Centered around a private collection of film memorabilia accumulated over five decades of travels through South Asian film festivals, this symposium features invited scholars of South Asian cinema who reflect on the collection's research value for South Asian film history, film archives, and visual culture. The symposium is accompanied by an exhibition of the memorabilia in the Allen Library North Lobby.
 

Following the material available in the Pearson collection on Urdu film culture, this talk will examine notions of political community, geographical address and historical consciousness in the post-partition films from the 1970s. While two films in the collection are explicitly concerned with the colonial partition, the others are adaptations of global and literary Islamicate histories. Journeying speculatively with the films encountered by the American cinephile and film critic, Salma Siddique will forward a historically-anchored ideology of the nationally divided Urdu film.

Salma Siddique is research faculty at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She is the author of Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit 1940-1960 (2022, Cambridge University Press). Her ongoing research project “Nitrate Cities” focusses on film protests and fan exertions in contemporary South Asia.

RSVP is encouraged: https://bit.ly/RSVPIndianCinema

Visit the project page for a full symposium schedule.