Reviews

Mehta & Area produced Lahore's first Daughters of Today, an adaptation of Rollin S. Sturgeon's Daughters of Today (1924). Its photo from Willard Library is available online.

Though we do not have details of the story by Mehta and Arya, Sturgeon focuses on Mabel Vandergrift who moves from the country to the city and enrolls in an upscale college. She starts to hang around with a "fast" crowd, and one night at a party a young man picks her for his "conquest". She fends him off, but when he is later found dead she is charged with his murder. Her boyfriend from back home hears about her troubles and comes to the city to clear her name and find the real killer (imdb).

The Lahori version must have focused on modern women as well, covering a story of indiscretion, disaster and awakening ... a startling romance of youth, beauty and triumphant love. It must have been a happy ending film, the awakening being a plausible theme for the local audience (Review courtesy: Film Museum Society Lahore).

1894 FIRST FILM

Chinese Laundry (or the Pursuit of Hop Lee by an irate policeman). (1894). Edison Kinetoscope Film. Directors: William K.L. Dickson, William Heise. Cast: Robetta, Doretto.

The title appears in the Maguire and Baucus catalog of 1897, where it is described as the "Pursuit of Hop Lee by an irate policeman", an old vaudeville act. Maguire and Baucus were the London agents for the Kinetoscope.

While "Chinese Laundry" is their first silent film, William Heise first filmed/Takes/Shots include "Monkey Shines, No. 1 in 1890 and William K.L. Dickson's "Newark Athlete" in 1891.

Reference: Iris Barry, Eileen Bowser, Gary Carey, Alistair Cooke, Richard Griffith, Arthur Knight, & Donald Richie. (n. d.). Silent Films. NY: Museum of Modern Art and the United States Information Agency.

BeDevil (1993) addresses the marginalization of Aboriginal Australians in the events, symbolism, and media hype surrounding the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988. Tracey Moffatt challenges the racial stereotypes by gearing a political process of reform and self-recognition though her postmodernist 'identity search'-driven work aiming at appropriation of hegemonic spectacle. BeDevil disrupts the hegemony of the pure original canon that excluded Aboriginal Australians from the mainstream. This sort of exclusion practice is a known phenomenon worldwide, more so happens in the post-colonial Third World countries like Pakistan and India as both exclude their ethnic minorities from the mainstream media. The author echoes back to Moffatt's stories of bedeviling experiences with tales of similar issues around race, gender, and normality from Islamic Republic of Pakistan, wherein post-Independence immigrants are constantly struggling for appropriation and redefinition of their identities. The Pakistan born children of miscegenation are considered immigrants by descent despite the facts concerning Islamic origins, two nations' theory, migration, and over 60 years residency. The author shares the mutually bedeviling experiences of 'othering' and a struggle with the notions of shared social conscience and histories between children of miscegenation in Australia and Pakistan in the context of the Australian trilogy.