Infrastructures and Archives of the B-circuit

Abstract

Disregarded, disreputable, provincial, seedy, illicit, cheap, scrap, or just plain trash: there are many ways to describe the forms of screen culture that populate this issue of BioScope. From Bhojpuri action cinema to film paraphernalia sold by the kilogram by the scrap-merchant; from 1980s Malayalam soft-porn to "cracked" games consoles; these forms of screen culture inhabit a netherworld of disregard, disrespect, and, often, discontent. They are produced and circulated through intersecting infrastructures of illegitimacy and inhabit spaces and forms peripheral to the mainstream, the national, the metropolis, and film and media scholarship. Nonetheless, they engage audiences across South Asia, either through their localized appeal, their wide accessibility, their easy circulation, or the notoriety of their illicit forms. And they have now appeared in the scholarly limelight too. This issue of BioScope brings together a series of articles that illustrate the persistence, relevance, and appeal of this broad field of screen culture. There is no agreed terminology by which to address these various forms of degraded media artifacts. The five articles dealing with the cinema in this issue variously speak of low-budget cinema, of paracinema, provincial cinema, B-films, C-and D-circuits, soft-porn, and morning shows, and even trash and scrap. Such terms aim to capture low-budget film production practices, non-metropolitan audiences, single-screen cinema halls, amateur and aficionado engagements, makeshift practices of making and screening, non-standardized industrial practices of all sorts, including illegal or illicit ones, pornography, and so on. Significant precursors to the work presented here (in particular, Singh, 2008; Srinivas, 2003) use adjacent but different terminologies with regard to the sorts of "circuits" in which such films and media artifacts circulate. The idea of the B-circuit comes from modes of film distribution in India that differentiate between metropolitan areas and their hinterlands, as well as between different classes of cinema halls. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, different distribution arrangements have generated different terminologies, for example, using the notion of the "run" that also appears in India, Iran, and elsewhere. The least respectable or desirable products are on show in cinema halls where films appear on their second or even third "run" through a territory. Current transitions away from celluloid have loosened the ways such terminology describes actual practices of production, distribution, and viewing BioScope 7(2) vii-xi

When celluloid pornography went digital: class and race in the Bangladeshi cut-piece online

“…These aesthetic traits were shared by Bangladeshi popular cinema with other low investment modes of film production in the region, for example Pakistan's Pashto cinema (Hulsing 2004;Khan and Ahmad 2010;Nabi 2017) and North India Bhojpuri cinema (Hardy 2010;Kumar 2016). These all drew on shared aesthetic repertoires and production conditions of what can be broadly termed the B-circuit in South Asian cinema (Srinivas 2003;Vasudevan et al 2016), films destined for the 'segment of distribution and exhibition sectors that is characterized by low levels of investment' (Srinivas 2003, 49). In that segment, across the region, aesthetic similarities relating to editing choices, lighting practices, sound design, mise-en-scène and narrative structures of B-circuit action cinema can be discerned.…”

When celluloid pornography went digital: class and race in the Bangladeshi cut-piece online

“…These aesthetic traits were shared by Bangladeshi popular cinema with other low investment modes of film production in the region, for example Pakistan's Pashto cinema (Hulsing 2004;Khan and Ahmad 2010;Nabi 2017) and North India Bhojpuri cinema (Hardy 2010;Kumar 2016). These all drew on shared aesthetic repertoires and production conditions of what can be broadly termed the B-circuit in South Asian cinema (Srinivas 2003;Vasudevan et al 2016), films destined for the 'segment of distribution and exhibition sectors that is characterized by low levels of investment' (Srinivas 2003, 49). In that segment, across the region, aesthetic similarities relating to editing choices, lighting practices, sound design, mise-en-scène and narrative structures of B-circuit action cinema can be discerned.…”