Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India

Lalitha Gopalan is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film, affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies, South Asia Institute, and Core Faculty in the Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, USA.  She is the author of Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (BFI Publishing, 2002) and Bombay (BFI Modern Classics, 2005), and editor of Cinema of India (Wallflower Press, 2010). She is a member of the editorial collective Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies.

• Part One.- 1 .Introduction.- 2 .Minding the Gap: The Arrival of Digital Feature Films.- 3.      Slowing Down.- Part Two.- 4. Bombay Noir.- 5. Tamil New Wave.- 6. Road Movie.- 7.Untitled: Amitabh Chakraborty’s Cinema.

“Gopalan’s book is a pioneering one for the area of Indian film studies, the first to formalise, historicise and aestheticise the advent of digital cinema in India in such a comprehensive manner. … The author has taken up a monumental task, and very frequently while reading the book, I found myself wondering what a difficult book it must have been to research, collate and write.” (Kaushik Bhaumik, BioScope, December 21, 2022)“The bibliographies and filmographies that follow each chapter are among the book’s outstanding achievements.” (Samhita Sunya, Film Quarterly, Vol. 75 (2), 2021)“The potency of this book’s contribution comes from the way that it weaves together technological, industrial and philosophical concerns with a keen focus on the specificities of the historical and cultural contexts of film production in India. There is no doubt that readers will benefit from the persistent labours of this self-confessed cinephile and her thick network of connections across the independent filmmaking landscape in India.” (Megan Carrigy, sensesofcinema.com, Issue 99, July, 2021)