The Department of Cinema and Media Studies Presents, as Part of the Marva West Tan Lecture Series:
“Thinking Through an Emergency: Gendered Mediawork in Indian Documentary Film”
Sangita Gopal
Associate Professor
University of Oregon
February 20, 2025 | 4:00 pm | Cobb 307
Reception to follow in Cobb 310
About the Lecture
Professor Gopal will focus on two films by Indian filmmakers – Deepa Dhanraj’s What Happened to this City (1986) and Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) to elaborate a certain tendency in women’s mediawork in India that she is calling Emergent Filmmakin, where a filmmaker is compelled by unexpected events—an emergency—to collect footage without any clear outcome in mind. Gendered mediawork comprises in thinking through this data. In Dhanraj, this labor is mainly focused on distribution—or how the film makes its way through the world and gathers publics—while for Kapadia (working in a very different media environment), the focus is on a production process that works on and through this footage. Professor Gopal thinks of feminist filmmaking as not primarily premised on identity and representation, but rather as a practice that thinks politically—in order to anatomize power, reflect on technology, foreground process, and imagine how we might be otherwise.
About the Speaker
Sangita Gopal is Director of the Center for the Women and Society at the University of Oregon and an associate professor of Cinema at University of Oregon. She is author of Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and coeditor of Intermedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen (Routledge, 2012), and of Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Film Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). She has completed a book on feminist mediawork in India in the 1970s entitled Mixed Media: Film, Feminism and Gendered Labor and beginning work on a monograph on the careers of James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Jhabvala entitled Transnational Film Production and the Social Network. Her recent articles have appeared in Feminist Media History, Bioscope, Cultural Critique, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.