This book provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films. Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various hidden gems by maestros such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, V Shantaram, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Shakti Samant, Rishikesh Mukherjee, and others. Other chapters provide a pioneering review and analysis of the portrayal of Indian religious communities such as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. The themes covered include unique Indian feminism and male chauvinism, environment and climate issues, international locations and diaspora tourism, religious harmony and conflict, the India-Pakistan relationship, asceticism, and renunciation in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Unlike many recent studies of Indian films, these chapters do not distinguish between popular and serious cinema. Many chapters focus on Hindi films, but others bring insights from films made in other parts of India and its neighbouring countries. One of the chapters in this volume was originally published in the book titled Film and Place in an Intercultural Perspective India-Europe Film Connections, edited by Krzysztof Stachowiak, Hania Janta, Jani Kozina, and Therese Sunngren-Granlund. Another chapter was originally published in Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology. All other chapters were originally published in Visual Anthropology.

In world anthropology different dimensions are fast emerging, and one of them is Visual Anthropology in which systematic and concerted efforts were made specially in sixties. However, sporadic efforts of people from anthropological as well as non-anthropological allied disciplines were precursors in this field. The new-wave films or parallel cinema were developed in Italy in post-war years, and later France and America followed suit. India did not remain immune to this movement. Satyajit Ray created a genere of films beginning from the Pather Panchali and others, and such Indian films show their relevance to Visual Anthropology. This book consists of nine important chapters which are mostly the trend-setters. It also includes the proceedings of the First International Symposium of Visual Anthropology. In all, it makes a formal beginning of Visual Anthropology in India. The five Appendices are fascinating and have references for supplementary readings. This book would be useful to the visual anthropologies, sociologists, historians, applied social scientists, Media people, those connected with social communication, development, and the enlightened laymen.

This book maps a hundred years of documentary film practices in India. It demonstrates that in order to study the development of a film practice, it is necessary to go beyond the classic analysis of films and filmmakers and focus on the discourses created around and about the practice in question. The book navigates different historical moments of the growth of documentary filmmaking in India from the colonial period to the present day. In the process, it touches upon questions concerning practices and discourses about colonial films, postcolonial institutions, independent films, filmmakers and filmmaking, the influence of feminism and the articulation of concepts of performance and performativity in various films practices. It also reflects on the centrality of technological change in different historical moments and that of film festivals and film screenings across time and space. Grounded in anthropological fieldwork and archival research and adopting Foucault’s concept of ‘effective history’, this work searches for points of origin that creates ruptures and deviations taking distance from conventional ways of writing film histories. Rather than presenting a univocal set of arguments and conclusions about changes or new developments of film techniques, the originality of the book is in offering an open structure (or an open archive) to enable the reader to engage with mechanisms of creation, engagement and participation in film and art practices at large. In adopting this form, the book conceptualises ‘Anthropology’ as also an art practice, interested, through its theoretico-methodological approach, in creating an open archive of engagement rather than a representation of a distant ‘other’. Similarly, documentary filmmaking in India is seen as primarily a process of creation based on engagement and participation rather than a practice interested in representing an objective reality. Proposing an innovative way of perceiving the growth of the documentary film genre in the subcontinent, this book will be of interest to film historians and specialists in Indian cinema(s) as well as academics in the field of anthropology of art, media and visual practices and Asian media studies.

Focusing on the precursors and contexts of ethnographic film, this text depicts the dynamic visual culture of the period as it collided with the emerging discipline of anthropology and the new technology of motion pictures.

From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity—the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film—operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors' anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production. Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossoukh

El Guindi provides a comprehensive guide to the methods of visual anthropology and the use of film in cross-cultural research and ethnography. She shows how visual media -- photographic, filmic, interactive -- is now an accepted part of the anthropological process, a vital tool that reflects and produces knowledge about the range of cultures and about culture itself. It preserves the integrity of people, objects, and events in their cultural context, and expands our horizons beyond the reach of memory culture. El Guindi places visual anthropology within an empirically-based, analytic framework, built on systematic observation, identifying the research cycle that begins with data gathering and leads to visual ethnographic construction that is anthropological in method, process, and product. She explains how indigenous, professional, and amateur forms of pictorial/auditory materials are grounded in personal, social, cultural, and ideological contexts, and describes the non-Western critique of the Western traditions of visual anthropology. Her book is an excellent guide for ethnographic research, and for film and other media instruction concerned with cross-cultural representation.

In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a guide to the cultural, social and political significance of Hindi cinema, outlining the history and structure of the Bombay film industry, and the development of popular Hindi filmmaking since the 1930s. Providing information and commentary on the key players in Bollywood, including composers, directors and stars, as well as material from current filmmakers themselves, the areas covered in Bollywood include: history of Indian cinema main themes and characteristics of Hindi cinema significant films, directors and stars production and distribution of Bollywood films interviews with actors, directors and screenwriters. Anyone interested in, or studying Bollywood cinema will find this a valuable purchase.