Tamil Cinema in the Twenty-First Century explores the current state of Tamil cinema, one of India’s largest film industries. Since its inception a century ago, Tamil cinema has undergone major transformations, and today it stands as a foremost cultural institution that profoundly shapes Tamil culture and identity. This book investigates the structural, ideological, and societal cleavages that continue to be reproduced, new ideas, modes of representation and narratives that are being created, and the impact of new technologies on Tamil cinema. It advances a critical interdisciplinary approach that challenges the narratives of Tamil cinema to reveal the social forces at work.

This is a quintessential book for Cinema buffs and particularly those who are passionate about Tamil cinema, which has the distinction of having played a significant role in history of films in India. Tracing the evolution of Tamil films from the time of pre-independence, when it was anathema for local Congress leaders to be associated with the celluloid, to the arrival of an American, Ellis Dungan, who made masterpieces like Meera, the book showcases vignettes about every important milestone in the vast canvas of Tamil films. In the almost ten decades of its evolution, Tamil cinema has grown to exert a dominant influence on the social and political life of Tamil Nadu in a manner that is unparalleled elsewhere in the world. This seminal volume is an analytical study of Tamil cinema both as an art form and as a socio-political force. Theodore Baskaran traces its history, and presents the achievements of many filmmakers with colourful insights. For the film buff as well as the serious student of film studies, The Eye of the Serpent is a handy reference book on several aspects of Tamil cinema - its character and evolution, the songs and songwriters, filmmakers and script writers, the beginnings of the unique nexus between cinema and politics in Tamil Nadu and much more.

Hitherto, the academic study of Indian cinema has focused primarily on Bollywood, despite the fact that the Tamil film industry, based in southern India, has overtaken Bollywood in terms of annual output. This book examines critically the cultural and cinematic representations in Tamil cinema. It outlines its history and distinctive characteristics, and proceeds to consider a number of important themes such as gender, religion, class, caste, fandom, cinematic genre, the politics of identity and diaspora. Throughout, the book cogently links the analysis to wider social, political and cultural phenomena in Tamil and Indian society. Overall, it is an exciting and original contribution to an under-studied field, also facilitating a fresh consideration of the existing body of scholarship on Indian cinema.

Winner of De La Torre Bueno First Book Special Citation, given by DSA, 2021 Celluloid Classicism provides a rich and detailed history of two important modern South Indian cultural forms: Tamil Cinema and Bharatanatyam dance. It addresses representations of dance in the cinema from an interdisciplinary, critical-historical perspective. The intertwined and symbiotic histories of these forms have never received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, historians of South Indian cinema have noted the presence of song and dance sequences in films, but have not historicized them with reference to the simultaneous revival of dance culture among the middle-class in this region. In a parallel manner, historians of dance have excluded deliberations on the influence of cinema in the making of the "classical" forms of modern India. Although the book primarily focuses on the period between the late 1920s and 1950s, it also addresses the persistence of these mid-twentieth century cultural developments into the present. The book rethinks the history of Bharatanatyam in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary, transmedia standpoint and features 130 archival images.

This book documents the history of Tamil cinema, one of the most colossal film industries in the world, and studies the major studios of Madras, the largest outside classical Hollywood in the private sector. It engages with five major studios of Madras—Modern Theatres, AVM, Gemini, Vijaya-Vauhini, and Prasad— through the origins of their founders, and explicates how their history influenced the narratives, genre, and ideology of the canonical films made in Madras studios, arguing for their lasting influence on Tamil cinema. Based on rare primary and secondary materials, and oral history, this book engages with Tamil cinema at the intersection of its industrial, cultural, and socio-political history to argue for its specificity in terms of its aesthetics and its belief in the potential of the medium to mobilize audiences for ideology, politics, and reflexivity.

This book examines the incorporation of newly accessible mass media into practices of religious mediation in a variety of settings including the Pentecostal Church and Islamic movements, as well as the use of religious forms and image in the sphere of radio and cinema.

This book interrogates the vocabulary used in theorizing about Indian cinema to reach into the deeper cultural meanings of philosophies and traditions from which it derives its influences. It re-examines terms and concepts used in film criticism and contextualizes them within the aesthetics, poetics and politics of Indian cinema. The book looks at terms and concepts borrowed from the scholarship on American and world cinema and explores their use and relevance in describing the characteristics and evolution of cinema in India. It highlights how realism, romance and melodrama in the context of India appear in a culturally singular way and how the aggregation of constituent elements – like songs, action, comedy – in Indian film can be traced to classical theatre and other diverse religious and philosophical influences. These influences have characterized popular film and drama in India which present all aspects of life for a diverse nation. The author explores concepts like ‘fantasy’, ‘family’ and ‘patriotism’ by using various examples from films in India and outside, as well as practices in the other arts. He identifies the fundamental logic behind the choices made by film-makers in India and discusses concepts which allow for a fresh theorizing on Indian cinema’s characteristics. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of film studies, media studies, cultural studies, literature, cultural history and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for general readers who are interested in learning more about Indian cinema, its forms, origins and influences.