The book also analyses the impact of star monopoly on textual and performance conventions through the half-century-long vocal dominance of playback singer Lata Mangeshkar as well as s actress Nargis. This book will be indispensable for students and researchers of cultural and film studies, politics, sociology, and history.
It will also appeal to anybody interested in Bollywood. Cinema arrived in India on 7 July , just six months after the first public screening by the Lumiere brothers in Paris.
By the s, alongside the material technology of filmmaking, such as raw film stock, cameras, projectors, lighting equipment, and, most recently, sound systems, Indian cinema had imported the less material but no less powerful cultural apparatus of the Hollywood mode of filmmaking, which was then, in varying accents, grafted onto existing Indian forms of entertainment. A stock-taking account of the history of Indian cinema written for the annual issue of Rangbhoomi, a Hindi weekly film magazine which had started the previous year, described the cultural complications associated with the entry of this new medium into India: By the s, Indian journalistic discourse on cinema was already historicizing itself and was obsessively engaged in asserting Indian cinematic identity and measuring it against international norms.
In the case of Indian stars, private information was regularly deflected back to a professional context. Rather than the on- and off-screen activities of individual stars, stardom itself was more regularly the subject of fascination and discussion. Technology is never culturally neutral, and the importation of cinema technology into India was always accompanied by its products.
Motion picture cameras, sound, and color arrived in conjunction with the films themselves, and the material technology and its cultural products became inseparable in the public mind. Thus, it is likely that the first motion picture cameras, for instance, became inseparable from their production of very specific images, as the Lumiere cameramen who traveled around the world to sell the cinematograph screened films to demonstrate the capabilities of their new technology.
The Lumiere production, Train Arriving at the Station , for example, almost immediately gave rise to its Indian counterpart albeit produced by a foreign production company, Andersonoscopograph , in a Bombay variant, Train Arriving at Churchgate station Similarly, as American, British, French, and other films circulated in India, they advertised both the new technologies and their cultural and representational possibilities in the form of advertising methods, exhibition venues, technical journals, genres, and stars.
Thus, alongside film equipment, film genres, and narrative forms, stardom itself may be regarded as one of the cultural technologies imported from Hollywood. The complex issue of translocation is also exemplified, in the case of cinema, in the oft-repeated story of the impulse behind the films of D.
Phalke, the maker of Raja Harishchandra , long considered to be one of the first feature films in India. It is not simply a matter of Indianization of a cultural text originating in the West, but of complex and ultimately commercially driven negotiations of popular taste and critical canons. The stunt and costume film genres, popular in the s, provide further evidence of the complex rewriting of specifically Hollywood technologies of entertainment onto existing Indian forms.
Yet, paradoxically, the study of early cinema stars in any national context remains in some ways plagued with the burden of the seemingly always already known, as the regulatory and gendered discourses of cinema and stardom in locations as different as China, Japan, and Britain appear to share a familiar terrain. In this shared global discourse of stardom, we find early film actresses as the object of both fascination and moral censure, taking on the burden of a more generalized anxiety regarding increased female participation and visibility in the public sphere.
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