Satyajit Ray S The Chess Players And Postcolonial Film Theory

Indispensable for students of film studies, in this book Reena Dube explores Satyajit Ray's films, and The Chess Players in particular, in the context of discourses of labour in colonial and postcolonial conditions. Starting from Daniel Defoe and moving through history, short story and film to the present, Dube widens her analysis with comparisons in which Indian films are situated alongside Hollywood and other films, and interweaves historical and cultural debates within film theory. Her book treats film as part of the larger cultural production of India and provides a historical sense of the cross genre borrowings, traditions and debates that have deeply influenced Indian cinema and its viewers.

This book explores Satyajit Ray's films, and The Chess Players in particular, in the context of discourses of labor in colonial and postcolonial conditions. Starting from Daniel Defoe and moving through history, short story and film to the present, Dube widens her analysis with comparisons in which Indian films are situated alongside Hollywood and other films, and interweaves historical and cultural debates within film theory.

This book focuses on the almost entirely neglected treatment of empire and colonialism in videogames. From its inception in the nineties, Game Studies has kept away from these issues despite the early popularity of videogame franchises such as Civilization and Age of Empire. This book examines the complex ways in which some videogames construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics and society that are often deeply imbued with colonialism. Moving beyond questions pertaining to European and American gaming cultures, this book addresses issues that relate to a global audience – including, especially, the millions who play videogames in the formerly colonised countries, seeking to make a timely intervention by creating a larger awareness of global cultural issues in videogame research. Addressing a major gap in Game Studies research, this book will connect to discourses of post-colonial theory at large and thereby, provide another entry-point for this new medium of digital communication into larger Humanities discourses.

"This is a deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated and organic study. Keya Ganguly's intellectual tour de force in this analysis of the great Indian film maker Satyajit Ray will provide a benchmark for future studies of the subject."--Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947 "What distinguishes Ganguly's book from the more fashionable approaches to non-Western cinema is her willingness to assert the importance of European theory--specifically, writings on film by Eisenstein, Benjamin, Kracauer, Balázs, among others--as a way to elaborate Satyajit Ray's contributions in the larger postwar context of an international New Wave cinema movement. She does this with extraordinary intelligence and finesse, and the result is an illuminating statement on how a cinema that seems nostalgic for a disappearing cultural past can in fact be read, for the first time perhaps, for its intimations of an as-yet unrealized futurity."--Rey Chow, author of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Shyam Benegal is an Indian director and screenwriter whose work is considered central to New Indian cinema. By closely analysing several of Benegal’s films, this book provides an understanding of India’s post-independence history. The book examines the filmmaker’s focus on women by highlighting his subtle and critical engagement with a truism of Indian nationalism: women’s centrality to the (nation-) state’s negotiation with modernity. It looks at the importance Benegal accords to history – its little known, contested, or iconic events and figures – in crafting national culture and identities, and goes on to discuss the filmmaker’s nuanced representation of the developmental agendas of the nation-state. The book presents an account of the relationship of historical film and fiction to official history, and provides a fuller understanding of Indian cinema, and how it is shaped by as well as itself shapes national imperatives. Filling a gap in the literature, the book offers an analysis of cinematic treatment of post-independence narratives and gives important insights into the imagination of the time. It is a useful contribution for students and scholars of Film Studies, South Asian History and South Asian Culture.

To date, no text exists that focuses exclusively on the concept of postcolonial film as a framework for identifying films produced within and outside of various formerly colonized nations, nor is there a scholarly text that addresses pedagogical issues about and frameworks for teaching such films. This book borrows from and respects various forms of categorization - intercultural, global, third, and accented - while simultaneously seeking to make manifest an alternate space of signification. What feels like a mainstream approach is pedagogically necessary in terms of access, both financial and physical, to the films discussed herein, given that this text proposes models for teaching these works at the university and secondary levels. The focus of this work is therefore twofold: to provide the methodology to read and teach postcolonial film, and also to provide analyses in which scholars and teachers can explore the ways that the films examined herein work to further and complicate our understanding of «postcolonial» as a fraught and evolving theoretical stance.

This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the author analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise-en-scene. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).

Literature and Film, Dispositioned looks to twentieth-century literature's encounter with film as a means to thinking about the locations of thought in literature and literature's location in the world. It includes readings of works by James Joyce, Henry James, and Samuel Beckett, whose Film (1965) forms a concluding focus.