StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...
Free

A Landmark Bollywood Film - Essay Example

Cite this document
Summary
This paper 'A Landmark Bollywood Film ' tells that The Bollywood film chosen for analysis in this essay is Lagan, released in 2001.  The film, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, stars Amir Khan and Gracey Singh in lead roles.  The movie combines popular formulaic elements within the time-tested format of sports movies…
Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER92.1% of users find it useful
A Landmark Bollywood Film
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "A Landmark Bollywood Film"

Lagaan (2001 A landmark Bollywood film that gracefully combines art and entertainment: The Bollywood film chosen for analysis in this essay is Lagaan, released in 2001. The film, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker stars Amir Khan and Gracy Singh in lead roles. The movie combines popular formulaic elements within the time-tested format of sports movies, making it a unique production to have come out of Bollywood in many years. Not only was the movie make a lot of money at the box-office (both in India and abroad), but it also attracted positive reaction from the critics. This is evident from the fact that it was one of the movies nominated for Best Picture under Foreign Language Movie category in the following year at the Academy Awards. It is hoped that reasons such as these make Lagaan an appropriate choice for discussion in this essay. Before getting the detailed analysis of the film, a brief summary of the story is called for. Lagaan is a fictional story set in nineteenth century India, when the country was still under the rule of British Empire. A group of villagers from a remote village in the arid central India “take up a British officers challenge to play cricket in order to get a reprieve from a crippling tax imposed by the colonial government” (Kasbekar, 2007, p. 366) If the villagers beat their colonial rulers, their taxes are waived off for three subsequent years. In the eventuality they lose they will be compelled to pay thrice the usual taxes Moreover, “The fact that the villagers have never played cricket and do not know the first thing about the game establishes the foundation of the films narrative and dramatic structure. The British officers sister takes pity on the villagers and secretly teaches them the game so that they have a fighting chance. The cricket match takes up the final hour of this nearly four-hour long film and is marked by moments of comedy, drama, and suspense.” (Ganti, 2004, p.25) Lagaan has proven to be a watershed event in mainstream Indian film industry. This view is supported by the fact that in the years since its release, no other movie had attained such overwhelming popular and critical acclaim. At the time when Lagaan was released, Bollywood was going through a crisis of sorts. Most films released by the film studios of Mumbai (which is where Bollywood is headquartered) were failing badly at the box-office. There were multiple reasons behind this decline, but the foremost among them is the lack of creativity and novelty in the scripts. Even regular movie-goers got fed up with the bland, repetitive and unimaginative storylines of a majority of films at the time. It is in this context that Lagaan should be studied and evaluated, for it then lucidly illustrates the uniqueness of Lagaan (Vasudevan, 2005, p.135). Bollywood is differentiated from the Independent/Art House film industry in India. The former is generally considered as a money making industry with importance given only to “entertainment”. This is in direct contrast to the Art House film industry, which adopts its ethos based on “artistic merit”. While Lagaan, without doubt, is a mainstream Bollywood production, it stands out for its artistic merit as well, as will be illustrated below. Firstly, given the lengthy four hour duration of the film, pacing the film becomes a challenging task for the director. Ashutosh Gowariker, the director, does a commendable job in this department as he employs ‘song and dance’ sequences at appropriate junctures to keep the audience engaged to the narrative. The background score given by A.R.Rahman also deserves mention here, as it is one of his masterly works. The task of finding a resonant blend in combining classical Hindustani music with classical Western is never easy. Rahman overcomes these challenges without a hitch and in the process delivers a unique musical work. Again, such ground-breaking works are not usually associated with Bollywood in general, which further goes to emphasize the enduring significance of Lagaan to the mainstream Indian film industry. Equally competent is the choreographic sequences in the film. Gracy Singh, who plays the role of the jealous village-girl in love with Bhuvan (played by Amir Khan) is particularly graceful in the dance sequences. Being a trained classical dancer, she carries off the role with great ease. The chemistry between the lead pair, especially in moments of romance, is another area where the movie scores (Kasbekar, 2007, p.378). Through a well thought-out interlay of drama, romance and song-and-dance, Gowariker balances the various imperatives of Bollywood entertainers. It is apt to bring to light at this point that Bollywood and Cricket have been two major sources of entertainment for the Indian public. In many ways, Cricket precedes Bollywood in finding a place in the collective Indian public consciousness, for the sport in India is as old as the British Raj. Bollywood, on the other hand, would have to wait for the advent of film and sound technology to grow into a large commercial enterprise that it is today. Lagaan benefits no end by bringing Cricket to the realm of Bollywood and thereby creating a risk-free approach to commercial success (Ganti, 2004, p.232). The employment of the game of Cricket as a metaphor for larger and real struggles in life is a brilliant conception on part of the director. Not surprisingly then, the Cricket match agreed to by the villagers and their British administrators comprises the central sequence in the film, the detailed discussion of which is as follows (Tripathi, 2002, p.38). The cricket match between the natives and the colonial powers takes up the last one hour of the lengthy movie. During the course of the match the built up suspense and anxiety resolves itself. In other words, the cricket match, with so much at stake for both sides serves as a perfect backdrop in which to unravel the climax. While the cricket match can be construed at one level as the struggle between the underdog and the master, at another level it is an allegory for the real-life struggle by subjects of empire against their colonial rulers. At an even greater level of abstraction, the cricket match is an allegory to the universal tussle between forces of good and evil, with the village team evidently being on the side of the good. There are discernible nationalistic undertones in the movie, as Jyothika Virdi points out in her scholarly work The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History: ”Lagaan celebrates the struggle against the empire: the trans-national forces of another moment, that noble moment to which the nation owes its origin and to which Hindi cinema has only made muted references before. The anti-colonial struggle might become the latest imprint to imagine the nation—more than a hundred years after the nationalist movement began in earnest and fifty years after the nations independence. The dramatic appeal of the now-historic anti-imperial victory might make it yet another enduring strategy to glorify the nation racked with internal polarizations, confused about contending with intensifying globalization forces, and willing to repress and displace the trauma of two nations with the self-aggrandizement of becoming a regional superpower.” (Virdi, 2003, p.78) The aforementioned observations by Jyothika Virdi are valid assessments of Lagaan. Moreover, it places the key ingredients of the film in the context of Bollywood role as an arbiter of Indian culture, values and notions of national identity. While some Bollywood movies take into consideration such elements as the nations tenuousness, its artifice, etc, and try to gloss over fault lines, a majority of the films “locate these fractures within the nation by projecting a national edifice and the rumblings against it. The nation not only subsumes personal identities but also collectives identified by class, gender, sexuality, community, and caste, although social movements centred around these threaten the hierarchies (feudal, capitalist, and patriarchal) maintained by the nation state. Hindi films explore the tensions these collectives generate, even openly articulate their conflicts within the nation; they offer a glimmer of change—and then contain it” (Ganti, 2004, p.232). It is quite fitting to conclude this essay by stating that Lagaan performs all these functions and more. References: Bale, John, and Mike Cronin, eds. Sport and Postcolonialism /. New York: Berg, 2003. Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Ganti, Tejaswini. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004. Kasbekar, Asha (2007) ‘An Introduction to Indian cinema.’ In: Nelmes, Jill (ed) An Introduction to Film Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 365–390. Tripathi, Salil. "Better Than Bollywood: Its a Hot Summer for Indias Film Industry, but Salil Tripathi Prefers a Film-Maker Who Favours Reality over Schmaltz." New Statesman 3 June 2002: 38+. Vasudevan, Ravi P.: The Politics of Cultural Address in a Transitional Cinema: A Case Study of Indian Popular Cinema. In: Gledhill, Christine/ Williams, Linda: Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, P. 130–164 Vick, Tom (2007) Asian Cinema: A Field Guide, Collins, pp. 87 - 112 Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Read More
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(A Landmark Bollywood Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words, n.d.)
A Landmark Bollywood Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words. https://studentshare.org/media/1726648-mapping-world-cinema-one-short-piece-of-film-analysisbollywood
(A Landmark Bollywood Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 Words)
A Landmark Bollywood Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 Words. https://studentshare.org/media/1726648-mapping-world-cinema-one-short-piece-of-film-analysisbollywood.
“A Landmark Bollywood Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 Words”. https://studentshare.org/media/1726648-mapping-world-cinema-one-short-piece-of-film-analysisbollywood.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF A Landmark Bollywood Film

Life of Simona Vackova

hellip; The author states that the summer of 2008 was a landmark in Simona's life for being recognized after winning an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences as a talented producer for a student television pilot called Hollywood Heights.... Blessed with genuine talent and zeal for art in the film genre, Simona graduated with a bachelor's degree in film.... Winning Best Screenplay at the Final Cut film Festival for No One's Fault, judged and awarded by Bobby Cohen in 2003 provided the impetus for Simona's focused vision in films and entertainment....
1 Pages (250 words) Essay

Business Report for Apple Inc

This is a landmark development in the Apple has already launched its iphone in India using a marketing strategy wherein it launched its phones in eight Indian cities at midnight of August 22, 2008.... The following is a Business Report for Apple Inc, which proposes that the Company pursue an active marketing strategy to sell its product the iphone in India, which is a large and upcoming consumer market....
11 Pages (2750 words) Essay

Bollywood film New York: a national approach

While several Hollywood films have dealt with the subject of terrorism and specifically the 9/11 incident with its consequent impact upon innocent victims, “New York” is the first Indian film to explore this subject.... It concentrates specifically on Indian diaspora living in… The film has done extraordinarily good business in India and raked up impressive revenues in the worldwide market as well, where it has been well received by the Asian community living abroad....
7 Pages (1750 words) Essay

Information About Business Opportunities and Trends

It was established in 1935 with the merger of Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox film Corporation.... 0th Century Fox film Corporation is an established name in the motion picture industry.... The Robe in 1953 was companies' inaugural wide screen viewable feature film.... From then on, they went on producing quite a few important and landmark films in the subsequent years....
7 Pages (1750 words) Essay

Neighborhood Astoria, NY

Before the film industry discovered the reliable weather in Hollywood, California, much filmmaking was done in Astoria.... It was once incorporated into Long Island City and is near Sunnyside and Woodside.... It is bound by the East River.... It was chartered in 1870 alongside Long Island city in 1870 and existed independently from New York for 28 years....
5 Pages (1250 words) Essay

Importance of songs and music in bollywood films

bollywood film makers have for long made no efforts to hide the fact that what the film represents on the screen is an illusion, a creation and a fiction.... Since the inception of Indian commercial films, all film have had a musical format with six or more songs in one film.... Needless to say, India has the highest film output per year. Music in films plays a vital role.... Since the inception of Indian commercial films, all film have had a musical format with six or more songs in one film....
2 Pages (500 words) Essay

A Bollywood Film: Deewar

In the essay “A bollywood film: Deewar” the author analyzes one of the greatest Hindi movies ever made mainly because of the superb direction and the mesmerizing acting by the lead cast, Amitabh Bachan, and Shashi Kapoor.... The writer of the movie is Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar....
6 Pages (1500 words) Essay

Digital Cinema Review and Analysis

The film has been well received in the box office and in critics and there have been many adjectives used for it such as outstanding, magnificent,… Science-fiction films have long been awaited as viewers believe that ever since Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey it is hard to experience good and truly memorable films.... Gravity tends to be a weighty movie which means that the script had been prepared over a course of five years and the direction of the film only became possible with the new techniques of lighting, shooting, and directing which marked a new era of fictional film making....
4 Pages (1000 words) Essay
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us