Tamil Cinema Research Articles

Psychological and Philosophical Readings of the Spectatorship of Bollywood and Indian Tamil Film in Sri Lanka

Psychological and Philosophical Readings of the Spectatorship of Bollywood and Indian Tamil Film in Sri Lanka

Art Cinema: The Indian Career of a Global Category

Previous articleNext article No AccessArt Cinema: The Indian Career of a Global CategoryRochona MajumdarRochona Majumdar Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 42, Number 3Spring 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/685605 Views: 649Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ranjani Mazumdar and, Neepa Majumdar Introduction, (Aug 2022): 1–33.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119048206.cintroRochona Majumdar Song Time, the Time of Narratives, and the Changing Idea of Nation in Postindependence Cinema, boundary 2 49, no.11 (Feb 2022): 105–135.https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615417Daniel Morgan Introduction: Media Archaeology and the Resources of Film Studies, boundary 2 49, no.11 (Feb 2022): 5–23.https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615375Indranil Bhattacharya Sound and the masters: The aural in Indian art cinema, Studies in South Asian Film & Media 12, no.11 (Feb 2021): 49–66.https://doi.org/10.1386/safm_00037_1Constantine V. Nakassis The ontological politics of the spoof image in Tamil cinema, New Review of Film and Television Studies 17, no.44 (Sep 2019): 423–455.https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1667056Sangita Gopal Media Meddlers, Feminist Media Histories 5, no.11 (Jan 2019): 39–62.https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2019.5.1.39Abhija Ghosh Memories of Action: Tracing Film Society Cinephilia in India, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 9, no.22 (Jan 2019): 137–164.https://doi.org/10.1177/0974927618814026

Red flags in Tamil cinema: agitprop and art-house during the Cold War

This essay argues that the narratives in Indian Tamil cinema’s ‘revolutionary art films’ of the 1980s were symptomatic of the social conflicts and ideological civil wars of the cold war. If the global nature of the cold war is to be found in the societal domain because of revolutionary conditions from the unevenness of capitalist development in states, these revolutionary art films intended to reflect these political realities, and were intertextually based on cultural memories of local working class struggles. As such, the revolutionary art films became plenipotentiaries of the Left, inveighing against capitalism in the cultural theatres of the cold war. The epistemic frames used by the avant-garde intelligentsia who shaped these films reveal that the dynamic of the cold war influenced cultural production even in regions where there was no direct superpower confrontation. Finally, by looking at the reasons for the limited run of these films, it becomes clear that local restrictions and cultural presuppositions diminished the potential of the revolutionary art films to promote the development of an alternative Tamil cinema. Thus, this study sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged issue of how societies, seemingly isolated from the cold war were also shaped by the ideological discourses that dominated the international system.

Experience of Exclusion: Tamil Cinema and Male to Female Transgender Community

The Male to Female (MtF) Transgender community emerges as the most visible queer culture in India. Cinema provides viewers the ideologies and beliefs sensationally through celebrities and distorts reality. The primary objective of this study is to describe the role of Tamil Cinema on Social exclusion of MtF Transgender community of Tamil Nadu. The study based on the face-to-face survey analysis of 416 MtF Transgender individuals of Tamil Nadu. The study shows that Transgender people are significantly excluded from family and forced to drop out from school and largely involve in sex work and begging for living because of their transgender identity. The perception of the Transgender community clearly describes that Tamil Cinema negatively propagates and maintains the dominant ideology about Transgender people in society. The control of communication mutes the Transgender community and the unequal power relationship drives them to the multidimensional social exclusion in Tamil Nadu.

Insight Of Teachers On Problems Of Students In Acquiring Communicative Skill In English

The study examined the insight of English Teacher towards students of standard XI in acquiring communicative skill in English. The main objective of the paper was to identify the problems of the students in acquiring communicative skill in English. The Normative survey method was adopted in the study. One hundred teachers were considered as a sample for the study. Problem inventory for the teacher was selected as a tool for the study. After establishing Reliability and validity of the tool, it was considered for the final study. Findings of the study is a significant association between the Male and Female teachers on the opinion of problems of the learners in Listening skill with respect to stress pattern, cohesive device, Distinctive sound, Intonation, Contextual meaning and Homophones. Communicative skill can be practiced in the classroom transaction by using role play, pandemonium, discussion, interaction, translated version of Tamil cinema, etc. Written communicative skill can be developed by conducting essay competition, preparing advertisement, preparing projects, etc.

A Tamil-speaking Heroine

Most actresses who play heroine roles in the contemporary Tamil film industry are not considered, by audiences or industry insiders, to be either ethnolinguistically Tamil or competent Tamil speakers. Drawing on interviews with industry insiders in and audiences of the Tamil film and television industries, this article interrogates discourses that take up this absence and non-identity within Tamil cinema. I show how these discourses ambivalently turn on—that is, mobilize and problematize—the historical stigma of cinema and, relatedly, its gendered performative semiotics, as well as a Dravidianist politics of language, gender, and ethnolinguistic identity. The article traces out the political contours of this stigmatic performativity and the culturalist identity claims that are made through appeal to it. I focus, in particular, on how this identity politics of the image comes to be articulated and contested in a recent reality television program devoted to finding a Tamil-speaking heroine. As I show, the tensions and contradictions that underlie this televisual attempt point to the productively fraught relationship between cinema, gender, vision, language, and regional Tamil identity in a post-television, post-liberalization context.

Spectacle spaces: Production of caste in recent Tamil films

This paper analyses contemporary, popular Tamil films set in Madurai with respect to space and caste. These films actualize region as a cinematic imaginary through its authenticity markers – caste/ist practices explicitly, which earlier films constructed as a ‘trope’. The paper uses the concept of Heterotopias to analyse the recurrence of spectacle spaces in the construction of Madurai, and the production of caste in contemporary films. In this pursuit, it interrogates the implications of such spatial discourses.

Watching From an Arm's Length: The Foreign Hand in Tamil Cinema

Scholarly work on Tamil cinema has traditionally focused on the construction of Tamil authenticity. Much of this work portrays the foreignness of the other Indian—particularly the North Indian—but little work exists on the construction of the non-Indian space or person. We argue that quite often films emphasize Tamil authenticity by constructing an othering-type discourse of foreign spaces and their inhabitants, including the Tamil Diaspora. Through an analysis of 90 films and 5 in-depth interviews, we demonstrate that Tamil film presents an opportunity to understand how an important regional center of Indian cinema both represents the foreign and constructs the Indian Diaspora and its spaces, while differing from the more globally known Hindi-language productions of Bollywood.

Mysskin’s Pisaasu (2014): Ghost as the goddess

Abstract This article engages with the Tamil film Pisaasu/‘The Ghost’ (Mysskin, 2014) to analyse the horror genre as providing the space for the binary of a beautiful maiden and her ghost and the gradual collapsing of the binary between the body and the spirit to make a statement on the predicament of women, particularly in Tamil society, thereby enabling the unravelling of the layers of the unconscious of a patriarchal society. The singularity of Mysskin’s Pisaasu, however, lies in its inversion of the ghost as yearning for love instead of revenge and thereby offering a rich space to interrogate Creed’s theorization of the monstrous feminine by juxtaposing it with the specificity of Tamil culture and psyche, as well as engage with the possibilities afforded by digital technology to converse with the cultural subconscious in its own language – one made up of complex images.

Keeping in control: The figure of the fan in the Tamil film industry

Abstract In this article I propose to critically engage with the figure of the fan in Tamil Nadu’s cinematic landscape. The ways in which fans contribute to a visual and political landscape are rather exceptional in South Asia and therefore require particular attention. I use the notion of the figure, following Barker and Lindquist, as ‘subject positions that embody, manifest, and, to some degree, comment upon a particular historical moment’ to elucidate the blurring lines of the figure as notion and as lived experience. By examining the figure I will show how fandom is a constant dialogue between intense affinity, affection and excess versus justification, control and denunciation. This brings fans from being part of the grand narratives of cine-politics in Tamil Nadu and the often taken for granted positions that they take in this to a subject position that shows the practice of being a fan.

More than Bollywood: studies in Indian popular music

List of Contributors List of Figures List of Companion Media Introduction - Popular Music in India - Gregory D. Booth and Bradley Shope Part One: Perspectives on Film Song 1. A Moment of Historical Conjuncture in Mumbai: Playback Singers, Music Directors, and Arrangers and the Creation of Hindi Song (1948-1952) - Gregory D. Booth 2. Global Masala: Digital Identities and Aesthetic Trajectories in Post-Liberalized Indian Film Music - Natalie Sarrazin 3. Kollywood Goes Global: New Sounds and Contexts for Tamil Film Music in the Twenty-First Century - Joseph Getter 4. On Nightingales and Moonlight: Songcrafting Femininity in Malluwood - Kaley Mason Part 2: Audio Cultures, Music Videos, and Film Music 5. Film Song and Its Other: Tracing the Boundaries of Indian Music Genres - Jayson Beaster-Jones 6. Play it Again, Saraswathi: Gramophone, Religion, and Devotional Music in Colonial South India - Stephen Putnam Hughes 7. Filming the Bhangra Music Video - Anjali Gera Roy 8. Mimesis and Authenticity: The Case of Thanda Pani and Questions of Versioning in North Indian Popular Music - Peter Kvetko 9. Making Music Regional in a Delhi Studio - Stefan Fiol Part 3: Live Music, Performance Cultures, and Re-mediation 10. Latin American Music in Moving Pictures and Jazzy Cabarets in Mumbai, 1930s to 1950s - Bradley Shope 11. The Beat Comes to India: The Incorporation Rock Music into the Indian Soundscape - Gregory D. Booth 12. Be True to Yourself: Violin Ganesh, Fusion, and Contradictions in Contemporary Urban India - Niko Higgins 13. At Home in the Studio: The Sound of Manganiyar Music Going Popular - Shalini Ayyagari 14. The Liveness-es of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi's Popular Abhangas - Anna Schultz 15. Bollywood in the Era of Filmsong Avatars: DJing, Remixing, and Change in the Film Music Industry of North India - Paul Greene Afterword: Capitalisms and Cosmopolitanisms - Timothy D. Taylor References Films and Music Cited Index

Neoliberal Logics of Voice: Playback Singing and Public Femaleness in South India

This essay explores the impact of neoliberal logics of voice on the music-making and performance practices of female playback singers in the South Indian Tamil film industry. As singers whose voices are first recorded in the studio and then ‘played back’ on the set to be lip-synched by actors, playback singers have been professional musicians and public celebrities since the 1950s. Their careers are governed by practices of voice cultivation and by modes of performance and public self-presentation, in the studio, on stage, and increasingly in mediatised contexts. Since the 1990s, neoliberal logics of flexibility, entrepreneurship and self-marketing have redefined the role of the playback singer and the way singers conceive of their work in both social and aesthetic terms. These changes have occurred within a broader context in which anxieties about globalisation and expanding commodity culture are reflected in debates about the place of women in public.

Media as Mediator: Intertextual Narrative in Digital and Performative Presentation

“Media as Mediator” tells a tale in two mediums: classical South Indian and Western dance in the seven-dance suite, Liquid Gems , and the fiction Tamil film, Pancha Ratna Media as Mediator was an intervisual presentation that explored sacred characters in a contemporary story in two- and three-dimensions. Intervisuality compares and interprets visual images in a cultural context. This concept enhanced contemporary approaches to classical Hindu myths in Liquid Gems and Pancha Ratna . Media sources brought classical Bharatanatyam dance and Bollywood-style songs into conversation with Western dance forms in the dance suite, Liquid Gems , and the Tamil fiction film, Pancha Ratna. The story focuses on women’s issues in diverse marriage arrangements, dowry and murder/suicide. Contemporary media reports influenced the way in which sacred archetypes inform their modern counterparts in the narrowcast narrative.

Distribution and circulation of Indian films in Singapore

ABSTRACTDespite the long history of the export and exhibition of Indian films in Southeast Asia, a systematic documentation of how Hindi and Tamil films from India found their way into the region has yet to be undertaken. Theatrical exhibition of Indian films is reported to have sharply declined or ended since the late 1970s in their traditional markets in Malaya, Ceylon, British East Africa, Burma, Persian Gulf Ports, Thailand and South Vietnam. Yet films continued to be circulated through formal and informal networks such as video parlours, CD shops, television and, lately, on the internet. Although Singapore has the unique distinction of being the only Southeast Asian country, which still has a few theatres exclusively dedicated to screening Indian films, theatrical exhibition is not the only medium through which they are circulated. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2010, this paper contrasts the formal distribution of Indian films with their informal circulation through which they “leak” into the multi-ethnic spaces of the global city. Drawing on photographs, exhibits, interviews, reports and observations, the essay focuses on television, CD shops, lending libraries and the internet through which Indian films are disseminated in Singapore.

Identification and Analysis of Images in Anjathey

The Tamil cinema has undergone a cycle of changes from storytelling to production technology and marketing strategies. This article finds out the film language and grammar of movie Anjathey directed by Mysskin. 36 images/shots were selected from the movie and they have been analyzed on the basis of film language, narrative aspects of the story cinematography, sound, and editing. Attempts have been made to understand the use of visual language and grammar to express the story by the use of mise-en-scene.

Disciplining the Dasi: Cintamani and the Politics of a New Sexual Economy

This article analyzes the representation of the figure of the dasi in early Tamil film. Against the backdrop of the abolition of the devadasi system in the Madras Presidency and the reformist activity associated with it, the article attempts to look at how the figure of the dasi underwent a strong repression in the cinematic discourses of the 1930s and 1940s. This was part of nationalist modernity, a project that sought to secure a new sexual economy in which the dasi was eventually narrativized out of Tamil film and pushed to the cultural margins of Tamil society. The article focuses on one film, Cintamani or Bilvamangal (1937) and shows how in this text the repression of the figure of the dasi was accompanied by an irruption of the real, the “uncanny.” It argues that there existed a nexus between sexuality and vision in early Tamil film, and that cinema itself acted as a safeguard against the trouble of the excessive sexuality embodied in the dasi.

The Production of the Past: Early Tamil Film History as a Living Archive

This article considers a series of questions about the relationships between historical sources, archival practice, and the production of film history about Tamil cinema of the 1930s. I review the range of archival material relevant for producing histories of early Tamil film in order to consider how the issue of access to historical sources has produced various kinds of expert knowledge. What kind of limits do these various film archives impose on our historical research? How do these archives constitute their own historical narratives? And, how might we begin to think critically beyond these limitations to write alternative histories of early Tamil film? I argue that these questions are vital in order to remake film history as an ongoing, unfinished, and open-ended project that is part of the living present.

Imagining Eelam Tamils in Tamil cinema

Tamil cinema because of its origin is mostly preoccupied with Tamil culture, people and society. This is in contrast to the popular Hindi cinema or Bollywood that portrays a Hindi-speaking and an ethnically undifferentiated middle-class pan-Indian identity. Since the 1990s, driven by rising production costs, dwindling audiences and fickle markets, Bollywood began targeting the Indian diaspora as a potential market for its films. Bollywood immediately captured the imagination of overseas Indians, who are often depicted as successful migrants and having strong national allegiances to India. In this context, the ways in which diasporic Tamils are represented in Tamil cinema, especially the Sri Lankan or Eelam Tamils, who constitute the largest market and most proximate diasporic Tamil community outside Tamil Nadu, remain largely unexamined. This paper critically analyses depictions of Eelam Tamils in Tamil cinema in light of the three-decade-long separatist struggle, at most times led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, against the Sri Lankan government. We argue that shifts and changes in the India–Sri Lanka political relations in light of the ethnic conflict coupled with the nebulous articulation of ethnic affinity between Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils greatly impacted on the ways in which Eelam Tamils were depicted in Tamil cinema.

Voices of Meenakumari: Sound, meaning, and self-fashioning in performances of an item number

This article considers how ‘item numbers,’ song sequences that serve as vehicles for sexualized female performance in popular Indian cinema, are re-animated through embodied – danced and sung – performances outside the films themselves. I examine a single song sequence from a 2009 Tamil film and two kinds of re-animations of it: first, the song as conceived and sung by the original playback singer in performance outside the context of the film, and second, as performed by young women in TV shows and in live stage shows. These performances participate in complex projects of self-fashioning that exceed the conventions by which female voices are given meaning within the Tamil culture industry.

Is There Concept of Viral Marketing Behind the Success of Kolaveri Di?

The soup song has become an anthem for the future managers of the country. The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are treating the popular song Di from an upcoming Tamil film 3 as a classic example of viral marketing. The song has got success beyond anyone’s expectation. Months after its release, it is still being given more airtime than any political issue, movie and cricket matches. Kolaveri di redefined viral marketing and it brought to light viral marketing in a broader sense to the world market. The song broke out to turn a spark into a massive fire. Marketing campaigns can never ignore the role of internet. Marketing campaigners now should start thinking to develop promotional activities for the social media too. We cannot say that 'Kolaveri Buzz just happened, in an unusual manner by chance. The audience was the strength of the song that was tired of listening songs crafted in typed surroundings with the lyrics that are either emotional or vulgar. This became a simple song that having no pretension of being a song may well appeal to every class of audiences. The Soup Song had its audience cut out and the penetration was extremely strategic, appealing to the people who had a high expectation of presenting and conveying the message in their communications with others over a short time. That is why it’s linkage with viral marketing has been a matter of discussion. On the other hand, the song is also a exact example of Earworm phenomenon. The present paper explains the concept of viral marketing and analyzes the Di song with this perspective.