Abstract
Starting with the first exhibitions of film from 1897 onwards, cinema inserted itself into new kinds of energies erupting in the field of cultural consumption and production that were beginning to change the tenor of life of the Indian metropolis of Bombay in momentous ways. The new medium took advantage of the energies, creative and spectatorial, circulating through a new regime of urban spectacles, ranging from theater to public dancing and music to the modern circus, in a frenetically excitable media sphere of reportage and advertising, and in the field of literature. It also inserted itself into the restructuring of the physical basis of the city as town-planners responded to this upheaval by locating cultural production in new and more permanent locations. The arrival of the cinematograph in random and ever-changing locations of exhibition and spectating was soon restructured into the modern mass entertainment form of “cinema.” In doing so the medium shape-shifted a number of times through rapid changes in programing style and the genres and formats of films shown, mostly imported from abroad. Along the way we also start noticing the gradual but sure approach of films produced in Bombay into this vibrant scenario of film exhibition. Very soon it was to dominate film culture of Bombay.
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