The Indian Film Industry

The last few years have seen considerable changes in the Indian film industry and the Indian ‘filmed entertainment’ market.

The biggest innovation has been the emergence of a group of Indian media corporations, each of which has adopted a policy of developing a ‘pan-Indian’ and international presence across a range of film-related activities. Previously, companies tended to concentrate on one major market (usually Bollywood) and one or two sectors such as production or distribution, film or DVD. Now, each of the following corporations has at least announced an intention to become involved in production and distribution of films from more than one Indian language cinema. Each corporation also has interests in either film exhibition or DVD distribution as well as links to new media and television and/or music. In addition each corporation is looking to consolidate its presence overseas in both traditional and new markets for Indian filmed entertainment. Inevitably this means a number of co-production and distribution deals with Hollywood majors. In a bullish market, despite world-wide economic recession, each of these corporations promotes itself as the biggest this or that in India. One of our aims on the blog will be to try to follow what these corporations get up to and how they are influencing the changes in India’s film environment.

UMP (UTV Motion Pictures) – part of UTV Media

This group has been one of the most prominent in developing partnerships with Hollywood companies as well as seeing opportunities in relationships with independent companies. It helped produce and distribute Mira Nair’s The Namesake in India and supports Farhan Akhtar’s Excel Entertainment. UMP was the first Indian company to announce that it had set up  a ‘Western-style’ studio production system  in 2007 and an Indian-wide distribution system. The company has long-term deals with both Disney and Fox Searchlight and has started a second production brand, UTV Spotboy for projects outside Bollywood. It has also recently introduced a ‘World Cinema’ channel on Indian television.

Yash Raj Films

The company headed by veteran Hindi Cinema producer Yash Chopra (a leading figure in Hindi film since the 1960s) has developed from a production company formed in 1973 into a fully-fledged studio operation with distribution in India and worldwide in both film and DVD and also in music. Yash Raj and Eros have competed for top spot in NRI markets in the UK and the US since the 1990s.

Eros Entertainment – part of Eros International

Alongside Yash Raj, Eros is another company with a long history in distribution and has been especially important in distributing Hindi Cinema outside India in Europe and North America since the 1970s. In 2008, Ayngaran, the principal distributor of Tamil films outside India, became part of Eros International, increasing the spread of Eros’ operations significantly.

Reliance Big Entertainment Ltd. (RBEL)

Part of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group and also trading as Adlabs, this company derives from the empire built up by Dhirubhai Ambani, starting from textiles and growing to encompass many of India’s major industrial sectors

Moser Baer Entertainment

Part of Moser Baer India Ltd, a global technology company that only moved into filmed entertainment in 2006. As the ’second biggest manufacturer of optical media in the world, the company has attempted to establish itself as the No 1 provider of DVD and VCD filmed entertainment in India with low-cost disks in every Indian language – with up to 10,000 titles planned for release. The company is now also involved in film production.

Pyramid Saimira Group

This Chennai-based group is involved in every aspect of filmed entertainment, including cinema exhibition, catering, music etc. It is involved in production and has a presence in five overseas markets as well as India (China, US, UK, Malaysia and Singapore).

If we’ve missed out an important company, let us know.

Kureishi and The White Tiger

A report in Screen International today announces that Hanif Kureishi has been commissioned by New York-based company Smuggler Films to adapt the Booker prizewinning novel The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga for a cinema feature production.

Smuggler Films is a UK/US outfit and funding is expected to come from a UK Film Council fund (and presumably other partners). No director is yet attached.

My first reaction is that this is another Slumdog scenario – Indian book, UK scriptwriter, UK/US production company. I’ve read the book and I enjoyed it, but couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about. Perhaps I should read it again. It reminded me in some ways of Indian novels in English from earlier periods with a decidedly modern twist re what is happening in big cities in India today (village boy gets involved in big city corruption and takes his revenge). Though it is not as well-written, I thought Q&A was just as interesting – both books have unusual narrative structures and it will be interesting to see how Kureishi turns an epistolary novel into a screenplay.

I wonder what others think – especially our readers in India. Could this cause a similar stir? Why hasn’t an Indian production company bought the rights? Who should direct it? What do you think about Kureishi as the screenwriter? I have plenty of time for him usually and he’s written some of my favourite films but I don’t know how much he knows about village life in the ‘Darkness’ (Adiga’s term) or about modern Bangalore.

Lakshya (India 2004)

Hrithik Roshan as the young army officer Karan

What to make of Lakshya? After Rock On!! I decided to look for some other films from Excel Entertainment and Farhan Akhtar and came across this DVD in a sale. The film is presented on 2 discs in a fold out package with an outer sleeve and a glossy booklet. At first glance, this matches the Hollywood packages that Excel and UTV are attempting to emulate. Unfortunately the impression is spoiled by the presentation on screen. A 185 min film in ‘Scope is compressed onto a single disc and my DVD player had problems with the coding in the central section of the film. The second disc does have some interesting material (including a ‘making of’ the film as a whole and a separate presentation of one of the dance sequences as well as some deleted scenes). This clearly was a big budget production with four major stars, location shooting in Kashmir and an international flavour to the crew.

The title ‘Lakshya’ means ‘objective’ or ‘aim’ and the central character Karan (Hrithik Roshan) is an upper middle-class young man with no real aim in life until, on a whim after watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, he decides to join the Indian Army. Eventually, he finds himself involved with his Punjabi Regiment in the Kargil War of 1999, when Pakistani forces crossed the LOC (Line of Control) in partitioned Kashmir. With the Pakistanis occupying one of the peaks and shelling an Indian highway, Karan finds his aim – to do the John Wayne thing and plant his country’s flag on top of the peak. The narrative utilises a flashback structure so that we meet the young officer first and then discover how he got there.

From what I’ve read and from the ‘making of’ documentary, it’s clear that the filmmakers here (father and son combination Javed and Farhan Akhtar as writer and director) intended to be as accurate as possible in representing the setting for the story and compared to what I know of mainstream Bollywood, Lakshya is a ‘realist’ film in the mode of mainstream Hollywood. The camerawork by the German cinematographer Christopher Popp is generally excellent, especially in presenting the mountain landscapes and the training moves of the Indian Army. Hollywood films such as An Officer and a Gentleman and The Eiger Sanction sprang to mind as I watched the film. I choose those references carefully as they represent two of the genre repertoires on which the film draws. Lakshya begins as a romantic drama and then transmutes into a patriotic war film with elements of the espionage thriller. There is no reason why this mixture shouldn’t work (although it is a tall order) but I wasn’t really convinced by any single genre element or indeed by the overall package. I was, however, impressed by many specific scenes/sequences. Is it me or is it the film? Lakshya was not a massive hit in India, despite its stellar cast (Preity Zinta, Amitabh Bachchan and Om Puri) but it does have some very enthusiastic supporters and played reasonably well in the US and UK.

Wikipedia’s detailed entry on the Kargil War/Conflict suggests several Hindi films that have been based wholly or partly on incidents associated with the war. I haven’t seen any of these, but I’m familiar with scenes from Mani Ratnam’s Tamil films and from Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist. Many critics have suggested that it was Ratnam’s Roja (1992) that pushed Hindi film producers towards films more clearly focused on issues in ‘real’ India. In Roja an Indian computer engineer working for the Indian military is abducted in Kashmir. His young wife campaigns to get the Indian authorities to do something to get him back and the engineer also attempts to escape. There is some business with an Indian flag and clearly there are connections between Roja and Lakshya. Although it is much more slick and probably more ‘authentic’, Lakshya doesn’t seem to me as coherent as Roja.

What’s the problem? First, I don’t really care about the central character Karan. Partly this is just prejudice against upper middle-class pretty boys. Hrithik Roshan is a good dancer and he looks very handsome in uniform, but his performance as a ’slacker’ is really embarrassing. The other three stars have very underwritten parts and for me, don’t do enough in their roles (it’s especially sad that we don’t see more of Preity Zinta as a TV reporter. Perhaps this is a problem with the Bollywood star system and with its approach to genres more fully developed in other cinemas such as the war movie. The combat/army sequences need more space for other characters. Why is Karan in a Punjabi regiment? Who are the other officers in the regiment? Who are the squaddies? What stories do they have to tell? The cliché of British and American war movies – a squad of young men drawn from different classes and regions is there for a good purpose.

This kind of Bollywood film still requires songs, two of which have sophisticated dance choreography. It seems impossible for the producers to not have these – and indeed there is no reason why they shouldn’t be incorporated in the narrative. I think all the songs work to some extent. It is the sickly sentimental score in other scenes that I found to be a real problem. The issue is how to develop a tone that can bridge the romance and action scenes and I don’t think that was achieved. The film has been praised for the realism of the combat scenes but I wasn’t convinced. I’ve seen much better sequences of this kind of assault in recent Chinese and Korean films as well as earlier Hollywood efforts such as Sam Fuller’s films or indeed the Russian film about Afghanistan, 9th Company. Have the producers’ seen Santosh Sivan’s combat scenes at the start of The Terrorist?

The other major issue for me is the film’s literal ‘flag-waving’ patriotism. I’m afraid that I struggle with all forms of nationalism, so war pictures that go beyond a narrative of looking after your mates and seeing that they get out alive usually leave me cold. Again Lakshya seems to have been praised for not demonising the Pakistani forces. I thought it did do that to some extent, but I recognise that there was also an attempt to humanise them. The actual sequence when the film’s narrative switched to the Pakistani defenders on the peak threw me a little. Again this felt arbitrary and not thought through.

Overall, Lakshya is an interesting attempt to make a different kind of Bollywood film. It didn’t work for me, at least not as well as the producers might have hoped, and I doubt it found audiences in India outside the major cities, but this production team will eventually crack it, I feel sure.

Thalapathi (The Leader, India 1991)

Rajnikanth

Even watching this classic Mani Ratnam film on a terrible DVD with a degraded image and Hindi dubbing couldn’t diminish its power. Thalapathi represents the ultimate in Tamil Cinema during the early 1990s. Director Mani Ratnam, composer Illayaraja and cinematographer Santosh Sivan combine to present the superstars of Tamil and Malayalam Cinema, Rajnikanth and Mammootty in an epic gangster melodrama.

The outline narrative is based on the Indian epic narrative the Mahābhārata. I can’t pretend to be able to explain how the connection is made, but it is mentioned by several commentators. The film’s plot sees a teenage mother abandon her newborn baby during the Holi festival. The baby is later found by children and eventually brought up by a woman in a poor community. Twenty-five years later, the abandoned baby is now a man, a child of the community and fast becoming its protector and moral conscience. This is Suraj/Surya (Rajnikanth). In defending a woman, Surya beats up man who eventually dies from his injuries. The dead man worked for the local crime lord Devaraj (Mammootty), who recognising his qualities recruits Surya. The two soon become very close, saving each other’s lives at various points and gaining control in a community who fear the (corrupt) police and the threat of rival gangs. Devaraj and Surya are criminal and violent in retribution but they support the members of the local community. Surya becomes the man to go to for help – the ‘Thalapathi’ of the community.

The new power regime is then threatened by the arrival of a new District Collector, a young man (played by Arvind Swamy, later to star in Roja and Bombay) who is determined to ‘clean up’ the city. It is at this point that all the coincidences of melodrama come into play. Everyone turns out to be related to one of the other characters in some way and cross-loyalties are inevitable. At the centre of everything is Surya’s hurt at still being an ‘abandoned son’. (He rationalises the action of the mother he has never known by saying that he was a ‘black baby’ that she didn’t want.) ‘Mothers’ become important characters in the narrative, both in a functional and symbolic way. The audience knows that the narrative can only be resolved by violence and death. (The connection to the epic is partly in relation to the cross-loyalties to friends and families.)

The high melodrama is played out in terms of music, compositions, colours and highly choreographed dance and fight sequences. I confess that in the first half of the film, I found Surya’s excessive violence to be deeply disturbing. It occurred to me that the character was rather like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry – a fascist cop who was morally right but prepared to break every law and to punish the bad guys. I still thought this in part two but as the melodrama intensified, it did become more understandable if not more acceptable.

The real value of the film for me was simply to see Rajnikanth in action. This is his only Mani Ratnam film which seems a surprise. I can see why he is a superstar. He exudes charisma despite lacking the pale features, aristocratic face and toned body of so many Bollywood male leads and in this film sporting a mane of seemingly back-combed hair. Like the beefy moustachioed Mammootty, he could only be a superstar in the South. There is something warm and vulnerable about him. He cries and comforts small children quite naturally – and a moment later beats opponents to a pulp without blinking. 

I’m wondering now whether I can bring myself to watch Mani Ratnam’s earlier Nayakan, another gangster epic starring the other Tamil superstar, Kamal Hassan. Like Thalapathi, this sees a working-class boy take on rival gangsters and the police in another massively successful film. But the DVD that I rented looks unwatchable, so perhaps I’ll look for a better copy.

Rock On!! (India 2008)

Rock On!! is an interesting Hindi film recommended by one of itpworld’s Indian commenters. It scores highly on IMDB (8.2) and was clearly popular in India on urban multiplex screens as an example of a new kind of Bollywood film. However, in the UK it died at the box office, faring badly compared to most Hindi releases with a screen average below £1,000 and being trounced by a Tamil release, Dhaam Dhoom (which has a very low IMDB score).

Viewed from the UK, Rock On!! feels like a fairly conventional take on a rock nostalgia story. Magik were a band that ten years ago were on the verge of ‘making it’ but the compromises they would have been forced to take in order to get a recording deal caused a split and the band broke up. Now there is a chance to re-form for the four band members. Will they take it? Wikipedia suggests that the film draws on the UK film Stir Crazy (1998) and a Korean film about which I know nothing. Maybe, but the genre is so well known that such comparisons can be easily made and I don’t think we should take too much notice. More interesting is the attempt to portray four characters from different backgrounds – two middle-class college boys, an Indian Christian and an Indian character from a European background. The film has music sequences but they are used much more like the performance pieces in a (fictional) music biopic than in a typical Bollywood film. The music itself is what I would call mainstream AOR with some Bollywood flavour. It’s melodic and pleasant but very smooth. The lyrics are sung in Hindi and the relatively old-fashioned feel is emphasised by two songs played by other acts, one in English and both much closer to modern US/UK sounds.

The story itself is not particularly interesting apart from the sociological details but I watched it quite happily. What is important, I think, is that the film provides an opportunity for the young urban middle-class in India to identify with a genuinely Indian take on a global cultural form. The production context too is interesting. Excel films was founded by Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani in 1999. Akhtar is clearly a young man with a future. At 35 he has directed four features, produced others and in Rock On!! takes one of the lead roles as the wealthy young man who writes the lyrics, acts as lead singer and then turns to investment banking when the band splits up.

Another interesting feature of the film’s release was the appearance of the four leads on the cover of the Indian edition of Rolling Stone magazine – another example of the Americanisation of middle-class Indian youth? Rolling Stone lost all its credibility as a serious music and culture magazine a long time ago. The quartet went on to play concerts in various Indian cities.

When I think about it, I can see the connection between this film and Rang De Basanti in terms of a kind of youthful romanticism. I think it could have had a bit more edge though. I’m a bit fed up of the American college kid thing now. Couldn’t we have some Hindi movies about working class kids who become great cricketers? (I was heartened to see that the Bollywood box-office, coming out of the strike between multiplexes and producers, was unable to recover during the weeks of the IPL and then the 20-20 World Cup).

Danny Boyle – life after Slumdog

Screen International this week reported that Danny Boyle has signed a three year deal with Fox Searchlight and Pathé, the two companies behind the successful distribution of Slumdog Millionaire. Slumdog is still making money around the world with theatrical currently showing $358 million and DVD already at $30 million in the US.

Boyle is said to be keen to link up with Indian filmmakers Shekhar Kapur and Anurag Kashyap and has acquired the rights to the book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta, a collection of essays about the city by a returning former resident. Shekhar Kapur is best known for Elizabeth in the UK, but more importantly he made Bandit Queen (India/UK 1994) with part-funding by Channel 4. This was one of the first films to attempt to marry aspects of British and Indian popular cinema. Anurag Kashyap is a younger (37) filmmaker with wide experience as an actor, writer and director. He has worked with Mani Ratnam and with Deepa Mehta, but it was his own film, Black Friday (India 2004), about the 1993 Mumbai bombings, that Boyle watched in his preparation for Slumdog.

The success of Slumdog means that Danny Boyle will have great freedom to choose his next projects. But it doesn’t mean that he has become a critical success. Anyone who wants to gauge the challenge that Slumdog’s success has presented to the critical community should look at the last two issues of Cineaste magazine. Robert Koehler wrote one of the silliest reviews of Slumdog I have seen and what was worse he wrote about the film claiming deep knowledge of India and Indian Cinema. Taken to task in the latest issue by Rahul Hamid, Koehler then compounds his folly. I don’t want to rehash all the debates again, but Koehler seems unable to accept that Slumdog is an Indian story about aspects of contemporary globalised Indian life adapted and mounted by Brits and Indians working together and drawing on recent Indian film styles.

¡Hola! India?

A Cinépolis multiplex in Acapulco (public domain image from Wikipedia)

The big news in the global exhibition market this week is the announcement that the largest cinema chain in Latin America, Cinépolis of Mexico, is to open up to 500 cinema screens in India. The initial launch is of 110 screens in multiplexes of 10 screens or more in eight Indian cities (Indian multiplexes are mostly less than ten screens).

Cinépolis is the fifth largest cinema chain in the world but has previously not moved beyond Central and South America. If the launch is carried through it will introduce a major overseas player into the Indian market and will potentially challenge the ways in which Indian distribution and exhibition has operated (the Indian cinema sector has recently experienced a stand-off between Bollywood producers and multiplexes with new product not reaching many screens).

The Mexican company was founded in 1947 and has recently been seen as an innovator. It has both upmarket (‘VIP’) and low-cost cinema brands that could be introduced alongside its standard multiplexes. Mexico is one of the international territories that has recently seen an increase in admissions to over 170 million per year. This is dwarfed by the 3 billion Indian admissions annually, but it still places Mexico in the Top 5 cinema markets.

Slumdogged by Bordwell

Sometimes I feel like Tammy Wynette – “it’s hard to be a . . .” film studies teacher/writer when there is a figure like David Bordwell around. For several weeks, I’ve spent odd moments thinking about Slumdog Millionaire, writing a couple of short pieces on the film here and elsewhere and planning for a couple of sessions where I hope to explore with teachers how the film might be used in work on Global Media (on a UK A Level Media syllabus). 

Now I discover that Bordwell has already done most of the research and published it on his blog. There might be a couple of points he hasn’t quite exhausted, but it’s all there otherwise with some great links and references that I’ll certainly be pursuing. I guess what pisses me off is that Bordwell seemingly has access to a print or a DVD of the film since he uses stills extensively. He also references a range of films I haven’t seen, including a neorealist film (Miracle in Milan) which I don’t think is available in the UK, as well as a range of 1950s Hindi films that I should have watched. So, do yourself a favour and read David Bordwell’s piece – you won’t be sorry, but you’ll probably feel that you need to see a lot more films.

One thing that Bordwell suggests is certainly worth recording – the sheer volume of blogging that Slumdog has prompted from a variety of sources and the range of debates that seem to have opened up. This in itself is worth study. The cultural questions that the film’s production and release raise come from an uneasy triangular relationship between India, the UK and the US. In cinema, it does seem to me that the focus has shifted away from India-UK to India-US. I wonder if the intervention of Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy will help to shift the attention back a little?