Film History-Keval J Kumar PDF

Cinema: The First Audio-visual Medium The Beginnings of Indian Cinema The years preceding the dawn of cinema in India were witness to the growth of musical dramas (sangeet natak), the Parsi theatre, the drama companies of Madras, and the jatra in Bengal. Music, dance and song were an integral part...

Cinema: The First Audio-visual Medium The Beginnings of Indian Cinema The years preceding the dawn of cinema in India were witness to the growth of musical dramas (sangeet natak), the Parsi theatre, the drama companies of Madras, and the jatra in Bengal. Music, dance and song were an integral part of these performing traditions; this was the heritage of Sanskrit drama and later popular folk performing traditions such as the Ramlila, the raslila, the nautanki and the thirukoothu. In painting, the calendar art (sometimes termed ‘bazaar art’) of Raja Ravi Varma and others was well known and stage sets incorporated some of the designs and colours of this new art form. So, when the first ‘cinematographic exhibitions’ of the Lumiére brothers were held in Bombay on July 7, 1896, Indian dramatists, photographers, magicians, musicians and singers saw in them great potential for the retelling of Indian myths and folklore. The Times of India advertised these early exhibitions as ‘the marvel of the country, the wonder of the world’. The mergers and acquisitions exhibitions’ included ‘living photographic pictures’ in ‘life-sized reproductions’ of the arrival of a train, of workers leaving a factory, of a sea-bath and of ladies and soldiers on wheels. The exhibitions continued to draw crowds to four shows daily for over two months. Meanwhile, a British cinematographer held exhibitions of a similar kind in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. It is significant that the cinema had its beginnings in India almost at the same time as in other major film-producing countries; indeed, barely six months after the first Lumiére Brothers’ cinematograph projected moving pictures on to a screen in a Paris basement and two years after Edison’s invention of the Kinetoscope in New York. Among the numerous crowds that watched the first screenings at Bombay’s Watson Hotel with utmost fascination was a photographer named Harishchandra S. Bhatvadekar (alias Save Dada). He ordered for a moving picture camera from London and when it arrived took it along to a wrestling match in Bombay’s Hanging Gardens and shot the match live (Two Wrestlers). He soon acquired a projector and processing equipment. To him must go the credit of shooting one of the earliest Indian newsreels, Return of Wrangler Paranjpe, which recorded the triumphant welcome in December 1901 accorded to R. P. Paranjpe, an Indian student who had won honours in Mathematics at Cambridge. Another Bhatwadekar short was A Man and His Monkey. Jag Mohan, the historian of the Indian documentary, credits Bhatwadekar with being ‘the father of the Indian factual film’. However, it is likely that the first Indian short films were Coconut Fair and Our Indian Empire, both made and exhibited in 1897 by unknown English camerapersons. Just as Indian photographers and studios proliferated soon after the introduction of the camera in 1840, so the arrival of the motion picture attracted a large number of business people, artists and craftspeople to film production and exhibition.6 Photographers in particular took to the new enterprise with enthusiasm. They turned out such items as Poona Races, Train Arriving at Bombay Station, Tilak’s Visit to Calcutta, Bathing Ghats at Benaras, Great Bengal Partition Movement and Terrible Hyderabad Floods. Some of them became professional showmen taking their equipment all over the country and holding exhibitions even in remote towns and villages. The first rural travelling cinemas had begun operating by the end of the ’20s. On May 18, 1912, R. G. Torney filmed a Marathi stage play, Pundalik, while it was being acted out. The play was based on the legend of a famous Maharashtrian saint. Torney’s screen version of Pundalik gave India its first filmed play (or ‘photoplay’) but the credit for making the first full length ‘feature film’ must go to Dadasaheb Phalke’s Rajah Harishchandra, released a full year later. The Pioneers: The Lumiére Brothers ‘The cinema is an invention without a future’, declared Louis Lumiére who together with his brother, Auguste, pioneered what was to develop into an international cultural industry. The Lumiére brothers were the inventors of the ‘cinematographe’, a compact and portable machine that with a few adjustments could be used as a camera or projector or printing machine. As professional photographers themselves, cinema for them was no more than an extension of photography; hence they sought to capture events from a static position and therefore from a single point of view, in brief ‘actualities’ such as: the arrival of a train, a train leaving the station, workers leaving a factory, a sea bath, ladies and soldiers on wheels. Like still photographs, these ‘living photographic pictures’ were no more than attempts to reproduce reality. They narrated no story, but reproduced a place, time and atmosphere. These brief moving reproductions were therefore termed ‘actualities’. It was another pioneer, the French magician Georges Méliès, who was to revolutionize the cinema from being a ‘photoplay’ to a mass medium for the creation of fantasies and dreams. Several of his creations had the words ‘nightmare’ or ‘dream’ in their titles. He used elaborate sets and editing techniques to make science fiction films like Voyage to the Moon (1902). So, while the Lumiére brothers laid the foundation of realism in cinema, Méliès pointed the way to ‘expressionism’ and to the magic of cinema. The Lumiéres’ realism introduced cinema to the ‘mise-en-scène’ while Méliès pioneered the technique of ‘stop motion photography’ to create magical special effects in his many ‘trick films’. Elaborate stage sets and special effects were the hallmarks of his films. It is this historical tension between traditions of realism and traditions of expressionism that is at the heart of the aesthetics of cinema. Evolution of Film Language Before becoming the means of expression familiar to us, cinema was a simple means of mechanical recording, preserving and reproducing moving visual spectacles—whether of life, of the theatre or even of small mise-en-scène, which were specially prepared and which, in the final analysis, remained theatrical. It was only when the cinema confronted the problems of narration, particularly in the years between 1910 and 1915 when films like Quo Vadis?, Enoch Arden, The Battle of Gettysburg and Birth of a Nation were made, did film language start inventing its own vocabulary to describe its techniques and procedures. The pioneers of film language were Méliès, E. S. Porter and D. W. Griffith who ‘cared little about the symbolic, philosophical or human message of their films’, but who were ace storytellers. Méliès it was, for instance, who invented ‘double exposure’, the device of ‘multiple exposures’ with a mask and a dark backdrop, the ‘dissolve’ and the ‘fade in’ and also the ‘pan shot’. He was present at the Lumiére brothers’ first exhibition of the cinematograph. In fact, he offered to buy up the machine. As a theatre owner and magician he believed he could make his magic shows livelier with a projector. Accordingly, he bought a projector from an English photographer and used it for his magic shows. He turned the projector into a simple camera to record objects in motion. Once it so happened that the camera jammed and so goes the legend—it was this accident that led to his discovery of ‘quick’ and ‘slow’ motion, of ‘stop- motion’ and also of the ‘fade’ and ‘dissolve’. Méliès’ masterpieces were Cindrella and A Trip to the Moon—the first perhaps to combine paintings with studio sets. (This technique was later perfected by the German expressionists.) Méliès regarded filmmaking as an extension of his career as a magician. Most of his work was destroyed during World War II; the few films that have survived reveal a filmmaker who resorted to photographic tricks, to ‘enchantments’ and to actuality recording to create his movie magic. Edwin S. Porter, who made the first story film, The Great Train Robbery, was deeply influenced by Méliès. The first occurrences of some other procedures of filmic language are attributed to the same pioneers as also to the Englishmen G. A. Smith and J. Williamson and to the Russian, Sergei Eisenstein. The procedures are: the ‘close-up’, the ‘pan shot’, the ‘tracking shot’, ‘parallel montage’ and ‘interlaced’ or ‘alternate montage’. Of these, the most significant and the most revolutionary was ‘montage’, derived initially from the masterpieces of D. W. Griffith. Indeed, it was montage that ‘gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography; in short, creating a language’ (Andre Malraux). Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard developed film language further with the introduction of new types of shots and camera and cutting techniques. The digitization of the filmmaking process has not radically changed cinematic language but rather speeded up the process, reduced the costs involved and democratized the medium, making it accessible to many more amateurs and to much larger audiences via television, VCD and DVD players, personal computers, the internet, game consoles and handheld devices like palm-tops, PDAs and mobile phones. Streaming technologies have promoted the viewing of films and web series across all these devices. Pioneers of Indian Cinema: One of the pioneers of the silent feature film in India was Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (alias Dadasaheb Phalke), a Bombay printer, photographer, painter and magician. It is reported that he was converted to cinematography when he saw the film Life of Christ, at a Christmas cinema show. The idea of a similar full-length feature on the life of Lord Krishna took hold of him and he made it his life’s ambition. But financial stringency and the blatant unwillingness of women, even prostitutes, to act in his films, were crucial issues he would have to contend with through his long career as a filmmaker. He broke ground in 1913 with Rajah Harischandra. So successful did it prove with audiences in all parts of the country (though it was hardly noticed by the English language press) that Phalke went on to make as many as 96 full-length feature films and 26 short films. His most popular features were Savitri, Lanka Dahan, Sinhasta Mela, Krishna Janma and Bhasmasur Mohini. The young man whom Phalke selected to play the women in his films was A. Salunke, a restaurant cook ‘with slender features and hands’. The first women to act in his films were Kamlabai Gokhale (nee Kamat) and her mother Durga. Phalke’s last silent film was Setu- bhandan (1932). His short films were on a variety of subjects including How to Make a Film and Growth of a Pea Plant. Only a few scattered fragments of Phalke’s silent films are extant. ‘The overall structure of each film is forever lost, but the fragments show a fine pictorial sense and remarkable technical resourcefulness. Like another magician who became a film pioneer, George Méliès, Phalke was a special effects genius. He explored a vast range of techniques, including animation. He experimented with colour, via tinting and toning.’ His approach to film making was influenced by the tribal Bohada form of storytelling, a folk-art tradition of the Nashik district (Maharshtra). (In early Tamil cinema too the mythological genre dominated: out of the 210 films made during the 9 years from 1935 onwards, as many as 177 were based on mythological episodes.) But the religious (or ‘mythological’) genre held little appeal for some of the other filmmakers of the ’20s and ’30s. D. G. Ganguly of Kolkata, for instance, specialized in satirical comedies like England Returned (1921) and Barrister’s Wife, Chandulal Shah of Bombay in films dealing with social problems—Gun Sundari (English title: Why Husbands Go Astray), Typist Girl (1918) and Himansu Rai, sponsored by the Germans, made the brilliant films The Light of Asia (1925), Shiraz (1926), A Throw of Dice (1929) and Karma (1934) which immortalized the actress Devika Rani. In South India, as in most other parts of the country (with the exception perhaps of Kerala), the mythological genre held sway. The foundation for a flourishing film industry in South India was laid by R. Nataraja Mudaliar, a businessman trained in cinematography in Pune. In 1917, he set up his own Indian Film Company and by 1923 had made six silent films—all based on mythological characters from the epics. The first was Keechaka Vadha (1917); the others included Draupadi (1919), Lava Kusha (1920), Markandaya (1922) and Mayil Ravana (1923). The films carried intertitles in English and Indian languages. During the Silent Era (1896-1930) over a thousand films of various genres were made in India; however, only ten of them survive, now restored and preserved in the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune. Regular film production though did not actually take off until 1919, when as many as 11 films were made.14 By then, Indian-controlled exhibition networks were firmly in place. The Talkies The films of the Silent Era did not ‘talk’ but they were never watched in ‘silence’. Dialogue was presented through intertitles which were often in English and two or three Indian languages. Almost every film had a background score which ran through the length of the film. The score was ‘live’ and helped to dramatize the narrative. Sometimes there was only piano accompaniment, but there were several films where a violin, a harmonium and other musical instruments could be added. The ‘Talkies Era’ was set in motion by The Melody of Love (1929), the first ‘talkie’ to be screened in India. The first Indian talkie Alam Ara (1931) directed by Ardeshir Irani, was released two years later, with Master Vithal and Miss Zubeida as the lead actors. It was based on a play by Joseph David. Like most films of that era it was a straight adaptation of the play. A fourth of the film was silent. The premiere was a proud occasion at the Majestic theatre in Bombay, with the Governor as the chief guest. It included seven songs— so enchanted was the director with the novelty of sound! Indra Sabha which was released the following year had 70 songs. Hindi films dominated right from the start: from 1931 to 1947, over 6,590 Hindi films were produced, while from 1947 to 1987, around 5,074 films were released. In the first five years of the Tamil talkie, 61 films were released—all exact duplications of stage shows of plays of drama companies;20 another 149 films were released during the next five years. The Studio System With many new hands needed for the production of films, now gradually developing into a small industry, the ‘studio system’ made its appearance in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. In Bombay, V. Shantaram and three others set up the Prabhat Film Co. and went on to roll out films at regular intervals. Most of the films were directed by Shantaram himself. Among the outstanding films were: Ayodhyacha Raja (1932), Sant Tukaram (1936), Amar Jyoti (1936), Duniya Na Mane (the Marathi version was entitled Kunku) and Aadmi. The Prabhat Film Co. later moved to Poona on the site where the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) now stands. Led by Himansu Rai, the Bombay Talkies (established in 1935) flourished as much as Prabhat, turning out three mythological films a year. The Imperial Film Co. another minor Bombay film venture, produced over seven features annually. Wadia Movietone, established by J. B. H. Wadia and his brother Homi, produced 130 films, with J. B. H. himself writing several of the screenplays. The credit for making the first railroad thriller shot on location (Toofan Mail, 1932) and the first film on Hindu-Muslim unity (Jai Bharat, 1936) must go to the Wadias, as well as the first stunt film (Hunterwali, 1935). In Calcutta, the foremost studio company was the New Theatre Co., which under the baton of B. N. Sircar and Dhiren Ganguli produced Chandidas (1932), Devdas (1936) and Mukti (1939). K. C. Barua’s Devdas was made in Hindi and Bengali and introduced audiences to Bimal Roy, the cameraman who was to go on to make his own films, notably the classic Do Bigha Zameen (1953) and also to the immortal voice of Kundalal Saigal. Studios were opened in Madras, Salem and Coimbatore, but it was the Madras United Artists’ Corporation under the leadership of K. Subrahmanyam that turned to filmmaking in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. The southern studios, just as the Madras studios do today, produced films also in Hindi. The five major Madras studios are: Gemini, AVM, Modern Theatres, Vijaya Vauhini and Prasad. Decline of the Studio System: Enter the ‘Movie Stars’ During the ’40s, however, the big companies lost their hold on the studio system. Shantaram left Prabhat in 1941 to make films under his own banner. So did Mehboob Khan and others. This gave rise to the ‘star system’, the ‘formula’ film and the injection of ‘black’ money into the film world—three interrelated evils which have beset the commercial cinema ever since. Shantaram with the help of the writer K. A. Abbas, made Journey of Dr. Kotnis, a war-effort film, Dharti Ke Lal and others. Sohrab Modi’s films (notably Pukar) and Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, Aurath, Sister, Roti were box office draws. Gemini Studios’ Chandralekha was the greatest Tamil draw in the South and later in the entire country when the Hindi version was released. Still later, an English version was distributed overseas. It was a spectacular song and dance extravaganza. Its music appeared to anticipate the ‘fusion’ of the post-MTV Hindi film such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun. ‘The songs are based on Carnatic, Hindusthani, Bharatnatyam, Latin American and Portuguee folk music, as well as the Struass Waltz, each distinct and standing on its own, with barely any background score attempting to interlink anything, just periods of silence’. A significant event at the close of the ’40s was the launch of the Calcutta Film Society by Satyajit Ray. He made films like Apu Trilogy—Pather Panchali (1954), Aparajito (1957) and Apur Sansar (1959)—with such masterpieces as Jalsaghar (1958), Devi (1969), Teen Kanya (1961), Charulata (1964), Nayak (1966), Gupy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968), a fantasy musical, Aranyer Din Ratri (1970), Seemabadha (1971), Sonar Kella (1974), Ashani Sanket (1973), Ghare Bhaire (1985), Ganashatru (1989) and Aguntak (1991). Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977) was Ray’s only Hindi feature and Sadgati his only short fiction film in Hindi made for television. Ray’s documentaries include the moving Rabindranath Tagore, a one hour documentary narrated by Ray himself and Sikkim (1980). The Golden Age: During the ’50s and ’60s, Sohrab Modi and Mehboob Khan continued their film ventures, though with a difference—the films were now all in colour. Modi’s Jhansi Ki Rani (1953) was India’s first colour feature, yet it flopped at the box office. But they had now to compete with two other stalwarts in Indian cinema. The first was Raj Kapoor who began his career as a clapper-boy in Bombay Talkies; the second, Guru Dutt. Raj Kapoor acted in and directed his own films—Awara, Barsaat, Shri 420, Sangam and Mera Naam Joker. In the ’70s he directed the phenomenal success Bobby and later the controversial Satyam Shivam Sundaram and Ram Teri Ganga Maili. Raj Kapoor’s films were runaway successes in the Soviet Union and the Arab world. An Indo-Soviet co-production, Pardesi (1957), starring Nargis and Balraj Sahni, told the tale of Afanasy, the first Soviet explorer to visit India in 1468. (In the English subtitled and dubbed version, the title of the film is Journey Beyond the Three Seas. Guru Dutt, however, excelled in delineating the tragic mood in films like Kagaz Ke Phool, Baazi, Pyaasa and Sahib Bibi Aur Gulam. Kamal Amrohi’s studies of Uttar Pradesh’s elite, Mahal, Dawa and Pakeezah belonged to the same period. The two great money-spinners of the decade after independence were V. Shantaram’s Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje (1955) and Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957). Shantaram’s film had a record run of 104 weeks at a single cinema theatre in Bombay. It was basically a song-and- dance extravaganza in technicolour, featuring Sandhya and Gopikrishna. The colourful decor, costumes, locations and dances accompanied by lilting music gave the cue to Indian filmmakers that a story could be dispensed with if such light entertainment were provided in full measure. Mother India, on the other hand, showed that a mother’s suffering and sacrifice could touch the hearts of millions in India. The ’60s saw Mughal-e-Azam (1960), a costume epic dependent on luxurious sets, dance and music sequences and easy flowing Urdu dialogue for its success. It set the pace for films with a Moghul background. In 1961, Ganga Jamna introduced the figure of the wronged man turning into a dacoit as also the stock characters of contemporary Hindi cinema—two brothers, one a law keeper, the other a law breaker. Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964) started the trend of shooting Indian films in exotic foreign locations, the necessity of a smooth camera technique and in terms of plot made the friendship between two males (yaarana) and their falling out over a woman as a result of circumstances, everlasting on the screen. The Angry Young Man: Return of the Action Genre The ’70s began with Bobby (1973) proving how big a draw the portrayal of young love on the Indian screen could be. But perhaps the greatest spectacular of post-independence cinema has been Sholay (1975), a ‘curry western’. Shot in 70mm and moving at a rapid-fire pace, it glorified the stocky and lovable dacoit chief, Amjad Khan. For the next decade or so excessive violence became the norm of the mainstream Hindi cinema and Amitabh Bachchan the ‘angry young man’ who set out to right the wrongs in Indian society. In film after film—Zanjeer (1973), Deewar (1975), Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977), Muqaddar-ka Sikandar (1978), Shaan (1980), Naseeb (1981)—the actor represented the common man at the mercy of ‘the system’ but willing to stand up and fight back. During the ’80s the box office draw was disco and music and dance sequences tied together with dollops of vendetta and romance. Feroz Khan’s Qurbani remained the pace-setter for this genre. Ramesh Sippy, Manmohan Desai and Prakash Mishra were the foremost directors of these decades. But during the ’90s, the family drama genre, with the usual ingredients of romance, song, dance and endless arguments about what it means to be ‘Indian’ promised to be the main attraction, despite the phenomenal growth of television channels. Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Apke Hain Kaun (‘Forever Yours’ in English, ‘Anbaalayam’ in Tamil) and Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhanya Le Jayenge were runaway sucessess at the box office, helped along by savvy marketing strategies and the strict monitoring of cable operators’ attempts to screen pirated versions; so were Yash Chopra’s Dil To Paagal Hai, Pardes, Border and Rangeela. Besides, David Dhawan’s wafer-thin comedies-cum-romances (Hero No. 1, Judwaa, Coolie No. 1 and Gharwali Baharwali) breathed new life into the ailing Mumbai film industry. The closing years of the 20th century and the first decade of the new millennium were marked by a revival of the mainstream Hindi, Tamil and Telugu cinema and the return of audiences to the big screen. The new digital technologies, a booming Indian economy and the mushrooming of ‘multiplex’ and digital theatres played no mean role in this revival. But first, a word about the ‘New Wave’ movement in Indian cinema. The New Wave : What is termed the ‘new wave’ in the history of Indian cinema is not the ‘nouvelle vogue’ of French cinema with which Bresson, Godard and other experimental filmmakers were associated in the ’50s and ’60s. In the Indian context, the term is rather loosely used to describe the deliberately realist (or ‘neo-realist’) and non-commercial style of filmmaking that sometimes experiments with form and content. Its roots are in IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) theatre, the realist novel and European cinema (especially Russian, French and Italian). It eschews the escapist Hollywood and the Mumbai film traditions and is concerned more with real-life issues of Indian society than with just entertainment. Other terms used to talk about this cinema are ‘alternative’, ‘parallel’ and even ‘another’ or ‘the third cinema’. The establishment of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) in 1960 raised the expectations of serious filmmakers though they were wary of the terms of the loans provided by it. The FFC began in a business-like manner giving loans only to established filmmakers. But from 1968 onwards, low-budget ventures by young filmmakers too began to be granted loans. Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969) set the trend for the ‘new wave’ Indian film. Bhuvan Shome was filmed on location with a small cast, ‘simple in structure though rich in resonance’, breaking from the ‘formula’ film. It made a mark as a commercial success and won the year’s Best Feature Film, Best Actor and Best Director awards; it won laurels abroad too. Like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen continued to turn out films at regular intervals. His prolific work includes: Baishey Shravan, Akash Kusum, Interview, Padatik, Chorus, Ek Din Pratidin, Parashuram, Mrigaya, Ek Adhuri Kahani, Ek Din Achanak and Genesis. In 1973, two FFC-aided films broke new ground. (The FFC is now the NFDC, the National Film Development Corporation.) Avtar Kaul’s 27 Down was a paen to railway lore and mystique in the outward form of a love story. It won the year’s Best Hindi feature award and later an award at the Locarno festival. Of a different genre was M. S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1973) which told the story of India’s Partition through the eyes of a Muslim family in Agra. The FFC assisted in funding the making of more than a hundred films, many of which did not make it to the box office. Notable among these have been Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan and Tarang and Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti, Ashad Ka Ek Din and Duvidha (‘they do not form a trilogy. They are about women, yes, aspects of women, that’s all’), Satah Se Utha Admi (on Muktibodh, the Hindi poet), Siddheshwari, a tribute to the thumri singer and Naukar Ki Kameez. The Middle Cinema Hindi cinema, dominated in the 1970s by the Sippys, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, B. R. Ishara and Vijay Anand, was jolted out of its wits when Shyam Benegal assisted by Blaze Enterprises, shot into prominence with Ankur (1974) and later with Nishant (1975), Manthan, Bhumika (1977), Kondura (1977) and Junoon (1979). Benegal turned his back on the standard Kalyug and Aaradhana (1981) genre, injecting a dose of caste politics into his first three films. He was closely associated with the making of Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh (1980), a political film about the exploitation of illiterate Adivasis. Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1984), Party (an expose of the upper middle class) and his TV serial on the Partition of India, Tamas, have been significant successes. While the films of Mrinal Sen, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani did not fare very well at the box office, those of the ‘middle cinema’ reaped a good harvest. Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho and Salim Langde Pe Math Ro, Rabindra Dharmaraj’s Chakra and Ketan Mehta’s Bhavni Bhavai (in Gujarati and Hindi), Mirch Masala and later Maya Memsahib and Sardar, started a trend in the making of socially conscious and political films which were entertaining as well. Both the new wave and the middle cinema wilted under the impact of multi-channel television, ‘commercial cinema’, the commercialization of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) and above all the abysmal paucity of exhibition outlets. The gradual decline of the Film Society movement too played a significant role in the fading away of ‘parallel cinema’. The Second New Wave As the century drew to a close, there was a revival of the New Wave spirit, with some assistance from the NFDC, Doordarshan, overseas TV companies such as Channel 4 of Britain and private financiers. Some termed this revival the ‘Second New Wave’, even though most of the filmmakers involved in the revival were also part of the first New Wave. Mani Kaul (Nazar, The Idiot, Siddeshwari), Shyam Benegal (The Making of the Mahatma, Mammo, Saatvan Ka Ghoda, Sardari Begum), Saeed Mirza (Naseem (1996)), Adoor Gopalakrishnan (Kathapurusham (1995)), Girish Kasaravalli (Mane (1996), Thai Saheb (1998), Govind Nihalani (Hazaar Chourasi Ki Maa (1998)), Kumar Shahani (Chaar Adhyay (1997)) and others in different regional languages of the country helped keep the spark of ‘alternative’ cinema alive. New Trends: Corporatization and Professionalization: The early decades of the 21st century witnessed several dramatic developments in Indian cinema. Cinema was at last declared an ‘industry’ in May 1998 by the BJP government (just a day prior to India’s nuclear test on May 11) and no sooner did this happen than the gradual ‘corporatization’ of the entertainment and media industry took off. Banks, insurance companies and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) were persuaded to support the industry. Active support from banks and financial institutions has resulted in the professionalization of the industry and also in the decline of its dependence on funding from the ‘underworld’ of Mumbai and other shady sources of financing. But perhaps the biggest impetus to the shake up of the industry has been the rapid proliferation of ‘multiplexes’ (multi-screen theatres) and digital cinema theatres, first in the metros and later in the big cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune. Multiplexes offered a different experience to cinemagoers, for in most cases they are part of a shopping and restaurant complex. Multiplexes receive direct tax benefits under the Income Tax Act (1961) and are integrated into shopping malls and comprise theatres of different sizes. This perhaps accounts for their rapid proliferation throughout urban India. Thus small-budget films could be released first in multiplexes and digital cinema theatres and later in single screen theatres. Ticket rates are much higher in multiplexes than in single screen theatres and therefore attract upper middle- class families; they also exclude the poorer sections of the film-going audience. Multiplex cinemas have thus succeeded in enticing the upper middle classes back to film viewing in theatres. This has given rise to what have come to be known as ‘multiplex films’, that is small-budget, experimental films on subjects which are rarely touched on in mainstream cinema. Further, the films are personal, urban and reflective; usually without any songs and the dominant language used is English or Hinglish.Young directors like Nagesh Kukunoor (Hyderabad Blues, Bollywood Calling, Iqbal, 3 Deewarein, Mod and Lakshmi), Sudhir Mishra (Hazaron Khawaishen Aisi, Khoya Khoya Chand, Yeh Saali Zindagi and Inkaar) and Anurag Kashyap (Black Friday, Dev. D, Gulaal, The Girl in Yellow Boots, Gangs of Wasseypur, Bombay Talkies, Ugly and Bombay Velvet) have been able to make a mark thanks to the multiplex phenomenon.