Film and Cinephilia in Pakistan: Beyond Life and Death

Abstract

This introductory article identifies some of the conceptual issues and themes worth considering in the pursuit of a broader and deeper knowledge about the cinema in Pakistan than currently exists. It does so with reference to several of the papers in this special issue and a number of recently published scholarly works on culture and politics in the Pakistani context. The article probes existing discourses on Pakistani film in a bid to clear the way for more nuanced conversations, asking: What is meant in precise terms when cinema’s “death” is spoken of and what are the implicit assumptions about the nature of cinematic “life” that flow from it? What, more fundamentally, is meant by “Pakistani cinema,” and what sorts of elisions and conflations result from its vague and polemical usage as a generic epithet encompassing film output from so vast and historically unstable an entity as Pakistan? A final set of questions centers around the term “industry.” Here again, defining and disentangling the terms of reference is a useful starting point for exploration of other units of analysis that may be appropriate for describing social realities and aesthetic forms than the clunky lexicon of life and death currently allows.

TheKaččāand thePakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan

“…The startling history of film industry output in Pakistan has been explored in a number of ways, from diagnostic journalistic articles on the industry's decline, to star-studded industry audits(Gazdar 1997;Kabir 1969), to studies tracing the connections between media, religion, and politics(Rajput 2005;Imran 2016), or examining film as a product of Pakistan's vernacular popular culture(Kirk 2016). Recent studies have tried to situate Pakistani cinema in the complex tide of social change and visual culture(Ahmad 2014; Ahmad and Khan 2016;Dadi 2012). T H E K A Č Č Ā A N D T H E P A K K Ā 281…”

Infrastructures and Archives of the B-circuit

“…This is particularly significant given the relative paucity of engaged scholarly attention to these cultural forms. All articles respond in different ways to the desire to recuperate something that appears to remain unseen, unstudied, or unloved given the broad contexts of disdain, disapproval, hostility, and suspicion of the screen culture of the B-circuit, from a generalized contempt to particular modes of “cinephobia” (Ahmad, 2014; Vasudevan, 1995).…”

“…This is particularly significant given the relative paucity of engaged scholarly attention to these cultural forms. All articles respond in different ways to the desire to recuperate something that appears to remain unseen, unstudied, or unloved given the broad contexts of disdain, disapproval, hostility, and suspicion of the screen culture of the B-circuit, from a generalized contempt to particular modes of "cinephobia" (Ahmad, 2014;Vasudevan, 1995). Akshaya Kumar's detailed narrative and aesthetic analysis of contemporary Bhojpuri action cinema highlight how a markedly local and rural form exists in continuous conversation with its Hindi A-circuit equivalents, thereby destabilizing how we might understand the relationships not only between A-and B-circuits, but also those among folk forms, cinema, and provincial or regional media cultures.…”

Raddi Infrastructure: Collecting Film Memorabilia in Pakistan: An Interview with Guddu Khan of Guddu’s Film Archive

“…The precariousness of film culture in Pakistan is often exacerbated by seismic instances of anti-film iconoclasm, such as the countrywide destruction of cinema theaters that took place in response to the YouTube mini-film The Innocence of Muslims in 2012, which saw at least six cinemas in Karachi destroyed on one day alone. Despite a rich and vibrant cinema-based film culture that flourished from the 1960s to the early 1980s, today Pakistan is unique for the ways in which a climate of cinephobia (Ahmad, 2014) limits and defines the circulation of films. Yet the accelerating absence of cinemas, the lack of a state film archive, governmental inertia, and the shift to private consumption has led to pirated media bazaars in Pakistan dealing in the dissemination of faulty images, preserving them not by altering the quality but by bringing them into the marketplace for public consumption.…”

“…Condemned by commentators to a perpetual cycle of rebirth and death, the materiality of bygone Pakistani film productions, materialized in memorabilia, is destined to occupy a somewhat tragic and apocalyptic space whereby spheres of future production are frequently conflated with the impossibility of reliving a past. In his important essay “Film and Cinephillia in Pakistan: Beyond Life and Death,” the cornerstone of an issue of BioScope dedicated to the study of Pakistani cinema, Ali Nobil Ahmad invited scholars to explore the conditions and “infrastructural wounds” of filmmaking and spectatorship in “circumstances utterly hostile to its existence” (Ahmad, 2014, p. 91), directing attention toward the very factors that produce the ambient conditions of cinephobia. Conversely, Guddu Khan’s cinephilia—expressed through his dedicated compilation of material culture—is the extravagant inverse to the cinephobic hostility that Ahmad defines, yet operates indefatigably as a series of citations across the very same discontinued cultural networks that Ahmad argues have succumbed to atrophy and deterioration.…”