The trope of mobility central to the socio-political and cultural geography of Kerala is engaged with by exploring select Malayalam films from the sub genre popularly known as New Generation Films. The variegated representations of migration in these films, increasingly evident since the second decade of the 21st century is studied through an analysis of Anjali Menon’s “Bangalore Days” (2014) and Rajiv Ravi’s “Kammattipadam” (2016). These films capture movements on two accounts- the kinetic processes that dovetails images with sounds, creating narratives that instigates a flux of ideas and identities therein and how it connives at a geo-political involvement ascertaining physical movements accounted for by dislocations, relocations and displacements mediated by the discourses of urbanization, globalization and transnationalism. Even when engaging with an apparent homogenous identity - the Malayalam speaking populace, this regional film industry foregrounds the polemics surrounding categories such as the homeless, nomads, refugees, and migrants, to name a few. Instigated by the narratives of neo-liberalization and internal globalization, this paradox is but inevitable. Means of articulation of the contours of being and existence becomes the linchpin here and its proclivity towards liminality is approached through Bill Ashcroft’s conceptualization of “Transnation.”

Landscape is complex meaning that is always the center of attention in arts and cinema and emergence of artistic expression. From classical to contemporary cinemas, architecture and urban themes has a variety of attractions for filmmakers. Classic Indian cinema is more relevant to daily life and Director was only in the roll of witness of events and reality in urban scenes and had no struggle to perform at urban pictures. This cinema is still popular. But in the process of modernization affected by global developments, other approaches formed in Indian cinema. In the modern period, Indian cinema is not only indifferent to the city and the place scale of the film is more extensive and the cities became main port in story structure. here major part of scenes taken in outer space and place characters of films such as film`s geography become important So that if you remove the geography of film, becomes incomplete and unclear. Cinemas in this approach, have belongs to a particular urban location and a conceptual view of the surrounding elements. They are real or dreamy. Today Cinema of India in terms of the place interpretation has not fixed approach and generally transition from the stereotype and entering the modern period.This study is Fundamental research with qualitative _ interpretation methods. Information required by this article has been collected through field observations, literature documents and authentic films. With presume fundamental relationship between cinema and the city, and dramatic relationship between urban space and cinema, the results of place study in Indian cinema can help create a fields for understanding the contemporary landscape and make evolving landscape.

In the theoretical conceptualization of contemporary space, cinema not only focuses on story telling but also provides a window to the cultural and traditional practices of the place and people. The armamentarium of the transitions of Tamil cinema after the 1970’s to date has shown an upward swing in the conscious use of sense of place as part of the visual narrative. This article studies the anatomy of place as portrayed in the Tamil film Madras (2014) against the backdrop of the reality and ethos of the slums of North Madras. The Wall – the main protagonist in the film and the power and value given to it, is the fulcrum on which the sense of place is established. This article takes the North Madras community’s sense of place as a window to the politics of dominant ideology and materialism infused with morality, as articulated in the film.

For the earliest attempts in Malayalam cinema seeking to evolve a poetic aesthetic, the paradoxical relation toward urban modernity that emerged among the middle class by the middle of the twentieth century—defined by antagonism as well as fascination—operated as the axis around which new spectatorial relations could be maneuvered. This article takes up for discussion two Malayalam films from the mid-1950s—Newspaper Boy (dir. P. Ramadas, 1955) and Rarichan enna powran (Citizen Rarichan, dir. P. Bhaskaran, 1956)—as cinematic experiments in conceiving the urban space from two influential ideological positions, and as attempts in adapting to modernist idioms of international cinema. Modalities of imagining the urban space, the author argues, attained crucial historical significance in aesthetics and politics: it enabled the cultural producers to aesthetically situate the films within global cultures of cinema, thus invoking and molding the contemplative viewer; politically, these films mark the earliest attempts to conceive the region's relation to modernity through the grids of imagining the urban.

This paper looks at the manner in which the city of Hyderabad, the capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and production centre of the Telugu film industry, has been represented in the recent commercial hit *Okkadu* (Gunasekhar, 2003). The film is thematically interesting in that it re-stages the country versus city in contemporary terms. More importantly, it follows the late 1990s trend in the film industry to recreate entire cityscapes within the studio, ensuring that location shooting in busy city streets and neighbourhoods merely returns us to the grandeur of lavish and ‘realistic’ studio sets. *Okkadu* goes a step further by reconstructing Hyderabad’s most recognizable monument, the four hundred year old Charminar, in addition to its obviously imaginary residential neighbourhood (Charminar is actually located in congested commercial area). This paper looks at how and why the city of Hyderabad, especially its older parts for which Charminar is a metonym, is rendered into a fantasy space in the film. The paper outlines the history of this mode of representing the city in Telugu cinema and argues that its significance lies in the tendency to de-localize the city. The criminalization of the city’s older inhabitants, who are marked by either religion (Islam) or their ‘non-standard’ dialect of Telugu often accompanies this move. In the processes any claims that they might have on the city are de-legitimized.

This paper analyzes contemporary, popular Tamil films set in Madurai with respect to space and caste. These films actualize region as a cinematic imaginary through its authenticity markers - caste/ist practices explicitly, which earlier films constructed as a “trope”. The paper uses the concept of Heterotopias to analyse the recurrence of spectacle spaces in the construction of Madurai, and the production of caste in contemporary films. In this pursuit, it interrogates the implications of such spatial discourses.

This article offers an overview of the exhibition and distribution sectors in Kerala between the late 1920s and the 1940s, and the economic and cultural considerations behind the initiatives to set up production centers within this region by the late 1940s. The incipient industry identified the " family social " as a convenient format to negotiate with the industrial and aesthetic terms set by South Indian cinema, mainly based in Madras, and the cultural demands placed on it by linguistic constituencies and elite patronage in the 1950s. The industrial constraints of small budgets and a narrow linguistic market necessitated an aesthetic that could cater to a socially and regionally mixed audience. Strategies of adapting existing popular genres like mythologicals, and subordinating these to the overarching narrative structure privileging an aesthetic of contemporaneity, enabled the early studio films to negotiate commercial and cultural pressures. Jeevithanouka (The Boat of Life; Vembu, 1951) is discussed as an instance where elements from popular mythologicals and stage performances were appropriated to privilege rationalist values. In the scholarship on histories of early cinema produced in regional industries in India there is often a direct relation made between " what is shown in the film " and " what was happening in the region when the film was being made. " While this dominant approach is limiting in several respects to studies of cinema in general, it is severely inadequate to understand the commercial filmmaking practices of the 1940s and the 1950s in regional industries. The dominant approach is not attentive to the creative engagements through which early commercial cinema in many regions devised signifying practices by borrowing generic elements from film cultures locally and across the world to conjure up new meanings, affects, and energies. One of the focuses of this article is to pay attention to the creative strategies adopted by the incipient commercial cinema in Malayalam to respond to the emerging cultural ethos and demands placed on it as a cultural institution. In the case of South India, linguistic markets were not consolidated until the early 1960s, and film entrepreneurs worked within the possibilities and constraints of often unpredictable markets. They were also engaged in the wider territorial networks of production and circulation stretching beyond the boundaries of specific linguistic regions. Hence, the recurring themes, the dominant aesthetic form and the Article BioScope 4(1) 31–49

This paper is an exploration of cinematic memory as a resource for remembering large-scale Keralan migration to the Gulf since the late 1960s. The south Indian state of Kerala, which predominantly speaks Malayalam, is a major contributor to the migrant labour force in the Gulf region for the last five decades. However, until recently, the migrant figured in the public discourse of Kerala as an economic agent alone. There has been increasing instances of memorialising the Gulf in the Malayalam public sphere since the beginning of the 2000s which brings to light the subjective aspects of the Gulf migration. However, what is lost in these accounts is the simultaneity and interlinked nature of the two places. Cinema, on the other hand, offers resources to inscribe the mutuality of the two places in the collective memory of Kerala. Invoking Pierre Nora's concept of places of memory, the paper looks at cinematic renditions of 'Dubai' as one such site of memory in the present when the image of Dubai and the profile of Keralan migrant has undergone a shift. Taking the example of one Malayalam film, Pathemari (Salim Ahamed, 2015), and tracing its cinematic genealogy, this paper analyses the ways in which 'Dubai' is remembered and how this remembrance inscribes the Gulf as part of the collective memory of Kerala. The paper identifies the persistence of filmed space, intertextuality, and the archivality of the star body as the modes in which cinematic memory achieves this collective memorialisation. The mutuality between Kerala and Dubai, offered by cinematic memory, allows it to be an act of affective citizenship on the part of the migrants, i.e. embodied and sensorial acts of claiming the universal right to have rights.