Film culture developed as part of a global network, and its proliferation in India coincided with and overlapped with other emergent film practices in America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. While film was a ‘foreign’ technology, it generated considerable excitement and anxiety. The notion of cinema as a Western technological import needed to be embedded within a series of vernacular modes of cognition and practice. This elaboration, dissemination and translation of cinematic discourse and the use of its technology generated a series of serious pedagogical engagements. The project aims to understand the pedagogical processes through which cinema was assimilated from global networks into a specifically Indian mode of production and practice in the early twentieth century.
In India, the transfer of technological knowledge, skill and cultural capital was based primarily on two modes of cognition and application. The first mode was formal and institutionalized, while the second was informal and autodidactic. The institutional route meant learning the disaggregated jobs of filmmaking through apprenticeships at film studios or attending courses at technical schools of filmmaking in India and abroad. The early studios provided a hands-on learning environment and held tremendous possibilities for mobility within the studio hierarchy. Through this project, I aim to investigate the accounts of early Indian filmmakers travelling to Europe and America to learn filmmaking through visits to Hollywood or German studios like UFA. For instance, American sound engineer Wilford Dening was hired by Ardershir Irani to assist with sound for the film Alam Ara (India’s first sound film). Filmmaker V. Shantaram visited and trained at UFA studios in Berlin in 1932. What kinds of entanglements did these encounters produce, and how do they contribute to our understanding of pedagogic processes pertaining to film?
My research project aligns with the Global Asia cluster and its concern with processes of globalization and the interconnections between Asia and the rest of the world. Film pedagogy and practice in India during the early twentieth century needs to be understood as a transnational process of knowledge production, sharing and exchange of skill and film technology. My research aims to develop a critical insight into how the flow of ideas and people produced a shared global film culture where Indian filmmakers, theorists and practitioners crucially intervened in the global discourses on film through acts of translocation and translation, thereby reinterpreting and re-habituating global film theories to apply to the South Asian contexts as pedagogical projects.