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At the fag end of the
19th century the brothers Lumiere held the first public screening of film in
the darkened basement of a Paris café. Their invention, the cinematograph was a camera, a
projector and a printer rolled into one, and defying Louis Lumiere’s expectation that
“cinema is an invention without a future”, it became the tool for a most potent
art. |
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The first
feature film to be made in India was the silent black and white epic of ‘Raja
Harishchandra’, a popular figure of legend who is still upheld as a symbol of
truthfulness. The film was made by Dadasaheb Phalke, the man who is credited as being the
father of Indian cinema.
The first talkie was made in 1931, when sound swept through the fledgling
movie industry. ‘Alam Ara’ was the first of the Indian talkies. With a
soundtrack, films acquired a mass following. It suddenly became financially feasible to
make movies and so it was that film production took off in regional centres around the
country. The Bengalis, Tamilians and Telugu were first off the block, followed by
filmmakers from Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Orissa. Colour came to Indian
films with ‘Kisan Kanya’ in 1937.
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With colour and sound, the motion picture had come of age and it didn’t
take Indians very long to tap this form of popular entertainment for all its worth. Today
the Indian film industry churns out a mammoth 800 films annually, give or take a few. A
fourth of these come from the Bombay industry, which, after a take on its LA counterpart,
is popularly referred to as ‘Bollywood’. While every region has its own film
industry, those that predominate are the Tamilian, the Telugu, the Malayalam (a.k.a.
Mollywood!) and the Bengali (a.k.a. Tollywood after the Calcutta locality, Tollygunge).
The standard fare churned out of the film factory is what is called the
“masala film”. The formula these movies employ to tug at the filmgoer’s
sentiments and purse strings consists of liberal doses of action and melodrama, and dances
to numbers that are produced by a music industry that is dedicated to the sole purpose of
providing these 800 films with at least 4800 songs. The sentiments vary from era to era
depending on the public mood and the ‘big social problem’ of the times.
There used to be a distinct parallel cinema, distinguished from its
mainstream cousin in content and style. The emotions were subtle, the themes delicate and
marked by a seriousness of purpose. While the popular cinema encouraged the imitation of
art in life (spurring countless youth to chase women on the streets, the day’s most
popular song on their lips), this other cinema consciously tried to imitate life. But not
many people would pay to watch the dreary bits of their lives on 70mm, and starved of
funds, trying to tap the huge mass market, parallel cinema makers died out as a breed.
The best of Indian cinema today has picked up the values and concerns of the
‘art house movement’ and merged it with a song-dance format to create movies
that are commercially viable as well as aesthetically sound. The worst… well,
that’s high entertainment and calls for a complete suspension of belief for the
duration of 90 minutes! |
