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Indian Film Industry

A cinema hall in Delhi

India is a large country where many languages are spoken. According to the 1991 Census of India there are about 10,400 'raw mother tongues' in India.

The Hindi film industry (Bollywood)

Main article: Bollywood

The Hindi film industry, based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), is the largest branch of Indian cinema. Hindi film Industry is often called 'Bollywood' (a melding of Hollywood and Bombay).

Although Bollywood does not distribute a lot of films, it can be considered to be largest in terms of viewers. It is believed that Bollywood movies are watched by majority of the Indian movie goers. It also has international recognition, especially in Western countries such as the UK, USA, Canada, and Australia where there is a large South Asian community.

The Kannada film industry

Main article: Cinema of Karnataka

The Kannada film industry, based in Karnataka, is sometimes called 'Sandalwood', as Karnataka is known for its abundant sandalwood forests; however, this term does not seem to be in widespread use.

The Kashmiri film industry

The Malayalam film industry

Main article: Malayalam cinema

Mohanlal, Suresh Gopi and Mammootty, the mainstays of the Malayalam film industry since early 1990s.

The Malayalam film industry, based in Kerala. Malayalam movies are known for their artistic nature and they frequently figure in the national film awards. It is also currently known for being the most conservative out of the different film industries in India, despite the fact that it went through a liberal phase in the 80's. Notable personalities include the filmmakers Padmavibhushan, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Bharathan, Aravindan, Padmarajan and John Abraham, the scriptwriters M. T. Vasudevan Nair and Sreenivasan, the cinematographers Azhagappan, Santhosh Sivan and Shaji; the actors Bharath Gopi, Tilakan, Padmabhushan, Prem Nazeer, Satyan, Padmashri Mammootty, Padmashri Mohanlal, Balachandra Menon; the playback singers, K. J. Yesudas, K. S. Chitra, P. Jayachandran, M.G. Sreekumar and Sujatha.

The first 3D film which produced in India was in Malayalam. Its name was My Dear Kuttichatthan produced by Navodaya Productions. Padayottam, the first fully indigenous 70MM film with all its work done in India was in Malayalam which was also produced by Navodaya. The fist Cinemascope film in the world was produced in Malayalam. Chemmeen was the first film which earned a gold medal from the President from South India."Guru", directed by Rajiv Anchal, is the only Malayalam film proposed as the Indian entry by the Indian Film Industry council for Oscar Award so far.

The Marathi Film Industry

Main article: Marathi cinema

Marathi Film Industry, one of the oldest film industries in India, originated in Nasik, and developed in Kolhapur and Pune. In recent years, it has moved mostly to Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra.

Dadasaheb Phalke, recognized as the father of Indian cinema, was a pioneer of movies in Marathi. He produced the first Indian silent movie, and later some Marathi talkies. In his honor, a much coveted "Dadasaheb Phalke Award" is given annually for exceptional contribution to Indian cinema.

1940s and '50s formed the classical era of Marathi cinema, mainly because of some hallmark productions by the now extinct "Prabhat Film Company" in Kolhapur. As an offshoot of Prabhat, V. Shantaram founded "Rajkamal Studios" in Pune, and produced some excellent Marathi movies in the late 1950s and early '60s.





Modern Marathi actors include Dilip Prabhavalkar, Bharat Jadhav, and Sanjay Narvekar.

While some old Marathi movie songs remain popular, new composers like Ajay-Atul have been producing some very popular songs. Some of the old songs have also been remixed.

The Telugu film industry

A still from Bhakta Prahlad (1931)

Main article: Telugu Cinema

The Telugu film industry is based in Andhra Pradesh's capital city, Hyderabad is the second biggest industry in India after "Hindi" . The state also has what is claimed to be the largest film studio in the world, Ramoji Film City. The first studio for Telugu talkies was Vel Pictures, constructed in 1934 by P.V. Das, located at Madras.

In the Telugu film industry, directors such as Kasinadhuni Viswanath (K.Viswanath), Ram Gopal Varma, Jandhyala, Krishna Vamsi and Singeetam SreenivasaRao have achieved box-office success whilst producing films that have balanced art and popular elements.Most number of Guinness records are in the telugu industry which include the most number of films directed,most films produced by a producer,most number of songs sung by a male singer and many more.Telugu films have a large box office collections in United States (which has the highest number of Andhraites abroad)and England and also in many other countries.Telugu films are also remaked and dubbed in other languages like Tamil,Malayalam and Kannada and are released in respective states.

Telugu films are released in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil nadu, East Maharastra, Orissa and few parts of West Bengal. Telugu movies are released worldwide in United States, Canada, parts of Europe, South Africa, Malaysia,Australia and Singapore.





Art cinema in India

Main article: Parallel Cinema

In addition to commercial cinema, there is also Indian cinema that aspires to seriousness or art. This is known to film critics as "New Indian Cinema" or sometimes "the Indian New Wave" (see the Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema -), but most people in India simply call such films "art films". These films deal with a wide range of subjects but many are in general explorations of complex human circumstances and relationships within an Indian setting.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, art films were subsidised by Indian governments: aspiring directors could get federal or state government grants to produce non-commercial films on Indian themes. Many of these directors were graduates of the government-supported Film and Television Institute of India. Their films were showcased at government film festivals and on the government-run TV station, Doordarshan. These films also had limited runs in art house theatres in India and overseas. Since the 1980s, Indian art cinema has to a great extent lost its government patronage. Today, it must be made as independent films on a shoestring budget by aspiring auteurs, much as in today's Western film industry.

The art directors of this period owed more to foreign influences, such as Italian neorealism or the French New Wave, than they did to the genre conventions of commercial Indian cinema. The best known New Cinema directors were Bengali: Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, and Bimal Roy. Some well-known films of this movement include the Apu Trilogy by Ray , the Calcutta Trilogy of Sen, Meghe Dhaka Tara by Ghatak (all in Bengali) and Do Bigha Zameen by Roy (Hindi). Of these film-makers, Satyajit Ray was arguably the most well-known: his films obtained considerable international recognition during the mid-twentieth century. He was awarded an Oscar for life time achievement in 1992. His prestige, however, did not translate into large-scale commercial success[citation needed]. His films played primarily to art-house audiences (students and intelligentsia) in the larger Indian cities, or to film buffs on the international art-house circuit in India and abroad. Like him, Mrinal Sen who has primarily been a political film director and has received international acclaim, is not well known for commercial success, with the lone exception being Bhuvan Shome, which ushered the New Indian Cinema.

Noteworthy Indian Art Cinema women filmmakers from the diaspora include Shashwati Talukdar, Nandini Sikand, Sonali Gulati, Prema Karanth, Nisha Ganatra, Eisha Marjara, Pratibha Parmar, Liggy Pullappally, and Shanti Thakur.

Art cinema was also well-supported in the South Indian state of Kerala. Some outstanding Malayalam movie makers are Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, T. V. Chandran, Shaji N. Karun, and M. T. Vasudevan Nair. Some of their films include National Film Award-winning Elippathayam, Piravi (which won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival), Vaanaprastham and Nizhalkkuthu (a FIPRESCI-Prize winner).

Starting in the 1970s, Kannada film makers from Karnataka state produced a string of serious, low-budget films. Girish Kasaravalli is one of the few directors from that period who continues to make non-commercial films. He is the only Indian director other than Satyajit Ray and Buddhadev Dasgupta to win the Golden Lotus Awards four times.

From the 1970s onwards Hindi cinema produced a wave of art films. The foremost among the directors who produced such films is Shyam Benegal. Others in this genre include Govind Nihalani (Ardh Satya), Mani Kaul (Uski Roti), Kumar Shahani (Maya Darpan), H. K. Verma (Kadamabari),M.S. Sathyu (Garam Hava).

Many cinematographers, technicians and actors began in art cinema and moved to commercial cinema. The actor Naseeruddin Shah is one notable example; he has never achieved matinee idol status, but has turned out a solid body of work as a supporting actor and a star in independent films such as Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding. H.K.Verma, a cinematographer turned to direction with his maiden venture Kadambari starring Shabana Azmi.

Marathi art cinema has been continuously churning out gems even when Marathi mainstream cinema had no suffered a setback. Dr.Jabbar Patel, Bhave-Sukthankar, Amol Palekar are some of the notable names while acclaimed movie titles are Umbartha, Dhyaasparva, Uttarayan, Vaastupurush etc.

Globalization of Indian cinema

Cinema admissions in 1995

Contact between Indian and Western cinemas was established in the early days of film in India. Dadasaheb Phalke was moved to make Raja Harishchandra after watching the film Life of Christ at P.B. Mehta's American-Indian Cinema. Similarly, some other early film directors were inspired by Western movies.

In India at least 80 percent of films shown in the late 1920s were American, even though twenty-one studios manufactured local films, eight or nine of them in regular production. American serials such as Perils of Pauline and Exploits of Elaine, and the spectacular sets of films like Quo Vadis and Cabira were popular and inspiring during the World War I era. Universal Pictures set up an Indian agency in 1916, which went on to dominate the Indian distribution system[7]. J. F. Madan's Elphinstone Bioscope Company at first focused on distribution of foreign films and organization of their regular screenings Additionally, J.P. Madan, the prolific producer, employed Western directors for many of his films.

A number of Indian films have been accused of plagiarising from Hollywood Movies. Due to the long time taken by courts to decide a case, few cases relating to copyright violations are brought up. One of the reasons Bollywood hesitates in purchasing rights is the assumption that these would run into millions of dollars, though according to some like screenwriter-director Anurag Kashyap, this is incorrect; He argues that while the films may cost millions of dollars in the west, the rights would be less expensive for Hindi remakes because the price would be based on the audience's buying power, the economy and the number of bidders.[11]In 2003, best-selling fiction writer Barbara Taylor Bradford brought a copyright infringement suit against Sahara Television for allegedly making a television series (Karishma: A miracle of destiny) out of her book, A Woman of Substance, without acquiring the legal rights to do so.

Today, Indian cinema is becoming increasingly westernised. This trend is most strongly apparent in Bollywood. Newer Bollywood movies sometimes include Western actors (such as Rachel Shelley in Lagaan), try to meet Western production standards, conduct filming overseas, adopt some English in their scripts or incorporate some elements of Western-style plots. Bollywood also produces box-office hit like the films Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Kal Ho Naa Ho, both of which deal with the overseas Indian's experience.

However, the meeting between west and India is a two-way process: Western audiences mostly of Indian origin are becoming more interested in India[citation needed], as evidenced by the mild success of Lagaan, Bride and Prejudice and Sivaji. As Western audiences for Indian cinema grow, Western producers are funding maverick Indian filmmakers like Gurinder Chadha (Bride and Prejudice) and Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding). Both Chadha and Nair are of Indian origin but do not live in India, and who made their names in Western independent films; they have now been funded to create films that "interpret" the Indian cinematic tradition for Westerners. A similar filmmaker is Deepa Mehta of Canada, whose films include the trilogy Fire, Earth and Water.

Indian cinema is also influencing the English and American musical; Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001) incorporates a Bollywood-style dance sequence; The Guru and The 40-Year-Old Virgin feature Indian-style song-and-dance sequences; A. R. Rahman, a film composer, was recruited for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams; and a musical version of Hum Aapke Hain Koun has played in London's West End.

Awards

The Filmfare Awards ceremony is one of the oldest and most prominent film events given for Hindi films in India [12] and is sometimes referred to as the "Bollywood Oscars." [13] The Filmfare awards were first introduced in 1954, the same year as the National Film Awards and gave awards to the best films of 1953. The ceremony was referred to as the Clare Awards after the magazine's editor. A dual voting system was developed in 1956. [14] Under this system, "in contrast to the National Film Awards, which are decided by a panel appointed by Indian Government, the Filmfare Awards are voted for by both the public and a committee of experts." [15]

Since 1973, the Indian government has sponsored the National Film Awards (which first began in 1954), awarded by the government run Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF). The DFF screens films from all the Indian movie industries and independent/art films. These awards are handed out at an annual ceremony presided over by the President of India.

Additional ceremonies held within India are:

Stardust Awards

Star Screen Awards

Ceremonies held overseas are:

Bollywood Movie Awards - Long Island, New York, United States

Global Indian Film Awards - (different country each year)

IIFA Awards - (different country each year)

Zee Cine Awards - (different country each year)

Most of these award ceremonies are lavishly staged spectacles, featuring singing, dancing, and lots of stars and starlets.

Film Training In India

Film And Television Institute Of India, Pune

Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata

R. K. Films & Media Academy, Karol Bagh, New Delhi

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