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South Asian Gothic Haunted cultures, histories and media, University of Wales Press •

Home Is Where the Horror Is: Pakistani Films and Historical Trauma

There are two broad positions on the matter of representing historical trauma in cinema. On the one hand: that the experience of trauma is so unimaginable that it can never be fully captured. On the other: that a mass medium like film can facilitate a public process of catharsis by interpreting memories of violence and rupture. The genre of the Gothic, defined by the repeated evocation of the past, is appropriate to tackle psychic wounds, both individual and collective.
In this paper, I will analyse two Pakistani films made forty years apart – Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground) (2007) and a film that it copiously references, Khwaja Sarfraz’s Zinda Laash (Dracula in Pakistan) (1967) – and look at how the South Asian Gothic addresses historical trauma. In the case of postcolonial narratives , the Other remains a central feature, if not in direct relation to Empire then to its legacy. While it has inherited the aesthetics of its colonial ancestor, the European Gothic, one prominent aspect of the hermeneutics of the South Asian Gothic has to do with the shock and tremors of Partition – a literal Othering from the Self – that continue into the 21st century as congenital and constitutive features of the modern nation-states that it resulted in.
Proceedings from the Document Academy •

Photo Synthesis: The Expatriate Family Album as Historiography

I want to look at the expatriate family album as a site of history-writing.

Through an examination of three photographs from my childhood in West Asia, I try to think about the idea of historical space and time through the visual narratives available to me of my own family.

This essay will be an exploration of the way in which nostalgia for a personal past gets imbricated within the shared experience of a bygone cultural moment.

I am interested in how an encounter with visual material from private archives initiates memory work and how these traces from the past can be used to apprehend public history.
Studies in South Asian Film and Media •

Archeology of an experiment: The science-fiction cinema of Pramod Pati

The Films Division (FD) of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting went through a spurt of experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s that yielded a small but historically significant corpus of films with a unique vision. Pramod Pati was one of the most distinctive voices to have emerged among FD film-makers in this period. While his short films have traditionally been categorized as ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’, in this article I argue that they are also examples of proto science-fiction cinema and provide a flickering glimpse of a newly budding outer space imaginary in 1960s India. In making a case for Pati’s films to be regarded as proto sci-fi, this article analyses three short films, Explorer (1968a), Claxplosion (1968b) and Trip (1970) with respect to their formal features, imagery and sound. Through the use of nonlinearity, special effects and electronic sound, the films both challenge and affirm the ambitions of a postcolonial nation caught between its past and future. This article suggests that these films are representative of a peculiar moment in the history of Indian experimental cinema when the deployment of science-fictional tropes signalled a transforming mediascape being mobilized by the state into constructing ‘modern’ publics.