“Sun in the Belly”: Film Practice at Films Division of India 1965–1975

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Beteiligte: Kaushik, Ritika
In: BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 8, 2017, 1, S. 103-123
veröffentlicht:
SAGE Publications
Medientyp: Artikel, E-Artikel

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Umfang: 103-123
ISSN: 0974-9276
0976-352X
DOI: 10.1177/0974927617699647
veröffentlicht in: BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies
Sprache: Englisch
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Kollektion: SAGE Publications (CrossRef)
Inhaltsangabe

<jats:p>This article looks at one decade (1965–1975) in the history of Films Division of India (FD), the first state film production and distribution unit in the country. It tracks the changing political environment and several administrative, infrastructural, and policy changes of the time, along with the emerging “experimental” film and interview format films. Under the dynamic supervision of Jean Bhownagary, a constellation of film makers and artists like Pramod Pati, S.N.S. Sastry, S. Sukhdev, among others came to the fore, experiment with film form was encouraged, and dissonant voices rose against the state itself. I suggest that it is possible to study certain experiments and formal practices emerging at a particular time and space not as mere aberrations, but as something that emerges from complex shifts in institutional practice. I locate these as part of a layered body of film uses, a palimpsest, in which the filmmaker’s creative engagement needs to be situated in a bureaucratic order that could be arbitrary and inflexible but also provide for a regime of the permissible.</jats:p>