ICinema speaks many languages in India. “If you have never seen a Satyajit Ray film, it is like living in this world without ever having seen the moon or the sun,'' legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa once said. Ta. Yet I know Ray's Moon and Sun simply because we speak the same language. The Calcutta filmmaker made most of his films in Bengali and grew up in a Bengali household, so he didn't need subtitles to understand. Aparajito or goopy gin burger vine. It was like coming from Liverpool and learning about Paul McCartney.Ray is ours. Similarly, my friends from Kerala grew up worshiping Malayalam masters like G. Aravindan and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Restricted access, terrible subtitles, and linguistic alienation kept us from seeing each other's great films.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way people watch movies in India. The Hindi film industry, based in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, and hence the name 'Bollywood', is losing its grip. Over the past four years, the southern states' films and stars, primarily the Telugu and Tamil industries, with the Malayalam industry not far behind, have taken over the commercial and critical reins. They're topical, they have momentum, and frankly, they're usually good movies. At the moment, it seems that Hindi cinema is being observed, imitated and taught.
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Traditionally, Indian television channels are classified into national channels and regional channels, with the latter term also used for channels broadcast across India and in different languages. The national channels broadcast in Hindi and English, and sometimes show regional films with rudimentary English subtitles. As a result, viewers remained largely in their own lane for a long time. With the advent of streaming television in the 2000s and 2010s, platforms took their existing movie libraries and made them available with better subtitles and with better dubbing in different languages in order to find a wider audience. Now available. However, his pace began to accelerate dramatically in 2020.
Director Bong Joon-ho won the Golden Globe Award in January of the same year, saying, “Once you overcome the 1-inch barrier of subtitles, you will discover many more great movies.'' parasite. A few weeks later, the pandemic hit. Indians were confined to their homes during a nationwide lockdown from March to May. Theaters were closed until at least October, and no new content was filmed, leaving audiences tired of reruns and restless looking for something fresh, but soon realized it already existed. .
Outsiders often mistake Indian films for “Bollywood,” a single song-and-dance riot. But of the roughly 2,000 films produced in India each year, he said, only four of the films made in Hindustani, a mixture of Hindi and Urdu spoken in much of northern India Less than 1. There are also other “Forests of…”. The Malayalam film industry is known as Mollywood, the Kannada industry as Sandalwood, the Tamil industry as Kollywood, and both the Telugu and Bengali film industries as Tollywood.
Indians have long been so narrow-minded that they remake movies instead of watching them in languages they don't know. Commercially successful romance, comedy, and action films have been produced over and over again in other Indian languages over the decades, adding cultural specificity and local flavor to each cover version. has been added. However, as better subtitled titles became popular, Indians began to lose their taste for remakes. Audiences in Delhi might turn to Malayalam and Maharashtrian films to scratch their arthouse itch, or to Telugu and Tamil blockbusters for an old-fashioned escapist experience. I might turn to it. Many Indians became interested in Korean and Turkish dramas from daily soap operas.
National tastes had evolved—or so it seemed. Domestic viewers began to demand more interesting content, while filmmakers and actors famous in their own states began to enjoy national celebrity. But even as audiences became more discerning about what they watched at home, they were also tired of staying home. Even with the rollout of coronavirus vaccines in 2021, audiences were wary of returning to movie theaters. By 2022 they were starving. They longed for something bigger than television, a phenomenon they could collectively share.This is the era of Telugu epics RRR I landed. Here's the scale, here's the action, here's some questionable right-wing historical revisionism, all presented as his three-ring circus on a grand scale. Indians marched to movie theaters for the first time to watch Telugu movies.
The Indian film industry has always been in search of stars, putting popular actors (mostly men) on a pedestal and treating the release of a major film like a festival. In this country, temples are actually built to honor actors. For example, Karnataka has a temple for Tamil star Rajinikanth and Kolkata has a temple for Hindi star Amitabh Bachchan, but it is only now that worshipers are starting to cross the country. This is the first time.
RRR The film sparked a wave of Telugu and Tamil films at the box office, leading to the new buzzword of a 'pan-Indian' hit that was appreciated across audiences (and the diaspora). These are unashamedly loud and violent bombastic films, films that literally star-worship and leave no room for subtlety at all. Some of the pan-Indian hits include: KGF: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, Pushpa: The Riseand leo. These are the kinds of movies that Hindi cinema left behind in his 1980s and his 1990s, made by filmmakers who successfully followed the blockbuster formula, with more artifice and theater-shaking sound design. It was only produced. Hindi films are currently trying their best to keep up with the volume.
This nationwide shift away from Hindi films is in dramatic contrast to the linguistic hegemony the government is trying to impose. India has 23 official languages, including English, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is trying to make Hindi the official language. lingua franca. Not only is Hindi increasingly featured prominently in all government communications, but the newly outlined National Education Policy also mandates the study of Hindi in schools even in non-Hindi speaking states. is intended to be mandatory.
In that case, the film may be showing resistance.
Just as we started watching the best subtitled movies, we started re-indulging in movies that were so deafening that they didn't need subtitles. But at least we're looking beyond what we know. Where once we chose our own moon, sun and stars, now we share a constellation. We are looking at a bigger sky.