scholarly journals “Cultured Women” do not act in films: Tracing Notions of Female Stardom in Bombay Cinema (1930s–1950s)

2020 ◽  
Vol 01 (02) ◽  
pp. 2050012
Author(s):  
PRIYAM SINHA
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Bombay City ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Ideological Construction

Women were absent from the archives and rendered as invisible within the film business that was changing the urban landscape of Bombay city in the 1930s through talkies. Questions were raised about female sexuality and respectability primarily due to a morality discourse closely associated with women acting in films. Tension, moral panic and distress had emerged from the dominant stigma regarding films making industries being a heterosexual and hybrid workspace. Moreover, an economy that capitalizes on voyeuristic pleasures of its male audience by objectifying women’s bodies. So, even though it offered women higher salaries unlike other professions, it was deemed as “dangerous” for women. Therefore, “cultured women”, essentially from the upper class, were discouraged from being a part of the studio film industry situated in the cosmopolitan Bombay city. Taking forward Neepa Majumdar’s (2009) dialogue on the denial of agency to women in Indian cinema, this paper traces the incorporation of feminist agenda into film making. This paper is limited to studying the biographical, autobiographical details and picturization of three eminent actresses: Nargis, Kanan Devi and Durga Khote. Further, I would elaborate on the struggles undertaken by them and the roles they played in films in order to deconstruct the notion of female stardom and an “ideal Indian woman” picturized in Bollywood from the 1930s–1950s. This period holds relevance in film historiography due to the ideological construction of female stardom that had its pros and cons which I would be discussing in depth through the paper.

scholarly journals Indian Cinema: Making Departure from the Stereotypical Presentation of Women in Nuptial

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-49
Author(s):  
Dr. Priyanka Kulhari
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Work Place ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Made In

In the late 20th and 21st century various movements took place which challenged the stereotypical notions of gender in society. #MeToo movement gave a momentum to the society where people started talking about any kind of violence, sexual assault and harassment against women. Many government policies and laws were framed and implemented to provide equal opportunities to women in every field. Vishakha Guidelines and Internal Complains Committee are made mandatory at work place and education institutions to assure a safe and healthy environment for females. Now the issues brushed under the carpet for long have been brought into light. Issues which were considered taboo even to talk about are now discussed on public forums and academia, penned down in literature and projected in media and cinema. Women and their concerns and point of views found space in popular cinema and were acclaimed too by the critics as well as spectators. Bollywood has made deviations from the stereotypical portrayal of women and broke the silence on issues like sexual consent and female sexuality. It also showed the role of woman in marriage and how it’s changing with woman becoming economically independent and realizing her real worth. The present paper will deliberate on the institution of marriage and the role of woman in it in the Indian society especially in the context of Indian cinema. It will discuss recent Indian cinema which came with stories in which decision-making power has been exercised by women in a nuptial and consent of a girl in a marriage has been considered. Gender roles in a marriage will also be analysed which has been shown deviating from the stereotypical notion especially in the movies Ki & Ka and Tumahari Sulu. It will include the movies which have at the centre the idea that the courage of a woman can put a full stop to the deep-rooted patriarchy of centuries in our society. The paper will include only popular cinema made in Hindi language film industry known as Bollywood in the last decade like Dil Dhadkane Do, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, Secret Superstar, Parched and Tumhari Sulu.

Representing Terrorism

2015 ◽  
pp. 183-200
Author(s):  
Omar Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
The Third ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Tamil Cinema ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Film Making ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores Mani Ratnam's 1998 film Dil Se (From the Heart) to engage critically with changing representations of terrorism in contemporary Indian cinema. Mani Ratnam is recognised by many critics and the Indian film industry as one of its finest and most commercially successful film-makers. Dil Se was Ratnam's first Hindi film and the third part in a loose trilogy of films dealing with the relationship between nationalism, terrorism, and urban violence. The chapter then looks at regional film-making in India, particularly Tamil cinema. It also considers Mani Ratnam's concerns as an auteur, the music of Dil Se and composer A.R. Rahman, and perhaps most importantly, the impact the film had at the UK box office with the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) audience.

scholarly journals The power of Bollywood: A study on opportunities, challenges, and audiences’ perceptions of Indian cinema in China

2021 ◽  
pp. 205943642110226
Author(s):  
Yanyan Hong
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Chinese Market ◽  
Star Power ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Cultural Connections

India has long been known for its prestigious Mumbai-based film industry, namely Bollywood, and remains by far the largest producer of films in the world. With the growing global reach of Indian cinema, this study looks at an intriguing Indian-film fever over the last decade in the newly discovered market of China. Through examining key factors that make Indian films appealing to Chinese and exploring the opportunities and challenges of Indian cinema in China, this article draws upon insights gained from the narratives of local audiences. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 32 Indian-film audiences residing across 14 different cities in mainland China. Thematic analysis identified the following five appealing factors, which explain why the Chinese enjoy Indian films: content-driven story, social values, star power, audience reviews and cultural connections. While a comprehensive list of opportunities was derived showing the potential future of Bollywood in China, results found that China’s unique institutional context and an ongoing India–China geopolitical tensions also present challenges, which in turn add to the overall complexity of films’ success in the Chinese market. This article argues the powerful role of Bollywood in bridging cultures and improving India–China ties, as Indian films have made Chinese people more aware of India in a favourable way.

Parallel Voices

2015 ◽  
pp. 127-144
Author(s):  
Omar Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Major Part ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Indian Art

This chapter assesses Shyam Benegal's seminal Ankur (The Seedling, 1972). The emergence of state-sponsored film-making in the late 1960s with Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969) laid the foundations for a new cinematic discourse, giving way to the next phase in the development of Indian art cinema, dubbed by many as ‘parallel cinema’. The work of film-maker Shyam Benegal forms a major part of the parallel cinema movement, and the rural trilogy of films characterising his early work not only sympathised with the oppressed underclass but also established an influential political precedent for many of the young film-makers emerging from the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India. The chapter looks at the origins and context of New Indian cinema, as well as the definitions of parallel cinema and its importance to the development of art cinema. It also considers Shyam Benegal's authorial status, key ideological strands, and the film's role in helping to politicise cinema in India.

Calibration of a Triaxial, Consumer-grade Magnetometer via an Extended Two-step Methodology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rogério P. Menezes Filho ◽  
Felipe O. Silva ◽  
Leonardo A. Vieira ◽  
Lucas P. S. Paiva ◽  
Gustavo S. Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Hardware Implementation ◽  
Inertial Sensors ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
External Information ◽  
Navigation Systems ◽  
Smartphone Applications ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Position And Orientation

Humans have always had the necessity of estimating their location in space for various reasons, e.g. hunting, traveling, sailing, battling, etc. Today, many other areas also demand that information, such as aviation, agriculture, multiple smartphone applications, law enforcement, and even film industry, to mention but a few. Estimating position and orientation is known as navigation, and the means to achieve it are called navigation systems. Each approach has its pros and cons, but sometimes it is possible to combine them into an improved architecture. For instance, inertial sensors (i.e. accelerometers and gyroscopes) can be integrated with magnetometers, producing an Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS); this process is referred to as sensor fusion. However, before sensors can be used to produce the navigation solution, calibration is often necessary, especially for low-cost devices. In this study,we perform the calibration of a triaxial consumer-grade magnetometer via an extended two-step methodology, correct small mistakes present in the original paper, and evaluate the technique in a restricted motion scenario. This technique can be implemented in-field, simply by rotating the sensors to multiple orientations; the only external information necessary is the local Earth's magnetic field density, easily estimated through reliable models. The error parameters, i.e. biases, scale factors, and misalignments, are indirectly estimated via a least squares algorithm. The calibration is first performed through software simulation, followed by hardware implementation to validate the results.

scholarly journals OTT as New Platform of Cinema Exhibition: Opportunities and Challenges for Kannada Films

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-51
Author(s):  
N. Vinod Rao ◽  
R. Rajeshwari
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Online Surveys ◽  
Film Exhibition ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Research ◽  
The People ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Over The Top ◽  
Depth Interviews

COVID-19 pandemic has affected many areas including cinema exhibitions. Due to non-opening of cinema theatres film makers found the platform that is over-the-top (OTT). Before COVID-19 OTT was not able to compete with theatrical release. However, the pandemic situations changed the way of movie release through OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hot-star and others. The usage of OTT increased during the period of lockdown. According to Boston Consulting Group, subscriptions increased 60% and average watching hours increased to 14.5%. In the Kannada film industry, the well-known actor and producer Punith Rajkumar’s two films titled Law and French Biriyani were released on India's second largest OTT platform Amazon Prime during the lockdown period. In this context, this research tried to find prospects of Kannada film exhibition through OTT platform. The specific objectives are to explore the opportunities for releasing Kannada films through OTT, to study the challenges ahead in this way. The study used both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Online surveys conducted with structured questionnaires among 100 OTT users and in-depth interviews conducted among the people who are involved in film making from Kannada film industry to answer the research questions. This study would help filmmakers who are intended to release their film through OOT in future.

scholarly journals A Reading of Bhabendra Nath Saikia's Films from Feminist Lens

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-274
Author(s):  
Minakshi Dutta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
The Third ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
The World ◽  
Images Of Women

Feminist movement deconstructs the constructed images of women on the screen as well. The gap between real and reel woman is a vibrant topic of discussion for the feminist scholars. As a regional genre of Indian film industry Assamese film flourished during the third decades of twentieth century. Like the films of other parts of the world, Assamese films also constructing the image of woman, particularly Assamese women, in its own way of projection. Hence, this article is an attempt to explore the questions related to women’s representation by taking the films of Assamese director Dr. Bhabendra Nath Saikia as reference. Moreover, as per the demand of the article it will cover a historical overview of the representation of women in Indian cinema and Assamese cinema. Different theories from psychoanalysis and feminism will be applied to analyze the select movies.

A Hotel of Her Own: Building by and for the New Woman, 1900-1930

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-541
Author(s):  
Nikki Mandell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
A Site

This article examines the little-known phenomenon of apartment hotels built for single middle- and upper-class women during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on New York City, where the first and most influential of these residences opened, this study argues that upscale women’s apartment hotels severed the Victorian equivalency between home and family, and reconfigured home as a site of women’s independence and self-fulfillment. They also helped redefine women’s economic role; rather than engaging elite women as consumers of household goods, apartment hotels engaged them as consumers of housing and as real-estate developers. As women’s apartment hotels moved from amusing experiment to markers of twentieth-century modernity, they etched the New Woman’s individuality, ambitions, sexuality, and civic engagement into the urban landscape.

Unruly Cinema

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rini Battacharya Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
First Century ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Systematic Exposition

Unruly Cinema is a meta-history of Indian cinema’s emergence and growth in correspondence with the colonial, postcolonial, and the neoliberal state. Indian popular cinema has grown steadily from the largest national film industry to a global cultural force. Between 1931 and 2000, Indian cinema overcame Hollywood’s domination of the Indian market, crafted a postcolonial national aesthetic, resisted the high modernist pull of art cinema, and eventually emerged as a seamless extension of India’s neoliberal ambitions. The major agent of these four shifts was a section of the Hindi cinema produced in Bombay, which came to be named and marketed as Bollywood in the twenty-first century. Through a systematic exposition of four historical periods, this book shows how Bollywood’s current dominance is an unlikely result of unruliness, that is, of a disorganized defiance of norms. Perpetually caught between an apathetic and adversarial government and an undefined public, Indian commercial cinema has thrived simply by defying control or normalization. The aesthetic turns of this cinema are guided by counter-effects, often unintended and always unruly.

Friction: Society, Censorship, and Government Policy

2019 ◽  
pp. 182-207
Author(s):  
Thomas Barker
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The State ◽  
New Order ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
State Agencies ◽  
Back Seat ◽  
Legal Challenge ◽  
Film Making

Overcoming the regulatory and institutional legacy of the New Order regime has been one of the main ambitions of reformasi. In the film industry, such reform took a back seat to practical efforts film making, resulting in a protracted struggle by filmmakers against censorship and the state agencies responsible for overseeing the film industry. Efforts culminated in the Masyarakat Film Indonesia (MFI) movement which protested the lack of professionalism by returning their Citra Awards before launching a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the Censorship Board in the Constitutional Court. Failing in their bid to abolish censorship, the case precipitated the legislation of a new film law and with it a plethora of new regulations that are adding additional regulatory burdens to filmmakers. In particular, the formation of new representative film bodies complicates the film industry, raising spectres of a return to state over-regulation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document