Raddi Infrastructure: Collecting Film Memorabilia in Pakistan: An Interview with Guddu Khan of Guddu’s Film Archive

Abstract

This interview with Guddu Khan of Guddu’s Film Archive was conducted in October 2015, concurrent with the first major public exhibition of Guddu Khan’s memorabilia collection in Karachi, and was translated from Urdu by Abeera Arif-Bashir. An introductory essay prefaces this interview and explores some of the methodological implications of the ways in which Guddu re-contextualizes both the objects he collects and the audience-consumer for which they were initially produced. Despite a rich and vibrant “golden-age” of film production that flourished from the 1960s to the early 1980s, the circulation and dissemination of cinema in contemporary Pakistan is defined by a socio-cultural climate that is hostile to filmmaking as a system of production and film as an object of mass consumption. In spite of this, Guddu Khan shares his small apartment in Karachi with an unparalleled collection of artifacts relating to the Pakistani film industry, a collection he has amassed in parallel with the deterioration of the industry that has become interwoven with his own personal biography.