Dr. Amrita Goswami (PhD)

Jawaharlal Nehru University, Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, PhD Student

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After my Masters in Social Work from TISS, Mumbai, I worked with PSI, an NGO working with people with HIV/AIDS where I worked on the Red Light District Project. After a stint of 2 years with PSI, I joined the MPhil program in Planning and Development in IIT Bombay, Mumbai, and my dissertation explored the queer spaces in Mumbai to understand at what point these spaces are autonomous and when they are exclusionary. Before starting my PhD in Cinema Studies, I worked in the market research and advertising industry in India. My PhD is on the corporatized Hindi film industry where I try to understand the new structures of the studio system that determine production, distribution and circulation of Hindi films within and outside India. My research is an ethnography of the industry where I have spent time on shoot locations and production house offices conducting interviews and observing personnels from different divisions of film making. I was awarded the PhD in March, 2020, having successfully defended my thesis in February, 2020, and I am currently working in content curation and development in the OTT platform - MX Player, holding the designation of Commissioning Editor for Hindi language web shows.
Supervisors: PhD Advisor - Prof. Ira Bhaskar (School of Arts and Aesthetics), JNU and MPhil Advisor - Prof. D Parthasarathy (Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences), IIT Boimbay
Phone: +91 8860610506
Address: Mumbai, Maharashtra

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‘New Bollywood’ and the emergence of a ‘Production House’ culture

South Asian Popular Culture, 2016

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'New Bollywood' and the emergence of a 'Production House' culture The 'New Bollywood' moment

This article focuses on the current phase in the Hindi Film Industry in Bombay which is character... more This article focuses on the current phase in the Hindi Film Industry in Bombay which is characterized by a new corporate logic coming into play since 2000 that looks at a lm as a product, and then goes about packaging it, branding it and presenting it to a predetermined audience. This shift is characteristic of the processes of the mainstream lm industry with the onset of corporate-run Production Houses (It is a conscious decision on my part to use the term 'Production House' and not Studios.) that came about with the transition of the Hindi lm industry from an unorganized industry to that of a corporatized body after being accorded Industry status in 1998 ('Film Accorded Industry Status', Business Line, October 19, 2000 http://www.indiaserver.com/businessline/2000/10/19/stories/141918re.htm). I am using the term 'Production House/s' despite the fact that lm companies use the term Studio in their nomenclature, because unlike the Studios in the early Indian cinema landscape, these are multinational corporations that have an entirely dierent logic of lm production and labour. This logic is what I attempt to discuss in this article. The methodology I have used for arriving at my understanding of how this Production House culture works is informed by ethnographic techniques of qualitative interviews with people working in the Hindi Film Industry in dierent capacities, participant observation on locations and sets, and using the technique of observing a day-in-the-life of an industry professional at work. In this article, I have located my arguments within the area of Film Industry studies. Since Hollywood forms the best analogy for mainstream cinemas in India, I have looked at the work on the Hollywood industry, the best known of which is by Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (xvi–xvii) who describe classical Hollywood cinema as 'a distinct artistic and economic phenomenon' (xvi–xvii) and have attempted to show how 'the concept of a mode of lm practice can historicize textual analysis and connect the history of lm style to the history of the motion picture industry' (xvii). Here, I would like to draw the reader's attention to the commodity nature of Hindi lms by exploring the process that is involved in turning

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Dr. Amrita Goswami (PhD)

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