Locating World Cinema argues for the importance of understanding the local context of a film's creation and the nuances that it conveys to the spectator. It examines the sociocultural contexts intrinsic to cinema from milieus like the USSR/Russia, China, Japan, France, the US, Iran and India. The book analyses the works of some of the more celebrated but, at times, less than fully understood auteurs, such as Kenji Mizoguchi from Japan; Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette and Éric Rohm...

This perceptive essay on Satyajit Ray, India's most well-know film-maker internationally, analysis the auteur's oeuvre, focusing on his early cinema which broke the rules of film-making prevalent in the country at the time. At the same time, it also focuses on how Ray took on a moral stand on issues and how that might have limited his growth as an artist. In the process it reveals the director in a light not addressed by any other film critic before.

Hindi popular cinema has played a key role as a national cinema because it assisted in the imagining of a unified India by addressing a public across the nation-to-be even before 1947. Examining the diverse elements that constitute the 'popular' in Indian cinema, M.K. Raghavendra undertakes, in this book, a chronological study of films to speculate on narrative conventions, thematic continuities, myths, archetypes, and other formal structures that inform it from its hesitant beginnings up ...

An eclectic collection of essays by the winner of the National Award Swarna Kamal for Best Film Critic 1997 With more than a thousand films produced annually in over fifteen languages India is acknowledged as the largest producer of motion pictures in the world.50 Indian Film Classics provides detailed critical accounts of the most important Indian films beginning with Prem Sanyas (1925) to Rang De Basanti (2006) in languages ranging from Bengali and Hindi to Manipuri and Malayalam and rep...

While 'Indian popular cinema', as if by default, has come to mean Bollywood, there are other cinemas in India which are at least as rewarding to study, the largest and perhaps most intriguing among them coming from South India. Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada cinemas have their own colourful histories, megastars and political trajectories. This anthology is an attempt to do justice to the bewildering variety there is in the body as a whole and addresses this diversity in the only way ...

This book analyzes the representations of the subjects of Hindi cinema as a way of gaining insights into the hegemony of the upper-caste Hindu male in narratives of nationhood.Given that Hindi cinema has narrativized the nation after 1947, the book examines how these subjects were chosen and argues that they were upper-caste, Hindu and predominantly male. The author's analysis shows asymmetries in the constitution of the ‘imagined nation’ in the public consciousness. Women, the mar...

The first comprehensive inquiry into the origin and growth of regional language cinema in India, this book traces the development of Kannada cinema from the 1940s to the new millennium. Focusing on the role regional language cinema plays, the book examines the conflict between the 'region' and the 'nation' in the regional consciousness. Raghavendra traces the shape of Kannada cinema to its origins in a princely state under indirect British rule and inquires into the effect of the linguisti...

Irony and the satirical impulse in cinema have gradually lost favor, mockery increasingly more selective in its choice of targets. As Linda Hutcheon notes, irony is becoming a problematic mode of expression in the twenty-first century.The book examines the work of eight film auteurs: Luis Bunuel, R.W. Fassbinder, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Paul Verhoeven, Aki Kaurismaki, Aleksei Balabanov and David Lynch, much of whose work is not always regarded thus and the films examined ar...

Indian literature is produced in a wealth of languages but there is an asymmetry in the exposure the writing gets, which owes partly to the politics of translation into English. This book represents the first comprehensive political scrutiny of the concerns and attitudes of Indian language literature after 1947 to cover such a wide range, including voices from the cultural margins of the nation like Kashmiri and Manipuri, that of women alongside those of minority and marginalised communiti...

The book is the first ever attempt to examine various sociocultural aspects of contemporary India, ranging from caste and hierarchy and the religious or political conflict resulting from it to literary practice and intellectual life in the public space and making interdisciplinary associations. It does this by going back to various aspects of India’s past, stretching back several millennia to those owing to public policy after independence. Many of the issues today, such as those named abo...

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 char...

A critical introduction to the best of international film-makers in the last 50 years.. This is an acutely perceptive collection of essays defining the work of fifty film-makers of the modern era. The shape of cinema is today unrecognizable from that in the 1950s but film criticism has perhaps not kept pace with changes after 1960, when cinema became modern. The collection addresses this deficit by examining the most important directors since 1960. It includes the film-makers of the French...