Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
intimate only temporarily in concentrated pockets of the city’s
housing spectrum.
The idea of the #scattered_domus transforms the city into a single
domestic space where toilets, dining and intimacy are all outsourced
to the available infrastructure. The home eventually becomes
the city itself.
In Lust Stories (Kashyap, Akhtar, Banerjee & Johar, 2018), the segment
directed by Karan Johar shows us how the typical Bombay
home houses a joint family. And the newly-married couple doesn’t
necessarily obtain the intimacy that they would expect when
starting a new life together. Rather, the bride typically shares
space with the groom’s extended family. This becomes even more
challenging when the houses are smaller in the denser areas of
the city.
When the dwelling is an integral part of the film, the #political
discourse also tends to be. The new #slum_architecture was
inextricably tied to politics in the city. Films don’t tell us what
the newspapers do. But Kaala (Ranjith, 2018), a film featuring
the Tamil superstar Rajinikanth, talks extensively about how the
slum dwellers of Bombay constantly struggle with a navigation
problem within the political field; one that their day-to-day existence
is based on. The film goes on to ostentatiously criticise the
top-down approach to affordable housing in the city.
Looking broadly at the parameters identified, Bombay cinema
presents itself as an assortment of thematically varied audio-visual
resources. The parameters can be grouped into spatial and
socio-economic tags. In order to organise our archival material,
the following tags can be utilised to better classify the footage.
There might be #economic factors such as the livelihoods of the
characters, often the central synopsis of the film. #environmental
factors like housing typologies and housing interiors that can but
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