A FLY IN THE CURRY: INDEPENDENT DOCUMENTARY FILM IN INDIA

This is an extraordinary book. It will set new standards for bringing together place form and context in cinema studies. It accomplishes what few studies of a modern visual genre even attempt much less achieve. This book looks at how independent Indian documentary film reworks the relationship between film-makers their narratives their subjects and their audience challenging the dominant idea of documentary as a discourse of the real. Based on close textual analysis conversations with film-makers and drawing on Breitrose’s cinema-verite film-maker as a ‘fly in the soup’ this work explores the place of documentary within the Indian public sphere.