Accidental Exposures: A Media History of Failure

Accidental Exposures: A Media History of Failure
Friday, March 1, 6:00pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway

In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "failures" as clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. By combining close analysis with extensive archival research and original interviews, Seeing Things reveals the spectral materialities informing the genre's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence.

Kartik Nair is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in the city of Philadelphia. His first book, Seeing Things, is about horror films in 1980s India, and is being published with University of California Press in 2024. Nair is one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and his writing has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The New Inquiry, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Following the talk, the author will be in conversation with Dr. Tejaswini Ganti (NYU)

Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Reception to follow.