Up to 2,000 films are shot in India every year, which is several times more than in the US and Europe. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics , for example, in 2017 alone, 1,986 films were produced on the regional market, and the film industry’s income amounted to $2.39 billion. At the same time, these are not always low-quality melodramatic films with songs and dances, which were popular in Soviet times. Today, Indian directors are ready to shoot both action and touching stories about homosexual relationships.
After the departure of major studios Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Universal and Paramount, new Bollywood films have already appeared in Russian distribution.
Where it all began
From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, India was an English colony, and it was largely due to this that Indians were among the first to see the Lumière brothers’ films. “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station,” “The First Waterer,” and “Workers Leaving the Factory” were seen in Bombay in July 1896, just a year after the first public showing of a film in Paris.
As early as 1903, photographer Hiral Sen from Calcutta was making films based on theatrical performances, and in 1905, documentary footage of city demonstrations of thousands of people.
The founding father of Indian feature cinema is considered to be Jundiraj Govinda Phalke (Dada Saheb Phalke). In 1913, he made the film Raja Harishchandra based on a folk epic – a story about a pious ruler who is generously rewarded by fate for the trials he has passed. Later, he repeatedly took the sure-fire mythological plot as a basis (The Birth of Krishna, Childhood of Krishna), trying to recreate the theatricality traditional to local culture on the screen.
Even then, according to researcher M.K. Raghavendra , Indian cinema acquired its own uniqueness – hyperbolized images, its own point of view on the depiction of good and evil, musicality. That is why even modern Indian films often seem strange and unrealistic to us. For example, in the popular 2009 film in Russia “Three Idiots” by director 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 at all to tell a story,” comments Vladislav Serikov, a specialist in South Asian culture at Frankfurt University, for the magazine “Art of Cinema.”
With the advent of sound cinema in the 1930s, Indian directors faced the difficult task of learning to speak to the viewer in a language they understood, and literally. Because of the linguistic diversity of the country’s regions (22 languages!), it was necessary to simplify the vocabulary on screen to basic concepts – “love”, “friendship”, “hate”, “betrayal” – and, of course, to sing and dance even more.
Bollywood and its “branches”
India consists of 29 states, six union territories and the capital city of Delhi. There is still no single language standard for films released in the country, so almost every state makes films for local audiences. And there is simply no tradition of dubbing. According to research , today the heroes of films most often speak Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam.
The world-famous Bollywood is just one of the film production regions with its center in Mumbai (former Bombay), where most films are shot in the most common language – Hindi. Bollywood has huge territories with decorations 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.
There are also two successful Tollywoods (Kolkata and Hyderabad), Kollywood (Chennai), Sunlawud (Bangalore), Mollywood (Thiruvananthapuram) and Coastalwood (Karnataka and Udipi).
At the same time, mainstream Hindi cinema, 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 slums of Dharavi or to become part of the thousands-strong crowd of the next blockbuster.
Favorite masala
In the 1970s, a unique type of Indian cinema emerged that remains popular today — masala (from the name of the traditional spice mix masala). In essence, it is a genre mix from action to melodrama with a mandatory happy ending in one bottle. This is where the legacy of the ancient epic and Sanskrit dramas can be clearly discerned.
“Find Each Other”, “Amar, Akbar and Anthony”, “Eternal Tale of Love”, “Ganga, Jumna, Saraswati”, “Destiny”, “Insidiousness” – classic masala.
A poor family is beset by misfortune: the father is forced to flee from bandits, the mother is blinded by grief, and the brothers are 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 masala: “These Crazy Youths”, “The Heart Says: Go Ahead”, “Chennai Express”, “The Other Side of Marriage”, as well as “In Joy and in Sorrow”, “My Name is Khan”, “The Runaway” and others.
The success of Bollywood films is explained by their therapeutic effect: these films make you forget about sadness and transport you to a wonderful world where everything always ends well. In addition, they convey traditional values, appealing to duty, honor and conscience. Despite the memes ridiculing the garish computer graphics and exaggerated acting, many Indian films of the entertainment genre can please not only the local audience, but also moviegoers from all over the world with interesting visual solutions.
If you also need therapy, Indian cinema expert Anastasia Belokurova recommends watching the films Bro Munna, the Seller of Happiness and 3 Idiots by Rajkumar Hirani first, as well as the great Veer and Zara, Will Tomorrow Come or Not and the poignant Little Stars on the Earth.
Indian Arthouse
The 1950s–1970s are considered the “golden age” of Indian cinema, when art cinema peaked. After independence, there was a demand for an artistic understanding of reality without cheerful songs. The heroes of the “new wave” or “parallel cinema” films were landless peasants, workers, and refugees.
At the same time, the star of the legendary director Satyajit Ray, winner of an Oscar and several awards at the Berlin and Venice festivals, rose. His “Song of the Road” about the life of the boy Apu is a recognized world masterpiece that influenced Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola and Akira Kurosawa .
Having picked up the ideas of Italian neorealism, Indian “parallel cinema” (directors Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen) developed its own cinematic language, which was fundamentally different from the standards of the emerging Bollywood: directors used a minimum of scenery, invited non-professional actors to star, and did not strive for a happy ending – the land of a poor peasant was sold at auction in the end, and he himself was devoured by the big city.
Among the films of the “new wave” you can even find a real Indian noir. According to film scholar Alexey Guskov , Kamal Amrohi’s “The Estate” is a unique example of this kind. It has the density of light and shadow, and the division of planes into ornaments, and the slow acting. And even the traditional noir theme of the predetermination of fate is revealed, albeit in its own way.
The decline of “parallel cinema” was first discussed in the 1990s, when the victory of Bollywood masala became obvious. But films for a narrow audience continued to be made, albeit in small quantities. An example of this is the work of modern authors, Mani Kaul and Mira Nair.
Who watches Indian cinema today?
Indian cinema is firmly on its feet – more than 11 million viewers watch it daily. Films are sold to countries in South and Southeast Asia, East Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia, as well as Russia and the CIS countries.
But the main consumers are Indians themselves, and the industry employs an average of 5 million people. According to a report by Ernst & Young , domestic movie theater revenues exceed $1.5 billion a year. Residents watch films not only in multiplexes, but also in single-screen village theaters. True, the latter are becoming fewer every year .
At the same time, Indian cinema is striving for the world market. In the 2000s, a tendency emerged to make films for export — as close as possible to European aesthetics, where electronic music is played instead of traditional national songs. For example, “Stranger and Stranger,” “Bikers 2,” etc. But Western viewers are not yet ready to watch Indian films en masse, and works on the level of the South Korean “Squid Game” have not yet appeared.
But Netflix, Amazon, and Hotstar are investing heavily in producing original content in local languages. According to Forrester , the companies spent about $520 million on this in 2020, which is almost $100 million more than in 2019.
Go beyond
Analysts say that the arrival of Internet broadcasting giants on the market has 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, Vogue India published a list of 14 must-watch OTT releases on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney. Among them are The Big Bull, The White Tiger, and Bhoomi.
