04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T
Aquia Building 219
Section Information for Fall 2016
“Bollywood,” India’s Mumbai-based Hindi-Urdu-language film industry, has come to signify a variety of things beyond just film. Bollywood cinema helps to shape and circulate images of India and Indianness that are exported abroad, and that become integral to how India is imagined in US, Canadian, British and other Anglophonic cultures. Bollywood as a brand, a style, and a cinema conjures vibrancy, vitality, and globalization, and its most famous (stereotypical?) elements of melodrama and spectacle are used as a way to invoke and interrogate Indian culture in films beyond its borders.
Looking at media produced in India and its diaspora, this course will consider the ways that film imagines “Indian” as a national identity that extends across linguistic, cultural, spatial, and temporal borders. In doing so, we will interrogate the relationship between visual culture and national belonging. But we will also go “beyond” the notion of Bollywood as a monolithic cinema, taking a close and careful look at the range of stars, styles, and perspectives that this particular brand of Indian cinema offers.
Note: this course is a designated research and scholarship course, which means that students will have the opportunity to do individual research leading to a final project. This project does not have to be a paper; it can be a film, photo essay, website, video game, etc.
Screenings include: Loins of Punjab Presents…, Heaven on Earth, Anita and Me, Bombay, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Mughal-e-Azam, Deewaar, Umrao Jaan, and Shree 420.
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Credits: 3
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