bengali performance traditions, Hindu mythology, Parsi theater, Sufi conceptions of the self, Urdu lyric poetry, and Hollywood musicals, bringing these traditions into dialogue with melodrama and neorealism. Examining this layered context offers insights into a period of rapid modernization and into cultural affiliation in the South Asian present, when frameworks of multiplicity and plurality are in jeopardy. Lahore Cinema probes the role of language, rhetoric, lyric, and form in the making of cinematic meaning as well as the relevance of the Urdu cultural universe to mid-century Bombay filmmaking. Dadi explores how films allowed their audiences to navigate an accelerating modernity and tense politics by anchoring social change across the terrain of deeper cultural imaginaries. Iftikhar Dadi is John H. Burris Professor in History of Art at Cornell University. He is author of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia and coeditor of Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space. Cover design by Michel Vrana. Cover illustration is from a publicity poster for Clerk (1960), featuring Rattan Kumar (top left), Musarrat Nazir (right), and Khalil Qaiser (bottom). Poster artist: Mustafa. University of Washington Press. Seattle, uwapress.uw.edu. Global South Asia

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