Experience of Modernity Ravi S Vasudevan This analysis of the popular Bombay cinema starts with certain formulations about the audio-visual in the age of mechanical reproduction, drawing upon insights about the importance of the reproducible image in constituting a new sense of the self The cinema's extended circulation of images afforded a framework of subjectivity that was intimately related to other mechanisms of extended imagining, and these formed the basis of a modern nationalist perception. Arguing against the idea that cinematic narration was engaged in a monolithic, unnuanced framing of this subjectivity, the author is concerned to understand the way mechanisms of narration turn back on the ostensible subject they construct to indicate the contradictory ways in which that subject is narrated. This analysis draws upon public discourses about the cinema to indicate the way reception was complicated by context.
