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

About the Book

Storytelling in Hindi Cinema seeks to understand the distinctive character of Hindi Cinema through the figure of the double. The double, in the form of the star playing identical twins or look-alikes, or assuming more than one persona, is an ubiquitous feature of post- independence Hindi cinema that continues into contemporary Bollywood. The double serves to articulate performance with narration though role play, deception, and imposture, which is common to melodrama and comedy alike. Furthermore, in confounding recognition, it poses the question of identity, the difficulty of telling who’s who and who belongs to whom, which inevitably reaches beyond the personal to the political, to questions of family, class, nation, gender and sexuality, and allows for the negotiation of social contradictions in the manner of myth.

Within maya, or the realm of appearances in the Sanskrit tradition, everything can in principle be something else, and this often yields a confusion of identity. Yet, when the double is introduced into postcolonial Indian cinema, the immediate inspiration is from the empirically rooted Western tradition where the identical twin or look-a-like confounds recognition. It is the double of Shakespearian comedy and 19th century melodrama, via Hollywood, or through the Benagli tradition via “middle cinema,” which provides Hindi Cinema with its characteristic double tropes, while shadowed by the psychological double as doppelgänger of European romanticism.

About the Author

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.

Discussants

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.

Stella Bruzzi FBA has been Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London (UCL) since 2017. She is also Professor of Film at UCL. Her previous post was at the University of Warwick, UK, where she also served as Chair of the Faculty of Arts from 2008 to 2011. She has published widely in the areas of costume and cinema, documentary (including the influential New Documentary in 2006), gender and masculinity in Hollywood and representations of history, and has, to date, published eight monographs, the last of which was Approximation: Documentary, History and the Staging of Reality (Routledge, 2020). Previous monographs include: Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies, New Documentary, Bringing up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Postwar Hollywood and Men's Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-scene in Hollywood. In 2013 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Mette Hjort is Chair Professor of Film and Media at The Education University of Hong Kong, where she serves as the founding Co-Director of the newly established Research Centre for Creative Arts and Public Value and as Head of the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies. Mette holds a PhD from the EHESS in Paris and an Honorary Doctorate in Transnational Cinema Studies from the University of Aalborg, Denmark. A film scholar with expertise in small national cinemas, transnational cinema, and cinema as a source of public value, Mette has served on the Board of the Danish Film Institute (appointed by the Danish Ministry of Culture). Mette’s fieldwork as a film scholar has taken her to West Africa, East Africa, and Palestine, and she regularly serves as a jury member at the Zanzibar International Film Festival. She collaborates with film practitioners on Zanzibar to create transnational learning opportunities for students from Hong Kong and Tanzania.

Moderator

Sangjoon LEE : Associate Professor, City University of Hong Kong

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!