With every passing year, there is a mounting evidence of the inextricable links between what was once the cinema and a host of other media forms. This situation presents an interesting set of challenges to students of contemporary cinema, often requiring them to mobilise a range of methodologies and to step out of the comfort zones of language, form and textuality. Today, the film historian too is not exempt from the need to engage the dispersal of the moving image and of a shared and stable universe of cultural forms. So Bazin’s question ‘what is cinema?’ remains central to a cinema studies that is intermedial and interdisiplinary.

The historical evolution of cinema and its leakage beyond traditional spaces of exhibition has been a recurring theme on the pages of BioScope. Our latest issue covers different periods, topics, regions and objects. From archival research to close reading of filmic and other texts and ethnography, the authors draw on very different methodologies for their analysis to offer valuable insights into established as well as emerging areas of study. These include the history of the film script, production cultures of our film industries, the intersections of old and new technologies of the moving image, mobility of images and accrual of meaning in circulation, cross-media flows as well the growing interface between regimes of spectatorship.

Editorial
Ravi S. Vasudevan, Rosie Thomas, S.V. Srinivas, Debashree Mukherjee, Lotte Hoek

Articles

Writing from the Margins of Media: Screenwriting Practice and Discourse During the First Indian Talkies
Rakesh Sengupta