Situating Tamil Cinema interrogates contemporary Tamil cinema’s relationship with the shifting meanings of world cinema as an emergent organizing principle of film studies. Specifically, the dissertation studies the reconfiguration of the narrative modes of Tamil cinema in the contemporary postglobal moment. It suggests that Tamil cinema is part of a broader global change in marginalized cinemas and is thus one demonstration of the theories of world cinema. “World cinema” is an emerging concept among film theorists – films and film cultures that used to occupy the erstwhile categories of global art cinema, Third Cinema, or transnational cinema are now tentatively encroaching and inhabiting the category of “world cinema” – but there is no broad consensus on the heuristic value of the term. If world cinema is simply the sum total of all cinema in the world, it tends to obscure the particularities of minor film industries. It is in response to this that I propose an alternative ontology of world cinema that rests upon the principles of democracy and globalization, but endeavours to create a category of cinema with shared principles that could then allow these movies to be studied, albeit not as an homogenous body. The working definition of world cinema in this project is that: world cinema is, fundamentally, any cinematic endeavour that intentionally attempts and/or succeeds at cultivating a non-native audience. This is achieved through several overlapping and systemic processes within a film industry that I call “worlding.” It is within this framework of world cinema and worlding that I study the peculiarities of contemporary, post-millennial Tamil cinema. Tamil cinema is the film industry of the state of Tamil Nadu, India and is rendered in the Tamil language. It is classified as one of the “regional” film industries of India – where the Hindi film industry is often considered to be interchangeable with “Indian cinema.” This identity struggle that manifests as the binary between “Indian” and “regional” cinema is a cornerstone of Tamil identity and its cinema, which has continually reaffirmed itself as an articulation of a non-Indian space in not-Hindi. The paradigmatic shifts in filmmaking, viewing and circulation of post-millennial Tamil cinema is interesting precisely because of how invested cinema has been in the construction and maintenance of a Tamil identity. My project begins by drawing up one of the first consolidated histories of Tamil cinema from origin to present, where I place special interest in the relationship between cinema and political identity in Tamil Nadu. The argument is that the Tamil film industry through its insistence on a non-Indian nationalism, seeks to complicate the equation of a politically unified nation-state to a culturally homogenous nationalism. The chapter makes the case for contemporary Tamil cinema being an apt subject for the framework of world cinema and worlding. The next chapter outlines the history of star politics and star practices in Tamil cinema and positions this against contemporary Tamil stardom and argues that the cascading irrelevance of the Tamil male movie star is a crucial manifestation of the processes of worlding. My third chapter looks at the changes in the structures and presentation of comedy in Tamil cinema. In particular, the growing popularity of the black comedy and the spoof genres, and the parallel fall of the comedian sidekick figure can be read as a specific reconfiguration of the local that is breaking its way out of the national-regional binary and engaging with world cinema. The final chapter looks at the song-sequence or the musical interruption, and how the changes in film and song structures speak to the worlding of Tamil cinema. Overall, this dissertation works towards de-westernizing film studies by way of including an autochthonous history of cinema from a region that is outside categories of national cinema and by working outside established modes of film studies scholarship.
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