Un-Fine Exemplars: Film Aesthetics Through Indian Cinema
If there can be no theory of the cinema without a theory of Indian cinema, given its sheer size (as one scholar proclaimed), and at the same time, if Indian cinema was held up for long as a rambling, scrappily and hastily fashioned "un-fine" exemplar of World cinema (as another scholar has observed), what might an "un-fine" exemplar teach us about film aesthetics?
This course attends to the aesthetic systems, visual idioms, performance traditions, narrative repositories, and the intermedial contexts (encompassing theater, still photography and the printed image) that have informed and shaped cinematic craft, form, style, and expression in South Asia. Our focus is on Indian cinema but our discussions will also venture further afield to other instances from the Global South and Anglo-American film theory, for some comparative orientation.
Some of the distinctive features of India’s commercial cinemas (at least till the 1990s) are easily outlined: melodrama and music, song, and dance; weak generic differentiation compared to Hollywood; and a patchy adherence to Hollywood’s style of "invisible" storytelling.
Under-girding these attributes, however, is the long and mediated influence of complex aesthetic philosophies such as the classical Sanskrit Rasa theory. At the same time, Indian cinematic editing has frequently incorporated devotional idioms of sight and seeing from South Asia’s religions that inform the exercise of the gaze (darshan). Ethnographies of visual culture in postcolonial India likewise point to ontologies of the photographic image that are unconcerned with mimesis, realism, or evidence, and are instead governed by notions of sensory and emotional appeal and efficacy steeped in everyday rituals and practices of faith and belief. (Indian films have often begun for instance with a devotional image "consecrating" the film to auspiciousness). Film and photographic practices have themselves seemed medium-agnostic in South Asia, or only intermittently interested in what makes cinema, cinema, or what distinguishes it from other art and cultural forms.
These aesthetic features have bearings on theorizing spectatorship, stardom, fandom, genre and more. As Indian cinema has itself changed dramatically in the past two decades to include new genres and formats more recognizable to transnational audiences, to what extent have some of the more longstanding cultural influences on its craft, lost their hold and relevance?
This course attempts at introducing students to an intellectual history of Indian cinema’s aesthetic tendencies, or perhaps equally, a cultural archaeology of it, an excavation of its varied roots (ancient, modern and postcolonial). The course aims to be interdisciplinary, drawing on scholarship from visual anthropology, art history, histories of photography and print culture, and film/media studies.
Course work includes weekly readings and films, discussion posts by students, and a final research essay.