The 1970s and its Legacies in India's Cinemas PDF Download

Author: Priya Joshi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134927592
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
The 1970s was a pivotal decade in the Indian social, cultural, political and economic landscape: the global oil crisis, wars with China and Pakistan in the previous decade, the Bangladesh war of 1971, labour and food shortages, widespread political corruption, and the declaration of the state of Emergency. Amidst this backdrop Indian cinema in both its popular and art/parallel film forms flourished. This exciting new collection brings together original research from across the arts and humanities disciplines that examine the legacies of the 1970s in India’s cinemas, offering an invaluable insight into this important period. The authors argue that the historical processes underway in the 1970s are important even today, and can be deciphered in the aural and visual medium of Indian cinema. The book explores two central themes: first, the popular cinema’s role in helping to construct the decade’s public culture; and second, the powerful and under-studied archive of the decade as present in India’s popular cinemas. This book is based on a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Author: Rohit K. Dasgupta
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442277998
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Although the motion picture industry in India is one of the oldest and largest in the world—with literally thousands of productions released each year—films from that country have not been as well received as those from other countries. Known for their impressive musical numbers, melodramatic plots, and nationally beloved stars, Indian films have long been ignored by the West but are now at the forefront of cinema studies. With the prolific number of films available, it can be difficult to know what to watch. In 100 Essential Indian Films, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Sangeeta Datta identify and discuss significant works produced since the 1930s. Examining the output of different regional film industries throughout India, this volume offers a balance of box-office blockbusters, critical successes, and less-recognized cult classics. From early films by Satyajit Ray to contemporary classics such as Salaam Bombay and Lagaan, each entry includes comprehensive details about the film and situates the work in the context and history of the Indian canon.In addition to these notable productions, this book also examines key film directors and the work of major film stars in the industry. While many studies of Indian films focus on a single language’s contributions, this encyclopedia offers a comprehensive guide to productions from across the country in various languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Assamese, Punjabi, Marathi, and English. 100 Essential Indian Films is an engaging volume that will appeal to both cinema scholars and those looking for an introduction to a vital component of world cinema.

Author: Priya Joshi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023153907X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Bollywood is India's most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. Its blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation's dispersed anxieties, and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes "India." Written by an award-winning scholar of popular culture and postcolonial modernity, Bollywood's India analyzes the role of the cinema's most popular blockbusters in making, unmaking, and remaking modern India. With dazzling interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. Themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. Summoning India's tumultuous 1970s as an interpretive lens, Joshi reveals the cinema's social work across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-starrer genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. In elegantly crafted studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009), Joshi powerfully conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.

Author: Ajay Gehlawat
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000448959
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Exploring the evolution of song and dance in the popular Hindi film, this book examines how these quintessential elements have been and continue to be theorized. As song ‘picturizations’, as they are frequently called, have evolved, shifting from little more than impromptu moves around tree trunks to highly choreographed affairs featuring scores of professional dancers and exotic backgrounds, their theorization has also developed beyond the initial, peremptory dismissals of earlier critics. Featuring a landmark collection of essays from leading theorists, as well as newer contributions from up-and-coming scholars, this book develops new and exciting ways of thinking about song and dance in Hindi cinema and, in turn, explores how these elements work to (re)define popular Hindi cinema in the twenty-first century. This collection will be of interest to students and scholars of Hindi cinema, musicals, and global popular cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Author: Michael Lawrence
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1844578577
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Indian Film Stars offers original insights and important reappraisals of film stardom in India from the early talkie era of the 1930s to the contemporary period of global blockbusters. The collection represents a substantial intervention to our understanding of the development of film star cultures in India during the 20th and 21st centuries. The contributors seek to inspire and inform further inquiries into the histories of film stardom-the industrial construction and promotion of star personalities, the actual labouring and imagined lifestyles of professional stars, the stars' relationship to specific aesthetic cinematic conventions (such as frontality and song-dance) and production technologies (such as the play-back system and post-synchronization), and audiences' investment in and devotion to specific star bodies-across the country's multiple centres of film production and across the overlapping (and increasingly international) zones of the films' distribution and reception. The star images, star bodies and star careers discussed are examined in relation to a wide range of issues, including the negotiation and contestation of tradition and modernity, the embodiment and articulation of both Indian and non-Indian values and vogues; the representation of gender and sexuality, of race and ethnicity, and of cosmopolitan mobility and transnational migration; innovations and conventions in performance style; the construction and transformation of public persona; the star's association with film studios and the mainstream media; the star's relationship with historical, political and cultural change and memory; and the star's meaning and value for specific (including marginalised) sectors of the audience.

Author: Madhavi Murty
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978828756
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Introduction: Spectacular realism and political economic change -- The development story : caste, religion and poverty in "new" India -- Iconicity : moving between the real and the spectacular -- The entrepreneur : new identities for new times -- Love in new times.

Author: Ruth Vanita
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501334425
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. In early films courtesan characters transmitted Indian classical dance, music and aesthetics to large audiences. They represent the nation's past, tracing their heritage to the fourth-century Kamasutra and to nineteenth-century courtly cultures, but they are also the first group of modern women in Hindi films. They are working professionals living on their own or in matrilineal families. Like male protagonists, they travel widely and develop networks of friends and chosen kin. They have relations with men outside marriage and become single mothers. Courtesan films are heroine-oriented and almost every major female actor has played this role. Challenging received wisdom, Vanita demonstrates that a larger number of courtesans in Bombay cinema are Hindu and indeterminate than are Muslim, and that films depict their culture as hybrid Hindu-Muslim, not Islamicate. Courtesans speak in the ambiguous voice of the modern nation, inviting spectators to seize pleasure here and now but also to search for the meaning of life. Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.

Author: Chandrava Chakravarty
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040183352
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book explores the dramatic rise in popularity of the women’s biopic in contemporary Bollywood, within the context of wider cultural shifts over the past decade. Delving into the societal shifts reflected in the genre, both on and off screen, the book explores the contours of individual agency and the centring of women in Indian cinema. The book offers new insight into women-centric Hindi biopics, a fast-rising genre carving out a tradition of its own, with female directors and actors contributing to this rising postfeminist celebration of women’s agency and individuality. The authors posit that the alternative narratives, created by Bollywood and accepted by mainstream audiences, have become a catalyst to elevate women or female actors to protagonists, without the need to conform to the sexist mores of mainstream Bollywood. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and upper-level students in the areas of film studies, media industries, gender and feminism, and South Asian studies.

Author: Ajay Gehlawat
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131764400X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Key changes have emerged in Bollywood in the new millennium. Twenty-First Century Bollywood traces the emerging shifts in both the content and form of Bollywood cinema and examines these new tendencies in relation to the changing dynamics of Indian culture. The book historically situates these emerging trends in relation to previous norms, and develops new, innovative paradigms for conceptualizing Bollywood in the twenty-first century. The particular shifts in contemporary Bollywood cinema that the book examines include the changing nature of the song and dance sequence, the evolving representations of male and female sexuality, and the increasing presence of whiteness as a dominant trope in Bollywood cinema. It also focuses on the increasing presence of Bollywood in higher education courses in the West, as well as how Bollywood’s growing presence in such academic contexts illuminates the changing ways in which this cinema is consumed by Western audiences. Shifting the focus back on the cinematic elements of contemporary films themselves, the book analyses Bollywood films by considering the film dynamics on their own terms, and related to their narrative and aesthetic usage, rather than through an analysis of large-scale industrial practices. It will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Film Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Author: Swapnil Rai
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009445316
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Networked Bollywood provides interdisciplinary analysis of the role of the stars in the transformation of Hindi cinema into a global entertainment industry. The first Indian film was made in 1913. However, filmmaking was recognized as an industry almost a hundred years later. Yet, Indian films have been circulating globally since their inception. This book unearths this oft-elided history of Bollywood's globalization through multilingual, transnational research and discursive cultural analysis. The author illustrates how over the decades, a handful of primarily male megastars, as the heads of the industry's most prominent productions and corporations, combined overwhelming charismatic affect with unparalleled business influence. Through their “star switching power,” theorized here as a deeply gendered phenomenon and manifesting broader social inequalities, India's most prominent stars instigated new flows of cinema, industrial collaborations, structured distinctive business models, influenced state policy and diplomatic exchange, thereby defining the future of Bollywood's globalization.