Film Flashcards
A Good Woman, a Very Good Woman: Tamil Cinema’s Women
C.S. Lakshmi
How did the Good woman (all that Tamil culture stands for) bad woman (even physical features, language usage and dress are different) come about?
Good mother central - equal to her warrior son - bad women birth cowards
Sivaji and MGR, Kamal and Superstar but no female heroine at same level
Kannagi and Madhavi - kannagi still the model to follow
Split between real life activism of women in self respect movement and anti Hindu campaigns and film which brings activism, court etc all under men
Independent woman who asserts her sexuality is a cultural freak in Tamil cinema
The Tamil Film Heroine: From Passive Subject to Pleasurable Object
Sathiavathi Chinniah
Charts the changing role of the heroine from passive subject to pleasurable object (always within patriarchal constructed ideas of womanhood)
Quotes CS Laksmi saying karpu (chastity) was the pet obsession of Tamils
Kannagi = karpu and sakti
Earlier films marriage near beginning in 60s get chaste girlfriend
MGR savior of women
Bringing the Amman into Presence in Tamil Cinema: Cinema Spectatorship as Sensuous Apprehension
Kalpana Ram
Begins with three narrative: a Dalit woman’s story, bow song (vil pattu) and an Amman 70s film
Wronged women turn into goddesses
Devotional films pan India but south has more goddess centered although Amman as ur not acknowledged in film until 70s - literary high caste goddess were the focus earlier
Middle class not connected to the devotional film audience ie modernity knows distinctions has a clear eyed gaze, those who pat their checks are backward
Devotional gestures can tell something about Spectatorship
Fluid morphological of Amman to women, flying etc activate other senses, not just sight and sound but kinesthesia, and inter-corporeality between devotee and Devi- cinema incorporates the off screen devotional practices (often include clips of real festivals with non actors edited in)
The Nurturing Hero: Changing Images of MGR
Sara Dickey
Research informed over 20 year period
MGR shift from virile hero to nurturer (even maternal)
Food programs, feeding, he is the leader who protects his people
He took care of the poor because “heart of a child”
Interesting contrast w Jayalalitha who unlike MGR never knew poverty in childhood, does not identify w poor (when pressed they admit it is because of gender she cannot get close to fans, mix with people, and needed to overcome the stigma of acting)
Suggest the shift in seeing him as mother figure is a nostalgia for a pre-economic liberalization leader, even though many she interviewed were better off they still felt things were better before liberalization
Cinema in the countryside: popular Tamil Film and the Remaking of Rural Life
Anand Pandian
Looks at ways fragments of cinema incite one to live in a certain way - cinema powerful way rural people deal with challenges of modernity
Rural folks more apt to catch a piece of film at tea stand or the sort
Moral social films resonate
Film supplies a language about kinship
Nativity films - rural men take these films as means of articulating their worth
Imaginary Geographies: The Making of the ‘South’ in Contemporary Tamil Cinema
Rajan Krishnan
Dichotomy between modern, metropolitan Chennai versus pre-modern, caste bigotry of the deeper south - usually Madurai
Tamil cinema trope torn between pre-modern caste assertion and supposed egalitarian neoliberal world of modern individuals
Rowdies and gangsters also have caste issues in depictions of Deep South (caste often thevar or mukkalathor)
90s thevars violence against Dalits - he thinks these events have lead to the portrayal of the south in early 2000s - Kamal Haasan’s thevar Magan started it (songs from film used at thevar events)
Intro Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry
Selvaraj Velayutham
Book wants to reclaim a position for Tamil cinema in discourses and narratives about Indian cinema
Tamil cinema - Tamil language (Ramaswamy reference) songs dialogue regularly glorify Tamil lang and people
Bollywood is supposed to be pan-Indian
Tamil politics Dravidian rhetoric still
Gender markers - mustache, strength, control of women
“Tamil cinema for a Tamil audience speaks volumes about being Tamil. Where Bollywood nominally transcends such particularitistic identities, depicting mostly generic characters, Tamil cinema employs Tamil-Indian identities both as a matter of fact and strategically” (8)
Tamil cinema precedent in every aspect of life, as popular culture not just entertainment but ontological points of reference - identity,norms,values, spread of dominant values
