Abstract:
        The startling phenomenon of the hologram used by Narendra Modifor his campaign in the Indian General Elections of 2014, an avowedly virtual form that uses a physical apparatus to reach audiences, is one ofthe intriguing features of the contemporary. More recently, the hologram has acquired more personalized form, with Maharashtrian Chief MinisterDevendra Fadnavis appearing in hologram form through a mobile app in the campaign for the recent Maharashtra civic polls. The thematic focus of thistalk is the political uses of film and an emergent post-filmic archive. Oneof the key questions the lecture addresses is how filmic and post-filmic practices are used to generate a sense of political immediacy and presence,a more general one is how to think of such media objects as an archive withdistinctive resources for historiography. In the longer history, the newsreel, the short film and the radio wereobviously key media forms for the presentation of the political. To thisend, I explore how films or post-cinema media objects are composed, to look for areas of uncertainty and excess, in filmic images and in discoursesabout their making, circulation and reception. I do this by looking at`stock’ films that were made to be used as archive footage for newsreels,shorts, and so on. Secondly, I will be considering films that use stock footage analytically, to reflect upon different types of media practicesand the audiences they address and constitute. Finally, I consider the new,ever proliferating archives produced by YouTube and other such video upload sites, and how these are put together with actual distribution and deliveryof media in contemporary politics, taking the case of the hologram, and the discourses and media artefacts through which an account of its affects canbe diagnosed.

About the Speaker:
         Ravi Vasudevan is Professor at the Centre for theStudy of Developing Societies (CSDS, New Delhi). His work on cinemaexplores issues in film, social history, politics, and contemporary mediatransformation. His doctoral work was on Indian nationalist politics of the 1930s at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and on film history at the Universityof East Anglia.From 2000 onwards Vasudevan has been involved in runningSarai, the CSDS media and urban studies research programme. His current research focus includes the way film use was dispersed from the site of the cinema into a variety of practical uses and the reception of videotechnologies from the 1980s. He has held fellowships at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies, Universityof London, Princeton and Cambridge. He edited *Making Meaning in IndianCinema* (OUP, 2000), a pioneering anthology of Film Studies focussing on Indian cinema and is the author of *The Melodramatic Public: Film Form andSpectatorship in Indian Cinema*. He is on the editorial board of the journal *Screen* and is one of the founder editorsof the journal *Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies.*