2013 Chapters (Layout Features)

Creating Cinema's Reading Publics: The Emergence of Film Journalism in Bombay

Mukherjee, Debashree

This article interrogates the modes and effects of the emergence of film journalism as a new critical discourse in India's late colonial public sphere and the concomitant surfacing of the intriguing figure of the film critic. I assert that film journalism distributed the pleasures of cinema, and simultaneously sought to redefine its cultural status. The film critic, as a new breed of public professional, reified both the affective and ideological power of cinema. Through case studies I analyze how cinema related to nationalist politics and Bombay’s public sphere via autodidactic film fans and celebrity film critics.