Cinema of India:
Global discourse
Sharmila Tagore was one of the International Competition's Jury Member at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival
Indians during the colonial rule bought film equipment from Europe.[36] The British funded wartime propaganda films during the second world war, some of which showed the Indian army pitted against the axis powers, specifically theEmpire of Japan, which had managed to infiltrate into India.[119] One such story was Burma Rani, which depicted civilian resistance offered to Japanese occupation by the British and Indians present in Myanmar.[119] Pre-independence businessmen such as J. F. Madan and Abdulally Esoofally traded in global cinema.[31]
Indian cinema's early contacts with other regions became visible with its films making early inroads into theSoviet Union, Middle East, Southeast Asia,[120] and China. Mainstream film stars like Rajesh Khanna, Shah Rukh Khan, Rajnikanth and Raj Kapoor gained international fame across Asia[121][122]and Eastern Europe.[123][124] Indian films also appeared in international fora and film festivals.[120] This allowed 'Parallel' Bengali filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray to achieve worldwide fame, with his films gaining success among European,American and Asian audiences.[125]Ray's work subsequently had a worldwide impact, with filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese,[126] James Ivory,[127]Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Kazan, François Truffaut,[128] Steven Spielberg,[74][75][76]Carlos Saura,[129] Jean-Luc Godard,[130]Isao Takahata,[131] Gregory Nava, Ira Sachs and Wes Anderson[132] being influenced by his cinematic style, and many others such as Akira Kurosawapraising his work.[133] The "youthful coming-of-age dramas that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy".[71]Subrata Mitra's cinematographic technique of bounce lighting also originates from The Apu Trilogy.[72] Ray's film Kanchenjungha (1962) also introduced a narrative structure that resembles later hyperlink cinema.[134]Since the 1980s, some previously overlooked Indian filmmakers such as Ritwik Ghatak[135] and Guru Dutt[136]have posthumously gained international acclaim.
Tamil films have enjoyed consistent popularity among populations in South East Asia. Since Chandralekha, Muthuwas the second Tamil film to be dubbed into Japanese (as Mutu: Odoru Maharaja[137]) and grossed a record $1.6 million in 1998.[138] In 2010, Enthirangrossed a record $4 million in North America.
Many Asian and 'South Asian' countries increasingly came to find Indian cinema as more suited to their sensibilities than Western cinema.[120] Jigna Desai holds that by the 21st century, Indian cinema had managed to become 'deterritorialized', spreading over to the many parts of the world where Indian diaspora was present in significant numbers, and becoming an alternative to other international cinema.[139]
Indian cinema has more recently begun influencing Western musical films, and played a particularly instrumental role in the revival of the genre in the Western world. Baz Luhrmann stated that his successful musical film Moulin Rouge!(2001) was directly inspired byBollywood musicals.[140] The critical and financial success of Moulin Rouge!renewed interest in the then-moribund Western musical genre, subsequently fuelling a renaissance of the genre.[141]Danny Boyle's Oscar-winning filmSlumdog Millionaire (2008) was also directly inspired by Indian films,[103][142]and is considered to be a "homage to Hindi commercial cinema".[143] Other Indian filmmakers are also making attempts at reaching a more global audience, with upcoming films by directors such as Vidhu Vinod Chopra,Jahnu Barua, Sudhir Mishra and Pan Nalin.[144]
Indian Cinema was also recognised at the American Academy Awards. Three Indian films, Mother India (1957), Salaam Bombay! (1988), and Lagaan (2001), were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Indian winners of the Academy Awards includeBhanu Athaiya (costume designer),Satyajit Ray (filmmaker), A. R. Rahman(music composer), Resul Pookutty(sound editor) and Gulzar (lyricist).[145]
Influences
Victoria Public Hall, is a historical building in Chennai, named after Victoria, Empress of India. It served as a theatre in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.
Prasads IMAX Theatre located at Hyderabad, is the world's largest 3D-IMAX screen, and also the most attended screen in the world.[146][147][148]
Ramoji Film City located in Hyderabad, holdsGuinness World Record as the World's largest film studio.[149]
PVR Cinemas is one of the largest cinema chains in India
There have generally been six major influences that have shaped the conventions of Indian popular cinema. The first was the ancient Indian epics ofMahabharata and Ramayana which have exerted a profound influence on the thought and imagination of Indian popular cinema, particularly in its narratives. Examples of this influence include the techniques of a side story,back-story and story within a story. Indian popular films often have plots which branch off into sub-plots; such narrative dispersals can clearly be seen in the 1993 films Khalnayak and Gardish.
The second influence was the impact of ancient Sanskrit drama, with its highly stylised nature and emphasis on spectacle, where music, dance and gesture combined "to create a vibrant artistic unit with dance and mime being central to the dramatic experience." Sanskrit dramas were known as natya, derived from the root word nrit (dance), characterising them as spectacular dance-dramas which has continued in Indian cinema.[150] The Rasa method of performance, dating back to ancient Sanskrit drama, is one of the fundamental features that differentiate Indian cinema from that of the Western world. In the Rasa method, empathetic"emotions are conveyed by the performer and thus felt by the audience," in contrast to the Western Stanislavski method where the actor must become "a living, breathing embodiment of a character" rather than "simply conveying emotion." The rasa method of performance is clearly apparent in the performances of popular Hindi film actors like Amitabh Bachchan andShahrukh Khan, nationally acclaimed Hindi films like Rang De Basanti(2006),[151] and internationally acclaimed Bengali films directed bySatyajit Ray.[152]
The third influence was the traditional folk theatre of India, which became popular from around the 10th century with the decline of Sanskrit theatre. These regional traditions include theYatra of West Bengal, the Ramlila ofUttar Pradesh, Yakshagana ofKarnataka, 'Chindu Natakam' of Andhra Pradesh, and the Terukkuttu of Tamil Nadu. The fourth influence was Parsi theatre, which "blended realism and fantasy, music and dance, narrative and spectacle, earthy dialogue and ingenuity of stage presentation, integrating them into a dramatic discourse of melodrama. The Parsi plays contained crude humour, melodious songs and music, sensationalism and dazzling stagecraft."[150] All of these influences are clearly evident in the masala film genre that was popularised byManmohan Desai's films in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly in Coolie(1983), and to an extent in more recent critically acclaimed films such as Rang De Basanti.[151]
The fifth influence was Hollywood, where musicals were popular from the 1920s to the 1950s, though Indian filmmakers departed from their Hollywood counterparts in several ways. "For example, the Hollywood musicals had as their plot the world of entertainment itself. Indian filmmakers, while enhancing the elements of fantasy so pervasive in Indian popular films, used song and music as a natural mode of articulation in a given situation in their films. There is a strong Indian tradition of narrating mythology, history, fairy stories and so on through song and dance." In addition, "whereas Hollywood filmmakers strove to conceal the constructed nature of their work so that the realistic narrative was wholly dominant, Indian filmmakers made no attempt to conceal the fact that what was shown on the screen was a creation, an illusion, a fiction.
However, they demonstrated how this creation intersected with people's day-to-day lives in complex and interesting ways."[153] The final influence was Western musical television, particularly MTV, which has had an increasing influence since the 1990s, as can be seen in the pace, camera angles, dance sequences and music of recent Indian films. An early example of this approach was in Mani Ratnam's Bombay(1995).[154]
Like mainstream Indian popular cinema, Indian Parallel Cinema was also influenced also by a combination of Indian theatre (particularly Sanskrit drama) and Indian literature (particularlyBengali literature), but differs when it comes to foreign influences, where it is more influenced by European cinema(particularly Italian neorealism and French poetic realism) rather than Hollywood. Satyajit Ray cited Italian filmmaker Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) and French filmmakerJean Renoir's The River (1951), which he assisted, as influences on his debut filmPather Panchali (1955). Besides the influence of European cinema and Bengali literature, Ray is also indebted to the Indian theatrical tradition, particularly the Rasa method of classical Sanskrit drama. The complicated doctrine of Rasa "centers predominantly on feeling experienced not only by the characters but also conveyed in a certain artistic way to the spectator. The duality of this kind of a rasa imbrication" shows in The Apu Trilogy.[152] Bimal Roy's Two Acres of Land (1953) was also influenced by De Sica's Bicycle Thievesand in turn paved the way for the Indian New Wave, which began around the same time as the French New Wave and the Japanese New Wave.[69] Ray known as one of the most important influences to Parallel Cinema, was depicted as an auteur (Wollen). The focus of the majority of his stories portrayed the lower middle class and the unemployed (Wollen). It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Parallel Cinema support grew (Wollen).[155]
Multilinguals
Some Indian films are known as "multilinguals," having been filmed in similar but non-identical versions in different languages. This was done in the 1930s. According to Rajadhyaksha and Willemen in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (1994), in its most precise form, a multilingual is
Rajadhyaksha and Willemen note that in seeking to construct their Encclopedia, it they often found it "extremely difficult to distinguish multilinguals in this original sense from dubbed versions, remakes, reissues or, in some cases, the same film listed with different titles, presented as separate versions in different languages.... it will take years of scholarly work to establish definitive data in this respect."[156]:15
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