![]() ![]() Unlike other productions of this kind around the continent, however, Ethiopian video films are firstly released in the large cinema theatres that characterize Addis Ababa’s urban landscape, and later circulate via VCDs, in Ethiopia, and in internet, throughout the diaspora. Films are shot in digital format, are independently funded and commercially-driven, use Amharic as main language and target local and diasporic audiences. Since the early 2000s, Ethiopia has witnessed the rapid growth of a local digital film industry whose economic model is similar to the one adopted by other industries of this kind emerged in African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. I claim that the concept of national cinema is a fictional construct precariously built upon the denial of the regional cinematic sphere. By unveiling these cinematic links, the previously unquestioned history of quintessential national cinema is reassessed. It is a new attempt to reconstruct East Asian film history. agencies helped to initiate the first postwar inter-Asian film studio network. While providing financial aids to film industries and supporting the cultural elite, U.S. I argue that the emergence of these motion picture studios was the offspring of the Cold War and American hegemony. ![]() More specifically, my aim is to elucidate the extent to which postwar film studios aspired to rationalize and industrialize the system of mass-production by way of co-producing, expanding the market, and co-hosting film festivals. This dissertation explores the ways in which postwar East Asian cinema was shaped by the practice of transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and still existing colonial states at the height of Cold War cultural politics. The fast-eroding nationalist consensus between state and capital which, I hope to show, ultimately led to the paradigmatic shifts in the film industry could not in retrospect be contained either by rigorous policymaking, mere censoring of film content or relentless taxing, yet this is what the state unsuccessfully tried to do. In short, what the Congress-coalition missed in its attempt to size up the film industry to the austere ideals of Nehruvian socialism was that this indigenous capital was itself shifting alliances, tapping into newer reserves of popular energy, desire and affect as the 60s were ending. Secondly, and tied to the first reason, is the failure of the Congress-led state to recognize or match up to the dynamics of indigenous capital, which was effectively the determinant economic force within the film industry. One is the failure of the political class which made up the post-Independence state to understand the very nature of cinema: the range of affects it generates, its play with desire. While the factors responsible for such a state of affairs are too many to enlist, the two main ones can be, at the risk of simplification, be declared outright. Briefly, what I show in the dissertation is that the project of reform of the Bombay film industry was always already delayed, missing the mark or slipping by. This period is bracketed off by 1939, the year of the All India Motion Picture Congress, and 1969, the year the Indian New Wave burst onto the scene. ![]() This dissertation tracks three decades of the relationship between the Bombay film industry and the Indian state as it relates to the question of infrastructural reform. ![]()
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