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Unruly Cinema is a meta-history of Indian cinema’s emergence and growth in correspondence with the colonial, postcolonial, and the neoliberal state. Indian popular cinema has grown steadily from the largest national film industry to a global cultural force. Between 1931 and 2000, Indian cinema overcame Hollywood’s domination of the Indian market, crafted a postcolonial national aesthetic, resisted the high modernist pull of art cinema, and eventually emerged as a seamless extension of India’s neoliberal ambitions. The major agent of these four shifts was a section of the Hindi cinema produced in Bombay, which came to be named and marketed as Bollywood in the twenty-first century. Through a systematic exposition of four historical periods, this book shows how Bollywood’s current dominance is an unlikely result of unruliness, that is, of a disorganized defiance of norms. Perpetually caught between an apathetic and adversarial government and an undefined public, Indian commercial cinema has thrived simply by defying control or normalization. The aesthetic turns of this cinema are guided by counter-effects, often unintended and always unruly.

Werner Herzog is the first book-length study of Werner Herzog’s American (in the hemispheric sense) work. It is also the first sustained, book-length study on the question of the political in Herzog’s work. Finally, as part of a series on contemporary directors, it introduces Herzog’s films through the arc of his long career, about 60 films (and counting) over nearly 60 years. The approach is materialist and postcolonial, with systematic attention paid to the historical impulses surrounding the films, both in terms of their history of representation (the stories that the films tell) and their history of production. Special attention is paid to how Herzog upsets our conventional expectations concerning categories such as capital, race, social class, and gender, and to what end. The specific aesthetic grammar of Herzog is essential, especially insofar as it confronts the viewer with political questions of world-historical significance. Although the book deals with dozens of films from across five decades (roughly 1968-2016), its heart is the 1970s and 1980s, and each chapter revolves around a single masterpiece: Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972), Stroszek (1977), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987). Through these films, Herzog challenges the viewer to rethink the foundational traumas of our liberal capitalist modernity, including discovery and conquest; migration and exploitation; resource extraction; and slavery. The book represents both an introduction to Herzog’s work at large, and a new argument about the significance of his films.