February 27, 2020

Debashree Mukherjee:

Between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman: An Actress Theorizes Exhaustion
SNF RDV
Reid Hall | 4, rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris
Free and open to the public

In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte (pron. Aap-tay) went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the Bombay film industry. In Should I Join the Movies? (1940), Apte highlighted the durational depletion of the body that is specific to acting work; a steady withering away of human capacities due to temporally accruing over-exertion on one hand, and under-use on the other.

In this talk, Debashree Mukherjee interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events – a strike and a book – and positions them as theory from the South that can help us rethink the meanings of gender, embodiment, labor, inequality, and human-machine relations in cinema. Thinking with Apte, we are compelled to acknowledge the materiality of the offscreen world of cine-work and to consider embodiment as the grounds for resistance.

Read more about Debashree Mukherjee.

UPCOMING EVENTS

NOVEMBER 29, 2023
Possible Lives
Maria Stepanova
Entre Nous
NOVEMBER 30, 2023
Rebellious Things
Mohamed Elshahed
SNF RDV
DECEMBER 5, 2023
“En-Chanté”: The World of Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand
part 3: Peau d’Âne
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