Immortal tale or nightmare? Dr Kotnis between art and exploitation

摘要

This paper analyzes the overlapping and contradictory transnational taste cultures addressed by the 1946 Indian film, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani, which became re-edited as an American exploitation film, Nightmare in Red China in the 1950s. A biopic featuring an Indian doctor who traveled to China as part of a medical team, the film offers a case study in multiple textual, institutional, and audience formations as we follow its transformation from middlebrow, canonical Indian film to lowbrow US exploitation film via a brief and unsuccessful detour as a highbrow international art film. While suggesting the broader implications of the possibility of other national cinema classics lurking in the bowels of exploitation films, the paper also argues that this film's secret history is one of failed negotiations and translations that centered around incompatible norms of realism, cultural representation, spectacle, and political ideology.