This course will enable students to:
• Understand and know the principles, forms and process of cinema as a discipline.
• Know the various theories of cinema studies
• Relate various technologies and their development.
Birth of Film, Silent Film, Studio System, Decline of Studio system in India The Star System, The Rise of the American Film Industry – Silent Cinema & Technical Thrills and its Early Form: Cinema of Attractions – Emergence of Censorship
Technical Elements, Symbolic Elements - Examining Narratives: Syntagmatic versus Paradigmatic Approach – Genre Analysis: Areas of Possible Genre Research – Researching Principal Elements: Essential Approach, Categorization Approach, and Iconography – Genre Development: Experimental, Classical, Parody and Deconstruction – Approaching Genre through Aesthetics and Exchange - Reading Narratives as ‘text’
Silent Film Theory - Soviet Montage Theorists – Russian Formalism &Bakhtian School – Frankfurt School – Cult of the Auteur – Americanization of the Auteur Theory – The Advent of Structuralism – Interrogating Authorship & Genre – From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis – Feminist Interventions in Film Studies – Birth of the Spectator and Semiotics - Queer Theory – Louis Althusser and Ideology – Michel Foucault : Discourse Power and Knowledge
Eisenstein and Socialist Cinema – German Expressionism – The Devastation of War and Italian Neorealism –The Coming of Modernism: The New Wave Cinemas – French New Wave: German New Wave : Japanese New Wave: British New Wave.
The Golden Age of Indian Cinema –Indian Art Cinema and the Parallel Cinema Movement – The Nation and its Fragment: The Idealized Woman - Narrating the Nation Through Heroes and Villains – Heroines : From Romance to Sexed Up Bodies – Major Hindi Film Genres and Forms - Song and Spectacle – Issues of Censorship – The Nation in Transition: The Problematic Decade of the 70s and the 80s -Contemporary Indian Cinema: Trends and Transformation - NRI cinema and the Multiplex