Thursday, April 4, 2024 – 5pm, Foster Hall 103
Rakesh Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto
The arrival of talkies in the early 1930s was an important historical juncture in the aesthetic and economic reformation of Indian cinema. The talk will explore this eventful period of anticipation and arrival through a centrifugal understanding of screenwriting as an intermedial practice disaggregated across sound, print and theatre history. In South Asia, screenwriting manuals were primarily aimed at amateurs whose wide-eyed enthusiasm for cinema reveals a cycle of pedagogy, promise and precarity outside the emergent Indian film industries. Inside the major film studios, Parsi theatre playwrights were recruited as the first screenwriters at a time of significant technological and textual transformation. The origins of talkie-writing as modified stagecraft reveal how the novelty of sound was deployed through frequent songs and elaborate dialogues, which arguably laid the melodramatic foundations of popular Indian cinema.