Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India

This book provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.

• Indian Film
• Bombay
• Independent Cinema
• Digital Technology
• Global Film

“Gopalan’s book is a pioneering one for the area of Indian film studies, the first to formalise, historicise and aestheticise the advent of digital cinema in India in such a comprehensive manner. … The author has taken up a monumental task, and very frequently while reading the book, I found myself wondering what a difficult book it must have been to research, collate and write.” (Kaushik Bhaumik, BioScope, December 21, 2022)

“The bibliographies and filmographies that follow each chapter are among the book’s outstanding achievements.” (Samhita Sunya, Film Quarterly, Vol. 75 (2), 2021)

“The potency of this book’s contribution comes from the way that it weaves together technological, industrial and philosophical concerns with a keen focus on the specificities of the historical and cultural contexts of film production in India. There is no doubt that readers will benefit from the persistent labours of this self-confessed cinephile and her thick network of connections across the independent filmmaking landscape in India.” (Megan Carrigy, sensesofcinema.com, Issue 99, July, 2021)

“There is no doubt that readers will benefit from the persistent labours of this self-confessed cinephile and her network of connections across the independent filmmaking landscape in India. Digging into a range of sometimes ephemeral, even obsolescent, practices and formats, Gopalan deftly illustrates how the digital is historical by offering histories of a variety of evolving, sometimes transitory, milieu, staging a multifaceted dialogue between digital film cultures and moving image poetics. By bringing us into the intricacies of the situations that shape the films under discussion, she goes a long way towards tearing open the gaps she identifies in cinema studies scholarship, offering those of us who aren’t embedded in these milieus a way in.” (Megan Carrigy, Senses of Cinema)

“This rich, profound and very personal account takes us on an exciting journey through a raft of feature films from across the Indian subcontinent that flow alongside the Bollywood monster, far too often hidden in its shadows. Gopalan has accumulated a glorious archive of lost and marginal films – some now almost impossible to find, others better known and more widely available– all deserving much more of our attention in the digital age. The author listens carefully as filmmakers talk about their practice and the material conditions of their films’ production, while bringing to the films her own insightful, imaginative and thought-provoking form of ‘slow’ textual analysis, that wears its immense scholarship and encyclopaedic knowledge of world cinema lightly. This is an important and very welcome intervention that opens up the parameters of scholarship on Indian cinema.” (Rosie Thomas, Professor of Film, University of Westminster; Author of Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies)

“Amidst other writings on Indian cinema, alternating between the exploration of colonial legacies and Bollywood’s powerful machine of mass-produced dreams, there comes Lalitha Gopalan’s absorbing new book. In the footsteps of her influential Cinema of Interruptions, the new Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India complicates and enriches the picture by adding whole new layers that link India’s independent art cinema scene to contemporary global film scholarship. By giving as much attention to developments in Kolkata and Chennai as to those in India’s better-known centres of filmmaking, Gopalan weaves the analysis of cinematic texts with the tenets of film culture, such as FTII in Pune, the festival in Trivandrum, filmmaking collectives, and diasporic distribution networks. We come to know and understand the work of filmmakers such as cult auteur Amitabh Chakraborty but also the visions and beliefs of cinematographers like Ranjan Palit and activist Fowzia Fathima. Fascinating.” (Professor Dina Iordanova, University of St Andrews)

“Lalitha Gopalan takes a deep dive into post-digital Indian cinema by exploring the intricacies of film languageand aesthetics as well as the material properties of the medium, the complexities of intermedial connections, the institutions that support filmmakers, and the elaborate global connections that enrich the lives of cinephiles. This magisterial volume must be on the shelves of everyone who values South Asian film’s ongoing contribution to world cinema.” (Professor Gina Marchetti, University of Hong Kong)

“Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India strikes an elegant balance between close textual reading and theoretical analysis of the major issues that mark India's contemporary "cinemas." Blending critique and cinephilia to explore the pleasures and risks of darkness and slowness in recent digital cinema, this engaging book investigates the complex negotiations among aesthetics, politics, and technologies that shape its rich and expansive archive.  As it ranges broadly across both popular and high cinematic arts in India, this book consistently interrogates the shifting parameters of cinema in the digital age, both in its production and the spectatorship it invites. This meticulously researched and fluidly written book will surely become indispensable for evolving transnational conversations about what counts as "cinema" in our historical moment.” (Professor Sharon Willis, University of Rochester)

• Austin, USA

  Lalitha Gopalan

Lalitha Gopalan is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film, affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies, South Asia Institute, and Core Faculty in the Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, USA.  She is the author of Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (BFI Publishing, 2002) and Bombay (BFI Modern Classics, 2005), and editor of Cinema of India (Wallflower Press, 2010). She is a member of the editorial collective Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies.    

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