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Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht after Om Shanti Om

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Figurations in Indian Film

Abstract

How do we make sense of a situation in which a film industry turns its own workings into one of its primary narrative ingredients and begins to represent itself obsessively? Is this simply a matter of modernist self-realization, now cast in a mythic frame that springs from commercial cinema’s penchant for the grandiose, the spectacular, and the hyperbolic? Or is something more at stake in a particular industry’s on-screen and off-screen self-projections at this conjuncture, in its mediatized articulation of the mythic and the reflexive, and in its willful blurring of the so-called “presentational” and “representational” modes1 in the service of metafiguration?

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© 2013 Bhaskar Sarkar

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Sarkar, B. (2013). Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht after Om Shanti Om. In: Sen, M., Basu, A. (eds) Figurations in Indian Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349781_11

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