Bombay Hustle: Film History as an Ecology of Energy Relations

Cinema is a powerful assemblage that activates people and things and sets them into motion. At the same time, a vast ecology of off-screen practices also participates in cinema’s dynamic logics. As an employer, cinema has the power to put bodies to work. The cine-ecology is at once energized and consumed by practices required to bring filmed images to a commercial screen. Running a camera motor, transporting imported raw stock, waiting for the next lighting set-up, and writing continuity, all depend on energy-intensive encounters between humans, electricity, celluloid, climate, paper, oil, and buildings. By tracking energy relations across the cine-ecology we not only see connections between the image and the labor that produces it, but we can also reconceive cinema’s relation to modernity with attention to the specificities of other places in other times, other bodies in other assemblages of power and practice.

Join Debashree Mukherjee of Columbia University for this talk, sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.