Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema
Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema

Author: Johan Manschot

Publisher: Kit Pub

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13:

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"Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema is an insightful journey into the complex worlds of fantasy and reality inhabited by creative artistes. India is a unique country that exists in multiple centuries simultaneously. This book unravels the various mysteries and contradictions embedded in our centuries-old tradition. (...) Using defined sections and relevant case studies, the authors analyse the emotional ingredients that form the essence of India and Indian cinema." (Excerpt from the Foreword by Amitabh Bachchan) Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema explores the inner world of Bombay film, the best known of India's movie industries. Many aspects of Hindi cinema are brought to life on the pages of this richly illustrated book - from its beginnings to the present day. The use of songs to advertise movies, the role of censorship, devotion to god and family: these subjects and many more are illuminated. It reveals the symbolism of the divine role models Radha-Krishna and Ram-Sita at the heart of the main protagonists in many films, and the passion of the people working behind the scenes. It examines the changing face of the nation's enemies, the marriage scene, lyricists and playback singers, and it sheds light on Tamil cinema, which rivals the Hindi film industry in output and popularity. The book concludes with an analysis of the mass appeal of Hindi film beyond India's borders and the recent embrace of the much-hyped 'Bollywood' phenomenon in the West.

Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood
Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood

Author: Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1351254243

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This is the first edited volume on new independent Indian cinema. It aims to be a comprehensive compendium of diverse theoretical, philosophical, epistemological and practice-based perspectives, featuring contributions from multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners across the world. This edited collection features analyses of cutting-edge new independent films and is conceived to serve as a beacon to guide future explorations into the burgeoning field of new Indian Cinema studies.

Behind the Curtain
Behind the Curtain

Author: Gregory D. Booth

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-10-13

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 019971665X

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Beginning in the 1930s, men and a handful of women came from India's many communities-Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others--to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in the words of some, "the original fusion music." They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name "Bollywood," but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, "behind the curtain"--the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres. Now, Gregory D. Booth offers a compelling account of the Bollywood film music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In a rare insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, Booth explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film music industry. On the basis of a fascinating set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creator and performers. Booth also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s-90s as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India. Featuring an extensive companion website with video interviews with the musicians themselves, Behind the Curtain is a powerful, ground-level view of this globally important music industry.

Unruly Cinema
Unruly Cinema

Author: Rini Bhattacharya Mehta

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0252052005

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Between 1931 and 2000, India's popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country's prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.

A Journey Through 100 Years of Indian Cinema: A Quizbook on Indian Cinema
A Journey Through 100 Years of Indian Cinema: A Quizbook on Indian Cinema

Author: MR Saumya Chaki

Publisher: Self Publisher

Published: 2015-06-18

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 9789384333867

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Indian cinema completed a century in 2013. The centenary was marked by special events celebrating cinema over the last century. Books were written and films like 'Bombay Talkies' were made to celebrate the achievements and growth of Indian cinema. Given this background there are no quiz books to celebrate the centenary journey of Indian Cinema. The idea behind this book is to create more interest about the journey of Indian films and recognize the work of eminent directors and actors.

Cinema India
Cinema India

Author: Rachel Dwyer

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780813531755

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"The unique style of this cinema is explored through an analysis of the mise-en-scene of the film itself - the locations, sets and costumes - and shows how they, along with the song and dance sequences, construct the 'look' and meaning of a film. Equally important to India's visual culture is publicity. Cinema India explores the development of film advertising and its range of aesthetic influences, from indigenous sources, for example, the Ajanta cave paintings, to foreign styles, such as Art Deco, and examines how publicity material is able to convey social, political and economic information about the society in which it is produced."--BOOK JACKET.

Bombay Hustle
Bombay Hustle

Author: Debashree Mukherjee

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0231551673

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From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial and compelling role in the life of modern India. Bombay Hustle presents an ambitious history of Indian cinema as a history of material practice, bringing new insights to studies of media, modernity, and the late colonial city. Drawing on original archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach, Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s–1940s. In the decades leading up to independence in 1947, Bombay became synonymous with marketplace thrills, industrial strikes, and modernist experimentation. Its burgeoning film industry embodied Bombay’s spirit of “hustle,” gathering together and spewing out the many different energies and emotions that characterized the city. Bombay Hustle examines diverse sites of film production—finance, pre-production paperwork, casting, screenwriting, acting, stunts—to show how speculative excitement jostled against desires for scientific management in an industry premised on the struggle between contingency and control. Mukherjee develops the concept of a “cine-ecology” in order to examine the bodies, technologies, and environments that collectively shaped the production and circulation of cinematic meaning in this time. The book thus brings into view a range of marginalized film workers, their labor and experiences; forgotten film studios, their technical practices and aesthetic visions; and overlooked connections among media practices, geographical particularities, and historical exigencies.

India's New Independent Cinema
India's New Independent Cinema

Author: Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1317290747

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This is the first-ever book on the rise of the new wave of independent Indian films that is revolutionising Indian cinema. Contemporary scholarship on Indian cinema so far has focused asymmetrically on Bollywood—India’s dominant cultural export. Reversing this trend, this book provides an in-depth examination of the burgeoning independent Indian film sector. It locates the new 'Indies' as a glocal hybrid film form—global in aesthetic and local in content. They critically engage with a diverse socio-political spectrum of ‘state of the nation’ stories; from farmer suicides, disenfranchised urban youth and migrant workers to monks turned anti-corporation animal rights agitators. This book provides comprehensive analyses of definitive Indie new wave films including Peepli Live (2010), Dhobi Ghat (2010), The Lunchbox (2013) and Ship of Theseus (2013). It explores how subversive Indies, such as polemical postmodern rap-musical Gandu (2010) transgress conventional notions of ‘traditional Indian values’, and collide with state censorship regulations. This timely and pioneering analysis shows how the new Indies have emerged from a middle space between India’s globalising present and traditional past. This book draws on in-depth interviews with directors, actors, academics and members of the Indian censor board, and is essential reading for anyone seeking an insight into a current Indian film phenomenon that could chart the future of Indian cinema.

Mourning the Nation
Mourning the Nation

Author: Bhaskar Sarkar

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-05-20

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0822392216

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What remains of the “national” when the nation unravels at the birth of the independent state? The political truncation of India at the end of British colonial rule in 1947 led to a social cataclysm in which roughly one million people died and ten to twelve million were displaced. Combining film studies, trauma theory, and South Asian cultural history, Bhaskar Sarkar follows the shifting traces of this event in Indian cinema over the next six decades. He argues that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia and that its representation on screen enables forms of historical engagement that are largely opaque to standard historiography. Sarkar tracks the initial reticence to engage with the trauma of 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a strong Partition discourse, revealing both the silence and the eventual “return of the repressed” as strands of one complex process. Connecting the relative silence of the early decades after Partition to a project of postcolonial nation-building and to trauma’s disjunctive temporal structure, Sarkar develops an allegorical reading of the silence as a form of mourning. He relates the proliferation of explicit Partition narratives in films made since the mid-1980s to disillusionment with post-independence achievements, and he discusses how current cinematic memorializations of 1947 are influenced by economic liberalization and the rise of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism. Traversing Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television, Sarkar provides a history of Indian cinema that interrogates the national (a central category organizing cinema studies) and participates in a wider process of mourning the modernist promises of the nation form.