Articles and Interviews

Music, Art, Film and TV

Articles and Interviews - Film and TV

Symbolic Worlds of Real/Fictional Histories in the Culture of Popular Indian Films - Abstract: By Jyotika Virdi, George Washington University

For its hundred years of history, for its ranking as the largest and most prolific film industry in the world, for its singular dominance in the Indian scene of cultural production, we are in possession of remarkable little today by way of historical records and archival resources that document ths history of popular Indian cinema. Treated as pulp and scorned by the literati, practically no attention has been paid to this institution that otherwise has a pervasive and powerful influence. Many films, themselves a record of history in some sense, are lost, film records have been destroyed, even film lists and production details are hard to come by. How then does one write film history, trace culture and change, reconstruct our past?

To a large extent we rely today on films themselves to speak a social history. But when the film texts tend to be "formulaic." the sources we read must expand, the archival records we use to reconstruct culture must include the social text beyond the film. For this purpose I conceptualize film culture as a "continuous film text." By this I mean not only the narrative within the film but also those surrounding it: discourses on film among different fora, such as, film criticism by journalists, within the academy, but most importantly, the popular discourse of film and gossip magazines.

Amoung the constituting elements of the Hindi film industry, the single most dominant group is the films' stars. With a powerful grip on peoples' imagination, "star-texts," comprising narratives of film-star's lives, are a constant preoccupation of film magazines - virtually an ancillary industry. Read against and as parallel texts to films, star texts offer a fund of information about cultura; politics particularly of the post-independence years. In part this methodological innovation is a response to the exigency of the situation - the emptiness of official archives - but it is also one that draws upon the domain of the popular in order to read the popular. I will discuss how the construction of stars in popular discourse intersect many of the issues raised in the films: femininity, masculinity, heterosexuality, family, nation, and community.

PRIME-TIME MURDER: PRESENTATIONS OF MURDER ON POPULAR TELEVISION JUSTICE PROGRAMS - Danielle M. Soulliere- University of Windsor - ABSTRACT -

Entertainment television has long been fascinated with violence and murder. This paper examines presentations and explanations of murder in three popular prime-time television justice programs - NYPD Blue, Law and Order, and The Practice - and compares these mediated presentations with images presented by official statistics and established research findings. The potential implications of these television presentations on viewer knowledge and understanding are discussed. The findings suggest that murder is presented fairly accurately such that viewers should come away with a basic understanding of the nature and circumstances surrounding murder, although they are likely to be somewhat misled that violence is common. In addition, the explanations offered for the commission of murder are heavily individualistic, precluding an adequate sociological understanding of murder by ignoring important social factors. - albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol10is1/soulliere.html