Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gq7q9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T15:54:34.408Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Kaččā and the Pakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2020

Timothy P. A. Cooper*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University College London

Abstract

For many city dwellers in Pakistan the distant memory of outdoor cinemas in their ancestral villages rekindles the thrill of first contact with film exhibition. This paper considers attempts made in colonial British India and postcolonial Pakistan to understand, wield, and benefit from the staging of such memorable and affective filmic events. In its cultivation of “cinema-minded” subjects, the British Empire commissioned studies of audiences and their reactions to film exhibition in hopes of managing the unruly morality and materiality of the cinematic apparatus. After Partition and the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan, similar studies continued, evincing a residual strategy of elicited contact. The elicitation of film contact aimed at the exertion and commandment of the event of film exhibition for the purposes of knowing their constituent subjects at a moment of malleability. Yet the Empire's struggle with the perceived problems of “Muslim tastes” and audience members’ ambivalence over rural screenings in post-Partition Pakistan calls for a reconsideration of the efficacy of these tactics. I argue that what complicated these encounters are affective responses that questioned the address, permissibility, and efficacy of film exhibition. In these tactics of elucidation, disenchantment, and denial, ruptures are refused and the new is dismissed as inoperable, incompatible, or impermissible.

Type
Taste, Territory and “the People”
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Acland, Charles R. 2003. Cinemagoing as Felt Internationalism. In Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 229–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahmad, Ali Nobil. 2014. Film and Cinephilia in Pakistan: Beyond Life and Death. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 5, 2: 8198.Google Scholar
Ahmad, Ali Nobil and Khan, Ali, eds. 2016. Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Anwar, Abdul Aziz. 1957. Film Industry in West Pakistan. Lahore: Board of Economic Inquiry.Google Scholar
Askari, Muhammad Hasan. 2014. Color in Film: Why and to What End? BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 5, 2: 167–73.Google Scholar
Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Bamford, P. C. 1925. Histories of the Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements. Delhi: Government of India Press.Google Scholar
Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1974–1975. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Alan Williams, trans. Film Quarterly 28, 2: 3947.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2011. Cinematograph to Cinema: Bombay 1896–1928. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2, 1: 4167.Google Scholar
Canudo, Ricciotto. 1980. The Birth of the Sixth Art (1911). Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 13: 37.Google Scholar
Casetti, Francesco. 2018. Why Fears Matter. Cinephobia in Early Film Culture. Screen 59, 1: 145–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterjee, Ranita. 2012. Cinema in the Colonial City: Early Film Audiences in Calcutta. In Christie, Ian, ed., Audiences. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 6680.Google Scholar
Chowdhry, Prem. 2000. Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Timothy P. A. 2016. Raddi Infrastructure: Collecting Film Memorabilia in Pakistan: An Interview with Guddu Khan of Guddu's Film Archive. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 7, 2: 151–71.Google Scholar
Cooper, Timothy P. A. 2018. Cinema Itself: Cinephobia, Filmic Anxieties, and Ontologies of the Moving Image in Pakistan. Visual Anthropology 31, 3: 253–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dadi, Iftikhar. 2010. BioScopic and Screen Studies of Pakistan, and of Contemporary Art. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 1, 1: 1115.Google Scholar
Dadi, Iftikhar. 2012. Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. In Khan, Naveeda, ed., Beyond Crisis: Re-Evaluating Pakistan. London: Routledge, 167–98.Google Scholar
Dass, Manishita. 2009. The Crowd outside the Lettered City: Imagining the Mass Audience in 1920s India. Cinema Journal 48, 4, 7798.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dharap, B. V. 1985. National Film Archive of India. In Ramachandran, T. M. and Rukmini, S., eds., 70 Years of Indian Cinema (1913–1983). Bombay: Cinema India-International, 528–36.Google Scholar
Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Sainsbury, Mark, Dumont, Louis, and Gulati, Basia, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
During, Simon. 2002. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2011. What Is Left of the Cinematic Apparatus, or Why We Should Retain (and Return to) It. Cinéma & Technologie 31, 1–2–3: 3344.Google Scholar
Film Centre, London. 1949. The Use of Mobile Cinema and Radio Vans in Fundamental Education. Series “Press, Film, and Radio in the World Today.” Publication no. 582. London: UNESCO.Google Scholar
Gazdar, Mushtaq. 1997. Pakistan Cinema 1947–1997. Karachi and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gell, Alfred. 1994. The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In Coote, Jeremy and Shelton, Anthony, eds., Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4063.Google Scholar
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Giraud, Jean. 1958[1930]. Le lexique français du cinéma, des origines à 1930. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.Google Scholar
Goodfriend, Arthur. 1963. The Twisted Image. New York: St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Government of the Central Provinces and Berar. 1938. Report of the Visual Education Committee. Nagpur: Government of India Printing Press.Google Scholar
Grieveson, L. J. and MacCabe, Colin. 2011. Film and the End of Empire. London: British Film Institute.Google Scholar
Honigmann, John Joseph. 1953. Information for Pakistan: Report of Research on Intercultural Communication through Films. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Institute for Research in Social Science.Google Scholar
Howard, Albert and Wad, Yeshwant D.. 1931. The Waste Products of Agriculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, Stephen Putnam. 2007. Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema. Journal of Asian Studies 66, 1: 334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imran, Rahat. 2016. Activist Documentary Film in Pakistan: The Emergence of a Cinema of Accountability. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
In Defense of Peace. 1948. Gillet, André, director. Atlantic Film/United Nations Film Board.Google Scholar
Indian Cinematograph Committee. 1928a. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–1928. Superintendent, Government Press Publications Branch Calcutta, Madras.Google Scholar
Indian Cinematograph Committee. 1928b. Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–1928. Evidence Volume II: Oral Evidence of Witnesses Examined at Lahore, Peshawar, Lucknow, and Calcutta, with Their Written Statements. Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch.Google Scholar
Insects as Carriers of Disease. 1945. Produced by Walt Disney for the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (and distributed by the latter).Google Scholar
Ionita, Casiana Elena. 2013. The Educated Spectator: Cinema and Pedagogy in France, 1909–1930. PhD diss., Columbia University.Google Scholar
Jaikumar, Priya. 2003. More than Morality: The Indian Cinematograph Committee Interviews (1927). Moving Image 3, 1 (2003): 82109.Google Scholar
Jaikumar, Priya. 2006. Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kabir, Alamgir. 1969. The Cinema in Pakistan. Dacca: Sandhani Publications.Google Scholar
Khan, Naveeda. 2011. The Acoustics of Muslim Striving: Loudspeaker Use in Ritual Practice in Pakistan. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 3: 571–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk, Gwendolyn. 2016. Uncivilized Language and Aesthetic Exclusion: Language, Power and Film Production in Pakistan. PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Laboto, Ramon. 2007. Subcinema: Theorizing Marginal Film Distribution. Limina 13: 113–20.Google Scholar
Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Larkin, Brian. 2013. Making Equivalence Happen: Commensuration and the Architecture of Circulation. In Spyer, Patricia and Steedly, Mary Margaret, eds., Images that Move. Santa Fe: SAR Press, 237–56.Google Scholar
Larkin, Brian. 2015. Binary Islam: Media and Religious Movements in Nigeria. In Hackett, Rosalind I. J. and Soares, Benjamin F., eds., New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 6381.Google Scholar
Larkin, Brian. 2016. Entangled Religions: Response to JDY Peel. Africa 86, 4: 633–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larkin, Brian and Meyer, Birgit. 2006. Pentecostalism, Islam and Culture. In Akyeampong, Emmanuel Kwaku, ed., Themes in West Africa's History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 286312.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Weightman, John, trans. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Mahadevan, Sudhir. 2015. A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Mazzarella, William. 2009. Making Sense of the Cinema in Late Colonial India. In Kaur, Raminder and Mazzarella, William, eds., Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 6386.Google Scholar
Mazzarella, William. 2013. Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naficy, Hamid. 2012. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pandian, Anand. 2015. Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Pandian, M.S.S. 1996. Tamil Cultural Elites and Cinema: Outline of an Argument. Economic and Political Weekly 31, 15 (13 Apr.): 950–55.Google Scholar
Pinney, Christopher. 2008. The Coming of Photography in India. London: British Library.Google Scholar
Pinney, Christopher. 2015. Mimesis as Infection: Charlie Hebdo Seen from the Indian Archive. Material World, 5 Feb., http://www.materialworldblog.com/2015/02/mimesis-as-infection-charlie-hebdo-seen-from-the-indian-archive/ (accessed 28 Nov. 2019).Google Scholar
Pioneer Mail and Indian Weekly News (Allahabad). 1920. Vol. 47 (6 Aug.): 32.Google Scholar
Powdermaker, Hortense. 1951. Hollywood the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers. London: Secker & Warburg.Google Scholar
Rajput, Ashok. 2005. Nation's Vision: The State, Media, and Religion in Pakistan. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin at Madison.Google Scholar
Report on the Use of Cinema in the Dominions and Colonies, British Empire Economic Conference, Ottawa. 1932. Pamphlet dated 19 May. British Library IOR/L/PO/3/3D.Google Scholar
Robbins, Joel. 2003. On the Paradoxes of Global Pentecostalism and the Perils of Continuity Thinking. Religion 33, 3: 221–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robbins, Joel. 2010. Anthropology, Pentecostalism, and the New Paul: Conversion, Event, and Social Transformation. South Atlantic Quarterly 109, 4: 633–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, James R. 1994. Visualizing Imperial Geography: Halford Mackinder and the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee, 1902–11. Ecumene 1, 2: 157–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shoesmith, Brian. 1988. The Problem of Film: A Reassessment of the Significance of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 2, 1: 7489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16, 3: 407–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Srinivas, Lakshmi. 2016. House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Srinivas, S. V. 1999. Gandhian Nationalism and Melodrama in the 30s Telugu Cinema. Journal of the Moving Image 1, 1: 1436.Google Scholar
Srinivas, S. V. 2000. Is There a Public in the Cinema Hall? Framework 42, at https://www.academia.edu/558095/Is_there_a_Public_in_the_Cinema_Hall (accessed 29 Nov. 2019).Google Scholar
Srinivas, S. V. 2003. Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, 1: 4062.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. The Decomposition of an Event. Cultural Anthropology 7, 2: 244–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szczepaniak-Gillece, Jocelyn. 2016. Revisiting the Apparatus: The Theatre Chair and Cinematic Spectatorship. Screen 57, 3: 253–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Television Is Here Again. 1946. Dorté, Philip, director. London: BBC.Google Scholar
Teri Yaad. 1948. Chand, Daud, director. Produced by Lal, Sardari and Singha, D. P., Lahore.Google Scholar
Vasudevan, Ravi S. 1995. Reflections on the Cinematic Public, 1914–1943. Paper presented at the Study Week, “Making Meaning in Indian Cinema” (26–29 Oct.), Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.Google Scholar
Vasudevan, Ravi S. 2000. Introduction. In Vasudevan, R., ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 136.Google Scholar
Vasudevan, Ravi S. 2015. Film Genres, the Muslim Social, and Discourses of Identity c. 1935–1945. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 6, 1: 2743.Google Scholar
Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. 2007. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar