History of Indian cinema Pre-cinema age

Pre-cinema age

Story telling

• Telling stories using hand-drawn tableaux images in scroll painting with accompanying live sound have been an age old Indian tradition.

• Stories mostly on tales of gods and goddesses and then movement of painted glass slides in a lantern which created illusions of movement.

Lumire brothers first public showing at Mumbai’s Watson Hotel

July 7 1896

• First showing by Lumire brothers did not see people running away from the images of train moving towards them as they did elsewhere.

• The Indians had seen the painted glass slides before so viewers took experience of moving trains as something already familiar with

Indian traditional art

• The characteristic enthusiasm for inserting song and dance sequences in Indian cinema even today is because of it’s strong influence of traditional arts, music, dance and popular theatre on the cinema movement

Regional Cinema: The fist film in Southern India was made by R Nataraja Mudaliar

Indian Cinema starts talking (Alam Ara produced by Ardeshir Irani)

• In early thirties, the silent Indian cinema began to talk, sing and dance and first release was on March 14 1931

• Mumbai became the hub of the Indian industry having a number of self-contained productions units

Uncontrolled India Cinema: The industry rejected established conventions, standards and categories

Exploitation, poor quality, pornography are a legitimate part of Indian movies

The Golden Fifties

• The fight for independence, famines, changing social mores, global fight against fascism all contributed to the learning in which the directors grew up

• 1950s saw the raise of directors like Mehboob, Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor who entered the film industry during the 1930s and 40s

Parallel CinemaThe 1970s saw a decline in parallel cinema