Indian Cinemas

Catalog description

This course will provide a historical overview of the diverse cinematic practices and cultures that together comprise the ‘Indian Cinema’ as it traverses political, technological, and aesthetic shifts. While Hindi-Urdu language films produced in Bombay/Mumbai popularity known as “Bollywood” are the focus, we will also study Indian cinemas from other regions, languages, and genres that circulate outside of mainstream productions. This course will familiarize students with the historiographic debates that animate Indian film studies and acquire a synoptic understanding of the film industries that together produce the largest number of films in the world, while inspiring among their viewers what the film critic Anupama Chopra calls “a particularly virulent case of movie madness.”