'Slow Descent into Digital Hell': How the Moving Image is Coping with Digital India

<strong>School of Arts and Aesthetics Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> Presents A Talk By <strong>Ashish Rajadhyaksha</strong> Independent Scholar Co-editor of the landmark Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (2001) and author of Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009) <strong>'Slow Descent into Digital Hell': How the Moving Image is Coping with Digital India</strong> <strong>Abstract :</strong> The Indian cinema today survives primarily in a digital environment. If, through the 20th century, the public process of making and showing moving images provided one of the major institutions of democratic modernity in the movie theatre, the question can be asked: how is the moving image transforming its vast and complex spectatorial arrangements, devised over the better part of fifty years, into this new era? This presentation places new Bollywood, alongside works in experimental video, into the complex and often fraught space that is digital India, to ask what several standard and essentially political practices that the cinema had once put together within a democratic public domain look like today. It will look at video games accompanying Bollywood releases and the gritty realism of its independent cinema, together with the work of a few key video artists, to inquire into a transformed political process taking place within a new process of digital governance. <strong>Friday, December 11, 2015</strong>