Abstract: This research talk will provide an opportunity to hear one of the world’s leading scholars of Indian cinema discuss their latest book, Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). To undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies in the field, Lalitha Gopalan’s publication provides a sustained engagement with several contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream that include Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja. Her work assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to various independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognisant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance.

Lalitha Gopalan is the author of Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (2002) and Bombay (2005). She is the editor of The Cinema of India (2010).