Film Review: Indian Film

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1.4 INDIAN FILM

India is the world’s largest producer of films—in the 1990s, the country made more than 800 films annually. It is the only country that has a bigger audience for indigenous films than imported ones. It also boasts one of the biggest international audiences.

Indian films mean different things to different people. For the majority, they mean “Bollywood” (a conflation of Bombay, the old name for Mumbai, and Hollywood), and for others,they mean exquisite art movies as exemplified by the work of Satyajit Ray. The films of Bollywood tended to be rigidly formulaic Hindi-language musicals, comedies, or melodramas. In the 1990s, Bollywood musicals, the staple of the Indian film industry, became more and more popular among non-Indians …show more content…

Renoir encouraged Ray to fulfil his dream of making a film based on Pather Panchali, a novel by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee that deals with Bengali village life. With the majority of money coming from the West Bengal government, Ray was able to make Pather Panchali in 1955, the first film in his Apu trilogy. Aside from Renoir’s importance to Ray, the influence of The River cannot be overestimated. It was one of the first films from the West to show India other than as an exotic background to Kipling-style colonial adventures. It was only after this film that Fritz Lang visited India in 1956 to make Taj Mahal, later abandoned. James Ivory also made several films there, including Shakespeare-Wallah (1965) and Heat and Dust (1983). Another European director to be influenced was Louis Malle (Phantom India, 1969). The success of Ray’s films proved that it was possible to work outside the commercial …show more content…

Meanwhile, Bollywood movies were improving in quality, both technically and artistically. Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975), starring one of the greatest Bollywood actors, Amitabh Bachchan, is one of the most successful Hindi films of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Indian “art film” was not so visible. However, in 1988, Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!, became a huge international success. Made in record time and for little money, it was an impressively assembled mosaic of Mumbai’s street life, its harsh cruelties and fleeting pleasures. Other critically acclaimed Indian films in recent years have been Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), an examination of caste discrimination, human suffering, and the role of women in India’s changing culture; Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996), which references Indian mysticism and the epic poetry of the Ramayana as well as late-20th-century feminism; and Sudhir Mishra’s hard-hitting Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005), about three college students in the 1970s, and how the political and social upheaval of the times changes their lives. India is the world’s largest producer of feature films, most of them musicals, the soundtracks of which are released before the movie is. Since the 1980s, the sale of music rights has generated income for the film industry equivalent to the distribution

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