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: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781479829644
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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