Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation announces the fifth lecture/talk of the year.
The presentation is by
Dr Rachel Dwyer,
Senior Lecturer in Indian Studies and Chair of the Centre of South Asian Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her paper will be of special interest to students and staff interested in national cinemas and in film theory generally Please come to the talk and engage in a dialogue with Dr Dwyer over some excellent Western Australian wine (or orange juice).
Cinema is one of India's most vibrant cultural products and one of its major industries. This talk concentrates almost exclusively on the popular or commercial Hindi/Urdu films produced in Mumbai (Bombay), since this is India's national cinema and is key to India's global culture. It traces the history of cinema in India very briefly before addressing the features which make the Hindi film ('Bollywood') distinctive, notably its melodramatic mode, its star system and its use of music and dance
Rachel Dwyer took her BA in Sanskrit at SOAS, followed by an MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. Her PhD research at SOAS was on the Gujarati lyrics of Dayaram (1777-1852). She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in literature, cinema, Gujarati and Sanskrit. She has written extensively on Bollywood cinema. Her Bollywood cinema related publications include: All you want is money, all you want is love: sex and romance in modern India (2000), Pleasure and the Nation (co-edited with C. Pinney) (2000), Cinema India (co-authored with Divia Patel) (2002), Yash Chopra in the 'World Director series' BFI/Berkeley/New Delhi(2002).
She is under contract with BFI/University of California Press to write a book on 100 great Hindi films, and another on religion and Hindi cinema for Routledge.
