NEWS

Two upcoming events sponsored by the Dean Rusk Program

Ladies First – Neoliberal Architectures and Moviegoing in India: April 18 @ 5 p.m. (VAC)

Tupur Chatterjee – Assistant Professor in Global Film and Media, University College Dublin

Since the late 90s, multiplexes in India have almost always been located inside malls, making it impossible to inhabit one space without also inhabitating the other. The prevalence coincides with a shift in the spectatoraial imagination of India’s mass audience – spaces that, for several decades, had been designed for the subaltern male, but are now built for the consuming, globalized middle-class woman. The mulitplex established a new link between media and architecture in the subcontinent, not only rewriting the relation between gender, caste, and urban space, but also changing the shapes of Indian cities.

Rethinking the Cinematic Extra: The Crowd in Gandhi and RRR: April 19 @ 4:30 p.m. (Hance)

Kartik Nair – Assistant Professor of Film and Media Arts, Temple University

Drawing on maternalist media theory, critical production studies, archival research, and close comparative textual analysis, this talk examines the appearance of the crowd in narrative fiction cinema. Focusing on the historical epics Gandhi (1982) and RRR (2022), I explore how digital crowd simulation is revolutionizing the racialized aesthetic of a spectacular textual convention, the uneven labor dynamics of filmmaking, and the geopolitical economy undergirding imperial screen imaginaries.