Art Cinema in India

Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago)

"The Problem of Newness: Art Cinema in India"

How do we think about newness in an aesthetic and commercial medium such as cinema? This talk explores this question with attention to the Indian new wave of the late 1960s-1970s. There is much controversy around the point that the body of films referred to as the Indian new wave were different from mainstream films as well as art films that preceded them. Yet, contemporary critics and film scholars acknowledge that there was a ferment in Indian cinema during this period not witnessed before or since. Taking a historical approach, and with close attention to some key films, I lay out a history of the Indian new wave.

Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago) is a historian of modern India. Her areas of expertise span histories of marriage and sexuality, postcolonial theory and intellectual history, and the history of Indian cinema. She is the author of Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal and Writing Postcolonial History (Duke University Press, 2009). She is presently finishing a book entitled "Art Cinema in India: Political and Aesthetic Histories".