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Singh, Sunny (2023) Farah Khan: cinephilia, nostalgia and melancholia. In: Women filmmakers in contemporary Hindi cinema: looking through their gaze. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 111-135. ISBN 9783031102325
Although the first woman directed a film within a year of the invention of cinema, women directors remain a minority in cinema, both in India and abroad. The woman-directed, big-budget blockbuster film intended for general audiences remains an even a rarer beast. As such Farah Khan stands out for the four films (so far) ascribed to her direction for being not only creating big budget (for India), big grossing, big star films, but also for a professional trajectory that encompasses choreography, script writing, production and direction spanning nearly three decades. Given her long and varied career trajectory, this chapter chooses to focus only on Khan’s four feature films, examining her explicit intertextual evocations of a golden age of the big budget, glitzy, multi-starrer that in many ways has come to define “Bollywood.”
Through close readings of Khan’s feature films, this chapter examines the roles played by three key elements of her oeuvre: cinephilia, nostalgia and a deepening melancholia that underpins her signature style of dizzying, glossy cinema. These three elements cannot be de-linked from Khan’s gender or her religiously minoritised identity. Finally, the chapter deploys an intersectional understanding of identity, marginalisation and power to examine her oeuvre as not only informed by her cinephilia and an individuated nostalgia but also an expression of wider socio-cultural-political anxieties.
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