Sample Material of Our IAS Mains GS Online Coaching Programme
Subject: General Studies (Paper 1 - Indian Heritage and Culture, History & Geography of the World & Society)
Topic: Culture - Art Forms (Indian Cinema)
INDIAN CINEMA
PRE-CINEMA AGE
Telling stories from the epics using hand-drawn tableaux images in scroll paintings, with accompanying live sounds have been an age old Indian tradition. These tales, mostly the familiar stories of gods and goddesses, are revealed slowly through choreographic movements of painted glass slides in a lantern, which create illusions of movements. And so when the Lumire brothers’ representatives held the first public showing at Mumbai’s (Bombay) Watson’s Hotel on July 7, 1896, the new phenomenon did not create much of a stir here and no one in the audience ran out at the image of the train, speeding towards them, as it did elsewhere. The Indian viewer took the new experience as something already familiar to him. Harischandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar, who happened to be present for the Lumiere presentation, was keen on getting hold of the Lumiere Cinematograph and trying it out himself rather than show the Lumiere films to a wider audience. The public reception accorded to Wrangler Paranjpye at Chowapatty on his return from England with the coveted distinction he got at Cambridge was covered by Bhatwadekar in December 1901 - the first Indian topical or actuality film was born.
In Calcutta (Kolkata), Hiralal Sen photographed scenes from some of the plays at the Classic Theatre. Such films were shown as added attractions after the stage performances or taken to distant venue where the stage performers could not reach. The possibility of reaching a large audience through recorded images which could be projectedseveral times through mechanical gadgets caught the fancy of people in the performing arts and the stage and entertainment business. The first decade of the 20th century saw live and recorded performances being clubbed together in the same programme.
The strong influence of its traditional arts, music, dance and popular theatre on the cinema movement in India in its early days, is probable responsible for its characteristic enthusiasm for inserting song and dance sequences in Indian cinema, even till today.
History
Raja Harishchandra (1913) was the first silent feature film made in India. It was made by Dadasaheb Phalke, By the 1930s, the industry was producing over 200 films per annum. The first Indian sound film, Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara (1931), was a super hit. There was clearly a huge market for talkies and musicals; Bollywood and all the regional film industries quickly switched to sound filming.
The 1930s and 1940s were tumultuous.times: India was buffeted by the Great Depressions World War II, the Indian independence movement and the violence of the Partition. Most Bollywood films were unabashedly escapist, but there were also a number of film makers who tackled tough social issues or used the struggle for Indian independence as a backdrop for their plots.
In the late 1950s, Bollywood films moved from black-and-white to colour. Lavish romantic musicals and melodramas were the staple fare at the cinema. Successful actors included Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoqr. In late 1960s and mid 1970s, violent movies’s era was started but romantic movies also co-existed and Dharmendra was a major star. In the late 1970s and 1980s, romantic confections made way for gritty, violent, films about gangsters and bandits. Amitabh Bachchan, the star known for his “angry young man” roles, rode the crest of this trend. In the early 1990s, the pendulum swung back towards family-centric romantic musicals with the success of such films as Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995).
Moreover, Indian cinema entered into a new theme based era that targeted the social ills and evils, like ‘Company’, ‘Onkara’, ‘Shoot Out’. These films are directly the mirror of our social evils occurring here and there. Another kinds of films like ‘Corporate’ targeted the malpractices happening in corporate companies. Today, the film makers are more keen to raise the. political and social lacuna presenting in their film.