This lecture will be held on-site in person.

The language of discussion will be English only.

Place is limited.

Register here. Registration deadline: 23 March 2026 (Monday) 

Registration IS NOT REQUIRED for City University students and staff.

For further inquiries, please email: arielhm.chan@cityu.edu.hk

Abstract

This talk reflects on key configurations and debates in the study of Indian cinema. Even as film criticism tended to focus on art films and auteur cinema, Film Studies from its outset in the late 1980s has taken as its primary object the theorization and researching of popular mainstream cinema. The ambition was to explore a cinematic imaginary that engaged mass audiences, and highlighted larger questions about the relationship of cinema to nationhood and democracy. Key topics included the specifics of industrial form, as in the role of informal financial arrangements and a so-called bazaar economy; differences between mainstream Euro-American codes and local practices, with continuity editing counterpointed with distinct registers of frontality in composition, framing and mode of address; the distinct forms and functions of melodrama: the question of song and dance sequences key to the popular format. Identity questions provide a larger frame within which a theorization of the popular has unfolded, invoking and problematizing the national by opening up different geographies, territorialities, and circulations, relating to linguistic states and industries, regional circulations that exceed territorial states, and the role of cultural geographies as in the so-called Islamicate dimensions of Indian cinema. Even as new research on the technologies and techniques of filmmaking, circulation and exhibition have generated a new depth and intricacy of material and cultural analysis, the cinema itself, old and new, is simultaneously available across multiple platforms, even as it is rendered in bits and pieces across many devices. The talk concludes by situating older questions of cinema in relation to the digital and social media environment of the contemporary.

About the Speaker

Ravi Vasudevan is a film and media historian. His publications include Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (ed., 2000), The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (2010, 2015), Media and the Constitution of the Political: South Asia and Beyond (ed., 2021) and Documentary Now, (ed., 2018) the Marg special issue on contemporary documentary. With Ravi Sundaram and the Raqs Media Collective, Vasudevan co-founded Sarai, the media research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in 2000. In 2010 he co-founded the South Asian screen studies journal Bioscope. He is currently working on non-fiction film infrastructures, the film archives and questions of historiography; film and the history of publicity; film, media and mythopolitics; post-cinema media artefacts and political imaginaries.

Discussant

Richard Allen is Chair Professor of Film and Media Art and Director of the Centre of Applied Computing and Interactive Media at City University of Hong Kong. Previously he was Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. He has published widely on film theory, aesthetics and poetics. He is the author of four books, including Projecting Illusion (Cambridge, 1997), and Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony (Columbia, 2007), and the editor of seven, including (with Ira Bhaskar) Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories (Intellect 2022), which was nominated for the Kraszna Krausz book award in 2023. His current research explores the history and philosophy of melodrama.

VISITOR ARRANGEMENTS 

1. For non-CityUHK staff/students, successful registrants shall receive an email enclosed with a QR code from CityU's Electronic Visitor Registration System. On the day of the visit, please present the QR code to our security staff, you might be asked for identification. A visitor badge will be given which is valid for the day.

2. For guests who haven’t received the above email with the QR code, please check your spam or junk email folder in case the email has been accidentally marked as spam.

3. One single email address cannot be shared with multiple visitors for registration on the same day.

4. Please refer to the Personal Information Collection Statement (PICS) for Visitor Registration System on our university's webpage: https://www.cityu.edu.hk/fmo/download/Personal%20Information%20Collection%20Statement_VRS.pdf

5. The event organizer reserves the right to amend admission requirements at any time without prior notice. In the event of any discrepancy between the English and Chinese versions of this statement, the English version shall prevail.

Thank you for your cooperation.

訪客安排

1. 成功登記的人士 (非城大教職員及學生) 將收到一封電子郵件，內附城大電子訪客登記系統的二維碼。請向我們的工作人員確認您的到訪，並可能需要在到訪當天出示身份證明文件以作登記之用。經確認後，訪客將獲得一個當天有效的標簽以進入會場。

2. 若 閣下沒有收到上述帶有二維碼的郵件，請檢查你的垃圾郵件文件夾，以防郵件被送到那裏而不是你的收件箱。

3. 登記者不能使用相同的電郵地址為多於一位訪客登記同日參加。

4. 有關訪客登記系統的個人資料收集聲明(PICS)詳情，請參閱 https://www.cityu.edu.hk/fmo/download/Personal%20Information%20Collection%20Statement_VRS.pdf (只設英文版本) 。

5. 主辦機構保留隨時修改入場要求而不作另行通知。此中文免責條款為英文版本譯本, 如中﹑英文版本有任何抵觸或不相符之處, 應以英文版本為準。

感謝您的合作!