The case of Pakistan's missing film archive

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• Dr Salma Siddique (Ludwig Maximilians-Universitat Munchen)
• Wednesday 13 November 2019, 17:00-18:00
• Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT.

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This talk will examine the missing national film archive of Pakistan against the politics of competing cultural memory. Sharing a common past yet existing in the shadows of the Indian film industry, cinema in Pakistan found itself in an unusual predicament after decolonization and Partition. While filmmaking was expected to carry the imprint of national difference, the intercultural context of colonial India bequeathed the industry its traditions and personnel. But Pakistan’s film quandary goes beyond that of difference and disavowal. It also constitutes a disinheritance: in the mid-1960s, the British Film Institute repatriated colonial Indian films entirely to India. If the absence of a national film archive of Pakistan severed the entangled film pasts of the two countries, it also foreclosed the systematic preservation of a postcolonial film culture. In the absence of a state archive, what has emerged in the country is a democratic archive consisting of independent collectors, magazine proprietors, and avid users. Using a term extracted from one of the archives, filmaria (film fever), I read in the popular film archives the contagious circumstances of intercultural cinema. It alerts us to a film contagion widespread in the subcontinental publics that thrives on filmgoing, cinematic resemblance, and embodied cultural memory, a condition caused by the displacements of Partition and the creation of national difference.

This talk is part of the Centre of South Asian Studies Seminars series.

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