Tamil cinema has common roots with and borrows from other national and regional cinema traditions, and thus shares some characteristics with those traditions. It also, however, draws from an aesthetic history specific to India and its southern regions, and has developed formal and narrative conventions of its own.

Films have been shown in India since July 1896, when the Lumière brothers introduced their cinematographe six months after its original unveiling in Paris. Production of Indian films began shortly thereafter. Indian movies have retained some foreign influences since those first days, but have also developed a style and format that are unique. The indigenous characteristics of popular cinema that seem most notable to the western viewer include the obligatory inclusion of songs, dances, and fight scenes, the emphasis on melodrama, and the apparent focus on these elements at the expense of narrative and verisimilitude.

Many of the aesthetic conventions of Tamil and other Indian cinema appear to derive from the various folk and classical dramatic performances that preceded film. The search for motivations of present-day forms in those of previous ones can be risky and even arbitrary, however, and I concur with Thomas in cautioning against too heavy a reliance on “tradition” as explanation of contemporary form – in part because South Asian traditions are heterogeneous enough to account for almost anything, and in part because of the danger inherent in such explanations of romanticising the exotic and ignoring other influences (Thomas 1985: 130).