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Dear Film-philosophers, Please come and join us to hear Professor Neepa Majumdar of University of Pittsburgh talking on "Audio Cultures and the Transition to Sound in Indian Cinema" at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, 6pm Friday 30 October. Using film excerpts and contemporaneous extra-filmic sources, this talk will offer some ways of approaching a history of the transition to sound in Indian cinema. Ads for sound recording and projection equipment, sound technicians’ columns, as well as reports by and about salesmen-technicians, such as the Americans Wilford Deming Jr. and C. Willman, will offer insight into debates and ideas about audio technologies and sonic cultures circulating in 1930s India. Alongside these extra-textual materials, the talk will also discuss voice, music, sound effects, and audio cultures as represented in feature films ranging from the 1930s Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936), Kunku (V. Santaram, 1937), and Street Singer (Phani Majumdar, 1938) to the 1950s Do Bigha Zamin (Bimal Roy, 1953) and Footpath (Zia Sarhady, 1953). Since many of the audio debates and practices of the 1930s centered on the problem of noise in sound recording and projection, the talk will approach the transition to sound in terms of a spectrum of noise and meaning through which film sound was understood. Neepa Majumdar is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include star studies, film sound, South Asian early cinema, documentary film, and questions of film history and historiography. To attend this event please register at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bimi-presents-professor-neepa-majumdar-for-the-annual-university-of-pittsburgh-lecture-tickets-18536243403 Michael Temple, Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image -- To manage your subscription or unsubscribe from the Film-Philosophy list, please visit: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy.html -- Journal: http://www.film-philosophy.com/ Conference: http://www.film-philosophy.com/conference/ --