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

Cooper, Tom

doi:10.1177/0974927616668004

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…What has been called cinephobia, and the myriad ways it has been conceptualized, is worth probing further as an expression of filmic exorbitance. Like Ali Nobil Ahmad (2014), I take cinephobia in Pakistan to be a symptom of both ambivalence and animosity toward film and the resulting strategies taken by cinephiles for navigating ellipses, deterioration, and decay in filmic institutions and infrastructures (Cooper 2016; 2018). Scholarly reflection on cinephobia is almost as old as the discipline of film studies.…”

Section: Thresholds Entanglement and “Muslim Tastes”mentioning

confidence: 99%

TheKaččāand thePakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan

Cooper

2020

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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For many city dwellers in Pakistan the distant memory of outdoor cinemas in their ancestral villages rekindles the thrill of first contact with film exhibition. This paper considers attempts made in colonial British India and postcolonial Pakistan to understand, wield, and benefit from the staging of such memorable and affective filmic events. In its cultivation of “cinema-minded” subjects, the British Empire commissioned studies of audiences and their reactions to film exhibition in hopes of managing the unruly morality and materiality of the cinematic apparatus. After Partition and the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan, similar studies continued, evincing a residual strategy of elicited contact. The elicitation of film contact aimed at the exertion and commandment of the event of film exhibition for the purposes of knowing their constituent subjects at a moment of malleability. Yet the Empire's struggle with the perceived problems of “Muslim tastes” and audience members’ ambivalence over rural screenings in post-Partition Pakistan calls for a reconsideration of the efficacy of these tactics. I argue that what complicated these encounters are affective responses that questioned the address, permissibility, and efficacy of film exhibition. In these tactics of elucidation, disenchantment, and denial, ruptures are refused and the new is dismissed as inoperable, incompatible, or impermissible.

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Section: Thresholds Entanglement and “Muslim Tastes”mentioning

confidence: 99%

TheKaččāand thePakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan

Cooper

2020

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Where Adab Meets Film: Mapping Discourses on Akhlaq and Islah in the Urdu Film Journals from India (1930–1950)

Niazi¹

2023

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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Film journals had become part and parcel of the complex of cinema consumption and a vital source of information in the 1930s. These film journals successfully expanded the reach of cinema and created a space for thinking and engaging with cinema and cinema-related content. The film magazine not only fulfilled the needs of average cinema-goers but was also aimed at distributors, exhibitors, advertisers and potential film financiers. This article throws light on the issue of cinema’s relationship to language through the Urdu film journal. It explores how literary public spheres impinged on the cinematic and reflected the tensions and anxieties that had arisen over the question of the Hindi-Urdu language divide during the 1930s. The intersection between – and transformations of – literary and cinematic cultures effected by commercial printing produced a series of complex negotiations. Through the specific cases of the Urdu film journals Film, Shama, Star, Film Stage and Nigarkhana, I show how these journals were responding to – or how they expressed continued engagement with – notions of akhlaq (moral conduct) and islah (correction) which were central to contemporary articulations on reform and morality.

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Archive Filmaria

Siddique¹

2019

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

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This essay examines the missing national film archive of Pakistan against the politics of competing cultural memory. Sharing a common past yet existing in the shadows of the Indian film industry, cinema in Pakistan found itself in an unusual predicament after decolonization and Partition. While filmmaking was expected to carry the imprint of national difference, the intercultural context of colonial India bequeathed the industry its traditions and personnel. Yet when the British Film Institute repatriated colonial Indian films in the mid-1960s, the holdings went entirely to India. The lack of a public film repository denied Pakistan not only its colonial heritage but also the systematic preservation of its postcolonial film culture. In the absence of a state archive, what has emerged in the country is a democratic archive consisting of independent collectors, magazine proprietors, and avid users. Using a term extracted from one of the archives, filmaria (film fever), Siddique reads in the popular film archives the contagious circumstances of intercultural cinema. It alerts us to a film contagion widespread in the subcontinental publics that thrives on filmgoing, cinematic resemblance, and embodied cultural memory, a condition caused by the displacements of Partition and the creation of national difference.

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

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

TheKaččāand thePakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan

TheKaččāand thePakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan

Where Adab Meets Film: Mapping Discourses on Akhlaq and Islah in the Urdu Film Journals from India (1930–1950)

Archive Filmaria

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