The South Asia Center recently sat down with Sudhir Mahadevan, an associate professor in the Departments of Comparative History of Ideas and Cinema and Media Studies and SAC affiliate, to discuss his upcoming fall course “597A: Collecting Cinema: Visual Culture, Film History, and the Archive of Indian Cinema” and accompanying symposium. This seminar is sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and will be held Oct. 3, 10, 17, 31 from 2:30-4 p.m. in Communications 202.
Can you give a brief summary on what “Collecting Cinema: Visual Culture, Film History, and the Archive of Indian Cinema” is about?
The seminar introduces students to issues relevant to a collection of South Asian cinema-related film memorabilia that has been donated to the University of Washington libraries by an American cinephile Lyle Pearson. We focus on the tumultuous decade of the 1970s and ask three questions: How were terms like “commercial” cinema, “art cinema”, or “regional” cinema understood in this decade? The seminar also attends to the design elements of film publicity, which includes highly visual and iconic modes of publicity, as well as more text and typography heavy approaches. These differences in turn map on to differences between commercial cinema’s iconic “excess” and art cinema’s self-image as a serious endeavor of critical reflection. A third question we ask is about the relevance of publicity ephemera for a history of cinema. What experiences do ephemeral film materials uncover that would not have been documented or preserved in traditional forms?
What inspired your work on this course?
The donated collection itself! The collection is not large, but it is extremely wide ranging in its materials: song booklets, posters, production and publicity stills, film festival documents, correspondence with film figures, articles in film magazines, and so on. One way to assert the value of ephemera is to say that they instruct us about something “beyond” and larger: say, the history of Indian cinema. But I think holding on to the collection around the unity of a single person is another approach. This is one figure’s life in the cinema, and following his journey through the world’s film festivals in the 1970s, opens up unexpected perspectives and points of connection. For instance, Pearson traveled from Paris to North Africa and then through overland routes to South Asia, and the collection accumulates documents pertaining to South Asian and other global South cinemas. We follow along and awaiting us, as a larger project, is a world history of global South cinemas in the 1970s, made possible by an itinerant logic.
“Collecting Cinema” will feature the film memorabilia belonging to Lyle Pearson. Can you explain his impact on the world of Indian cinema?
What I want to say in this regard is that Pearson discarded nothing. Songbooks are of practical value for him in learning Hindi, so my impression is that he wasn’t collecting memorabilia for the sake of collecting. Pearson also assiduously clipped news articles on a daily basis and even those clippings (on acidic and crumpled and fragile newsprint) offer an insightful glimpse of one man’s quotidian attention to cinema. I hesitate to formulate things in terms of impact, which assumes a readily formulable terrain of cinema against which such impact can be assessed. Instead, we acquire a mobile and mutating view of film culture (its institutions, materials, events, and people). We can follow along and start from Indian cinema’s first retrospectives in Paris for French audiences, to a detour through North Africa (where I believe after watching a Hindi film there, he resolved to come to South Asia), to his presence at South Asian film festivals.
Courtesy of UW Libraries
What do you hope students will get out of this course?
I hope students learn something about South Asian cinema and its dominant forms. There was an internationalism in the ethos of film festivals in this decade that in hindsight invites points of entry and engagement for non-South Asian cinema scholars as well. For those more art-historically or visually inclined, and those interested in book and paper arts and crafts, I think the design aesthetics should be of great interest. Any student of history working on or reflecting on archives and their relation to forms of evidence such as material ephemera, might find the scholarly reflections in this seminar useful. Students learning South Asian languages might find interesting research projects to initiate from this collection around translation (not just between languages, but between mediums of screen and page).
What are the biggest reasons you would recommend students sign up for this course?
Fascinating movies, fascinating ephemera!
Courtesy of UW Libraries
Besides the regular seminar meetings, there’s also an Oct. 24 panel with Lyle Pearson and Oct. 25 symposium. What can people expect at these events?
The conversation with Pearson on Oct. 24 is anticipated as a reminiscence really, by Pearson, of his travels in the world of cinema. The symposium will feature three exemplary scholars of South Asian cinema, Navaneetha Mokkil (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), Usha Iyer (Stanford University, California), and Salma Siddique (Humboldt University, Berlin). Mokkil’s talk will attend to “formations of woman as a contingent category” as it emerges through a perusal of the collection. Iyer takes the collection as an invitation to look back to earlier decades (1930s/1940s) “to write a history of women’s participation in Indian cinema” as evidenced through material ephemera. Siddique examines “notions of political community, geographical address and historical consciousness in the post-partition films from the 1970s” whose traces are evident in this collection.
Anything you’d like readers to know?
There will be an exhibition in the Allen Library from Oct. 24 to Nov. 30. I hope people will visit that exhibition to get a firsthand look at some of the artifacts from the collection.