Coming of age in the time of video
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On hearing about the recent death of media magnate Nari Hira, I was reminded of the first time I heard that name as a child (briefly thinking it designated a company rather than a person) and of the wave of “video films" that Hira produced in the mid-to-late 1980s. These were quickly made, visually unambitious movies of varying quality that were shot, edited and distributed on video, and heavily promoted in his magazines like Stardust and Society.
They didn’t seem to fit any of the usual Hindi-film categories; indeed, one was unsure if they were even “cinema". The longest chapter in Ishita Tiwary’s book Video Culture in India: The Analog Era provides some backstory about these films, through a process of discovery by a much younger person who hadn’t lived through the period herself. Tiwary says she had no idea such video films existed, and a few people she spoke to didn’t remember them either—details were slowly uncovered.
“It is possible to imagine that the consumption of content in the private space of one’s home allowed middle-class women to become the primary spectators of these straight-to-video erotic thrillers," she proposes. “Video made possible a new imagination of the spectator as not just male." This might, with hindsight, seem a large claim, given how fleeting the videofilm interlude was (and also that satellite TV, with much more permissive content, was just a few years away). Yet, to someone who was a child in 1986-87, it feels plausible.
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