Cinemas Dark and Slow Digital India in Bloomington, MN

This book provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including
Aaranaya Kaandam
,
I.D
.,
Kaul
Chauthi Koot
Cosmic Sex
, and
Gaali Beeja
, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.