Aesthetics of Space in Indian Cinema

This issue is an intervention into the dynamic history of film studies as it pertains to Indian cinema. Cinema is a quintessential location for exploring notions of “practiced place” as elaborated by Certeau, among others. Contributors to this issue demonstrate how the imagination of geographic or conceptual closure of spatial imagination is an ideological operation. The conflict between realism and melodrama, often performatively staged in cinema, is also a conflict over the mode of imagining spaces as bound and unbound. The issue in its totality contributes to a reassessment of the dynamic present of Indian cinema by foregrounding vantage points and articulations that are often waylaid in the increasingly popular “Bollywood model” of film studies.