A discourse on veiling and unveiling was implicated in changing notions of the body in nineteenth century India, prominent amongst which was the place of the female nude. Introduced by European artists and taught at the British-run academic art schools in India, the nude was also displayed in the houses and palaces of the elite as a symbol of good taste. This chapter argues that this idea of the nude – as the body shorn of all clothing – was premised upon Enlightenment ideas of the ‘naked truth’ that assumed the naked body as ‘natural’ and prior to representation. In the Indian context, however, as many authors have noted, it was the adorned body that was regarded as auspicious. This chapter evaluates how the female body becomes the site of an inordinate erotic investment in nineteenth-century Indian pictorial practice, premised upon exactly such a mechanism of veiling and unveiling, providing us with some historical perspective in recent debates on nudity in Indian painting.

Countering the predominantly literary analysis of Parsi theatre, this chapter reassesses theatre as the site of many experiments with visual technologies as the proscenium stage introduced a fixed grammar of the curtain into the fluid spaces of premodern performance. Framed like a painting, the stage introduced illusionist painting, directional lighting and lavish costumes to present stories with verisimilitude, enticing viewers into its world. Exploring links between Parsi theatre and Ravi Varma’s paintings, the chapter discusses melodrama as an alternative aesthetic mode that bound viewers and performers. Finally, it proposes limits to the gaze of darshan as a visual trope in analyses of theatre and mythological imagery, arguing that innovative optics of theatre and painting were influenced by and in conversation with technologies of the spectacle within imperial networks.

As a symbol of opaque darkness, the mysterious subterranean caves of Elephanta haunted the imagination of writers and painters ranging from John Ruskin to Flaubert and were notably memorialised in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. This chapter examines the recruitment of optical devices like the camera obscura and the magic lantern, aimed at solving the caves’ mysteries, suggesting that these instead exaggerated the ghostly character of the caves, undermining the claims of a rational vision in apprehending their complex iconography and architecture, going on to feed a fantastical visual archive of the caves (and, by extension, the Indian landscape) in German cinema of the early twentieth century.

In the late 1960s, Kaprow embarked on a fresh conceptualisation of the Happening as a fusion of radical pedagogy and sociology, which could act an innovative educational tool. Despite Kaprow’s oft-cited ambivalence toward photography, this went hand in hand with a new receptiveness to the medium, with performances incorporating the act of taking photographs as a way of generating knowledge and facilitating interaction. These experiments, which were shaped by sociological writings on education and nonverbal communication, together with conceptual photography, received their fullest treatment in Project Other Ways, a pedagogic collaboration with the educator Herbert Kohl in Berkeley between 1968 and 1969. While Project Other Ways has been treated as an outlier in Kaprow’s practice, Chapter 1 establishes its connections with the artist’s longstanding investment in art education, sociology and communications theory, and with the broader transformation of the Happening during the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Chapter 2 analyses Marta Minujín’s increasingly countercultural attitude to communication after Three Country Happening, turning to the artist’s subsequent sociological media performances: Circuit (Super Heterodyne) (1967) and Minucode (1968). It reads these works as extended sociability studies, which used feedback to address the power imbalances of cultural capital, the pressures of Cold War soft diplomacy, and the experiences of exile and alienation. The chapter grounds Minujín’s deployment and critique of social science methodologies in the analytical reception of the Happening in Argentina and the dramatic rise of sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis in the country. It shows how the artist’s fascination with sociability, socialisation and cultural capital, and the media’s role in their consolidation, influenced her immersion in the counterculture, and her desire to undermine the disciplinary effects of sociology and psychology by inciting improvisatory relations – notably in her deeply idiosyncratic, provocative New York and Washington, DC Happenings of the early 1970s.

This chapter maps the evolution of Eric Serra's compositional style over the span of his collaboration with Luc Besson. It seeks to mount an argument, by example, for more consideration to be taken of the contribution a long-term composer-director relationship makes to the oeuvre of an auteur. The chapter takes each of Besson's films in turn, noting both the key elements that make Serra's style unique and tracking developments in his technique as he evolves from a composer of pop scores into a writer of full-blown orchestral film music. It seeks to relate the music to image and narrative in order to suggest something of what Serra brings to Besson's films. The music for Le Dernier combat is modest in terms of instrumentation, built around the core of a funk group augmented by exotic percussion. Many of the principles defining Le Dernier combat's score are carried forward into Subway's.

Many film critics, in France and within the international film scene, share the conviction that Luc Besson is one of the most Americanised European filmmakers of his generation, a typical byproduct of Hollywood's pervasive influence over nation-state cinemas. This reputation has accompanied Besson for most of his career; and indeed, for his detractors, it constitutes a major point of critique. Besson's independent attitude vis-à-vis both the French and the American film contexts has concretised in the film production and distribution company Europa Corp. A studio entirely based in France, located on Besson's estate properties in Paris and Normandy, and financed through the reinvestment of box-office revenues from the films that Besson directs and produces, Europa hardly registers as a 'French comeback'. In her book Luc Besson, Susan Hayward analyses Besson's films 'in context,' stressing the filmmaker's alterity with respect to the French lineage of state- and television-supported authorial cinema.

The 1930s was a period when the mass media began to develop into the forms that we are familiar with today. This chapter traces the growth of cinema as a mode of mass entertainment, beginning with the early picture palaces and the 'super cinema' developments in the early 1930s. The audience was attracted to watching films along with a newsreel and a cartoon which gave them a respite from the grim reality of life, and the major cinema circuits were anxious to encourage greater attendance amongst the middle classes. The chapter discusses the legislative and other government interventions, notably the Cinematograph Films Act 1927, and highlights the specific concerns regarding the morally corrupting influence of cinema and its effects. It also documents the establishment of the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films and the debates about the role and function of the cinema as a leisure activity.