Tag: The Indo-European Correspondence

The First Talkies: a Global Race

If you lie in bed at night staring at the ceiling wondering about things such as who invented talkies like I do, this video is for you. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t one person but a global evolution.

It gave me a chance to use a small bit of my Fulbright-Nehru research. This was not my primary research topic but a subplot I stumbled upon, so India makes a couple of guest appearances.

I enjoyed creating the opening animation using generative AI to create a thematically relevant image, then generative AI video to animate it. In later a portion, I used two old photos of the 1900 Paris Exposition and an Edison wax cylinder recording to make a brief film sequence using generative AI video and Adobe Premiere Pro to bring to life the moment when the auxeto-gramophone was blasted from atop the Eiffel Tower.

Original music by Ano Malee.

Rise, Roar, Revolt

I’m so happy to share that my article “Calcutta 1908: Apocalypse Now” has been published in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Democratic Communiqué as the featured critical commentary.

Can theatre and film help spark an armed revolt? I believe they can, and that they did, specifically Indian theatre artists and India’s first silent filmmakers, in the capital of British India in 1908, in response to the Partition of Bengal and the systemic sentencing of children to public floggings.

My article is, in my view, a timely exposé of crimes and human rights abuses committed by the British Empire that have largely gone unreported in the West, but which are increasingly coming to light in the news and in pop culture of late. I’m not condoning or condemning revolutionary violence. We all have our positions on that, usually on a case-by-case basis, and that’s okay. I’m eager to shine a light on this history.

I’m really excited to share this slice of my research as a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in India. It is, I daresay, in-depth, yet it is only one part of a much larger story I’ve written.   

Democratic Communiqué focuses on “cultural artifacts, media and imperialism, media’s relatedness to social movements,  and the power of media to convey varying versions of the same event simultaneously.”  It’s housed on the ScholarWorks server at Umass Amherst. 

You can find it at the link below. I hope you’ll check it out. 

Download the full pdf at https://doi.org/10.7275/9w1h-k362 .