As a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Rakesh Sengupta researched early Indian cinema. His essay 'Writing from the Margins of Media: Screenwriting Practice and  Discourse During the First Indian Talkies', published in the Dec 2018 issue of Bioscope [no. 9.2] won the Best Journal Article by Screenwriting Research Network and also  received High Commendation for Screen's Annette Kuhn Debut Essay Prize. On today's episode, we talk about the way in which the lack of script archives dictated the methods of research, how the  vocation of screenwriting propelled fantasies of self-improvement and socioeconomic ascendancy in the 1930s and 1940s and the way in which the  study of early cinema has been revitalised in the contemporary context of OTT and web programming. We also have some lovely anecdotes about serendipitous discoveries of forgotten Indian cinema scripts in other corners of the world.

Click here to access the Image+ Guide & view the material being discussed in the podcast: https://sites.google.com/view/artalaap-podcast-resources/episode-9.

Credits:

Producer: Tunak Teas

Design & artwork: Mohini Mukherjee

Marketing: Dipalie Mehta

Musical arrangement: Jayant Parashar

Images: Rakesh Sengupta

Additional support: Kanishka Sharma, Amy Goldstone-Sharma, Raghav Sagar, Shalmoli Halder, Arunima Nair

Audio courtesy: Vernouillet by Blue Dot Sessions [CC BY-NC 4.0]

References:

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Kaushik Bhaumik, 'The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913-1936', D. Phil Diss., University of Oxford, 2001.

Priya Jaikumar, 'Cinema at the End of Empire', Duke University Press, 2006.

Debashree  Mukherjee, 'Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women's Film History Against an  Absent Archive', Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies' [Vol. 4.1], pp.  9-30, Jan. 2013.

Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City',Columbia University Press, 2020.

'Somewhere Between Human, Nonhuman  and Woman: Shanta Apte's Theory of Exhaustion', Feminist Media Histories  [Vol. 6.1], pp. 21- 51, 2020.

Tom Gunning, 'The Cinema of Attractions', Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

André  Gaudreault and Phillipe Marion, 'The Cinema as a Model for the  Genealogy of Media', Convergence: The International Journal of Research  into New Media Tecnologies [8.4], pp. 12-18, Dec. 2002.

Ravi Vasudevan, 'The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema', Palgrave Macmillan US, 2010.

Rachel Dwyer, 'Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema', Routledge, 2006.

Rosie Thomas, 'Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies', SUNY Press, 2015.

Sudhir Mahadevan, 'A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India', SUNY Press, 2015.

André Bazin, 'What Is Cinema?', trans. Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1967.

Stephen  Hughes, 'The Production of the Past: Early Tamil Film History as a  Living Archive', Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, pp. 71-80, June  2013.

Ravikant, 'Words in  Motion Pictures: A Social History of the Language of Hindi Cinema (c.  1931 till present)', Unpublished diss., University of Delhi, 2015.

Henry Jenkins, 'Converge Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide', NYU Press, 2006.

Virchand  Dharamsey, 'Light of Asia: Indian Silent Cinema', 1912-1934, eds.  Suresh Chabria, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Niyogi Books, 1994.