Third Text

19 May 2023

The outdoor screen at Charukala, Dhaka University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, during Britto Arts Trust’s ‘ShohorNama’ project, 2018, photo by Lotte Hoek

The once majestic buildings are crumbling, their demolition imminent. Curator and researcher Sadya Mizan seeks out exactly those whose collapse is terminal, buildings on the verge of decay and disappearance. Here, Sadya stages residential art exchange programmes. Her Uronto Artist Community brings together artists who are invited to engage with the buildings’ histories, structures and stories in site-responsive art practice. They take the fabric of the building, its social environment, its colours or volumes, and the fact of the artists’ togetherness in this place, as a drive for the work that is made during the residential period. The communities living near and with the building are actively involved and invited. Combined, these practices constitute a mode of documenting and archiving a site and structure in aesthetic forms that live on beyond the life of the site as an artistic articulation of what once was.

Uronto Collectives, The Tongue, 2013, site-specific installation, Kushtia, image courtesy of Sadya Mizan, photo by Sadya Mizan

In November 2019, Uronto had gathered a group of art practitioners and researchers at Dubolhati Palace outside the town of Noagoan, in northern Bangladesh. The ruins of the once grand palace formed the backdrop to the eighth edition of the residential programme. The artists taking part created site-responsive interventions and works. Among the tall columns of the ruined building, a play was staged. Local cultural organisations participated in the activities at the ruined palace, and among these was the Zahir Raihan Film Society of Noagoan. In the evening, the film society screened documentary films about two of the most significant modernist painters of Bangladesh: Madonna ’43 (2015, directed by Pradeep Ghosh), about Zainul Abedin, and Lal Miya (undated, directed by Amirul Islam), about S M Sultan. Abedin had been the first president of the Pakistan Film Society in Dhaka in the late 1960s. Sultan’s approach to art, his bohemian rural lifestyle and his status as an organic intellectual, had been a great inspiration to the artists and filmmakers involved with the film society movement in the 1980s. When the Noagaon film society projected these films at the Dubolhati palace, they layered the imbricated histories of fine art and the film society movement into the present of Uronto’s interventions.

Theatre group Prachyanat from Dhaka and cultural workers from the Zahir Raihan Film Society from Naogaon, BD, perform a play at Dubolhati Palace during Uronto’s 9th episode, 2019, image courtesy of Sadya Mizan, photo by Sadya Mizan

The practitioners, works and events brought together in Uronto’s edition at Dubolhati illustrate the proximity of the film society movement to contemporary art in Bangladesh. It is a vivid example of how contemporary art dwells among the materials, practices and forms of the film society movement, and how the film society constitutes a lively archive of materials and social forms that is inhabited by, and shapes, contemporary artists’ practices in Bangladesh. This essay attends to this mutuality between the film society and the contemporary arts in Bangladesh to show how film societies constitute a living archive from which social, aesthetic and critical forms are drawn by artists.

Film Societies as Living Archives

I had first met Sadya Mizan at a different film society. Sadya had been on stage at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts in Dhaka. There she was receiving her certificate for the completion of a six-month film appreciation course run by the Moviyana Film Society. Film societies are more or less formal groups of people organised around a shared interest in art cinema (broadly understood as formally experimental and realist cinema by auteur directors in conversation with transnational cinematic movements and ideas). ^[1]  Film societies run a variety of activities for their members, with the aim of sharing their interest, understanding and appreciation of film art and its place in society. For Moviyana’s film appreciation course, Sadya had attended the weekly screenings, listened to visiting lecturers, participated in the discussions of the study circle and worked through the accompanying readings in film analysis, many translated into Bengali by the society’s activists. After six months, she completed the course and received her certificate. When we met a few days later to chat and share a cup of tea at Dhaka’s Goethe Institute, I asked her why she had taken the course. It was 2013 and Sadya had just staged the first edition of Uronto, after completing her degree in Graphic Design from Dhaka University’s Faculty of Fine Arts (Charukala). She said that she felt she had not learnt enough about the image at Charukala and she wanted to understand it better. Moviyana’s film appreciation course had been a means to do so.

Moviyana Film Society poster, 2021, courtesy of Moviyana Film Society

The Moviyana Film Society in Dhaka is a very active cine-club whose volunteers run regular seminars, film screenings, study circles, and other events. The small office of the society at Shilpakala features a large desk, behind which sits the society’s founder and president. Members and friends often gather around, discussion flowing. Along the walls are stacks of books, film tins, posters, and boxes of booklets and flyers. Moviyana collates and prints key texts in film criticism, directors’ reflections and interviews, translated into Bengali if originally in another language. These booklets are part of the study packs for the students that come through its courses. A big desktop computer and many external hard-drives hold films. They range from classics by the Bengali master-filmmakers, and their international counterparts, to the short films produced annually by Moviyana through its digital filmmaking workshops. Scattered across containers, from hard drive to bound text, are the images and words of Agnès Varda and Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, Tareque and Catherine Masud, Zahir Raihan, and innumerable others. The small office, then, is packed with the artefacts of art cinema. If you wanted to learn about the moving image, Moviyana is a good place to turn to.

Inside the Moviyana Film Society office, Dhaka, in March 2014, photo by Lotte Hoek

Moviyana, and other film societies in Bangladesh, can be thought of as constituting an archive of sorts, made up of small or large collections of art films and a plethora of related artefacts. Its archival nature can be compared to the cinephilic archival practices described for other parts of South Asia. ^[2]  Informal collections are collated by enthusiasts, fans or hoarders, and these complement the formal and national film archives, such as in Dhaka or in Pune, India. The formal archive is the repository of national film culture, where inclusion of films and attendant artefacts bestows on the film a level of significance to the life of the state and nation, and where the focus is on preservation and consolidation. Informal or commercial film archives are more eclectic and often evanescent. Film societies, in Bangladesh and elsewhere in South Asia, can be thought of as forming an archive of the everyday life of the art film that is collated, transcribed, translated and maintained by film society activists, particularly as changes to the exhibition and production of art cinema are transforming the foundations of the film society and decimating its memberships. In these informal archives are collected canonical films in digital form, texts by filmmakers and film society activists, as well as records of the societies’ life made up of events, debates and engagements with other formal institutions, from embassies to the Censor Board. Film societies come to constitute informal archives of the art film through their practices of collating and maintaining these materials. These collections document and preserve the particular and located life of the global category that is the art film.

But the archive that is the film society is less of a repository and more of an arsenal. Rather than collecting and storing these materials for safekeeping or research, film society activists continually put their archival materials to use in events designed to animate these materials. Alongside and woven into the archive are a set of practices that make up and develop a social and bodily repertoire. ^[3]  A fundamental tenet of film society activism in Bangladesh is the idea that the art cinema provides a vast aesthetic terrain that has an inherently transformative potential. This is evidenced in film society slogans, such as the one on the Bagerhat Film Society’s letterhead: ‘Better Film Better Society’. A viewer-member is invited to traverse the archival terrain through viewing, reading and discussion practices. Such critical aesthetic engagement is understood to reorder ways of perceiving and engaging the world. The film society as an archive, then, is an arsenal from which aesthetic artefacts and forms can be drawn through social and bodily practices that will transform those who enact and engage them.

Film appreciation courses are foundational in realising the potential of the aesthetic material in the film society archive by teaching film society members the skills and experience to engage with art cinema and allow it to reorder their ways of perceiving the world. Film appreciation is a regular part of film education anywhere, for practitioners and scholars alike. A central practice of the film societies that emerged in South Asia in the 1950s, film appreciation had been upheld by critics since the 1920s as a means of crafting discerning audiences, with appropriately directed tastes for aesthetically valuable films, who could come to be a properly constituted public. ^[4]  The film society was a key site through which national and international art film could be seen in India and Pakistan from the 1950s, ^[5] and film appreciation animated the study circles, little magazines and film festivals that developed around them. Film appreciation is the close study of film text and the visceral and intellectual engagement with cinema as, firstly, an artistic and visual practice; secondly, a realm of opinions and written texts; and thirdly, modular social forms such as the non-theatrical public screening or the film festival. The film appreciation course invites a student-viewer into a close engagement with cinema and aims to produce within them a familiarity with these particular forms of art cinema, opening up their sensorium and their understanding of its particular aesthetic and social forms. The conscious immersion into a film education is an invitation for these texts to reshape how you see, to reform the eye and senses, to produce intimacy with the formats of screening, debate, publication. Film appreciation activates the knowledge of the film archive and settles it into the body of the viewer. Thus, film appreciation emerges as an embodied skill in understanding and interpreting the moving image, crafted through a focus on a canon, but also as a transferable skill, profoundly shaping the way in which you might pay close attention to other aesthetic forms. The texts and images, the sounds and sights, the critiques and authorial visions, all sediment into the ways in which you would approach other films, and by extension the world. The repository of cinematic knowledge emerges as a bodily disposition, a ‘repertoire [that] enacts embodied memory’ ^[6] illustrating ‘the relevance of aesthetic objects and experiences and their significance for moulding collective forms of perception and sensation’. ^[7]  The artefacts in the film society archive, then, are devices that can be activated to transform and reorient our sensory experiences and our understanding of the world around us.

To achieve such sensory reorientations and bodily dispositions, the informal archives of the film society are activated through the events that film society activists stage using their collected materials. Such events animate these materials and allow the visual and textual collections to become come alive, be inhabited and embodied. Stuart Hall describes the ‘living archive’ as a heterogenous collection of texts animated by engagement and interruption, in which this critical engagement iteratively recasts and animates that living archive. ^[8]  The film society is the living archive of art film culture in Bangladesh, where its aesthetic forms, its social practices and its critical texts are engaged, reordered, and taken into the streets and debated. It is these activities that allow the archive to be lived in, and for this archive to stay alive in the bodies and perceptions of those who have opened themselves up to its content. This, then, is why the informal film society archive is an arsenal: through film society practices the materials in its collection are animated and shared, brought to life in the encounter with audiences and participants and reshaping their experience, understanding, ways of seeing and modes of practising.

Contemporary Art and the Moving Image

Among those who inhabit and are inhabited by the living film archive in Bangladesh are many contemporary artists. In 2018, the Britto Arts Trust staged three days of public events for its ‘ShohorNama’ project in and around the grounds of Dhaka University’s Faculty of Fine Arts (Charukala). ShohorNama was curated by Mahbubur Rahman as a part of a larger international project with different iterations in major global cities. The three days at Charukala included the screening of four films by Bangladeshi filmmakers that all dealt in different ways with the city. In the large garden around the institute a screen had been set up and in the evenings three short creative documentary films by Molla Sagor, Humaira Bilkis and Saiful Wadud Helal were shown, as was a feature-length fiction film by Rubaiyat Hossain. The screenings interlaced with performance art that was staged in the thoroughfare and the park opposite over the three days by different artists, including Mahbubur Rahman, Sumana Akter, Jewel A Rob, Afsana Sharmin Jhumpa and Mustafa Zaman. A collective work of putting graffiti on rubbish containers on the street breeched a number of boundaries. Large, painted film hoardings for the four films had been commissioned from painters who traditionally painted the posters and hoardings for popular films before digitial technologies displaced their craft. The bright hoardings were hung on the outer walls of Charukala, facing the busy Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, announcing the presence of the four films. The curation of these films and their mode of exhibition at ShohorNama illustrated how the film society archive and its aesthetic and social practices extend into the screen practices within contemporary arts in Bangladesh.

Hand-painted advertising outside Charukala, Dhaka University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, for the films screened during Britto Arts Trust’s ‘ShohorNama’ project, 2018, photo by Lotte Hoek

One of the films shown at ShohorNama was Molla Sagar’s short film Gonga Buri (2009). Made as part of a Britto Arts Trust workshop, this nine-minute creative documentary is a poetic exploration of the Buriganga river in Dhaka’s urban environment. It opens with the sound of women singing, and a fade-in reveals a large, wet banana leaf onto which a pattern is drawn with vermillion. A title notes this is a gonga puja, and the opening sequence closely follows the women and the ritual objects at the water’s edge, accompanied by the sounds of their singing and ululation. The sequence ends and the film starts with a shot of four women now standing in the water, the leaf carrying oleanders and floating on the river’s surface. The sound transitions to the opening bars of Kofil Ahmed’s song ‘Gonga Buri’. As the women release the leaf into the river, it slowly submerges, letting the oleanders float to the top. The camera follows the leaf under water, the screen now split by the river’s surface, with water below and air above. The title ‘Gonga Buri’ appears as the camera sinks further below the surface. We see the vermillion dissolve into the water and bubbles rising to the surface. Looking up, a floating oleander drifts off to reveal the women at the river’s edge, now seen from below the surface of the river. The film consists of a huge repertoire of different types of images from in and around the river, many of them underwater shots, cut together and set against the rhythms and flows of Kofil Ahmed’s song. The film’s duration, the soundscape, the music and the associative imagery bring the river into view as a constellation of natural, human and divine objects and forms, with the camera and a distorting fish-eye lens manifestly present and immersed in the world and the thickly affective and material environment of the river. In this way Gonga Buri is a meditative ‘visual water medium’ ^[9] that translates what Naveeda Khan calls the ‘there-ness of the river’ and ‘the river’s point of view’ ^[10] into film and allows it to emerge as a cultural form, where ‘water also seeps into our cultural memory, historical consciousness and visual and material practices to fundamentally structure how we see, touch, feel, ingest and comprehend its form’. ^[11]  The film has been shown in other fine arts contexts, including at the photography festival Chobi Mela IX, as have Sagar’s other works, such as The River Titash, which was shown at the contemporary art festival Colomboscope in Sri Lanka in 2019.

Molla Sagar had been a graphic design student at the Institute of Fine Arts at Dhaka University, which he had entered with an interest in film and a desire to work with the moving image. Not unlike Sadya Mizan, Sagar’s experience at the Institute of Fine Arts on the graphic design degree was not conducive to an engagement with the moving image and its aesthetic and social repertoires. While very differently positioned and with very different types of practice, both Mizan and Sagar have taken part in the film society movement in Bangladesh. Their aesthetic and curatorial practices show affinities with the ideals of the movement: both work extensively with local communities and take their priorities and precarity as an ethical and political impulse to the work they do. They are both interested in intermedial practices in which the moving image has a place in installation works and public screenings, and are driven by political concerns and solidarities with marginalised groups. Contemporary art practices and film approach one another in the community-oriented creative practices of both artists.

The Shohornama film screenings in the middle of a contemporary art festival echoed the presence of the Noagoan film society at Uronto’s Dubolhati edition. The moving image and the public screen are sites of encounter between the archive of the art film that is the film society, and experimental film art that is now a staple form in contemporary art practice in Bangladesh. Where into the 1990s sculpture and painting were predominant in contemporary art in Bangladesh, multi-media installation, performance and site-specific work have since proliferated. Moishan, Rahman and Zaman describe new media art as fostering a ‘rebirth’ for art practice in Bangladesh. ^[12]  Where Dhali al Mamun and Mahbubur Rahman have long integrated intermedial forms and screens into their installation works, ^[13] contemporary artists such as Tayeba Begum Lipi, Munem Wasif, Zihan Karim and Naeem Mohaiemen are today internationally recognised for their work with the moving image. It is within this field of contemporary art practice that the resonances of the film society movement and film appreciation can be discerned.

Discussing his film Kheyal during an online talk at the Ishara Art Foundation, Munem Wasif noted that in this project about phenomenological and affective experiences of Old Dhaka, as he aimed to combine various sensory impressions and memory with experiences of temporality, ‘film captures something of the many layers of old Dhaka that still photography couldn’t’. ^[14]  In the same talk, he explained that one of the key references ‘which helped me recalibrate the way I think’ ^[15] was the durational and immersive approaches taken by Abbas Kiarostami in his films. A much-loved director in the film societies in Bangladesh, Kiarostami’s films have been a staple in society screenings and festivals across the country, even before the easy availability of his oeuvre on DVD and online. The Bangladeshi art films of the 1970s and 1980s – from Surjo Konna (1975, directed by Alamgir Kabir) and Ghuddi (1980, directed by Syed Salahuddin Zaki), to Agami (1984, directed by Morshedul Islam) and Adom Surat (1991, directed by Tareque Masud) – have been shown alongside international films such as Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) in small screenings, festivals and seminars for many years. This film society canon and the ways in which it has been programmed and screened in society events are antecedent forms and sources of inspiration for the films and moving image works by Bangladeshi artists that are now curated in galleries, group shows and biennales nationally and internationally.

Installation view of Munem Wasif’s Kheyal, 2015–2018, at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, in 2021, single channel video, 23:34 mins, 16:9, black and white, sound, courtesy of Munem Wasif, photo by Munem Wasif

The movement between contemporary arts and the living archive of the film society is multi-directional. ‘While I was never a formal member of the film societies, all the activists are our friends’, ^[16] the visual artist Dilara Begum Jolly told me of her proximity to those at the forefront of the film society movement. Trained as a painter at both the Government Arts College in Chittagong and at the Institute of Fine Arts in Dhaka, Jolly’s work has progressively incorporated the moving image and is truly intermedial. Her works appear frequently driven by social commitments, including in short video works related to terrible industrial tragedies in Dhaka, such as the haunting seven-minute work Tasreen Nama. Her practice uses the moving image in myriad ways, with video art incorporating her performance works. She explained how it was the subject matter of the work that determined the artistic language and the materials of the work. ^[17]

Still from Dilara Begum Jolly’s film Jothorleena, 2019, courtesy of the artist

Dilara Begum Jolly’s solo exhibition ‘Parables of the Womb’ in 2020 at Bengal Shilpalay in Dhaka illustrates the fertile intersection of the fields of filmmaking and moving image art. Her entire oeuvre profoundly engages the female body, and this exhibition was driven by an exploration of female suffering inflicted by war and torture. The exhibition included a number of moving image works, including a video performance piece titled Departed Souls of Mahamaya and the film Jothorleena (2019). Both deal with the aftermath of the 1971 War of Independence and the extensive use of torture and sexual violence against women in the war. Departed Souls of Mahamaya is an eleven-minute black and white video performance by Jolly. In it we see a figure shrouded in white cloth moving across the concrete spaces of a building, along steps and doors, who is eventually joined by other such figures at the barred window. The slow motion, crossfades and superimpositions highlight the white cloth that appears as both movement and background. In the final sequence, the image of the figure is superimposed on the internal and subsequently external surfaces of the building that a final shot reveals as Mahamaya Dalim Bhaban, in Chittagong. At this point the melancholy soundtrack gives way to the sound of marching boots, and a title card recounts how the paramilitary wing of the Pakistan army seized the house from its Hindu owners and turned it into a torture camp. The shrouded figures are the souls of those tortured and killed in this building. On the other side of the exhibition space, Jhotorleena also deals with the aftermath of torture and violence on women’s bodies. It is a creative documentary that engages with the inner world of the extraordinary writer and freedom fighter, Roma Chowdhury, through a powerful visual language. The exhibition of these two moving image works in the exhibition differed notably. Departed Souls of Mahamaya was screened over a number of suspended objects representing torture instruments. Instead, Jothorleena was screened in a space walled off on nearly all sides from the main gallery area, with a bench set before the wall onto which the film was projected, allowing a different style of engagement with the film as a more linear and immersive experience.

Partial installation view of Dilara Begum Jolly’s Departed Souls of Mahamaya in her solo exhibition ‘Parables of the Womb’ at Bengal Shilpalay, Dhaka, February 2020, courtesy of the artist, photo by Lotte Hoek

Jothorleena has moved between galleries and film society spaces with ease. In 2019, the film was screened at the Goethe Institute in Dhaka through the International Film Initiative of Bangladesh, run by filmmakers and film society activists. There was a lengthy Q&A after the screening in which Jolly described the making of both Departed Souls of Mahamaya and Jhotorleena to documentary filmmaker Shabnam Ferdousi. ^[18]  Also featured in the same screening series was work by Fauzia Khan, who edited Jothorleena and is an IIFT-trained Bangladeshi filmmaker and film society stalwart. The film also opened the International Festival of Docufilms on Liberation and Human Rights at the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, and was selected for screening at the Mumbai International Film Festival as well as being shown at the Birmingham Museums Trust in the UK in collaboration with the Bengal Foundation and the British Council.

The formal qualities, production and circulation of Jothorleena, and Dilara Begum Jolly’s other works, show how the aesthetic, social and institutional worlds of the film society movement and the contemporary arts overlap in personal, collective and formal ways. Like the work by Mizan, Sagar and Wasif, they underscore the proximity of art practitioners to the forms and sites of the film society movement. The archive of the film society movement is alive in contemporary art practice in Bangladesh.

The Living Film Archive

The breathing of film in the cultural landscape of contemporary curators and artists can be discerned in the making, performing and curating of moving images in galleries and biennales in Bangladesh. The boundaries between the visual and performative arts and art cinema are porous, with key people, films, institutions and practices crossing between these fields. The use of the aesthetic and social forms of the film society movement in these contemporary art practices is one of the ways that the archive of the film society movement is brought to life and comes to be lived in. Hall describes a living archive as ‘neither unified as a single collection from a single source, nor so amorphous as an inert corpus of work’. ^[19]  Instead, he notes ‘the trick seems to be not to try to describe it as if it were the oeuvre of a mythical collective subject, but in terms of what sense or regularity we can discover in its very dispersion’. ^[20]  This dispersal could be discerned in the screen and the chairs gathered in the Charukala gardens, and with the presence of the Zahir Raihan film society at Dubolhati Palace alongside Uronto’s resident artists. The culture of the art film as articulated by the film society movement in Bangladesh is dispersed in many forms: the presence of the screen, shared aesthetic experiences, the social modes of watching together, especially in public spaces and institutions, the conversations about directors and montage, the repertoires and canons of films pulled out to curate a programme on the edges of the art biennial or as part of the artists’ residency. These are the aesthetic, social and cultural repertoires by which the archive of the film society is animated.

From Hall’s understanding of the living archive as dispersed, it follows that the ‘critical effort is to discern the regularity in its heterogeneity…’. ^[21]  To understand the living nature of the archive that is the film society movement in Bangladesh is to be alive to the repeating emergence of the film society’s social, aesthetic and critical forms and practices at the sites and forms of contemporary art practice in Bangladesh today. It means to follow how film appreciation moves out centripetally from the film society into other domains, and how it comes to connect contemporary art practices in Bangladesh with the film society movement – from the insistence on ‘good’ film in the 1950s film society movement in India, its formation in the early 1960s in Pakistan, and then into Bangladesh, through the activist short film forum in the 1980s, and into contemporary workshops and classes of film and video practice on such occasions as, for example, Britto’s video art workshop in 2008 and its Pixelation events in 2012.

To ask what a living archive is, is to ask how an archive is brought to life, how its artefacts come to have efficacy in the orientations and perspectives of those who are touched by these artefacts, and to shape other domains of their understanding, practice and production. It requires an attentiveness to the animation and dispersal of its artefacts and forms across other sites, where they come to be inhabited by new people in new contexts, ‘in the midst of things and in the undulation of fragments’. ^[22]  When the Noagoan film society screened its films at Uronto’s 2019 Dubolhati edition, it illuminated the relationship of mutuality between the film society movement and contemporary arts in Bangladesh. It showed that contemporary artists inhabit the living archive of the film society, and that the forms, commitments and practices of that archive come to inform the critical gaze and aesthetic practice of artists and cinephiles alike.

^[1]     See Ira Bhaskar, ‘The Indian New Wave’, in K Moti Gokulsing, Wimal Dissanayake and Rohit K Dasgupta, eds, Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, Routledge, London, 2013, pp 19–33

^[2]     See Kuhu Tanvir, ‘Pirate Histories: Rethinking the Indian Film Archive’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, vol 4, no 2, 2013, pp 115–136; Stephen Putnam Hughes, ‘The Production of the Past: Early Tamil Film History as a Living Archive’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, vol 4, no 1, 2013, pp 71–80; Timothy P A Cooper, ‘Raddi Infrastructure: Collecting Film Memorabilia in Pakistan: An Interview with Guddu Khan of Guddu’s Film Archive’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, vol 7, no 2, 2016, pp 151–171; Salma Siddique, ‘Archive Filmaria: Cinema, Curation, and Contagion’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol 39, no 1, 2019, pp 196–211

^[3]     See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2003

^[4]     See Manishita Dass, Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016; S V Srinivas, ‘Is There a Public in the Cinema Hall?’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no 42, Summer 2000; Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2010

^[5]     See Rochona Majumdar, ‘Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol 46, no 3, 2012, pp 731–767

^[6]     Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, op cit, p 19

^[7]     Andreas Reckwitz, ‘Affective spaces: a praxeological outlook’, Rethinking History, vol 16, no 2, 2012, pp 241–258, p 242; see also Birgit Meyer, ed, Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009

^[8]     See Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an archive’, Third Text, vol 15, no 54, Spring 2001, pp 89–92

^[9]     Bishnupriya Ghosh, ‘Making water media in 21st-century South Asia’, in Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, eds, Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, Routledge, London, 2020, p 228

^[10]   Naveeda Khan, ‘River and the corruption of memory’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol 49, no 3, 2015, p 395

^[11]   Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, eds, Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, op cit, p 3

^[12]   See Shahman Moishan, Sharmillie Rahman and Mustafa Zaman, ‘New Media: the locus of rebirth’, Depart 22, no date, accessed 28 June 2022

^[13]   See Mustafa Zaman, ‘Art after 71: new turns, twists and trajectories’, New Age, 26 March 2021, accessed 28 June 2022; and Iftikhar Dadi, ‘Installation’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, vol 12, nos 1–2, 2021, pp 106–112

^[14]   See Ishara Art Foundation, ‘Static In The Air – Transformation 5 (Kheyal)’, video, 15 September 2021, accessed 27 June 2022

^[15]   Ibid

^[16]   Interview with Dilara Begum Jolly, 17 August 2022

^[17]   Ibid

^[18]   See ‘Jothorleena | Through Her Eyes | Dilara Begum Jolly’, a video recording of Dilara Begum Jolly discussing Jothorleena at a screening of the film at the Goethe Institute in Dhaka on 22 September 2019, accessed 08 August 2022

^[19]   Stuart Hall, op cit, p 90

^[20]   Ibid, emphasis in the original

^[21]   Ibid, pp 90–91

^[22]   See Aditi Chandra and Sanjukta Sunderason, in their two-part Introduction to this ‘Living Archives’ Forum, ‘Living Archives and Decolonial Potentialities: Re/Animating the Subjects of History’ and ‘Living Archives and Decolonial Potentialities: Some Formations’

Lotte Hoek is a media anthropologist whose research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies. Her work explores the public and political life of film in South Asia. She is the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is one of the editors of the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. She is currently a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences and is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.