Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable

Even before Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable, the study of the cinema in Pakistan owed much to the work of Iftikhar Dadi. Cinephiles, budding researchers and students of this once long-neglected field could look to Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi’s Urdu Film Series (1994/ 2009). Made up of photographs of television screens broadcasting Urdu-language Pakistani films, the series depicted the mutual exchanges between cultural memory and electronic media. One could also look to Iftikhar Dadi’s work as a curator and writer on contemporary art in his 2012 edited volume, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (with Hammad Nasar), or his influential role in the Lahore Biennale, and the artistic productions and collaborations this work documented and inspired. Then, one could turn to his writing on Pakistani film which, until the present book, appeared in important volumes on contemporary Pakistan or pioneering journals on screen studies in South Asia. As his first book-length foray into the subject, Dadi’s focus is Urdu-language films made in Pakistan between 1956 and 1969, a time he calls the ‘long sixties’. This roughly correlated with the rule of Ayub Khan, whose military rule ushered in a period of both industrial and infrastructural stability and political and social upheaval. In an earlier study of Pakistani films from a similar era, Dadi warned against mapping the relations between cinema and society, a relationship he called neither ‘mimetic nor reflective’. Wisely eschewing this foundational assumption that animates many global film histories, Lahore Cinema ends up being a very idiosyncratic text, an exercise in multi-scale comparison that looks not to linear trajectories of production and reception but to repertoires that emerge from, return to, or cling to the city of Lahore. There is an implicit qualitative difference that Dadi appears to be making between so-called Lollywood cinema, as both a space of industrial production