With a focus on India's Hindi language cinema in the current millennium, this course introduces students to several directors whose films range from big budget epic blockbusters featuring some of the biggest stars of the Indian subcontinent, to more small-scale and personal expressions. Around 2000 or so, some things changed dramatically in Hindi film making, and this course is an introduction to that transformed landscape of Hindi cinema.
This is primarily a course of close analysis: students learn how to look closely at movies, and notice how film editing, color, cinematography, sound, mise-en-scene, and narration work together to construct a compelling audiovisual world. Along the way, students also acquire some sense of the history of cinema in India. Finally, they encounter scholarship on caste, class, religion, and the range of issues affecting contemporary South Asia, to the extent that these are relevant for film analysis.
Course work includes short essays, quizzes, and exams.