Screen1900 Member Brigitte Schulze: Dissertation
Brigitte Schulze: Humanist and Emotional Beginnings of a Nationalist Indian Cinema in Bombay. With Kracauer in the Footsteps of Phalke. Avinus: Berlin 2003, 419 pp.
'Bollywood' has been setting its own standards in terms of aesthetics and cinematic language for decades. Exploring the beginnings of Bombay's cinema means to enter spaces largely occupied by orientalist or nationalist myths; however, Schulze’s discursive and contextualising approach brings into light long forgotten visions and landscapes of a 'cinematographic humanism' beyond caste, class, gender or nation-state.
Who were the first historical audiences in Bombay and its hinterland, and how did these actually respond to the first ‘Indian films’, to Indian filmmakers and their mediations of ideas and feelings of belonging to a particular culture defined by nation and state? In what way did long feature films made by film pioneer Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (1870-1944) convey sentiments of 'being Indian' which he intertwined with his modern cosmopolitan outlook.
Brigitte Schulze argues that Phalke was rather avant-gardist and humanist than nationalist. She presents astounding affinities between Phalke’s cinematic venture and Siegfried Kracauer’s reflections on cinema’s paradox potential to inspire in modern audiences a complex cognitive and emotional ‘redemption’ of the endangered physical reality.
Reviews of Brigitte Schulze's Dissertation
