|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Behind the scenes City Flicks: Indian Cinema And The Urban Experience.
The efforts presented in this book come from a seminar that was organised in 1999 at Copenhagen. Even though the papers were presented a few years ago, they are not dated and give us interesting information about the world of Indian cinema. Ashish Rajadhyaksha tells us something about the scale of Indian cinema. On the verge of conquering the globe, Indian cinema is growing rapidly. Yet, its scale of operations, as far as business is concerned, is rather puny. Even with the widely acclaimed success of films like Dil to Pagal Hai, Taal and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Indian films grossed much less than the top ten successful dot com companies of the day, says Rajadhyaksha. In contrast, just a handful of successful films from Hollywood fetch more than the entire produce of Indian cinema. Indian cinema has come to be identified with Bollywood. Ironically, Bollywood has got into competition with the techno-savvy films of Hollywood without making much effort to improve the story line of its films. The main thrust of the contributors to this volume is to examine the placement of urban spaces in cinema. Moinak Biswas, M Madhava Prasad, Manas Ray and many others have presented interesting essays. Peter Larsen examines the ideas of sociologist Georg Simmel to say that the language of the film is a universal one and not confined to any particular locality or class. Ravi Vasudevan’s commentary on the film Satya makes an effort to explain audience response to action films. Meandering from Parinda to Baazigar to Satya via the European film theory, Vasudevan ends up telling us that seeds of the action film of the 1990s lay in the violence (riots) in Bombay in 1993. "The energy of that very particular compact between screen and audience is then channelled as an intervention into the contemporary, disembowelling one form of political spectacle by our heady engagement with another." Sudipta Kaviraj analyses
the famous Johnny Walker / Mohammad Rafi song from the film CID.
This song, says Kaviraj, presents the dark side of the new urban sprawl
as also the hopes and opportunities that emerge from it. He points out
that no amount of scholarly analyses would have been able to convey this
complex image to the people. That, in the end, remains the most
important capability of the film medium: that it can express complex
emotions in an effective way. And it is the skill of an analyst like
Kaviraj that enables us to get a deeper understanding of the
relationship between Indian cinema and Indian society. |
Critics have come together
in this book to tell us about Indian cinema. These
"cinegogues" are known to peel off its outer surface to
reveal the meaning underneath. Some times they do a good job of it, at
other occasions we are given poetic assertions which are difficult to
swallow. In the process, however, they do take away some of the magic
associated with the sensual experience that cinema represents.