Indian National Cinema Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Indian National Cinema - Essay Example From the beginning of the 18th century, inventors focused on developing a motion picture, and eventually from live dramas to silent movies and ultimately the development of motion picture with sound surfaced. Since then, motion pictures have become a global phenomenon. National industries have been developed in many countries, to cater to the needs of people belonging to a certain culture and can speak a certain language. Countries where diversity in culture exists, national cinemas have been so vastly developed that movies are produced in various languages and are also translated from one local language to another. One of the best and most widely known examples of national cinema is the Indian Cinema. This article looks into the concept of national cinema and explores the Indian cinema in detail. The history of the Indian cinema, along with the analysis of the film industry from production to exhibition and the governmental infrastructure for films, has been discussed. The essay als o reflects on the dominant ideas of what constitutes cinema in India. The Concept of National Cinema Andrew Higson (1989) has presented an innovative insight into the concept of national cinema. National cinema has been referred to mean the films that are produced in a particular country. Before the 1980s the cinema was analyzed using common-sense concepts by critics (). The past decades have shown that national cinema has long served as a means of promoting non-Hollywood films. Stephen Crofts argues that coupled with the name of the director-auteur, national cinema has subserved as a way of distinguishing between the Hollywood and non-Hollywood films. Used as a marketing strategy, he contends that national cinema has vouched for the delivery of ‘otherness’- representative of the cultural differences existing between Hollywood and films from other countries (Triana-Toribio 2003). Higson observes that there is no single, universal definition of national cinema. Looking b ack at the history of how cinema has evolved, the term does not confer any updated holistic meaning. Globalization has altered the perspectives through which cinema was viewed in the yore (Carroll & Choi 2006). Now there are a number of perspectives regarding the notion of national cinemas, as Higson (1989) illustrates. The notion of national cinema can be interpreted from an economics perspective, expounding upon the link between the national cinema and the domestic film industry (Higson 1989). This comes to encompass issues such as who own the cinemas, who makes the films and where are these films shot. Another perspective of exploring and studying the national cinema is to contemplate upon the nature of the films made. The approach, being text-based, represents questions such as the theme of the films produced, the nature of the projections of the national character that they portray and the degree to which these films are able to discover, survey and build a concept of nationhoo d embedded in the films themselves as well as in the spectators. Higson observes that there is a third perspective to national cinema, entailing an exhibition-led or consumption based approach. This view looks into the type of films that are viewed the most, with specific attention being given to foreign films, chiefly those produced in Hollywood having a high-profile distribution in one particular country. Higson asserts that the criticism based approach to national cinema also exists and rates the films produced by the industry in the context of the quality of the art cinema. Higson is of the view that in order to recognize a national cinema, it is essential to detail consistency and a unison. The identification of a national