Duration: 00:04:15; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 152.568; Saturation: 0.016; Lightness: 0.299; Volume: 0.286; Cuts per Minute: 49.969
Summary: Two glimpses of crime and the city, one located at the streets, and the other which mobilizes the idea of the city as an information network within a global contemporary in which time and space are completely reconfigured by technology.
Bombay
Dubai
Mobile Phones and the City in Company:
The gangster film has always provided us with a glimpse into the underbelly of the city. If noir films were located in the shadow cities, Ram Gopal Varma's Company looks at the global city, bound together by communication technologies. In Company, the ubiquitous presence of the mobile phone presents us with a dizzying sense of the contemporary global city and the information networks that sustains it.
Company traverses a very different landscape from some of the earlier gangster films such as Satya, where the focus has been on streets and alleyways. Films like Deewar portrayed the city as the ruins of modernity, but Company stages the city as a node in an elaborate network of financial flows.
Ranjani Mazumdar says that Company mounts an elaborate landscape that moves seamlessly from Bombay to Hong Kong, form Switzerland to Kenya. In Company space is fluid and almost virtual, producing the postmodern city of the contemporary gangster world.
Mobile phones
gangsters
global city
networked city
underworld
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