Revisiting the Indian New Wave: Infrastructures & Ideologies of Art Cinema in the Postcolony

Catalog description

India is the world's largest producer of films, with Bollywood and other popular film cultures more recently being most visible on the festival and academic publishing circuit as well as university curricula. This seminar brings a rare focus instead to the various "art cinemas" of India, revisiting an extraordinary but neglected moment, extending from 1969 to the 1980s, when a constellation of alternative film practices emerged at the intersection of state interventions, oppositional politics, and a range of regional and transnational influences and exchanges. This upsurge in filmmaking outside mainstream cinema was dubbed the "Indian New Wave" or "parallel cinema." The goals of this graduate seminar include: Exploring the heterogeneous film cultures of the New Waves across multiple languages, categories of documentary and fiction, experimental and political cinema; Studying the relationship of the Indian New Waves to Third Cinema and other global art cinema traditions; Disrupting and expanding Eurocentric histories of art and political cinema; Examining the afterlives of the Indian New Waves through contemporary films and critical discourses on caste, gender, and sexuality; Cross-pollinating approaches that have traditionally been binarized across the art-popular cinema divide to foreground questions of dis/pleasure, cinephilia, stardom, labor networks, and the potential of gossip and anecdote as methodological approaches. For participants whose area of focus lies outside of South Asia, the seminar aims to discuss broader questions of cinema in relation to institutional networks in postcolonial contexts, state patronage and censorship, transnational influences and affiliations, infrastructures of canon formation, and new approaches to studying cinematic "new waves."