Nearly one billion people reside in slums around the globe, but how has this reality been depicted on the cinema screen? In Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums, Igor Krstić offers a polycentric, interdisciplinary approach to exploring how slums have been represented on film over the last 100 years, including such critical and commercial hits as Slumdog Millionaire and Cidade de Deus (City of God) as well as examples drawn from Bombay Cinema. While he would have welcomed further comment on film reception, Shannon Philip finds this a fascinating read that challenges a number of assumptions about our ‘planet of slums’

Philip, Shannon

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8/16/2016Book Review: Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet ofSlums by Igor Krstićblogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/08/16/book-review-slums-on-screen-world-cinema-and-the-planet-of-slums-by-igor-krstic/Nearly one billion people reside in slums around the globe, but how has this reality been depicted on the cinemascreen? In Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums , Igor Krstić offers a polycentric,interdisciplinary approach to exploring how slums have been represented on film over the last 100 years, includingsuch critical and commercial hits as Slumdog Millionaire and Cidade de Deus (City of God) as well as examplesdrawn from Bombay Cinema. While he would have welcomed further comment on film reception, Shannon Philipfinds this a fascinating read that challenges a number of assumptions about our ‘planet of slums’. Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums . Igor Krstić. Edinburgh University Press. 2016.  Find this book: The word ‘slum’ usually raises strong and emotive images. Yet few of us mayhave ever visited a slum, let alone lived in one. What, then, do we mean by‘slums’, and how do we understand them? From where are our opinions andthoughts about slums shaped? These are some of the key concerns that guideIgor Krstić’s detailed exploration of global slums and their visual representationsin cinema in Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums .Apart from quizzing the familiar yet mystified idea of the ‘slum’, the book makesfor an engaging read in forcing the reader to critically recount impressions ofslums in iconic films like Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) or PedroCosta’s ‘The Fontainhas Trilogy’ (1997-2006). This book skillfully provides adetailed and wide-ranging account of slum representation across films drawnfrom most continents and spanning a timeframe of over one hundred years.Analytically too, the book engages with a range of academic thought from thepolitics of urbanisation and globalisation to approaches drawn from cultural andfilm studies. Yet this immense breadth does not overwhelm or dilute thearguments because Krstić anchors his exploration of global slums and theirvisual representations in specific examples.I found Krstić’s methodological approach exciting as it challenges many conventional binaries. He uses apolycentric approach that breaks from the conventional European tradition of looking at films from the Global Southas the ‘other’ on the ‘peripheries’. Such an approach also allows him to legitimately choose films that do notobviously follow a teleological or historically linear framework. Rather, Krstić makes a strong and successful case forpresenting a wide sample of ‘world films’. Krstić’s polycentric approach also avoids demarcating arbitrary linesbetween local, national and regional cinema. Instead he engages with contemporary social science literature onglobalisation and cultural studies to demonstrate how these are forces in play with each other in a globalising world.Krstić therefore carefully avoids any attempts at a totalising grand theory and the book’s approach becomes trulyrelational.1/3Image Credit: Favela (eflon CC2.0)The first part of the book, ‘Global Currents’, lays out the general tendencies in world cinema along with specific well-contexualised and historicised case studies. This section starts from the 1890s and stretches all the way into the2000s. It covers the major trends that have shaped cinematic images in relation to slums, ranging from earlyphotographic styles of representation in Chapter Two; social documentary styles in Chapter Three; more‘narrativised documentary’ in Chapter Four; before arriving at the postmodern transformation in slum representationin the 1980s and 2000s as well as the most recent shift ‘back to the real’ in the ‘Digital Age’ in Chapter Six. All thesechapters use a descriptive scene or cinematic dialogue from films as the point of departure to explore case studiesthat contexualise the larger cinematic trends that the author writes about.These shifts are then grounded in the ‘local’ context in the second part of the book. Titled ‘Local Expression’, thesecond part of Krstić’s text, true to its polycentric approach, analyses the constant exchanges between the ‘local’and the ‘global’. In two chapters, ‘Favelas on Screen’ and ‘Bombay Cinema’, the author hones in on how slums havebeen depicted on screen in contemporary Brazilian and Indian cinema. To do so, Krstić uses the 2002 Brazilian filmCidade de Deus (City of God) and the global blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire from Mumbai to assess their criticalreception, aesthetic representations and contextual positionality. He looks at how the films are both ‘local’ and‘global’ at the same time, and how this process is reflected in the aesthetic visualisation of the cities and slums of Riode Janeiro and Mumbai respectively.Focusing on Krstić’s arguments about Mumbai, there is a careful exploration of both the Mumbai cinemascape andits corresponding urban reality in relation to slums to demonstrate ‘local expressions’ of ‘global currents’. Thechapter traces the trends in Bombay Cinema from India’s independence in 1947 to the beginning of the 1990s,when urban poverty came to gradually disappear as a topic of popular cinema (227).  This period in Indian cinemasaw the simultaneous emergence of ‘geo-televisual’ masalas rooted in ‘traditional family values’ whilst also valorisingWestern consumer culture; in these representations, slums and poverty do not fit but narratives about consumption,shopping and world-class cities dominate. The author demonstrates that this shift is also reflected in a move awayfrom the location-based filming of the 1970s, which by default featured the city space and its urban poverty, towardsmore studio settings in the 1990s, which allowed for more ‘decorative’ representations and imaginations. Interweaving these cinematic trends and sociological analysis, Krstić shows how these cinematic processes maponto the processes of social urbanisation that have changed the physical landscape of urban Mumbai (232).2/3These arguments are further nuanced by Krstić’s observation that it is not just that slums have started to appearless and less in Bombay Cinema, but also that certain other narratives about poverty and slums come to the fore.For example, Krstić explains how a new genre of gangster films from Mumbai has emerged that creates andsustains counternarratives of crisis, illegality, overcrowding and underdevelopment in the city (243).Apart from these arguments, Slumdog Millionaire is analysed for how the local articulations of global melodrama arerepresented, the embodiment of homelessness and street life and the significance of clocks displaying time in NewYork, London and Mumbai as comments on how cinema production and purpose have evolved. Krstić’s centralargument is that films now use a ‘hypermediated form of realism’, which reflects the evolution to the ‘Digital Age’outlined in the first part of the book (232). He makes it clear that Slumdog Millionaire and other such films do not‘represent’ the cities and slums they depict; rather, they point to how films have evolved as part of a ‘city of screens’(253) and the importance of this shift for film studies and sociologists studying films. He concludes that ‘cinema itselfis being transformed today too: it is becoming a presentational rather than a representational medium’, which‘acknowledges the presence of an embodied spectator’.As Krstić rightly explains, film studies has often studied film as an artistic language distinct from sociology, whichhas largely been concerned with empirical data on social phenomena. His attempt at tackling this dichotomy bylooking at both the sociological and aesthetic significance of slums in cinema offers important lessons to scholarsand disciplines on both fronts. For Krstić, a study about slums and their representations in cinema is not just anaesthetic exercise but is also a deeper political project: ‘when it comes to this topic one cannot isolate aesthetics forpolitical and ethical concerns; instead one needs to consider them as indissolubly entangled’ (2). Hence this bookmakes not just for a fascinating read, but also challenges some far too easily accepted and maintained binaries.However, as a visual anthropologist, I would have also enjoyed some comments on film reception to furthercomplicate our understandings of the ‘glocal’. Nonetheless, this book will be of great academic interest to scholarsand students of development studies, urban politics, film studies and visual anthropology as well as to avid film fans.Shannon Philip is a PhD student in the Oxford University Department of International Development. He works ongender, visual representations and urban politics in contemporary India. Shannon has spent twelve months living inIndia doing ethnographic fieldwork with young Indian men about their gendered identities and filmic heroes.Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of theLondon School of Economics.Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books3/3

Book review: slums on screen: world cinema and the planet of slums by Igor Krstić

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