Abstract
University of DelhiThe basic framework of this paper is to deliberate upon the emergence of item songs as a reinstatement of the dominance of the ‘song and dance sequences’ in popular Hindi cinema, and its inferences as a sub-text in contemporary cultural forms. While doing so, the paper argues that the transition in consumption and the circulation/distribution of Hindi film songs, and other visual/ audio media has affectively facilitated the course. In the given context, the paper further attempts to address shifts in the filmic techniques that have consistently regulated the production of such songs, revealing a spectrum of negotiations between and among the ‘body’, ‘performance’, and ‘frame’, with which the spectator becomes familiarized over a series of visual/ audio leaps that have taken place in the traditional media forms like that of television and in newer forms like the internet.
Highlights
With more than a decade of history and dozens of box office hits to celebrate, academic research on the ‘item songs’ of Bollywood cinema is often in danger of being dismissed on various accounts
Cinematic frame as well as in the sieve of the tabloid, situated at the very core of capitalistic conventions. It is this convergence of the very idea of the body in the ‘frame’ explicitly contained in the case of item songs that I find helpful for the reading of, and defence against or for the technological epistemology of contemporary Hindi popular cinema
What is most characteristic in this reading is that a tangible context of the cinematic frame is invoked to critique the visible sexual abundance and gluttony for filmic techniques relentlessly levied by a filmmaker, while at the same time observing item songs as a dramatic interjection in the passivity and ennui of the spectatorship
Summary
Song and dance sequences in popular Indian cinema have perpetually demonstrated affiliations with the use of lurid elements in costumes, music and lyrics that became rampant in the 1960s and 1970s with an increased sense of fashion, style, dance and thrill. Ranjani Mazumdar illustrates her meticulous work on the design of the cinematic frame that includes multiple urban spaces in the performance of lead heroines like Raveena Tandon in the song, ‘Sheher ki ladki’ (Rakshak, 1995) or Karisma Kapoor in the song, ‘Sona kitna sona he’ (Hero, 1997) shot in India and abroad Such instances in Hindi cinema have acquired responses from the academic circle, engaging in the discourse of voyeuristic pleasure, body and performance. I would argue that the spaces within the filmic text act like memorabilia—lavishly exhibited look-alike visual scrapes of the 1970s club spaces, reenergized into pubs and discotheques or a revisit to the stage/ public or dance situations of the 1950s and 1960s, fusing elements of folk and rural songs with a tang of lingo The readability of these textual spaces is foregrounded in the memory of the spectator; whereas, it is in the dissipation of the item girl’s body that spaces cease to be localized and seek territories outside the cinematic text. A flurry of these sexually rebellious bodies, displayed in various apparatuses of social reality, attempts to understand the meaning of this new form, thereby achieving a symbolic significance
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