Abstract

This article examines the ambivalent aesthetics of Urdu action heroine films directed and produced by the female star, Shamim Ara, and promoted in their day (1980s) as a cinema for women. Released under the Islamist military regime of Zia-ul-Haq, these films draw on action genres from elsewhere, thanks to rampant video trade/piracy. Historians dismiss such films as exploitative and escapist. A close look at the arts of depicting fights and choreographing female movement on screen reveals, instead, a tendency to arrest the exploitative sexualisation typical to action heroine cinema worldwide. I argue that these female-focused arts were pleasurable to a non-liberal Pakistani women’s culture riddled, at this time, with violent censorship. The female and male bodies on the Ara action screen interact in paradoxical ways both with the masculinist Pakistani state, and with global genres that fetishise the aggressive female body and sexual violence.

摘要

本文考察了由女明星沙米姆·阿拉（Shamim Ara）导演和制作，并在当日（1980年代）推广为女性电影院的乌尔都语动作女主角电影的矛盾之处。由于影片贸易/盗版猖ramp，这些电影是在齐亚阿勒哈克（Zia-ul-Haq）伊斯兰军事政权下发行的，借鉴了其他地区的动作类型。历史学家认为这类电影是剥削性的和逃避现实的。仔细观察一下在屏幕上描绘战斗和编排女性动作的艺术，可以发现一种趋势，那就是遏制全球动作女英雄电影中典型的剥削性行为。我认为，这些以女性为中心的艺术对于非自由的巴基斯坦女性文化而言是令人愉悦的，这时文化充斥着暴力的审查制度。