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Indian cinema is over 100 years old. During this time, Bollywood invented the genre of masala, learned how to shoot arthouse and produce paintings for export. Understanding what the world’s largest film industry is doing today
Up to 2 films are shot annually in India, which is many times more than in the USA and Europe. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, for example, in 000 alone, 2017 films were produced on the regional market, and the film industry’s income amounted to $1 billion. At the same time, these are not always low-quality melodramatic films with songs and dances that were popular in Soviet times. Today, Indian directors are ready to shoot both action and touching stories about homosexual relationships.
After the departure of the major studios Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Universal and Paramount, Bollywood films have already appeared in the Russian box office.
From what it all began
From the middle of the 1896th to the middle of the XNUMXth century, India was an English colony, largely due to this, the Indians were among the first to get acquainted with the paintings of the Lumiere brothers. “The Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat”, “The First Sprinkler” and “The Exit of the Workers from the Factory” were seen in Bombay in July XNUMX – just a year after the first public film show in Paris.
Already in 1903, the photographer Hiral Sen from Calcutta was making films based on theatrical performances, and in 1905 documentary footage of thousands of city demonstrations.
Jundiraja Govinda Phalke (Dada Saheb Phalke) is called the founding father of Indian feature cinema. In 1913, he shot the painting “Raja Harishchandra” based on the folk epic – the story of a pious sovereign, whom fate generously endows for the trials he has passed. Later, he repeatedly took as a basis a win-win mythological plot (“The Birth of the God Krishna”, “Childhood of Krishna”), trying to recreate the theatricality traditional for the local culture on the screen.
Even then, according to the researcher M.K. Raghavendra, Indian cinema acquires its originality – exaggerated images, its own angle of view on the image of good and evil, musicality. That is why even modern Indian paintings often seem strange and unrealistic to us. For example, in the 2009 film Three Idiots, popular in our country, directed by Rajkumar Hirani (Kinopoisk rating 8,1), the leitmotifs of the Ramayana are also heard – the positive hero is endowed with superpowers and becomes a role model.
“The main task of cinema in the traditional sense is to evoke a special emotional state of rasa (translated from Sanskrit as “juice”, “taste”), and not to tell a story at all,” Vladislav, an expert on South Asian culture at the University of Frankfurt, comments for the Art of Cinema magazine. Serikov.
With the advent of sound cinema in the 1930s, Indian directors faced the difficult task of learning to speak to the audience in a language they understood, and literally. Due to the linguistic diversity of the country’s regions (22 languages!) it was necessary to simplify the vocabulary on the screen to basic concepts – “love”, “friendship”, “hatred”, “betrayal” – and of course, even more singing and dancing.
Bollywood and its affiliates
India is made up of 29 states, six union territories and the Delhi metropolitan area. Until now, the country does not have a single language standard for released films, so almost every state makes films for local audiences. And there is simply no tradition of dubbing. According to research, the most common languages spoken by movie characters today are Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam.
The world-famous Bollywood is just one of the filmmaking regions centered on Mumbai (formerly Bombay), where most films are shot in the most widely spoken language, Hindi. Bollywood has huge areas with scenery and hundreds of pavilions for every taste. And the fame of local movie stars – Dilip Kumar, Rajesh Khanna, Shammi and Rishi Kapoor, Aamir and Shah Rukh Khan – can be the envy of Hollywood celebrities.
Also in India, two Tollywoods (Kolkata and Hyderabad), Kollywood (Chennai), Sunlawwood (Bangalore), Mollywood (Thiruvananthapuram) and Kostalwood (Karnataka and Udipi) are successfully operating.
At the same time, the Hindi mainstream, which avoids regional specifics, still claims the title of national cinema.
In recent years, film tourism has been actively developing in the country – inexperienced Europeans are ready to pay money for a location tour to the Dharavi slums or become part of the crowd of thousands of extras of the next blockbuster.
Favorite Masala
In the 1970s, a unique type of Indian cinema was formed that remains popular today – masala (from the name of the traditional mixture of spices masala). In fact, this is a genre mix from an action movie to a melodrama with an obligatory happy ending in one bottle. This is where the heritage of the ancient epic and Sanskrit dramas is precisely guessed.
“Find each other”, “Amar, Akbar and Anthony”, “Eternal tale of love”, “Ganga, Jamna, Saraswati”, “Fate”, “Cunning” – a classic masala.
Misfortunes befell the poor family: the father was forced to run away from the bandits, the mother was blinded by grief, and the brothers were separated in childhood – this is the plot of the beloved film “Amar, Akbar and Anthony”. Three hours of exciting action and catharsis: the family is reunited and everyone is happy.
More modern versions of the masala: “That Crazy Youth”, “The Heart Says Go”, “Chennai Express”, “The Other Side of Marriage”, as well as “In Sadness and In Joy”, “My Name is Khan”, “Fugitive ” and others.
The success of Bollywood films is explained by their therapeutic effect: this movie makes you forget about sadness and takes you to a wonderful world where everything always ends well. In addition, it broadcasts traditional values, appealing to duty, honor and conscience. Contrary to memes that make fun of clumsy computer graphics and exaggerated acting, many Indian films of the entertainment genre can please not only local audiences, but also movie fans from all over the world with interesting visual solutions.
If you also need therapy, Indian film expert Anastasia Belokurova advises first of all to watch the films “Bro Munna, seller of happiness” and “Three Idiots” by Rajkumar Hirani, as well as the great “Veer and Zara”, “Tomorrow Comes or Not” and a poignant painting “Stars on the ground”.
Indian arthouse
The “golden age” of Indian cinema is considered to be the 1950s-1970s, which saw the peak of art cinema. After gaining independence, there was a request for an artistic understanding of reality without merry songs. The heroes of the films of the “new wave” or “parallel cinema” were landless peasants, workers and refugees.
At the same time, the star of the legendary director Satyajit Rai rose – the owner of an Oscar and several awards at the Berlin and Venice festivals. His Song of the Road, about the life of the boy Apu, is a world-famous masterpiece that influenced Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola and Akira Kurosawa.
Having picked up the achievements of Italian neorealism, the Indian “parallel cinema” (directors Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen) developed its own film language, which was fundamentally different from the standards of the emerging Bollywood: directors used a minimum of scenery, invited non-professional artists to shoot and did not strive for happy endu – the land of a poor peasant in the final went under the hammer, and he himself was devoured by a big city.
Among the films of the “new wave” you can even find real Indian noir. According to film critic Aleksey Guskov, Kamal Amrokhi’s “Estate” is a unique example of this kind. There is also a density of chiaroscuro, and the division of planes into ornaments, and a slow-motion game of actors. And even the theme of predetermination, traditional for noir, is revealed, albeit in its own way.
The decline of “parallel cinema” was discussed in the 1990s, when the victory of the Bollywood masala became obvious. But films for a narrow audience continued to be made, albeit in small numbers. An example of this is the work of contemporary authors, Mani Kaul and Mira Nair.
Who is watching Indian movies today
Indian cinema is firmly on its feet – every day it is watched by more than 11 million viewers. Films are sold to the countries of South and Southeast Asia, East Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia, as well as to Russia and the CIS countries.
But the main consumers are the Indians themselves, and the industry employs an average of 5 million people. Home theater revenues exceed $1,5 billion a year, according to a report by Ernst & Young. Residents watch films not only in multiplexes, but also in single-screen village cinemas. True, the latter are becoming less and less every year.
At the same time, Indian cinema is striving for the global market. In the 2000s, there was a tendency to make films for export – as close as possible to European aesthetics, where electronic music sounds instead of traditional national songs. For example, “Stranger and Stranger”, “Bikers-2”, etc. But while Western viewers are not ready to massively watch Indian films, and works of the level of the South Korean “Squid Game” have not yet appeared.
But Netflix, Amazon and Hotstar are actively investing in the production of original content in local languages. According to Forrester, companies spent about $2020 million on this in 520, nearly $100 million more than in 2019.
To go beyond
Analysts say that the Internet broadcasting giants that have entered the market have allowed Indian films to go beyond the notorious action films and melodramas: more and more films are devoted to the problems of women in modern society, war and politics.
In 2021, Indian Vogue published a list of 14 must-see OTT releases on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney. Among them are “Big Bull”, “White Tiger” and “Bhumi”.
Another emerging trend in national cinema is the desire to speak openly about homosexual relationships and queer people. It turned out that viewers even in India itself are ready to look at gays who come out in front of relatives (“Kapoor and Sons”, 2016, “Be even more careful with marriage”, 2020), happy lesbians (“What did I feel when I saw this girl”, 2019) or a student with cerebral palsy who recognizes herself as bisexual (“Margarita with a Straw”, 2015).
According to Konstantin Kropotkin, one can also judge how radical the changes taking place in Indian cinema are by the work of director Faraz Arif Ansari, a non-binary person who should be addressed as “they”. Their 2021 short film about Muslim women in love, Sheer Qorma, won a prize at the oldest LGBT film festival Frameline Film Festival.