Collecting Cinema: Visual Culture, Film History, and the Archive of Indian Cinema

This seminar is tied to a symposium of scholarly talks devoted to the personal collection of film memorabilia belonging to American cinephile and writer Lyle Pearson. We will explore three themes connected to the materials in the collection pertaining to the 1970s. First, we will consider how salient categories in Indian film historiography – art cinema, commercial cinema, and regional cinema – were shaped by that decade’s public and cinematic events as documented in the collection. Second, we consider the iconography and design elements of song books, and other forms of film publicity. In so doing, we ask how distinct idioms of visuality, some modernist and text-and-typography focused, and others that foreground body, gesture, and emotion, reflect and refract prevailing distinctions between art and commercial cinema. Finally, we consider paper ephemera’s relation both to vernacular cultural memories of the cinema and to formal celluloid film archives in India, especially given the current surfeit of digital traces of the past.