Revising World Cinema through Tamil Cinema

Abstract

This article situates Tamil cinema as world cinema, and interrogates current definitions of the field and category of world cinema from the perspective of twenty-first century Tamil cinema. In a discipline that has historically privileged national cinemas, the field of world cinema better facilitates the study of a sub-national film industry like Tamil cinema that has been overshadowed by the Hindi film industry in India. However, the current conceptions of world cinema as a category are not entirely suitable to the study of Tamil cinema. By studying examples from twenty-first century Tamil cinema, I propose a revised definition of world cinema, and the associated process of ‘worlding,’ that would expand and revise the parameters of world cinema, and film studies writ large.