This volume is a carefully curated selection of recently published academic research, critical essays, translations, and interviews on Pakistani cinema. Indispensable for film enthusiasts, students, and scholars of cinema in Pakistan and beyond, it brings cutting edge works previously trapped behind paywalls together with neglected writings by figures such as Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Muhammad Hasan Askari. Certain to become a classic in the burgeoning field of South Asian film and media studies, its scope encompasses past and present complexities of filmmaking, distribution, and cinephilia in a country whose rich cinematic heritage is just beginning to be appreciated.

The book presents a rich collection of critical essays, ethnographic writings, memoirs, and reflections, portraying a well-rounded picture of cinema culture and historical change in Pakistan. The multiplicity of voices and approaches enhances the appeal of this collection, which is the first ever to delineate the diversity in the cinematic and extra-cinematic traditions of Pakistan, as well as in the histories of production, exhibition, and reception. The work also highlights aesthetic and affective politics in relation to nationalism; Islamization in policy and practice; the biopolitics of morality, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; and the phenomenology of film exhibition and urban formation. The book incorporates rarely seen nostalgia items, such as pictures of studio shootings, as well as of film actors, film scenes, posters, and lobby cards.

Has there been a 'revival' of Pakistani cinema? Or can the very question be put to scrutiny? Can we think beyond a national cinema, and instead simply think with films to explore the fraught politics and aspirations of our times? Love, War & Other Longings brings together historians, anthropologists, artists, and film-makers to offer new lines of enquiry that probe the tensions between cinema's past and present, absences and the archive, seduction and respectability, class and consumption, as well as genre and censorship. At times experimental in form, the essays seek to draw readers into conversations that engage political theory and postcolonial history, and become part of ongoing writing, thinking, and the making of films in Pakistan and the global south more broadly.

This title explores the increasing relevance of digital media in the consumption and analysis of film.

Filming the Line of Control charts out the history of the relationship between India and Pakistan as represented in cinema, especially in light of the improved political atmosphere between the two countries. It is geared towards arriving at a better understanding of one of the most crucial political and historical relationships in the continent, a relationship that has a key role to play in world-politics and in the shaping of world-history. Part of this exciting study is the documentation of popular responses to Indian films, from both within the two countries and among the Pakistani and Indian diaspora. The motive of this has been to locate and discuss aspects that link the two sensibilities — either in divergence or in their coming together. This book brings together scholars from across the globe, as also filmmakers and viewers on to a common platform to capture the dynamics of popular imagination. Reverberating with a unique inter-disciplinary alertness to cinematic, historical, cultural and sociological understanding, this study will interest readers throughout the world who have their eye on the burgeoning importance of the sub-continental players in the world-arena. It is a penetrating study of films that carries the thematic brunt of attempting to construct a history of Indo–Pakistan relations as reflected in cinema. This book directs our holistic attention to the unique confluence between history and film studies.

Over the past fifteen years, writer, producer and director Christopher Nolan has emerged from the margins of independent British cinema to become one of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood. From Following (1998) to Interstellar (2014), Christopher Nolan's films explore philosophical concerns by experimenting with nonlinear storytelling while also working within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Contextualizing and closely reading each of his films, this collection examines the director's play with memory, time, trauma, masculinity, and identity, and considers the function of music and video games and the effect of IMAX on his work.

This study explores artistic choices in cinema exhibition, focusing on film theaters, film festivals, and film archives and situating film-curating issues within an international context. Artistic and commercial film availability has increased overwhelmingly as a result of the digitization of the infrastructure of distribution and exhibition. The film trade's conventional structures are transforming and, in the digital age, supply and demand can meet without the intervention of traditional gatekeepers—everybody can be a film curator, in a passive or active way. This volume addresses three kinds of readers: those who want to become film curators, those who want to research the film-curating phenomenon, and those critical cinema visitors who seek to investigate the story behind the selection process of available films and the way to present them.

The advent of new screening practices and viewing habits in the twenty-first century has spurred a public debate over what it means to be a “cinephile.” In Anxious Cinephilia, Sarah Keller places these competing visions in historical and theoretical perspective, tracing how the love of movies intertwines with anxieties over the content and impermanence of cinematic images. Keller reframes the history of cinephilia from the earliest days of film through the French New Wave and into the streaming era, arguing that love and fear have shaped the cinematic experience from its earliest days. This anxious love for the cinema marks both institutional practices and personal experiences, from the curation of the moviegoing experience to the creation of community and identity through film festivals to posting on social media. Through a detailed analysis of films and film history, Keller examines how changes in cinema practice and spectatorship create anxiety even as they inspire nostalgia. Anxious Cinephilia offers a new theoretical approach to the relationship between spectator and cinema and reimagines the concept of cinephilia to embrace its diverse forms and its uncertain future.

This book, the first academic book on Pakistani documentary cinema, traces the development of activist filmmaking practices in Pakistan which have emerged as a response to the consequences of religious fundamentalism, extremism, and violation of human rights. Beginning with the period of General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization process (1977-88), it discusses a selection of representative documentary films that have critically addressed and documented the various key transformations, events, and developments that have shaped Pakistan’s socio-political, socio-economic, and cultural history. Such activist filmmaking practice in Pakistan is today an influential factor in addressing the politics, and negative and oppressive effects of the Islamization era, discriminatory laws, particularly gender-discriminatory Sharia laws, violation of human and citizen rights, authoritarianism, internal strife, the spread of religious fundamentalism, and the threat of Talibanization, and oppressive tribal customs and traditions. The contribution of Pakistani documentary filmmakers stands as a significant body of work that has served the cause of human rights, promoting awareness and social change in Pakistan, particularly regarding gender rights.