Love, War, and Other Longings Essays on Cinema in Pakistan

Has there been a 'revival' of Pakistani cinema? Or can the very question be put to scrutiny? Can we think beyond a national cinema, and instead simply think with films to explore the fraught politics and aspirations of our times? Love, War & Other Longings brings together historians, anthropologists, artists, and film-makers to offer new lines of enquiry that probe the tensions between cinema's past and present, absences and the archive, seduction and respectability, class and consumption, as well as genre and censorship. At times experimental in form, the essays seek to draw readers into conversations that engage political theory and postcolonial history, and become part of ongoing writing, thinking, and the making of films in Pakistan and the global south more broadly.

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, associate professor of History, Brown University,Asad Ali, sociocultural anthropologist,

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is associate professor of History at Brown University, and works on twentieth century histories of decolonization, displacement, war, non-violence, the visual archive, and contemporary art. She is most well-known for her book The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (2007), and is presently completing a manuscript entitled The Ruin Archive: Art and War at the Ends of Empire, that interrogates colonial films and photographs from the north-west frontier for the writing of an anti-colonial history. She co-organized with Asad Ali the two Brown-Harvard Pakistani film festivals in 2014 and 2015.

Asad Ali is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work focuses on the relationship of the political and the religious, as mediated by language and law. He is particularly interested in rethinking the historical formation and contemporary possibilities of liberalism, secularism, and religion in postcolonial Pakistan. His current interests and projects include work on censorship and populist language of the Pakistan Peoples Party. Before becoming an anthropologist, he worked as a journalist and documentary film-maker, and then taught at Harvard for some years where he, along with Vazira Zamindar, organized the two Brown-Harvard Pakistani film festivals.

1. Introduction: A Longing for Film by Vazira Zamindar and Asad Ali
2. After the Interval by Fahad Naveed
3. The Ghost in the Projector: Pakistani New Cinema and its Hauntings by Meenu Gaur and Adnan Madani
4. Burnt Film Reels, Nishat Cinema, Karachi by Bani Abidi
5. The Zinda Bhaag Assemblage: Notes on Reflexivity and Form by Iftikhar Dadi
6. On Female Friendships and Anger by Kamran Asdar Ali
7. Ek Haseen Archive: Notes on Love and Longing in a Film Archive by Vazira Zamindar
8. A War Film of Our Own: Notes on Living and Dying in Reel Time by Vazira Zamindar
9. Engaging Manto: Film, Fiction, and History by Ayesha Jalal
10. Pissing Men, Dancing Women, and Censuring Oneself by Asad Ali
11. Afterword: The Uncanny, the Repressed and the Abject: The Haunting of Pakistani Cinema by Rachel Dwyer
Bibliography
Image Acknowledgements
Contributors
Index