Category — Books

Silhouette is a lively film magazine with a range of interesting articles published from Kolkata (Calcutta) and is available free as an ebook. To obtain it email Amitava Nag (amitava.nag@gmail.com) or download it from its home at Wikidot (link).

Selvaraj Velayutham’s edited work “Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry” is a welcome addition to a growing body of works on Indian cinemas. The book focuses on the cultural politics and history of Tamil cinema. Selvaraj’s introductory note sets the tone for the book’s ambition to break a new ground.

The Link to the book is here

The one short sentence which runs a ceaseless course in the talks and speeches of majority of actors, directors, producers and technicians of the Tamil film industry is, “It is different.” The close counterparts of this sentence are “it is truly different” and “it is new.” Whenever a film enters the production phase or scheduled for release, the people who are associated with the film do not miss an opportunity to tell the [Read more →]

Slavoj Zizek

Žižek has been under sustained attack by critics who find his analysis arcane, subjective and frankly, pointless. In the latest issue of the peer-reviewed and open source International Journal of Žižek Studies (Vol 1, No 3, 2007), Prof Todd McGowan (Univ of Vermont) makes a compelling argument defending a Žižekian reading of cinema (I use the term cinema as opposed to film. Why? Because I define film to be the text while [Read more →]

Barring the few research papers, there is very little information about Indian film music. Manek Premchand’s book Musical Moments From Hindi Films, though not an academic work, attempts to fill that gap. The only sore point is that critical writing is given a go-by in favour of trivia. The book illustrates Pendakur’s point about the lack of serious writing on the industry. Nevertheless, it is a good resource for any researcher into Hindi cinema.