DVD compilations of Hindi film songs: (Re)shuffling sound, stardom, and cinephilia

Abstract

Much of the current scholarship on DVDs within the context of India specifically, and the global South more generally has explored emerging informal economies, shifting urban landscapes, and re-mapped relations within and between the global South and North with respect to copyright and piracy. In order to broaden the scope of this research, I approach the DVD as a textual object and explore how the DVD technology's (re)produces intergenerational cinephilia as well as ‘visual’ and ‘aural’ stardom. In pursuing this line of inquiry in the context of Bombay cinema, I seek to widen the range of available textual analyses of DVD, which are largely anchored in western cinema. This research focuses on the fidelity and technical virtuosity of sound on DVDs; here, sound, remains, an aural entity. A cursory glance at the DVDs produced in India show that the picturization sound is also a crucial feature of DVD organization. DVD compilations of Hindi film music offer a particularly rich site for beginning research on how DVD technology has re-structured sound, stardom and cinephilia as the songs are untethered from the filmic narrative and re-classified.