Print Works

There were three publications that came out of the larger project. The first one was dates.sites – a timeline composition that worked as the primary resource for many other works within the project. The second was Project Cinema City – an anthology that attempted to collate the entire project – its findings, productions, related readings and annotations, and most importantly its flamboyant creativity and incisive queries. The third publication was a dossier on the establishments of cinema theatre as a primary site for urban public culture in the 20th century. It was developed as a campaign material to save the single screen cinema theatres in the city.

dates.sites Bombay / Mumbai

by Madhusree Dutta; designed by Shilpa Gupta and Madhusree Dutta; Tulika Books, Delhi / Columbia University Press, 240 pages, 2012
ISBN: 9788189487997

dates.sites presents two parallel timelines, in text and graphics, and by cross-connecting the dates and the sites, of the city of Bombay / Mumbai in the 20th century - anchored to its most adored public institution: cinema. The book is written, designed and imaged with snippets, fractions, scraps of found texts, found stories, found knowledge, found signage etc. The disparate strands of the past are edited and loosely threaded together following some associative and playful impulses that belong to the contemporary time.
The book states less and insinuates more.

Project Cinema City

Edited by Madhusree Dutta, Kaushik Bhaumik & Rohan Shivkumar; designed by Sherna Dastur; Tulika Books, Delhi / Columbia University Press, 560 pages, 2013
ISBN 9789382381228

This volume presents cinema as a manufacturing enterprise that alters through shifts in materials, technologies, labor inflows, distribution territories, demographic patterns and development policies, and the city as a phenomenon that continuously evolves through the interface between the lived reality and the reality perceived in cinema. The main aim of this volume is to convey the richness of documentation made through the parent project – a richness that, hopefully, will also convey to the reader the scale and diversity, and the crisis and creativity of the relationship between cinema and city in Bombay. In its free mixing of images, graphics, field notes, information and commentary, the book, quite like the parent project, maintains a work-in-progress status.

Foreworded by Arjun Appadurai, the contributors to the book include filmmakers, visual artists, designers, architects, photographers, historians and other social scientists.

Adjudged Best Printed Book of the year at Publishing Next Industry Award 2014

Cinema Theatres in Bombay Mumbai: A Dossier

Edited by Paroma Sadhana, designed by Afrah Shafiq, UDRI & Majlis publication, 2015
ISBN 978-93-81444-07-8 (For informal circulation only)

The growth of the city of Bombay (and of some other 20th century Asian cities too) – can be traced, literally, by the sites of the cinema theatres. The infrastructure of cinema (studios and theatres) followed the growth of the urban population and sometimes even speculated on the expansion of the urban territory by occupying and acquiring yet-to-be urbanised lands. The rise and decline of the cinema theatres is the story of consolidation and disintegration of urban public culture and its relationship with the urban development policies in the 20th century. This dossier collates various readings of the phenomenon through maps and records of land use, architectural drawings, discursive texts, documentation of key cinema theatres and a complete list of all theatres built and demolished in Bombay / Mumbai through the century.

Cinema City Lived (for exhibition only)

Edited by Rohan Shivkumar, Designed by Abhinav Shaw, KRVIA and Majlis publication, 2010

Houses, then neighbourhoods, change shape in response to their inhabitants’ struggle. Grills get extended, mezzanines grow like mushrooms, technology is domesticated. The edit software on the personal computer is a thin wall away from the household mixer-grinder. A small space under the clothes-line is cordoned off for ‘writing’.

This is a compilation of spatial negotiations that happens in the daily life of the cinema city. Video has multiplied the forms of the moving image, and digital technology has altered the need for and the very idea of space vis a vis this medium. The number of aspirants to the cinema city keeps growing and so does the volume of image productions. How does the spatial layout and structured forms in the city adjust to these changes?

A group of architecture students look at the production spaces of cinema as well as the dwellings of the cinema citizens.