Ranjani Mazumdar
Ranjani Mazumdar teaches Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender and the cinematic city. Her writings have appeared in several anthologies as well as in journals such as Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Screen, Social Research, Journal of Television and New Media, Economic and Political Weekly, Film International. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) and co-author with Nitin Govil of the forthcoming The Indian Film Industry. She has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and her productions include Delhi Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (Co-Directed). She has been a Marie Curie European Union Fellow in Indian Film at the University of Westminster (London) a Fellow at the Cities Cluster of the Shelby Cullom Davis Centre for Historical Studies, Princeton University, a British Academy (ESRC) Fellow, an ICSSR Visiting Fellow at the Maison des Sciences de l’homme in Paris, and visiting faculty at the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her current research focuses on globalization and film culture, the visual culture of film posters and the intersection of technology, travel, design and colour in 1960s Bombay Cinema.
Faculty profile link -
https://www.jnu.ac.in/content/ranjani
Faculty profile link -
https://www.jnu.ac.in/content/ranjani
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Papers by Ranjani Mazumdar
Compiled by Ranjani Mazumdar, Pallavi Paul, Shaunak Sen
Memory, history and time work through the cinematic narrative in ways that make the medium significantly different from all the other art forms. Film in a variety of ways lends itself to the possibility of organizing not just historical knowledge but also comments on the nature of historical narration. As an archive of sensations, of emotions, of images and of sounds, film works as a powerful recorder of life and its events, and as a form of witnessing and testimony. Ideas of the past as they permeate the present through cinema will be analyzed in this course by looking at the different ways in which films make connections between history and evidence, between history and the present, between historical narration and the historical event, and between memory and representation. If the history of cinema is a history of the 20th century, it contains within its archive a history of modern subjectivity (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith). Moving through popular genres, documentaries, art cinema and avant-garde film practice, the course will explore the intricate relationship between film and history as it unfolds in the terrain of World Cinema.