"Amphibian Cinema for a Deltaic Audience: Publicity Films in Riverine Bengal"
4:45 PM on Monday, October 23rd, 2023
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract:
The creation of Pakistan frequently left newly appointed bureaucrats grappling with a territory and population that was not immediately self-evident to them. In this fluid and often violent situation, the cinema was considered a key means by which all sorts of boundaries might be consolidated. Tasked with publicising the new state, Pakistani bureaucrats at the Ministry of Information had at their disposal a colonial inheritance of a decaying public information infrastructure, complete with iconic ‘publicity vans’ carrying celluloid reels. They also had the keen support of the United States Information Agency. All actors in this publicity drive were continually vexed, however, by the watery conditions of Bengal. The publicity van would never do in this deltaic landscape, where distinctions between sea and river, island and sandbank, dissolved in the silty waters. In this paper I trace the boats and floating screens invented by the East Pakistani state alongside the plentiful river films they produced to theorise the possibilities of an amphibian cinema, an infrastructure for public information appropriate to deltaic peripheries and their waterborne communities. Working with materials from the Bangladesh National Archive and NARA, the paper contributes directly to the current discussions in South Asian film studies about the ways in which film audiences defied the hardening of national and communal borders at the moment of the consolidation of nation-states in the region (Dadi 2022; Siddique 2022; Alonso 2023) and is inspired by the intersecting concerns of cinema and ecology there (Khan 2015, 2022; Mukherjee 2020; Ghosh 2021).
Speaker Biography:
Lotte Hoek is a media anthropologist whose research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies. She is the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is one of the editors of the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. She is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
This talk is co-sponsored by the South Asia Program.
