Description

International film production studies often considers the importance of location shooting.The popular “woods” suffix appended to various film industries: Bollywood, Nollywood, and Kollywood frames a kind of imagined location of practices dispersed across different places. While location can become part of a region’s creative capital, it can also stand in for the nation and link to imperatives that position the national within global. Since tourism ties into the auratic assumptions about location and a perceived irreproducible distinctiveness, international film producers have been drawn to location shooting because unique local geographies provide the requisite authenticity to anchor a film’s narrative. On the other hand, the transposable mutability of place: Vancouver for New York, Dubai for Mumbai, means that location is now integrated into broader policy and economic frameworks. This talk considers Hollywood’s production of place, focusing on American cinema’s real and imagined engagement with India. Professor Govil will discuss how geographies of production narrativize place across histories of practice.

Nitin Govil is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is the co-author of Global Hollywood
(2001) and Global Hollywood 2 (2005). Other work has been published in over twenty journals and anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. His new book, “Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay”, will be out early next year. His new project is called “Out of Alignment: Bombay Film and the Cold War”.