MEDIA STUDIES ESSAY

Ly Verduyn Media Studies Essay

 

To what extend have Hindu values and ideologies dominated the representational agenda of Indian cinema?

 

            Cinema was first introduced in India in July 7, 1896, when the  Brother’s Cinematographe showed six soundless short films in the Watson Hotel in Bombay.

            Indian cinema is named Bollywood. This name is conflation of Bombay, the old name of Mumbai, and Hollywood, the center of the United State film industry. Bollywood is also commonly referred to as Hindi cinema. The Bollywood industry is usually tha largest in terms of films produced and office receipts.

            The first Indian film concerned with honor, sacrifice and mighty deeds. For in that period many “mythologicals” were made and took India by storm.

            In the 1930’s, Indian films adopted a modernist outlook essentially converging of society, addressing social differences of caste, class and the relations between the sexes. The most important film in the period,  (1935), the director created a tale of love frustrated by social distinction and masculine ineffectuality. This film focused on indecision, frustration and a focus on failure and longing rather than on achievement.

            Indian cinema has made a unique contribution towards evolving a new popular culture by reconstructing the traditional performative themes and idioms, using western narrative forms and positioning implicitly in the narrative many contemporary tensions and encoded messages of social change. It provided an intimate cinematic interpretation of Indian identity in its sentiments, outlook and diversity.

Indian Cinema has built its narrative around the notion of enlightenment, taking up a well-informed discourse on the human connection with the metaphysical, at the same time presenting a sound critique of the orthodox worldview, age-old social hierarchy and the social tensions and suffering. Some of the major concerns of Indian literature were also incorporated in their films. During the classical period when film-making was at its highest artistic peak, it fulfilled an important social function by translating the main agenda of Indian society at that time by interpreting human suffering in an inequitable society, and to release and reinstate the cultural traditions from the influences of the recent colonial past.

The basic emotional basis or structure of Indian films has its roots in living a life in the puritan, sublime love through a cycle of union and separation. The protagonist was presented essentially as an introvert, a restless soul in search of his identity in love and suffering. But the large part of the cinema is characterized by the reflection of internal suffering of a nation at large. The film-makers submerge the nation’s pain in highly appealing story-telling, which interpreted the uprootment and loss in different ways and help people incoming terms with it.

Hindu films act as the interface between the traditions of Indian society and of the disturbing Western intrusions. The function of Hindu film is to externalize an inner psychological conflict and handle the inner passion generated by social and political processes as problems created by events and persons.

 

           

 

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