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The Kaččā and the Pakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2020

Timothy P. A. Cooper
Timothy P. A. Cooper*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University College London
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

For many city dwellers in Pakistan the distant memory of outdoor cinemas in their ancestral villages rekindles the thrill of first contact with film exhibition. This paper considers attempts made in colonial British India and postcolonial Pakistan to understand, wield, and benefit from the staging of such memorable and affective filmic events. In its cultivation of “cinema-minded” subjects, the British Empire commissioned studies of audiences and their reactions to film exhibition in hopes of managing the unruly morality and materiality of the cinematic apparatus. After Partition and the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan, similar studies continued, evincing a residual strategy of elicited contact. The elicitation of film contact aimed at the exertion and commandment of the event of film exhibition for the purposes of knowing their constituent subjects at a moment of malleability. Yet the Empire's struggle with the perceived problems of “Muslim tastes” and audience members’ ambivalence over rural screenings in post-Partition Pakistan calls for a reconsideration of the efficacy of these tactics. I argue that what complicated these encounters are affective responses that questioned the address, permissibility, and efficacy of film exhibition. In these tactics of elucidation, disenchantment, and denial, ruptures are refused and the new is dismissed as inoperable, incompatible, or impermissible.

Keywords

filmIslamPakistanmaterialityanthropologydisenchantmentpermissibilitymediamoralityinformality
Type
Taste, Territory and “the People”
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 262 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2020

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