Producing Images, Consuming Images: The Spaces of the Film Industry in Mumbai

Event Information

Cinema, that most suspect of all cultural production, with its aura of crudeness, vulgarity and popular entertainment, has always been subject to the policing tendencies of city planners. The ‘city’ that is imagined by them- neatly ordered, legible and cleansed, cannot accept the anarchy of the production and consumption of images that spill over the neatly drawn lines of the formal city.

 

This is true of the city of Mumbai – the city that continues to be the centre for the production of cinema in the country and attracts many migrants who flock to it in search of stardom and fame. This, in spite of the fact that real estate pressures make finding a home incredibly difficult; increasing xenophobic tendencies that emerge from ‘sons of the soil’ movements; and the rise of a middle class morality within the public realm that is suspicious of the migrant as a deviant.

 

But, the film industry does not merely survive, it thrives. The city morphs to facilitate the assembly line of production for cinema industry- slum pockets and low income areas absorb these forces as new neighborhoods emerge with their own institutions, public spaces and ways of living that lie in between the cracks of the formal city.

 

In the presentation we will investigate the nature of the spaces within the city that enable and facilitate the film industry in Mumbai. It is part of the research carried out during the interdisciplinary research art project Project Cinema City.

 

For more information about Project Cinema City, please refer to:  http://projectcinemacity.com/