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Filmic narrative: Text and transformation in Bombay cinema
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Filmic narrative: Text and transformation in Bombay cinema

V. Mishra
Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol.2(1), pp.9-43
1988
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Abstract

I would like to begin this paper on filmic narrative with an examination of the most important essay written on the relationship between the work of art as traditionally conceived, and the modern techniques of mechanical reproduction. The essay of course, Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Benjamin's aim here is to offer a non-mystified, a non-facist theory of art now made possible as a result of advances in technology. If in the process the theory also leads to an examination of the likely conditions under which the art of a classless society might be possible than all the better. But here that extension of his argument is of minor consequence because what Benjamin is interested in is the radical alteration which mechanical reproduction brings to the concept of the pristine, the hallowed, the canonised, the "auratic" orginal. The significance of this to a theory of mass culture - and more specifically to Bombay cinema - should become clearer as I proceed.

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