Download or read book Tamil Cinema in the Twenty First Century written by Selvaraj Velayutham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Onscreen Offscreen written by Constantine V. Nakassis and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question "what is an image?" Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination. Bridging and synthesizing linguistic anthropology, film studies, visual studies, and media anthropology, Onscreen/Offscreen rethinks key issues across a number of fields concerned with the semiotic constitution of social life, from the performativity and ontology of images to questions of spectatorship, realism, and presence. In doing so, it offers both a challenge to any approach that would separate image from social context and a new vision for linguistic anthropology beyond the question of "language."
Download or read book Capital in the Twenty First Century written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
Download or read book Bollywood and Postmodernism written by Neelam Sidhar Wright and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this innovative study reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the 21st century.
Download or read book Politics and the Media in Twenty First Century Indonesia written by Krishna Sen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every political aspirant and activist knows the media are important. But there is little agreement on how an increasingly diversified media operate in post-authoritarian transitions and how they might promote, or impede, the pathways to a sustainable liberal democracy in the 21st century. This book examines the role of the media during Indonesia’s longest experiment with democratisation. It addresses two important and related questions: how is the media being transformed, both in terms of its structure and content, by the changing political economy of Indonesia after the fall of Suharto? And what is the potential impact of this media in enabling or hampering the development of democracy in Indonesia? The book explores the relation between the working of democratisation, by examining the role of ethnic identity and nationalism; increasingly cheaper and diversified means of media production, challenging state monopolies of the media; the reality of personalised and globalised media; and the challenging of the connection between a free media and democracy by global capitalism and corporate control of the media. The book argues that the dominant forces transforming Indonesia today did not arise from the singular point of Suharto’s resignation, but from a set of factors which are independent from, but linked to, Indonesia’s internal politics and which shape its cultural industries.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Film Music written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating and unusually wide-ranging collection of essays overviewing ways in which music functions in film soundtracks.
Download or read book Tamil Brahmans written by C. J. Fuller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tamil Brahmans were a traditional, mainly rural, high-caste elite who have been transformed into a modern, urban, middle-class community since the late nineteenth century. Many Tamil Brahmans today are in professional and managerial occupations, such as engineering and information technology; most of them live in Chennai and other Tamilnadu towns, but others have migrated to the rest of India and overseas. This book, which is mainly based on the authors ethnographic research, describes and analyses this transformation. It is also a study of how and why the Tamil Brahmans privileged status within a hierarchical society has been perpetuated in the face of both a strong anti-Brahman movement in Tamilnadu, and a series of wider social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological changes that might have been expected to undermine their position completely. The major topics discussed include Brahman rural society, urban migration and urban ways of life, education and employment, the position of women, and religion and culture. The Tamil Brahmans class position, including the internal division into the upper- and lower-middle classes, and the process of class reproduction, are examined closely to analyze the congruence between Tamil Brahmanhood and middle classness, which as comparison with other Brahman and non-Brahman groups shows is highly unusual in contemporary India."
Download or read book Cancer and the Kali Yuga written by Cecilia Coale Van Hollen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen's critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women's narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.
Download or read book Madras Studios written by Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai and published by SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Stigmas of the Tamil Stage written by Susan Seizer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-11 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the lives of popular theater artists, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage is the first in-depth analysis of Special Drama, a genre of performance unique to the southernmost Indian state of Tamilnadu. Held in towns and villages throughout the region, Special Drama performances last from 10 p.m. until dawn. There are no theatrical troupes in Special Drama; individual artists are contracted “specially” for each event. The first two hours of each performance are filled with the kind of bawdy, improvisational comedy that is the primary focus of this study; the remaining hours present more markedly staid dramatic treatments of myth and history. Special Drama artists themselves are of all ages, castes, and ethnic and religious affiliations; the one common denominator in their lives is their lower-class status. Artists regularly speak of how poverty compelled their entrance into the field. Special Drama is looked down upon by the middle- and upper-classes as too popular, too vulgar, and too “mixed.” The artists are stigmatized: people insult them in public and landlords refuse to rent to them. Stigma falls most heavily, however, on actresses, who are marked as “public women” by their participation in Special Drama. As Susan Seizer’s sensitive study shows, one of the primary ways the performers deal with such stigma is through humor and linguistic play. Their comedic performances in particular directly address questions of class, culture, and gender deviations—the very issues that so stigmatize them. Seizer draws on extensive interviews with performers, sponsors, audience members, and drama agents as well as on careful readings of live Special Drama performances in considering the complexities of performers’ lives both on stage and off.
Download or read book Tamil Cinema written by Selvaraj Velayutham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-04-03 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Indian Popular Cinema written by K. Gokulsing and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema written by Johan Manschot and published by Kit Pub. This book was released on 2005 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema is an insightful journey into the complex worlds of fantasy and reality inhabited by creative artistes. India is a unique country that exists in multiple centuries simultaneously. This book unravels the various mysteries and contradictions embedded in our centuries-old tradition. (...) Using defined sections and relevant case studies, the authors analyse the emotional ingredients that form the essence of India and Indian cinema." (Excerpt from the Foreword by Amitabh Bachchan) Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema explores the inner world of Bombay film, the best known of India's movie industries. Many aspects of Hindi cinema are brought to life on the pages of this richly illustrated book - from its beginnings to the present day. The use of songs to advertise movies, the role of censorship, devotion to god and family: these subjects and many more are illuminated. It reveals the symbolism of the divine role models Radha-Krishna and Ram-Sita at the heart of the main protagonists in many films, and the passion of the people working behind the scenes. It examines the changing face of the nation's enemies, the marriage scene, lyricists and playback singers, and it sheds light on Tamil cinema, which rivals the Hindi film industry in output and popularity. The book concludes with an analysis of the mass appeal of Hindi film beyond India's borders and the recent embrace of the much-hyped 'Bollywood' phenomenon in the West.
Download or read book Cine politics written by M. Madhava Prasad and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Brought to Life by the Voice written by Amanda Weidman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. To produce the song sequences that are central to Indian popular cinema, singers' voices are first recorded in the studio and then played back on the set to be lip-synced and danced to by actors and actresses as the visuals are filmed. Since the 1950s, playback singers have become revered celebrities in their own right. Brought to Life by the Voice explores the distinctive aesthetics and affective power generated by this division of labor between onscreen body and offscreen voice in South Indian Tamil cinema. In Amanda Weidman's historical and ethnographic account, playback is not just a cinematic technique, but a powerful and ubiquitous element of aural public culture that has shaped the complex dynamics of postcolonial gendered subjectivity, politicized ethnolinguistic identity, and neoliberal transformation in South India.
Download or read book Celluloid Classicism written by Hari Krishnan and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The 9 Emotions of Indian Cinema Hoardings written by Va Kītā and published by Tara Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paying tribute to the vibrant and unique hoarding-art of the Tamil film industry, The Nine Emotions runs the gamut of Tamil cinema history, celebrating its evergreen heroes, unique imagery, and irrepressible musical numbers.
