We’re happy to announce the publication of BioScope vol. 15. no. 1.

This issue of BioScope features essays, interviews, and translations that focus on phantasmatic remediations of celebrities and media platforms, language and music. Ishani Dey explores an intriguing relay between cinema and TikTok.  She presents two case studies to illustrate the ways in which cell phones, social media apps, and diegetic film worlds triangulate to produce a new kind of star. The essay analyses a 2019 film, Bala, as an intertextual study of the phenomenon of TikTok stardom and its nostalgic dependence on Hindi film music. Dey then extends the intermedial feedback loop to study the case of a real-life person, Sonali Phogat, whose TikTok virality led to ambitions of a political career. The remediation of TikTok into cinema and vice versa, comes full circle in this innovative study. Ravinder Singh takes us back in time to an era before smartphones and considers another mode of real-reel stardom: the spectacular popularity of the militant revolutionary Bhagat Singh who was hanged to death by the British colonial government in 1931. The essay focuses on a 1954 biopic, now considered lost, titled Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh, directed by Jagdish Gautam and starring Prem Adib. The key point of interest here is the controversy that erupted during the film’s production and subsequent censor certification. Several parties converged on the film text to contest ideas of historical accuracy, the line between fiction and reality, and the ‘proper’ posthumous treatment of a political personage. Of special interest will be the many exhortations in a newly-independent India for the state to boldly occupy the place of the gatekeeper of national history, the ultimate arbiter of who has a claim to said history, its representation and dissemination. The Archive section revisits one of the early ambitions of BioScope – to publish primary sources in translation. Moving beyond South Asian languages, we present a text in German—an excerpt from the memoirs of the Czech-German screenwriter and critic, Willy Haas, who migrated to Bombay in the 1930s. Translated by Xan Holt, the excerpt offers a rare glimpse into the professional networks that sustained the eastward migration of Jewish exiles during Hitler’s fascist takeover of Europe. Along the way we get a textured view of screenwriting techniques and logics during the early phase of Bombay’s talkie transition. The Fieldwork section features a long interview with the intrepid, but enigmatic, ‘Hamraaz’, known to Hindi-Urdu film song enthusiasts as a master of compilation lists. Isabel Huacuja Alonso interviews him across Lucknow and Kanpur to probe the connections between film fandom and film memory, the fluid travels of film songs across medium and time, from the radio to the internet into an embodied present. The Book Reviews section showcases three exciting new works: Amanda Weidman’s Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India, reviewed by Pavitra Sundar; Anugyan Nag and Spandan Bhattacharya’s Tollygunge to Tollywood: The Bengali Film Industry Reimagined, reviewed by Soumik Pal; and Salma Siddique’s monograph Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940-1960,  reviewed by Anupama Arora. 

Editorial