Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

Introduction Even though the fi lm industry of Pakistan has been a major producer of popular fi lms, especially since the late 1950s, a proper study of its cinema is still in its infancy. Apart from Mushtaq Gazdar’s study Pakistan Cinema 1947-1997, little in the way of interpretive and critical scholarship has been published.1 According to Gazdar, Pakistan is one of the top 10 movie producing countries worldwide — in terms of the number of fi lms produced — with an average of 80 fi lms per year till 1997 (Gazdar 1997: 1). It is thus likely to be one of the least studied fi lm industries, which is all the more surprising considering that fi lm analysis is potentially very useful in illuminating the dramatic transformations of Pakistani culture and society. Certainly, the watching of fi lms has continued to provide Pakistanis with a key leisure activity for decades, yet no critical analyses of fi lm semiotics, production, distribution, reception and spectatorship have been undertaken. There is also little work on television in Pakistan, despite its importance in the shaping of regional and national identities and its role in the rise of Pakistani consumer society.2 This article relies upon Gazdar’s overall narrative of the development of cinema, but also subjects a few fi lms to a more detailed formal examination with reference to a period of crisis in Pakistani society. The relationship between cinema and society is neither simply causal, mimetic nor refl ective. Rather, this relationship is overdetermined, with thematic evasions and temporal distanciations that do not allow for a simple mapping between political crisis and cinematic production. Moreover, the effects of brute facts on cinema, such as the loss of more than half of the country (by population) in 1971, cannot be discounted either.