Bollywood

Since its inception in the second decade of the 20th century, the Bombay-based Indian film industry--Bollywood--has developed a unique visual language, articulated by the vivid hand-painted movie posters that have since become highly-desirable collectors' items. While Bollywood poster artists produced a staggering number of these hand-painted images, their ephemeral work has traditionally been presented unevenly, with shoddy reprints and re-release posters. The Art of Bollywood digs deeper into the tradition, presenting the original art in its true glory--from seldom-seen posters to rare images of street publicity and cinema displays. The text provides a detailed discussion of the works of key artists, in this comprehensive overview of a previously neglected and underrated artistic genre.

Exploring the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, the strikingly illustrated Bollywood's India examines its nonrealistic depictions of everyday life in India and what it reveals about Indian society. Showing how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema, Rachel Dwyer argues that Hindi cinema's interpretations of India over the last two decades are a reliable guide to understanding the nation's changing hopes and dreams.

Every year the Indian film industry produces more than a 1,000 feature films; every day 14 million Indians go to a movie; and a billion more people a year buy tickets for Indian movies than for their Hollywood-produced counterparts. Bombay's studios have taken the cinematic techniques of Hollywood and used them to produce features that have enthralled audiences throughout eastern Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. The result is the Bollywood movie, a film genre characterised by multiple song and dance routines, intense melodrama, and plots containing everything from farce to tragedy. This is the fantastic, diverse, and rich story of the social and cultural phenomenon of Bollywood and an up-close look at the men, women, and ideas that have fuelled its incredible growth.

Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit.

Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this innovative study reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the 21st century.

In Bollywood Cinema, Vijay Mishra argues that Indian film production and reception is shaped by the desire for national community and a pan-Indian popular culture. Seeking to understand Bollywood according to its own narrative and aesthetic principles and in relation to a global film industry, he views Indian cinema through the dual methodologies of postcolonial studies and film theory. Mishra discusses classics such as Mother India (1957) and Devdas (1935) and recent films including Ram Lakhan (1989) and Khalnayak (1993), linking their form and content to broader issues of national identity, epic tradition, popular culture, history, and the implications of diaspora.

This book examines the circulation and viewership of Bollywood films and filmi modernity in Bangladesh.

On the various devices and medium specific techniques film makers use in the making of films; juxtaposed with a historical overview of the development of Hindi motion pictures.

Bombay before Bollywood offers a fresh, alternative look at the history of Indian cinema. Avoiding the conventional focus on India's social and mythological films, Rosie Thomas examines the subaltern genres of the "magic and fighting films"--the fantasy, costume, and stunt films popular in the decades before and immediately after independence. She explores the influence of this other cinema on the big-budget masala films of the 1970s and 1980s, before "Bollywood" erupted onto the world stage in the mid-1990s.

Cinema is not only a major industry in India, it is a powerful cultural force. In Bombay Cinema, Ranjani Mazumdar takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding Bombay cinema as the unofficial archive of the city in India. In this analysis, Mazumdar reveals a complex postnationalist world, convulsed by the social crisis of the 1970s and transformed by the experience of globalization in the 1990s.

Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s-1940s.

This book presents rare behind-the-scenes photographs from the personal archive of the cinematographer Josef Wirsching, a pioneer of Indian cinema. Most of these photographs were taken in the 1930s and '40s when Wirsching was employed at the legendary film studio, Bombay Talkies Ltd. The essays by a variety of scholars and film historians help us understand the historical and imaginative value of Wirsching's photographic archive.

Eye-catching song and dance sequences, colourful imagery and glamourous costumes are just some of the factors that create the distinctive style of a Bollywood film. The book charts the historical, political and cultural changes experienced by the country, as seen through the eyes of the Bollywood film industry.

In this bold study of what she names New Bollywood, Sangita Gopal contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films' evolving treatment of romantic relationships. Gopalargues that the form of the conjugal duo in movies reflects other social forces in India's new consumerist and global society. She takes a daring look at recent Hindi films and movie trends--the decline of song-and-dance sequences, the upgraded status of the horror genre, and the rise of the multiplex and multi-plot--to demonstrate how these relationships exemplify different formulas of contemporary living.

Consuming Bollywood is a major activity in the Indian diaspora and the revenue generated from diasporic audiences is growing exponentially. By combining extended qualitative interviews and textual analysis, this book provides an insightful analysis of how the women who are socially located in the Indian diaspora use the spectacle of Bollywood cinema to renegotiate cultural meanings of home, gender, belonging, and identity. By taking the experiences and interpretations of diasporic women as central, this book substantially adds to the literature on gendered and transnational identity in the context of migration and globalization. Furthermore, it considers the emergence of Bollywood as a potent global brand that is reconstituting cultural identities within a transnational, neoliberal, market-driven economy.

Eena Meena Deeka is a fascinating glimpse into the world of Indian screen comedy, peopled by known, as well as once-important but now-forgotten comedians, who helped evolve the genre from its first slapstick beginning to the polite comedies of manners aimed at the urban middle class.

Fantasy of Modernity: Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema of the 1950s explores the films, the songs, the stars and the extra-cinematic discourse of the period to read love and romance as its most productive trope that mobilized a dynamic and contested public sphere.

This publication is the first ever book dedicated to the topic of film preservation and restoration to have been published in India. It moves on to film preservation in India, assessing what has been done so far, and what remains to be done in the future.

Global Bollywood brings together leading scholars to examine the transnational and transmedia terrain of Bollywood. Defining Bollywood as an arena of public culture distinct from Hindi-language Bombay cinema, this volume offers a new critical framework for analyzing the institutional, cultural, and political dimensions of Bollywood films and film music as they begin to constitute an important circuit of global flows in the twenty-first century.

This book discusses the people involved in Hindi cinema, including the actors, the writers, the producers and directors, and the musicians.

This book traces the life and works of the remarkable director and actor, Guru Dutt, who succeeded in introducing to Indian cinema an individual and lyrical vision. This book is lavishly illustrated with beautiful black and photographs illustrating his life and film career.

There is no film family quite like the Kapoors. A family of professional actors and directors, they span almost eighty years of film-making in India, from the twenties to the present. Based on extensive personal interviews conducted over seven years with family members and friends, The Kapoors resembles the films that the great showman Raj Kapoor made: grand and sweeping, with moments of high drama and touching emotion.

This is the first book to investigate how mental illness is portrayed in Hindi cinema. It examines attitudes towards mental illness in Indian culture, how they are reflected in Hindi films, and how culture has influenced the portrayal of the psychoses.

Networked Bollywood provides interdisciplinary analysis of the role of the stars in the transformation of Hindi cinema into a global entertainment industry.

Once Upon a Time in Bollywood presents an extravaganza of essays on globalization and contemporary Hindi cinema ("Bollywood").

Orienting Hollywood moves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources, policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections were imagined over a century of screen exchange.

Producing Bollywood offers an unprecedented look inside the social and professional worlds of the Mumbai-based Hindi film industry and explains how it became "Bollywood," the global film phenomenon and potent symbol of India as a rising economic powerhouse.

In this interview-based book, Hindi film technicians, artists and industrialists from all horizons and all age groups speak in detail about their work, and give their input on the present situation of Hindi cinema as well as its future. Whether this future will really be bright or not, one could not say; but that Hindi cinema is now living fascinating times definitely cannot be denied.

This book traces the journey of popular Hindi cinema from 1913 to contemporary times when Bollywood has evolved as a part of India's cultural diplomacy.

Hindi popular cinema has played a key role as a national cinema because it assisted in the imagining of a unified India by addressing a public across the nation-to-be even before 1947. Examining the diverse elements that constitute the "popular" in Indian cinema, M.K. Raghavendra undertakes, in this book, a chronological study of films to speculate on narrative conventions, thematic continuities, myths, archetypes, and other formal structures that inform it from its hesitant beginnings up to the 1990s.

In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War.