South Indian Cinema

Cinema scholars often refer to Hindi cinema as Indian cinema. India has diverse languages, cultures, and a long history of Cinema of its own. Regional cinema in numbers, as well as quality, competes with any cinema in the world. The study is an attempt to present the case of five film industries in the southern part of India, which includes Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Tulu language films. The southern film industries is theorized as 'South Indian cinema' as they share similar features, yet each one of them is unique. South Indian cinema has often been looked down upon as it is cheap and vulgar. The research also explores the gender dimensions in both the industry as well as on-screen presentation. This chapter aims to provide a theoretical and philosophical interpretation of South Indian cinema.

Pruning Knife Busy

Chapter 7 addresses film censorship in the South, and places this history in the larger context of the American film industry as a whole. From early boxing films such as the Johnson-Jeffries fight of 1910, which led southern politicians to ban interracial boxing films (and, in some cases, all boxing films) to the prodigious work of individual southern censors including Lloyd T. Binford of Memphis and Evan R. Chesterman of the State of Virginia, this history reveals the embeddedness of Jim Crow ideology within all sorts of film institutions. In the years after World War II, when film censorship practices came under greater scrutiny and legal threat, the work of southern film censors largely petered out, anticipating some of the coming confrontations of the Civil Rights Movement.