Category — Film Industry

I’m sharing an essay I read on the Bachchan film posters. It has been written by Ranjani Mazumdar, Associate Professor of cinema studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Ranjani has previously written on the Bombay film poster, but this paper works specifically on Amitabh Bachchan, and it creates a visual map of how cinema responded to societal changes in the 1970s, and also traces Bachchan’s rise to stardom through the film poster.

The essay is four-pages long, and you have to go to the bottom right corner of the page and click on ‘next’, a link that isn’t very visible on the page.

Click here to access the essay.

The popular Hindi film industry is often accused of recycling material, rehashing old stories, copying Hollywood and generally not generating any new innovative material. We can argue over the validity of these claims, but there is something new and wildly interesting that has been brewing in Bollywood for some years now, and that is the manufacturing of stars.

With the internet, social networking and myriad other options, the mapping of stardom has changed over the last few years. Namrata Joshi of Outlook has written about the role of marketing in selling stars and their films. Have a look here.

A recent report by the Press Trust of India claims that the first quarter of 2010 has seen Marathi films grossing higher than most mainstream Hindi films produced by the Bombay film industry. Notwithstanding the likes of 3 Idiots and My Name is Khan, an upsurge has been noticed in the returns of films like Harishchandrachi Factory, Natrang to name a few.

Click here to access the full report.

Just over thirty years after it came into existence, Miramax  studio that gave the world films like Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Chicago to name a few, was shut down by Disney. Click here to access the entire report.

Nominations, predictions, surprises and catfights are usual fare in the run up to the most popular award show hosted by the Academy for Motion Pictures and Sciences. An interesting list was drawn up by the guys at TIME, that made early predictions about what film, director and actors would be honoured by the Academy if the awards were decided by critics.

I’ve linked the list of Best Picture and the votes it got here.

For the complete list, click here.

There is a very good reason that I didn’t write on the much celebrated, much talked-about recent film, 3 Idiots, despite having some thoughts on it. The reason, quite simply, is my regular critique of Aamir Khan and the response it generates. While I enjoyed the film for its lighter moments, its use of comedy and some irreverent moments that are unique to popular Bombay cinema, it would have been impossible for me to ignore the glaring problems with this film. And for fear that my criticism of Aamir Khan’s constructed star persona (polite words for god complex) looks like a bad habit, I have chosen to remain somewhat in the background with this one. Luckily, I came across Jai Arjun Singh’s insightful piece on the film that appeared in Business Standard. I share his opinion to a large extent, and it can be accessed here.

The last few months have seen much frenetic activity around Paresh Mokashi’s Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory, primarily because it was picked as India’s official entry to the Oscars. While a lot of dinnertime conversation seems to revolve around this film and its supposed uniqueness, it is likely that most of this excitement in the air is based on some reviews about this film and its supposed archival value, because very few people have actually seen it. The question therefore is, is the film really the right choice to send to an international forum as our selection of the best film made in India this year. The answer, is, no. [Read more →]

I have been planning to document the experiences and encounters of Tamil film artists who worked during 1940s-1960s, but with limited success as many old living artists are difficult to trace to begin with and meet their natural ends of their lives by the time we are able to locate them. I was lucky to meet two important living sources recently, Mr S S Rajendran and Mr Subbu Arumugam and succeeded in documenting their experiences and encounters in Tamil cinema and politics during 1940s-1960s. I hope to post the audio files of the sessions with the two in the days to come. But here is what transpired [Read more →]

The chaste Tamil word Ayan is made to suspend its real aura3 and enact a performative and false aura for the sake of lending a unique flavour to a film which is not unique and which is of a run-of-the mill kind. The word Ayan has its aura fixed in the realism of the Sangam age. Not long ago, Zizek remarked that the “the fetish is the embodiment of a lie that enables us to endure an unbearable truth.4 Invoking the Zizekian notion of fetish, one can come closer to the post-colonial problematic of Ayan as the title of a masala Tamil film. The film Ayan has its unrealistic grandeur as the real (the truth) and claims to be realistic in terms of the title and plot as the fetish (the lie). [Read more →]

With the advent of Paruthiveeran (2007) and Subramanyapuram (2008), there have been renewed hopes of optimism among members of the discerning lovers of Tamil cinema that all has not been lost and departures from the mainstream narrative practices are not only a possibility, but can also be sure winners at the box office. Both Paruthiveeran (Dir.Ameer) and Subramanyapuram (Dir.Sasikumar) have also been labelled as exemplars of violent narratives. [Read more →]