We’re happy to announce the publication of BioScope vol. 10. no. 1.

With the winds of authoritarianism sweeping across democracies in South Asia as elsewhere, the question of how to articulate the new social and political contexts in which we find ourselves is as urgent as ever. Censorship, surveillance and populism have taken on new, changed and sometimes spectacular forms which older vocabularies and modes of interpretation do not always appear to counter or even capture. How to speak of, and to, this moment is a challenge that faces scholars, activists and citizens alike. The original articles in this issue of BioScope do not appear to be particularly directed to an investigation of the current moment and all four are driven by practices of close reading. Nonetheless, each of these articles can be understood to investigate what the film makes sense in contexts of repression or elision. Together, their authors ask how cinema might express or make concretely present what is otherwise beyond the register of the articulable. They point to the narrative elements, generic forms, structural aspects, star texts, minor technologies or small media that provide different opportunities for recounting realities that are elided in mainstream or official accounts or that appear beyond expression

Editorial: Hidden Accounts
Ravi Vasudevan, Rosie Thomas, S. V. Srinivas, Debashree Mukherjee and Lotte Hoek

Articles

Agami (The Time Ahead, 1984), the First “Short Film” of Bangladesh: Toward a New Cinematic Aesthetic of Imaging Time and Nation)
Fahmida Akhter

The Islamic Subject of Home Cinema of Kerala
Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil

Evolution of Dada Uttam Kumar: Performing Masculinity and the Disillusioned Bhadralok Mahanayak in the 1970s’ Popular Melodramas
Smita Banerjee

Visions of Queer Anarchism: Gender, Desire, and Futurity in Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana
Syeda Momina Masood

Book Reviews

Book Review: Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram, India’s New Independent Cinema: The Rise of the Hybrid
Reviewed by Tupur Chatterjee

Book Review: Giulia Battaglia, Documentary Film in India: An Anthropological History
Reviewed by Deborah Matzner