By Anika Grevstad
Could you briefly introduce yourself and your field of study?
I came here via Philadelphia and New York, but I grew up in India, in Calcutta, on the east coast of India. I worked in film and television production in Mumbai, the film capital of India, for a while. I am now a film and media studies scholar, and I study global media and how it relates to social movements, Indian cinema, global documentary film, experimental film, film festival cultures, among other areas of interest.
Do you have a favorite film?
I have so many – I don’t think I’ll be able to choose one! I grew up in between so many cinemas, Bollywood, Hollywood, but also independent/art cinema from around the world, that it is really hard to choose one film or one genre. But some of the films that really influenced me growing up were Indian films by the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who is known as one of the pioneers and key figures of Indian art cinema. He made some wonderful children’s films that I loved as a child, but he is best known for a series of three films known as The Apu Trilogy, which has been very influential for me as well.
You majored in English literature for your undergraduate degree – what made you decide that you wanted to study film and media?
I grew up in a family that has a few filmmakers, was very into the arts in general, so I was always interested in film and media. But I think I was always interested in stories, and different forms of storytelling. So while I started with literature, I was drawn to the art and craft of filmmaking as well. That is why I first started working in film production, trying to understand how films were constructed. It felt like a natural move. I guess it’s about finding different ways to tell stories.
What makes Indian cinema interesting to you?
That’s a good question. Indian cinema is very diverse; it’s not one thing, first of all. The most popular form of Indian cinema is Bollywood, which on a global scale immediately stands out as different from Hollywood. It’s one of largest film industries in the world; it’s very influential and very transnational, and it has a global audience. But it’s very distinct in its form from Hollywood. It’s never had the classical Hollywood dramatic structure; it’s always had stories and characters that suddenly break into song and dance, so it doesn’t follow the traditional realist conventions. It has a very melodramatic structure, and for a long time, critics dismissed that as backward and as not real quality cinema. But in recent years there’s been a turnaround, and critics have kind of started taking it seriously as a really powerful and distinctive national cinema. Hollywood has dominated film markets in many countries, but it’s never been able to do that in India, it’s not really been able to carve out a big market in India, though that’s changing a little bit. Nowadays, there’s actually a lot of co-productions and convergence between Hollywood and Bollywood as industries, but that’s a different story. So I was drawn by the vitality of Indian cinema, the way it navigates an immense amount of diversity, and also it’s really changing in this era of globalization, with new people experimenting with new forms. I am kind of interested in where it’s headed. There’s so much discord all over the world, and different kinds of film, I think, can play an interesting role in bringing ideas and narratives together from around the world.
What do you hope that you will bring to the academics at CC with your area of study?
CC has a strong and growing film and media program, and I hope to bring a little bit more of my global perspective on it. I am an anthropologist of film and media; I am interested in how people use and produce media and film, the ways in which cinema circulates, and the kinds of meanings different audiences make of it, so I want to contribute more of that perspective to CC. And I’m really excited that CC is all about collaboration and people collaborate between different departments, so I hope to explore some ideas along with feminist and gender studies, race and migration studies, and Asian Studies, of course, history and others as well I hope. I hope to share and exchange and develop ideas about global social movements and transnational cinema and documentary film, be inspired by other approaches and hopefully inspire some other people to make parallel connections.
Do you have any advice for students studying Asian Studies?
Broadly, I would say that Asia is this huge big continent. There’s so much to study so I would tell students to explore the diversity of it, but at the same time make connections. Try to think about the historical connectedness not just between Asia and different regions of the world, but also within different regions of Asia. I think Asian Studies needs to be studied more and there’s a lot of fascinating work to be done there. And especially if you want to study Asian media, that’s also a really interesting and diverse area: China, India, Hong Kong, K-pop and Korean cinema, there’s so much going on there. I would love to see more CC students exploring all of those, and more.
