Ranjani Mazumdar

...What comes through is the critical imperative to shore up the archive of Bombay cinema’s recent history, to keep in mind the transformations of both the physical and mental landscape of India’s recent past. All of which is threatened with extinction from the banal forces of economic globalization. Mazumdar is suggestive of holding out for an emerging ‘fringe cinema’, but set against her own acute analysis of an implosion of ‘real’ urban space and experiences, it is hard to be opti- mistic. Strangely, perhaps, Mazumdar chooses to explore postmodern city experiences through the lens of modernist writers such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Simmel and Charles Baudelaire. This does cause a certain disjuncture. At times more contemporary concepts such as ‘hyperreality’ are invoked, but these lack underpinning. In his 'Skeptical Introduction to Visual Studies', James Elkins questions the value of Benjamin’s own project in respect to contemporary late capitalism. Similarly, and perhaps more significantly, Elkins questions the application of western ‘methodologies’ (as developed for example from the work of Benjamin et al.) to non-western material, so raising the fraught spectre of the postcolonial condition.

There is undoubtedly a tension between the theoretical passages in Mazumdar’s book and the analyses of the many films examined. What is apparent, however, is an overwhelming sense of the films’ inherent vibrancy and otherness (to academic discourse). Mazumdar is evidently right in wanting to lead us through a deconstruction of the cinematic city of Bombay, but at times her theoretical sources appear inadequate. Bombay Cinema is ambitious in its purview. It is not a book solely for those interested in Indian film, since it is equally a book open to the theory and study of cinema in much broader terms. Mazumdar has a great capacity to discuss Indian cinema, with a brilliant grasp of its political, historical and aesthetic developments, but equally she is well attuned
to the interests and ruptures in the academic discourse of film and cinema studies. One feels that she has really only just begun something of great magnitude. Perhaps then, in the vein of Giuliana Bruno, we might expect Mazumdar to go on to produce further important studies, to engage the ‘allegorical gaze’ without needing to look back over the shoulder at those who could never have even imagined the wonders and complexities of other kinds of cinema.

FULL REVIEW:
Review: 'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City - Ranjani Mazumdar' in Film International, Volume 7, Part 1, 2009, pp.67-69.
http://www.atypon-link.com/INT/toc/fiin/7/1?cookieSet=1… (plus d'informations)