TheKaččāand thePakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan

Abstract

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.

3DZiyarat: Lenticularity and technologies of the moving image in material and visual piety

“…Others describe it as the legacy of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose decade of military rule in Pakistan between 1977 and 1988, tinged with a populist theocratic bent, is often cited as the reason for the perceptible visual and material transformation. As I have shown elsewhere, in Pakistan, as in other places that grapple with the problem of defining the public place of majoritarian faith in relation to the practices of religious minorities, sources of religious authority are often called upon to deal with a wide repertoire of questions over image permissibility and the public morality of film experience (Cooper 2018(Cooper , 2020. In the instances in which image technologies are questioned, answers often refer to the ontology of the apparatus rather than its contextual dispensation.…”