Amanda Weidman on Tamil Cinema

Event at Bryn Mawr College

Amanda Weidman 
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College

 “Female Voice-Body Relationships and the Acoustic Organization of Tamil Cinema, 1940-1960” 


Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Thomas Library 224
Bryn Mawr College
12:30-2pm

This talk will explore how relationships between the female voice and the female body were managed in South Indian Tamil-language cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, during the transition from singing actresses to the division of labor between professional playback singers who recorded their voices in the studio and actresses who appeared on screen. While the relationship between the female voice and the female body was managed through a combination of technological, discursive, and performative means in the world of South Indian classical music, it was simultaneously being negotiated in the context of cinema, where technological mediation provided expanded possibilities for representing voice-body relationships. Examining several Tamil films from this period, we can see a variety of ways in which the potentially problematic spectacle of a performing female body was presented.

Penn Colloquium: Xiaojue Wang

Xiaojue Wang (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
"Building Leisure and Everyday Life in Socialist Shanghai"

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

University of Pennsylvania

Abstract:
My talk considers socialist urban imaginations and reconstructions of Shanghai as represented in a small group of low-budget films in the late 1950s focusing on the everyday life of early socialist China among the vast bulk of war films and Cold War conspiracy films. It examines how ideological hegemony of the fledgling socialist state is projected onto the reconfiguration of urban space and urban landscape, and how the construction of socialist new person, and the conceptualization of work and leisure, and the production of new socialist spaces are tightly intricated in the cinema of the Seventeen Years Period.