Over 1000 films are made each year in India. Only a couple of those films get to be seen in the movie theatres of the western world.
The Indian cinema is divided into 11 ”cinema-centres”, according to the language spoken in the films. The biggest one is the Hindi-speaking Bollywood. Second comes Tamil-speaking Kollywood, and third the Telugu-speaking Tollywood.
The home of Bollywood cinema is Mumbai, located in the marathi-speaking state of Maharashtra. Until 1995, the city was called Bombay, hence the name for the films. Nowadays Mumbai is considered to be the biggest cinema base in India. Over 200 films are produced there each year.
Bollywood films are spoken in Hindustani. It is a language composed of Hindi and Urdu, and often also English words are added to it. In India, people call Bollywood plainly Hindi cinema. Bollywood films are watched especially in Northern India, where most people understand Hindi. They are also very popular in Africa, Great Britain, USA, Canada, Western Asia, Russia and Pakistan.
A Bollywood film is a 3-4 hour musical film, which has a melodramatic and stereotyped storyline. Typically they include various subplots, flashbacks and musical scenes filmed abroad. Usually a Bollywood film also has a moral teaching for its audience.
The structure of a Bollywood film is divided into two parts. During the first half, the characters and the themes of the film are presented to the audience. Getting to know and identify to the characters happens through musical scenes, which there are plenty in the beginning of a movie. The intermission takes place just after the storyline culminates into a great change experienced by the main character. It might be change of location to another country, the death of a central character, or a crisis in the life of the protagonist. Bollywood films end most of the time into a catharsis.
Bollywood films are also called Masala films, named after the Indian mixture of spices. That is because inside one film, many different genres can be found: comedy, action, drama…
Nowadays, besides traditionnal Bollywood films, parallel cinema and modern Bollywood are being made. The directors of parallel cinema try to tell more realistic stories about the Indian life. The directors of modern Bollywood are more interested into remaking Hollywood films by adapting them to fit an Indian taste.
Text by: Reetta Flink
Translation by: Laura Kunnas
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