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Novels, digests, orally-transmitted legends, short stories and historical ballads have frequently been adapted into films and television series in South Asia. These narratives exist both in English and in South Asian languages, spanning multiple versions and time periods. Therefore, manifold layers of translation are involved in transmitting them to screen. This is an introductory course to studying screen cultures in their medium specificity by looking at adaptations that make narrative borrowings explicit. Over fourteen weeks, students will be taught how to diagnostically write about and think with films, which rework popular and literary tales. As adaptations, these film extracts and episodes will be studied not for their faithful or authentic representations of events, plots and figures. Instead, our emphasis will be on artistic choices, historical demands and the technological affordances that underlie these cinematic and televisual translations. A body of 6-8 iterations will be screened and studied closely for their departures and proximity to the ‘original’ tales. In this process, the course will train students to critically analyse the power of the ‘original’ over that of the remake or the adaptation. The films and series will include Charulata (1964), Mughal-i-Azam (1969), Alibaba (1976), Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (1992), Akbari-Asghari (2011), Padmavati (2018), and A Suitable Boy (2020). Each lecture and screening will also familiarize students with new scholarship on global screen cultures, an important field in the 21st century.
To diagnostically write about films and TV, to understand the specificity of the screen cultures, and to differentiate between narratives across different mediums. |
