Project Cinema City is an anthology of text and image essays,
documentation transcripts, maps, graphics, annotated artworks, and films
on various configurations of the cinema and the city of Bombay/Mumbai.
This volume has evolved out of and is the culmination, in a sense, of
Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices - an
expansive project initiated by Majlis, a center for multidisciplinary
art initiatives in Mumbai, and developed over five years, from 2008 to
2012. The contributors to the book include filmmakers, visual artists,
designers, architects, photographers, historians and other social
scientists.
Project Cinema City is primarily a set of inquiries into the labor,
imagination, desire, access, spaces, locations, iconization,
materiality, languages, moving peoples, viewing conventions, and hidden
processes that inform the cinemas the city makes, and also the cities
its cinema produces. The inquiries are based on the hypothesis that
cinema in the terrain of cinema city is as much everyday practice as it
is a part of a speculative desirescape. Hence this volume presents
cinema as a manufacturing enterprise that alters through shifts in
materials, technologies, labor inflow, distribution territories,
demographic patterns and development policies, and the city as a
phenomenon that continuously evolves through the interface between lived
reality and the reality perceived in cinema. The main aim of this volume
is to convey the richness of documentation made through the parent
project - a richness that, hopefully, will also convey to the reader the
scale and diversity, and the crisis and creativity of the relationship
between cinema and city in Bombay. In its free mixing of images,
graphics, field notes, information and commentary, the book, quite like
the parent project, maintains a work-in-progress status.
The book is divided into three sections. The first, Mapping
Imaginations: Terrains, Locations, deals with the spatiality,
materiality and habitability of the cinema city. The second section,
Performing Labour: Bodies, Network, is about the act of producing and
the labor that produces - skill, work, character, aspiration, dissent,
transgression, duplication, ancillaries - and the myriad ways in which
they populate the cinema city. With the death of manufacturing
industries in Bombay, the service and entertainment sectors have become
the mainstay of aspiration-induced migration to the city. The third
section, titled Viewing Limits: Narratives, Technologies, deals with the
multiple niches and varied strategies through which cinema is arranged
and rearranged in the everyday life of the city and its citizens.
