CMS 320 A: From Family to Nation: Contemporary Indian Cinema

Around 2000 or so, conditions of filmmaking and film exhibition, audience preferences, and India’s wider media landscape (TV, internet) underwent significant changes. In this course, we try to understand how these changes resulted not just in transformed storytelling and filmmaking styles but also in new depictions of the family, community, and society in Indian cinema. The family was the dominant institution in Indian commercial movies. Family was synonymous and coextensive/contiguous with tradition, community, and nation. How has the cinema of the current millennium redefined and even diluted the symbolic authority of the family? What new forms of civil association does cinema envisage in contemporary India outside of the traditional family unit? How have new ideas of romance not dependent on parental approval, or social change loosened from traditional norms, emerged in today’s Indian cinema?     

Prior knowledge of film vocabulary is not necessary. Students learn the wider history of Indian cinema and encounter a diverse sampling of films (epic blockbusters, low-budget art films, documentaries). Close and careful viewing of long movies (often two a week) is essential for this course. Assignments include spot quizzes, longer research papers, and short reflections that will require you to pair scholarly film criticism with film analysis.