What is a Cine-Ecology? Scenes from Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City

“Filmmaking depends on a dense network of human and nonhuman energies,” writes Debashree Mukherjee as she explains the photographs in her recent book Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press and Penguin Random House, 2020). In the book, Mukherjee posits the idea of a cine-ecology, an understanding of Bombay cinema that extends beyond the narrow definition offered by words like "industry." The cine-ecology is made up of a network of energies—labour, technologies, sites, desires and materialities—that interact in complex and myriad ways to produce a multidimensional cinematic universe.

In this curated selection of images from the book, Mukherjee spotlights aspects of the cine-ecology relevant to the talkie transition of the 1920s–40s in erstwhile colonial Bombay. The photographs paint an evocative portrait of filmmaking at the time, locating it within the landscape of the city and the socio-economic infrastructures that comprise it.

To know more about the book Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, watch our two-part interview with Debashree Mukherjee here and here. 

All images and captions courtesy of Debashree Mukherjee.

Click on the image to view the album