course description: popular bombay cinema 1947-present
Cinema from India is one of the most popularly viewed in the world. Boasting thousands of films in dozens of languages, India’s films have been watched by audiences in the Soviet Union, Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, and more recently, have been winning over audiences in the U.S. The cinema of India recently celebrated its centenary. As we shall see, India’s cinema has been transnational and global from its inception. Surveying a century of Indian cinema is outside the scope of a semester long course. Our investigation will begin with the ‘golden age’ of Bombay’s Hindi-Urdu language popular cinema of the 1940s/1950s and take us to the present.
Indian film history is a complex endeavor, given that analyses of popular cinema have long been undertaken by the state (i.e., in the form of censorship and regulation), cultural theorists and the literate elite (i.e., film critics, gossip columnists), as well as intelligentsia from the global North (i.e., film critics, journalists, from the "West" such as the U.K. and the U.S.) We must be aware of the criteria we use to evaluate non-Western cinemas and popular cinemas, since such criteria are the product of specific political, class, and social contexts. This course suggests that we must take the “popular” seriously, and equips us with the vocabularies necessary for investigating the “popular” in non-Western cultural arenas. How, for instance, do we think about the differences and similarities between Hollywood and Indian cinema when we deploy terms like melodrama and realism, when we discuss gender and sexuality, consider class, assess genre, or encounter the term “Bollywood”? Rather than aiming for generalizations and simple binaries, this course encourages us to think about specific contexts and grounded analyses when we encounter film.
Since the cosmopolitan center of Bombay is home to the Hindi-Urdu film industry, the city continues to play a pivotal role in determining the world of Indian cinema. This course will be as much about the social and political history of the city of Bombay, as it is about the vicissitudes of the modern Indian nation-state. It will introduce students to: 1) Reading filmic narratives in terms of what they represent of collective desires, fantasies, and identities; and 2) Analyses which take seriously the fact of the films’ materiality—their modes of circulation, distribution, and consumption and what these convey about the relationship between urban and global life-worlds. Cultural politics are as important as, and indeed intertwined with, the political economy of films. Films are fascinating lens through which to encounter the cultures, classes, regions, genders, religions, and politics of India, but they are also a way to understand change, and continuity over time, when assessing flows of capital, labor, crime, and migration. In the interest of its centrality to Hindi-Urdu cinema, we must not overlook the role of the city of Bombay (its many diverse peoples) in manufacturing national desires.
This course also encourages us to reflect on our own practices of spectatorship and the cultures which produce our tastes. Drawing on and in conversation with the readings, it will be important for us to develop a critical vocabulary for how we respond to the film screenings. How do we categorize or evaluate them? What registers of our pleasure, boredom, distaste, laughter, or appreciation do they awaken?
Seminar participants are not expected to have prior knowledge of Indian cinema, but will be expected to do a fair amount of course reading to orient themselves to the history as well as current events in Indian politics, society, and culture.
Indian film history is a complex endeavor, given that analyses of popular cinema have long been undertaken by the state (i.e., in the form of censorship and regulation), cultural theorists and the literate elite (i.e., film critics, gossip columnists), as well as intelligentsia from the global North (i.e., film critics, journalists, from the "West" such as the U.K. and the U.S.) We must be aware of the criteria we use to evaluate non-Western cinemas and popular cinemas, since such criteria are the product of specific political, class, and social contexts. This course suggests that we must take the “popular” seriously, and equips us with the vocabularies necessary for investigating the “popular” in non-Western cultural arenas. How, for instance, do we think about the differences and similarities between Hollywood and Indian cinema when we deploy terms like melodrama and realism, when we discuss gender and sexuality, consider class, assess genre, or encounter the term “Bollywood”? Rather than aiming for generalizations and simple binaries, this course encourages us to think about specific contexts and grounded analyses when we encounter film.
Since the cosmopolitan center of Bombay is home to the Hindi-Urdu film industry, the city continues to play a pivotal role in determining the world of Indian cinema. This course will be as much about the social and political history of the city of Bombay, as it is about the vicissitudes of the modern Indian nation-state. It will introduce students to: 1) Reading filmic narratives in terms of what they represent of collective desires, fantasies, and identities; and 2) Analyses which take seriously the fact of the films’ materiality—their modes of circulation, distribution, and consumption and what these convey about the relationship between urban and global life-worlds. Cultural politics are as important as, and indeed intertwined with, the political economy of films. Films are fascinating lens through which to encounter the cultures, classes, regions, genders, religions, and politics of India, but they are also a way to understand change, and continuity over time, when assessing flows of capital, labor, crime, and migration. In the interest of its centrality to Hindi-Urdu cinema, we must not overlook the role of the city of Bombay (its many diverse peoples) in manufacturing national desires.
This course also encourages us to reflect on our own practices of spectatorship and the cultures which produce our tastes. Drawing on and in conversation with the readings, it will be important for us to develop a critical vocabulary for how we respond to the film screenings. How do we categorize or evaluate them? What registers of our pleasure, boredom, distaste, laughter, or appreciation do they awaken?
Seminar participants are not expected to have prior knowledge of Indian cinema, but will be expected to do a fair amount of course reading to orient themselves to the history as well as current events in Indian politics, society, and culture.