An ambitious work whose dry, academic prose might put off some readers.
What caused the recent shift in India’s entertainment cultures.
There’s a lot going on in this latest book in New York University Press’ Critical Cultural Communication series by film and media scholar Chatterjee. At its core, it “offers an interdisciplinary conversation between media studies and architecture.” In the past 30 years, the heightened hyperreal architectonics of multiplex cinemas, rather than single screens in Indian malls, radically altered the politics of theatrical space, female consumption, and moviegoing. Chatterjee smartly explores how this moment “played out across media industries, architecture and design, popular cinema, and public culture,” especially in New Delhi. Media, gender, and architecture are woven together in the creation of this global media city in the “throes of a severe spatial, moral, and emotional crisis.” The author looks first at the prehistory of the multiplex, from the 1960s to the 1980s. In the 1980s, television and VHS tapes emerged as a favorite of the Indian middle classes, creating “heterogenous taste cultures.” Commodity and consumption culture “took over the Indian landscape” via the rise of shopping malls, public safety, and their multiplex spectators—not the only country, of course, where a similar pattern occurred. Chatterjee studies in detail three films that have thematically engaged with gender, especially women, a violent rape culture, liberalization, and space in Delhi: Pink, NH10, and Dev.D. She also discusses the nostalgia surrounding the death of the single screens, which could often turn spectators into joyful “performative fans,” and the conversion of older cinemas into multiplexes, as well as the addition of virtual reality lounges to them. Chatterjee soberly concludes by examining the impact of moviegoing in the midst of India’s right-wing Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, and how it negatively “infiltrates the regulated ‘safe’ microclimates of the mall-multiplex.”
An ambitious work whose dry, academic prose might put off some readers.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781479829644
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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