@phdthesis{Wolf2007, author = {Wolf, Nicole}, title = {Make it Real. Documentary and other cinematic experiments by women filmmakers in India.}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:521-opus-663}, school = {Europa-Universit{\"a}t Viadrina Frankfurt}, year = {2007}, abstract = {This project explores documentary film practices in India with a specific focus on the relation between documentary film, social movements and political thought and practice. The book concentrates on historical moments significant both in terms of political—referring to state politics as well as non-state activism—and documentary film developments, between the mid 1970s and the present. Hereby, the main body of this anthropological and interdisciplinary research foregrounds the work of women documentary filmmakers and argues that their negotiations of their socio-political and film cultural contexts has led them to, time and again, provoke crucial shifts in and the expansion of documentary modes present today. Hence, Make it Real! argues for feminist film/politics not as a sub-cultural realm, but as making propositions for the political as such and here in particular supported through the continuous discourses in and around documentary mode film. The Make it Real! of the chosen title refers to the book's theoretical approach, which perceives documentary film not as a tool to represent political issues but as a social, political and artistic practice, which continuously opens out the new—new debates on local and global citizenry. This translates into working from the politics that documentaries make through the realities that they imagine and engender and which are often political by thinking and arguing beyond what is thought within the "limits of the possible" (Ranci{\`e}re). Those contextual proposals for the real and the intelligible develop throughout the book into an interrogation of the ethics of documentary mode filmmaking in the context of contemporary regional and global conflict. Herein the themes discussed include the constitution of movements as such, questions of gender and public space, sexuality and the nation, presentations of the female body, as well as, and interrelated, debates on the politics of historicity, on the question of Human/Rights, victimhood and citizenship and the ethics of listening. The book chapters elaborate on singular moments in which particular historical-political constellations and the discourse and practice of documentary mode filmmaking generate points of emergence or a so called turn, which redefine relations between image making, the political and collectivity. Crucial nodes are: The rise of a new independent documentary film movement in the mid 1970s under a State of Emergency and therefore its particular relation to the nation state, to Marxist ideologies as well as its affinities to the Latin American Third Cinema movement. The particular development of mutual impact between documentary filmmaking and the Indian women's movements in the 1980s, the influence of national and international development organisations on film productions in the 1990s as well as the changing media scene post market liberalisation in 1989, up to the moment of a recent significant turn during the years 2002 to 2004. The latter can be seen as a key moment for filmmakers to rethink the relation between documentary film and its possibilities to address pressing contemporary issues such as the communal violence in Gujarat against the minority Muslim population in 2002, which was followed by increasing pressures through censorship regulations of the state. Both challenges spurred new networks for debate as well as state alternative screening and distribution possibilities and, together with and dependent on preceding developments, paved the way for what might be called 'the new Indian documentary'. Make it Real! addresses those moments of emergence through the prism of in-depth portraits of selected film examples - where the production process has in most cases been followed ethnographically. Film projects have been chosen for their innovative formal contributions, while recognizing that the focus on urban contexts as well as the personal selection does not at all lead to a representative description. Nevertheless, the examples are perceived as relevant moments of density from where legacies and genealogies are traced. The very writing of film histories is hereby thematized and the subjective views of individuals and institutions, including of the author herself, are implicated and reflected upon. Furthermore, this text argues for the theorizing that arises from conversations (also as media practice) as well as for an ethnography which does not merely describe and analyze the present but seeks to be attuned to the signals of the future present. Filmmakers whose works are addressed in more detail, next to many others mentioned, are: Monica Bhasin, Madhusree Dutta, Deepa Dhanraj, Sherna Dastur, Pooja Kaul, Surabhi Sharma, Soudhamini, Paromita Vohra.}, subject = {Dokumentarfilm}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Ohm2007, author = {Ohm, Britta}, title = {The Televised Community. Culture, Politics, and the Market of Visual Representation in India}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:521-opus-469}, school = {Europa-Universit{\"a}t Viadrina Frankfurt}, year = {2007}, abstract = {This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution). Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), 'good governance' (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion. Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, 'authentic' media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances. In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between 'the global' and 'the local' in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an 'ethnographic moment' instead of the 'ethnographic present', a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.}, subject = {Fernsehschaffender}, language = {en} }