TY - BOOK AU - AU - Mukherjee, Madhuja [Ed.] AU - Bakshi, Kaustav [Ed.] TI - Popular Cinema in Bengal : : Genre, Stars, Public Cultures SN - 9780367330828 U1 - 791.43 PY - 2020/// CY - Oxon PB - Routledge KW - Motion Pictures N1 - 1. Introduction: A brief introduction to popular cinema in Bengal: genre, stardom, public cultures Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi Part I: Styles, Stars and Popular Forms 2. Rethinking popular cinema in Bengal (1930s–1950s): of literariness, comic mode, mythological and other avatars Madhuja Mukherjee 3. Kanan Devi: a Bengali star Sharmistha Gooptu 4. Performing the region: Sadhona Bose and the modern Bengali film dance Pritha Chakrabarti 5. A postcolonial iconi-city: Re-reading Uttam Kumar’s cinema as metropolar melodrama Sayandeb Chowdhury 6. Filmfare and the question of Bengali cinema (1955–65) Anustup Basu 7. From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: feminist politics, Bengali high culture and the stardom of Aparna Sen Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta 8. The action heroes of Bengali cinema: industrial, technological and aesthetic determinants of popular film culture, 1980s–1990s Spandan Bhattacharya Part II: Ray and Felu Mittir, the private detective 9. Feluda on Feluda: a letter to Topshe Rochona Majumdar 10. Reviewing ‘Feluda on Feluda’: Maganlal Meghraj ‘Writes Back’ to Tapesh Kaushik Bhaumik 11. Negotiating mobility and media: the contemporary digital afterlives of Feluda Pujita Guha Part III: Photo Essays: Public Cultures 12. A booklets sequence Moinak Biswas 13. Inside a dark hall: space, place, and accounts of some single-theatres in Kolkata Madhuja Mukherjee 14. Rituparno Ghosh, performing arts and a queer legacy: an abiding stardom Kaustav Bakshi 15. A Rendezvous with the Ghosh Brothers: A Sneak Peek into Bengal’s Homegrown Exploitation Cinema Subhajit Chatterjee N2 - Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry. The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks. Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture ER -