[Reader-list] First posting--IFS-2007

[smita mitra]

Dear Friends
 OK this is the first posting for my project on *Cinematic City:Kolkata,
Modernity, Middle class and* *the Urban Woman-- A study of 1950s and 60s
Popular Bangla Cinema*.I am interested in exploring the relationship between
cinema and the city and the urban middle class woman's identity that is
spatially and cinematically located in the city of Kolkata in some Popular
Bangla Films of the 1950s and 60s  such as *Teen Bhuvoner Paare*,*Saat Paake
Bandha, Uttar Phalguni, Harano Sur, Agnipariksha ,Bipasha* etc. I will
attempt to explore issues of work , profession, intercaste, interracial love
, choice of career, interpersonal conflicts and new and different focus on
the working woman and her identity. I would like to historicize this
cinematic articulation as  adocument/archive of the lived city which can be
used to formulate(a) tesis of a specific self -fashioning of the Bengali
middle class,(b)to locate the imaginary of this cinema within the emergence
of a new popular engaged in mapping a feminine subjectivity in the modern
city.I am drawing on Moinak Biswas's work on the 1950S Bengali and Hindi
Popular cinema's engagement with the urban as a cinematic story of the male
citizen's career and rhetoric of love as a creative interface of the cinema
and the city. I want to see how these films are formulating new conceptions
of the modern city as an empowering space for the educated middle class
urban woman as a)professinal space and  b) new emotive space for a different
configuration of love and the couple.I would also like to focus on issues of
female desire--- both transgressive and conformist and the relationship
between this woman and the city that she inhabits.

At present I am enrolled in the Film Studies PHD programme at SAA, JNU. I
teach English Literature at Delhi college of Arts and Commerce, DU. Looking
forward to engaged responses from you guys.
Bye Smita
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