Blog Buddy Research

Next weeks work:
*More research about the representations of women.
*How has the role of women / men changed in films.
*How has men’s roles in film changed and is Bollywood changing for the better or the worse?

This weeks findings:

Cinema is such an important industry and cultural influence in India that studies of films and audiences are almost irresistibly intriguing. It is valuable and interesting to get informed opinions about this field of life. Steve Derne's ethnographic study Movies, Masculinity, and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men's Film going in India is no exception....very enlightening and instructive.
Men in India are attracted to Hindi films partly because of their attraction to depictions of "modern" lifestyles. Derné argues that films help men handle their ambivalence about modernity by rooting their sense of "Indianness" in women's acceptance of traditional food habits, clothing, and gender subordination.
Derné considers the effects of films' eroticization of domination and submission on men's sexuality. The study provides ethnographic support for Mulvey's argument that film going prompts men to make women the object of a controlling look. Association with Indianness with limitations on women's movements, and by portraying men as rational and modern, and women as emotional and traditional. One of the first ethnographic studies of film going and one of the first to focus on mainstream male audiences, the book contributes to a rethinking of some key arguments in media studies. While media studies have rightly focused on how films prompt men to gaze at women, this study shows that films simultaneously encourage men to see themselves as the object of controlling looks. Derné exposes as one-sided the scholarly emphasis on how Indians value hierarchy and group guidance, asserting that Indian films instead celebrate individualism and love.