146 Framework 54, No. 2, Fall 2013, pp. 146–151. Copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. Melodrama as Method Anupama Kapse A striking aspect of the early cinema archive in India is its partial and truncated nature. Other non-Western examples include Iran and Japan, which too have few or no surviving films from the early period. Despite this absence, scholars like Kaveh Askari 1 and Aaron Gerow 2 have ofered innovative and substantive accounts of early film culture in these countries in the face of the unavailability of the films themselves. Here the very lack of material acts as the driving force that spurs film historians to assess cinema’s place within a broader institutional framework encompassing a slew of interconnected concerns: modernity, capital, technology, global film traffic, colonialism, genre-formation, and archives of print and visual culture, notwithstanding the academy’s own late arrival into this scenario. We were, in other words, smitten by the fragment—frustration became the key motivation for so many of us. In my own research, which began nearly a hundred years ater the birth of cinema, I could no longer talk to a flesh and blood person. Like the films, there were few survivors. All that was let was a select group of films that had somehow escaped fires or being thrown into junkyards. My most reliable sources turned out to be autobiographies; as such, they presented informal versions of official history while being selective and somewhat unreliable as chronicles of the lives of famous people. 3 Could such quotidian recollections be incorporated into a heuristic mode of academic inquiry? As a scholar, I was faced with considerable anxiety about how to script such material into an acceptable academic framework. Nor did I want to arrange the small number of films in hand into yet another narrative of loss and lament. But because I thought I had nothing, I ended up with