Project Cinema City
Edited by Madhushree Datta, Kaushik Bhaumik, Rohan Shivkumar
Published by Tulika Books, 2013
Is it an archive of Mumbai? A coffee-table book? A volume of research articles? An array of visual narratives with maps and drawings and schemes for the city? This sweeping, stunning volume is born out of Project Cinema City: Research, Art and Documentary Practices, a project accompanied by a series of exhibitions that ran from 2008 to 2012. Initiated and hosted by Majlis, and visualised in part by the design cell of KRVIA (Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies), this ambitious enterprise was conceived, as Madhushree Datta puts it, as “a set of enquiries into the labour, imagination, desire, access, spaces, locations, iconisation, materiality, languages, moving peoples, viewing conventions and hidden processes that inform the cinemas the city makes, and also the cities its cinema produces”. The book consists of several essays comprising both text and visuals organised into three broad sections: Mapping Imaginations: Terrains, Locations; Performing Labour: Bodies, Networks; Viewing Limits: Narratives, Technologies.
Arjun Appadurai’s foreword to the book suggests that the overarching philosophy here combines Guy Debord’s notion of derive and the Situationist detournement—“a rapid passage through various urban ambiences that aims to explore and intervene in the psychogeography of the city, a technique that aims to break through the monotony of the capitalist city by seeking experiences by chance and then building out of them an alternative experience of the possibilities of the urban”. Accordingly, the scope of the book is to examine fluid shapes and patterns and capture myriad moods and manifestations, revealed primarily by the cinematic lens that has become our go-to definer of the city.
Kaushik Bhaumik argues that Bombay/Mumbai’s pre eminence as the centre for cinema production is a direct outcome of its position as “ur-bazaar encompassing the energies of all bazaars of northern India”. He posits, further, that its location on the west coast put the city outside the main currents of heartland India’s caste politics. Consequently, with its growth as a trade and commercial magnet, “the city’s bazaars provided a panorama of a hectic, interactive commercial space with little consideration for somatic or religious identities, at least on the shop-fronts of its bazaar spaces”. This persuasive theory fits well with the popular culture projection, driven largely by Hindi cinema, of the city as a site of modernity where caste and class, regional, linguistic and religious origins meld into a multifaceted urban identity.
The city, however, is not always a dreamscape. Often, in feature films like Jagte Raho, it is a spectral, heartless, faceless beast, triggering Kafkaesque experiences in shadowy half-worlds, while documentary films tend to problematise the entire city as a studio set. The book explores the dynamics of this elusive dream nightmare chimera in considerable detail. Thus, documentary practices are used in engaging and interactive ways to capture images that both de-familiarise and illuminate the less visible: telephone instruments among complex networks of goods and services, migrant wage workers, noir locations of crime in the city. While, over the years, many artists trained in fine art have achieved commercial success as art directors of drama companies and film studios, we see, too, the travails of the faceless and unsung labour force that has toiled to make cinema such an integral part of the city. There are also lively and revealing interviews with a range of female film-viewers (‘Zenana Show’), bar dancers and stunt artistes, sweatshop labourers and a waste celluloid dealer who recycles old film reels evocative of escapist fantasies into the materiality and banality of bangles and collar stiffeners. These visceral glimpses of Mumbai are contrasted, ironically, with the melodramatic productions of up-and-coming movie centres like Malegaon and the Northeast.
T he book abounds in visual essays, animated and stylised maps of real and imagined places, artworks, illustrations and storyboards enlivened by styles as varied as Kalighat and surrealism, eye-popping photographs of people, places and artefacts, designs for nameboards of train stations featuring film villains to encapsulate the underlying unease of an urbanism tainted by crime as heavily as grime, graphic thrillers and photo-romances, even a delightfully quirky Vastu Sangrahalaya Dukaan—a Museum Shop of Fetish Objects. Visual archives freeze for posterity several fast-vanishing areas of the city like Pila House (where the erstwhile playhouses that facilitated the growth of Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi theatre stood), Kamathipura and Girangaon, while Mumbai’s growth as a cultural and industrial centre is graphically traced through colourful mill labels, calendar art and lithographs. The sheer number and richness of all these images calls for a lengthy and intense immersion.
Even those f Rs. Rs. Rs.amiliar with Bombay/ Mumbai history will be drawn in by this audacious and panoramic volume. It is a cornucopia of impressive research, documentation and data, sharp, lively observations and insights, and engaging narratives, while its riotous aesthetics make for a sensory feast. Project Cinema City redefines the trajectory for future writings about the city.
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Dr. Shefali Balsari-Shah is former Associate Professor and Head, Department of English, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Mumbai. The NCPA Reference Library is open to visitors from 10 am to 5.15 pm on weekdays. The reference library membership is complimentary for NCPA Members and Friends of the SOI. The books and LPs in the Stuart-Liff music library are available for reference to Friends of the SOI at no cost. The reference library membership is open to the general public at a nominal annual fee of Rs.500/- (April-March). Casual membership for visitors (outstation visitors only) is available at Rs. 100/- per day. For more information, please call 022-6622 3715.
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