Film and Cinephilia in Pakistan: Beyond Life and Death

Abstract

This introductory article identifies some of the conceptual issues and themes worth considering in the pursuit of a broader and deeper knowledge about the cinema in Pakistan than currently exists. It does so with reference to several of the papers in this special issue and a number of recently published scholarly works on culture and politics in the Pakistani context. The article probes existing discourses on Pakistani film in a bid to clear the way for more nuanced conversations, asking: What is meant in precise terms when cinema’s “death” is spoken of and what are the implicit assumptions about the nature of cinematic “life” that flow from it? What, more fundamentally, is meant by “Pakistani cinema,” and what sorts of elisions and conflations result from its vague and polemical usage as a generic epithet encompassing film output from so vast and historically unstable an entity as Pakistan? A final set of questions centers around the term “industry.” Here again, defining and disentangling the terms of reference is a useful starting point for exploration of other units of analysis that may be appropriate for describing social realities and aesthetic forms than the clunky lexicon of life and death currently allows.