Reframing Bollywood.

Item

Title
Reframing Bollywood.
Identifier
AAI3287107
identifier
3287107
Creator
Gehlawat, Ajay.
Contributor
Adviser: Peter Hitchcock
Date
2007
Language
English
Publisher
City University of New York.
Subject
Cinema
Abstract
This dissertation explores how the Bollywood film works to achieve a "recoding," both of itself and its implied viewers. Just as the Bollywood film, rather than neatly fitting into any one category, defines itself through its transgression of each, this study proceeds by combining multiple fields and approaches. This fusion of approaches is representative of the larger scope of this work, namely, to destabilize the positioning of Bollywood within any one sphere of reference and, instead, to illuminate how several spheres of meaning are at play in its construction. By doing so I hope to demonstrate how applying a variety of critical tools can enable a more comprehensive reading of the films. In the process, my theorization of the Bollywood film's hybrid strategies and techniques reformulates the notion of a "Third Cinema," problematizing what Teshome Gabriel has called "the fundamental basis of difference between Western and Third World discourses." In moving beyond the narrowly focused lenses of individual disciplines, this study, like the Bollywood film it addresses, creates multiple frames through which to view this cinema, even as it provides a methodology that works to transcend and dissolve the very notion of essential otherness.
Type
dissertation
Source
PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
degree
Ph.D.