Posts from — September 2009

A new channel, Polimer, was added on Sep.23 09 to the overcrowded market of Tamil television at a function in Chennai. The launch has several implications for the satellite channels controlled by political parties and the political families. [Read more →]

Many of the accepted notions of the history of Dravidian Political CInema remain on a plane of contestations borne of divergent views of the yesteryears stars and their associates (who collaborated in the making of the Dravidian political cinema) about how it all started. [Read more →]

As expected, Frank Heidemann’s lecture on the “Photographic Processes and Artefacts,” hosted by the Dept.of Mass Media and Communication Studies, University of Madras, on 18 09 2009, evoked a very good response. A good number of senior professors (from disparate disciplines such as philosophy, history, statistics and public affairs) along with students in Journalism and Communication, Electronic media and other courses attended the first session of the Media and Society Seminar Series and enjoyed the lucid presentation of Prof.Frank Heidemann. Prof.Steve Hughes, SOAS, University of London, whose work on early Tamil cinema audience is well known, was also in the audience. Here is more on what I wrote today on the topic.

ANNA 100 is a video documentary with an academic and research vision, among the clutter of videos produced by govt. agencies and Tamil media on the eve of Anna centenary celebrations. The documentary is produced by Prof. R. Thandavan, Dept.of Anna Centre for Public Affairs, University of Madras. It is directed by R R Srinivasan, a well-known documentary filmmaker, who became famous for his Nadhiyin Maranam (Death of a River) and En Peyar Palaru (My Name is Palaru), in association with the Dept.of Mass Media and Communication Studies, University of Madras. [Read more →]

Issue 2, Vol 1 2009

Wide Screen encompasses a broad range of perspectives and approaches and we invite papers on film studies reflecting the journal’s aims. We welcome papers on (not limited to):

Film Theory
Film Practice
Film Criticism
Film Audience
Film Policy
Film and Culture
Research Methods

We also invite comment articles, interviews, book reviews and film reviews.

The details about various sections and their policies are defined here:
http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/editorialPolicies#sectionPolicies

Send an abstract of your paper (preferably 500 words) to kuhu@widescreenjournal.org or kishore@widescreenjournal.org by October 30, 2009.

We adhere to a strict double blind review policy, which is defined here:
http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess

To access the first issue of Wide Screen, go to:
http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal

American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is now taking on the mighty wall street in his film Capitalism: A Love Story. Reports claim that Moore is afraid the critique will not go down well with financiers and he will be forced to fund his future projects independently.

Click here to read what he had to say.

I have been planning to document the experiences and encounters of Tamil film artists who worked during 1940s-1960s, but with limited success as many old living artists are difficult to trace to begin with and meet their natural ends of their lives by the time we are able to locate them. I was lucky to meet two important living sources recently, Mr S S Rajendran and Mr Subbu Arumugam and succeeded in documenting their experiences and encounters in Tamil cinema and politics during 1940s-1960s. I hope to post the audio files of the sessions with the two in the days to come. But here is what transpired [Read more →]

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).