This project revisits the “golden era” of Bengali cinema to document a historical and topographic narrative of the diverse media infrastructures that formed the industry during the 1950s. Ravaged by the effects of Partition, the critical discourse pertaining to Bengali Cinema in the post-Partition period was that it had to be saved. Ironically, the word ‘save’ gained a contemporary currency with the organisation of Film Preservation and Restoration Workshop India (FPRWI) 2018, at Kolkata, that focussed on the need to save Bengali films. The word ‘save’ therefore teases pertinent questions that are integral to my research objective of mapping the circuit of travel of films of the era through the sites of film studios, cinema halls and film archives. What is the politics of saving Bengali cinema? This project thus explores the politics and context of the creation of cultural value around iconic films as well as figures of Bengali Cinema. This helps to delineate the rationale behind the construction of cultural heritage.

Amrita Biswas has been awarded the Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellowship by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for conducting research at ICON, Utrecht University, Netherlands. She is the recipient of the Wilhelm Bender Dissertation Award 2025 for excellence in research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (awarded by the VFF). She works as an editorial assistant for ‘Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television,’ published by Taylor & Francis in collaboration with the IAMHIST (International Association for Media and History). She worked as an Adjunct Lecturer at Goethe University, Frankfurt, from October 2024 to September 2025. She completed her PhD in the “Configurations of Film” graduate research training program at Goethe University, Frankfurt in February, 2025. She was awarded the Erasmus Plus fellowship for conducting research in the department of Cultural Anthropology at Gottingen University, Germany (2019-2020). She received grants from DAAD to conduct archival research at Margaret Herrick Library, U.S.A (2023). She has also received research and travel grants from the VFF (2022, 2023, 2024). Her work has been published by Intellect, Routledge, Meson Press, Open Library of Humanities, and the National Film Archive (Czech Republic).

biswas[at]tfm.uni-frankfurt.de

amritabiswas0411[at]gmail.com