The Department of Cinema and Media Studies Presents, as Part of the Marva West Tan Lecture Series:
“An Archive of Failures”
Kartik Nair
Assistant Professor, Film Studies
Temple University
March 28, 2024 | 4:00 PM | Cobb 307
Reception to follow in Cobb 310
About the Lecture
In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. In his new book, Kartik Nair reads the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Seeing Things argues that the "failures" of these films are clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. In this talk, Kartik Nair combines close analysis with extensive archival research and original interviews to reveal the spectral materialities informing the genre's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence.
About the Speaker
Kartik Nair is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in the city of Philadelphia. His first book, Seeing Things (University of California Press, 2024), is about horror films in 1980s India. Nair is one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and his writing has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The New Inquiry, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.