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 What Hollywood asks Bollywood
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Posted on 12-05-06 10:28 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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That according to this article in the Economist:

Indian cinema
Let them come to Bombay


Nov 30th 2006
From The Economist print edition


Indian film-makers don't need to be patronised by Hollywood



“CROWDED houses nightly”, crows an old advertisement for “Pundalik”, the first result of an Indian's use of film to tell a story. “Almost half the Bombay Hindu population saw it last week and we want the other half to do so before a change of programme takes place!” Alas, in 1912 so little of the Bombay population saw “Pundalik” that the producers lost their shirts and quit the business. The ad survives, but not a frame of the celluloid.

Mihir Bose, a London-based journalist with a childhood lived in Bombay (now Mumbai) and an enormous love and knowledge of the city's cinematic output, has put together a narrative history of India's century-long affair with the movies which in many ways resembles the subject itself: breathless, improbable, bigger-than-big and unafraid to dream. But the term “Bollywood”, a portmanteau joining of Bombay and Hollywood that grew popular in the West during the 1990s, has never been of much use to the men and women who churn out the product.

For a start, Bombay's film industry predates California's. Worse, the term tends to be pejorative and is certainly murky. It refers most properly these days to the popular, Hindi-language, song-and-dance extravaganzas produced by studios based in Mumbai. In Mr Bose's colourful story, it sprawls to include nearly all of India's popular cinema. The country as a whole releases more than 1,000 films a year, exceeding America's turnout.

The history of the Indian film industry is rarely coherent and often barely plausible. Mr Bose repays his reader's attention by stuffing his book to bursting with outrageous characters, humour and pathos. In the process he manages, accidentally it would seem, to spin a good yarn through the story of India's turbulent 20th century.

The sad tale of “Pundalik” is but a footnote, which testifies to the immense difficulty of writing this history authoritatively. Well into the post-independence period, groundbreaking talkies were lost to warehouse fires; major releases were financed entirely by “black money” from the underworld; and everybody from stars to screenwriters seemed to be sleeping with one another, marrying, remarrying, committing suicide and forgiving everything to remake the last big hit.

Sorting through the gossip of bigamies and blood feuds can be fun, if a bit maddening. The technical challenges overcome by India's film pioneers inspire awe: for a time, movies were shot in different languages cut-for-cut, to increase the audience (“Hindi take! Cut! Bengali take!...”) and an early rival to Bombay, its country cousin Kolhapur, played host to studios even before it had electricity (abundant daylight was of the essence).

For such riches, Mr Bose's book does not disappoint. It does however fall prey to some sloppiness and exaggeration. Nearly every page is plagued by typographical and sometimes factual errors, which often distract from the point. By calling entry into the mainstream Western market its “final frontier” of success, Mr Bose makes at once too much and too little of Hindi cinema's true ambition. India's popular films are reaching abroad as never before, thanks in large to expatriate South Asians who make them box-office hits in profitable Western markets. But the concerns remain Indian.

Two of the biggest releases of the past year reach in opposite directions. “Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna”, or “KANK”, unleashes Bollywood conventions in a fantasyland vision of Manhattan, representing the aspirations and anxieties of an internationally oriented middle class. The wildly funny “Lage Raho Munna Bhai” by contrast, applauded by India's current Congress-led government, inverts some of the same conventions to tell a tale of old-time patriotism through the travails of a good-hearted gangster. The successful young director of KANK was asked by a fan at the Toronto film festival when he expects his career to bring him to Hollywood. “Never! Let them come to Bombay!” said he.
 
Posted on 12-05-06 10:55 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Fact remains that lot, if not most, hindi movies are unauthorized copies of cinemas made in the West (and to lesser degree, far East). Hence, the term Bollywood, with its negative copy-cat connotation, is quite apt.
 
Posted on 12-05-06 12:34 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Yeah, I suppose there is an element of that. But by the same token, I wonder if all of commercial cinema, both Hollywood and non, suffers from an authenticity gap. Something independent cinema has less of a problem with - both in the West and India.

Just a thought.
 


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