A FLY IN THE CURRY: Independent Documentary Film in India

Description

This is an extraordinary book. It will set new standards for bringing together place, form and context in cinema studies. It accomplishes what few studies of a modern visual genre even attempt, much less achieve.

This book looks at how independent Indian documentary film reworks the relationship between film-makers, their narratives, their subjects and their audience, challenging the dominant idea of documentary as a discourse of the real. Based on close textual analysis, conversations with film-makers and drawing on Breitrose’s cinema-verite film-maker as a ‘fly in the soup’, this work explores the place of documentary within the Indian public sphere.

K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro are former Professors from the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. They are award-winning documentary filmmakers who have worked with community-based, collaborative films since the 1980s. They are also media teachers, researchers, and authors. This book has won a Special Mention for the Best Book on Cinema at the Indian National Film Awards, 2016. More at http://monteiro-jayasankar.com/