I have recently completed my PhD thesis entitled Cut-Pieces: Obscenity and the Cinema in Bangladesh,

which is an ethnography of the Bangladesh film industry. This thesis analyses the controversy over ‘obscenity’ in the Bangladesh film industry. Since the early 1990s, the national film industry of Bangladesh has seen a strong increase in the production of action films that have uncertified material of a sexually explicit or violent nature inserted intoitsreels. Thismaterial is known as ‘cut-pieces’ and is generally considered to be obscene and vulgar (oshlil in Bengali). To investigate this phenomenon, I tracked the entire life-cycle of a single Bangladeshi romantic action film.This film had a number of cut-pieces and its production and consumption practices were mainly given form by these cut-pieces.

In this thesis, I argue that the cut-piece is the key to understanding the issue of obscenity in the film industry of Bangladesh . In answering the question why the cut-piece has become the main cinematic device in Bangladeshi action films, I show that the cut-piece is firstly a means to produce marketable cinema in a rapidly transforming media landscape. Secondly, the cut-peice is a cultural form that allows degraded material to oscillate between public presence and absence and thus form a focal point for public anxieties and fantasies. Simultaneously, the cut-pieces display these anxieties as a consumable spectacle. Through this oscillation, the cut-piece becomes a focal point for social controversy as well as a means by which the fantasies and anxieties that plague society can become visualised.

The thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning 18 months. This consisted of (participant) observation, formal and non-formal interviews and questionnaires undertaken within the various branches of the industry, ranging from sound technicians and cameramen to actresses and scriptwriters. Archive work was facilitated by the Bangladesh Film Archive. Although a large part of the work was carried out at the ‘Bangladesh Film Development Corporation’ in Dhaka, this was supplemented by shorter research trips to Gazipur, Jessore, Khulna, Feni, Cox’s Bazar, Bagherhat, Lalmonirhat, Joypurhat, Rongpur, Satkhira and Bhurungamari. The thesis that will be written on the basis of this work will take the form of an ethnographic monograph.

The project is supervised by Prof. Dr. WillemvanSchendel and Prof. Dr. Birgit Meyer and takes place within the context of Prof. Meyer’s NWO-Pionier project “Modern mass media, religion and the imagination of communities. Postcolonial trajectories in West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and India”.

The Mysterious Whereabouts of the Cut-pieces: Dodging the Film Censors in Bangladesh