Interpreting Cinema: Adaptations, Intertextualities, Art Movements is a collection of sixteen essays which explores the academic aspect of film studies. Film is a complex medium whose means of display, storage and survival are an extension into time and space. The act of interpretation must work with the multiple facets of film as a medium. Films are not only a cultural representation, but also a means of cultural production. Their appeal to large and mixed audiences provides an effective means of political criticism and raising social consciousness. Films become the unconscious of the nation as they reflect upon the power relations, political conditions and social disturbances using the individual psyche as a medium of expression. Another conceptual category important for film arts is the environmental space. Interaction between space and individual is an important part of the semiotics of the film and sends out signals towards its meaning. Beyond the film itself, the personal contexts of artists provide an additional means to connect the worlds of illusion and reality. The essays in this volume take up adaptations from fiction and drama both from within the same culture and across cultures and explore the relationships between cultures and mediums. There are individual essays on relationships, theoretical frameworks and art movements, reflecting the intimate connection between critical theory and filmmaking. This book will be of interest both to the lay reader and the serious researcher as it comments upon the significance of the film medium and opens out its mysteries. It goes on to provoke the imagination of the reader to enter into a dialogue with unexplored areas and recognise the facts that a film is more than mere entertainment. CONTENTS 1. Interpreting Cinema: A Retrospect and an Analysis 2. Travelling Memories: Between Word and Image 3. Theatre into Film: Adaptations and Cultural Formations 4. Birthing the ‘New’? Intertextuality, Grafting, Recycling: Text–Image–Text Journeys 5. Refraction or Parallel Narrative?: The Imaging of Bedi’s Ek Chadar Maili Si 6. Histories of Violence: Little Narratives Countering Master Narratives 7. Art and Power Dynamics: Mirza Ghalib and Shatranj Ke Khilari 8. Constructing the Nation through the Semiotics of Difference 9. Deepa Mehta’s ‘Elements’ Trilogy: Exploring the Nation’s Past 10. Body as Text: Women Transgressors and Hindi Cinema 11. Reclaiming the Body: The Gender of Creativity 12. Urbanscapes, Shifting Cultures and the Film Narrative 13. Fathers and Daughters: An Enigmatic Bond 14. Surrealism in an Anonymous City: Raj Kapoor’s Jagte Raho 15. Value as Integrator in Modernity: Re-viewing Feminist Theory in Dor 16. Exteriorising the Self: Film Autobiographies