GLIMPSES OF OUR CINEMATIC HISTORY

SPLASH OF COLOUR

In 1952, Mehboob made Aan, the first colour film shot in 16mm Kodachrome. By the mid-1950s, V. Shantaram was making optimum use of colour (Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje, Navrang). Shammi Kapoor’s Junglee was the first film made in Eastmancolor.

THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN

As India endured its first brush with authoritarianism in the Emergency, writers Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar collaborated to capture the fury and frustration of the average Indian. Amitabh Bachchan embodied that persona in films like Deewaar.

THE MULTIPLEX BOOM

In 1997, Ajay Bijli, who’d inherited Priya cinema from his father, partnered with Australia’s Village Roadshow to start Priya Village Roadshow (PVR) with a fourscreen complex in Saket, Delhi. Soon, multiplexes became the norm and giant single-screen halls the anomaly.

THE PAN-INDIA FILM

Telugu filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli’s Bahubali films (2015, 2017) broke linguistic boundaries and became a pan-India sensation. The franchise’s success emboldened others to dub their films in Hindi and reach out to a wider audience.

AROUND THE WORLD

Though Naaz (1954) offered a glimpse of the world beyond India with shots of London and Cairo, its actors, Ashok Kumar and Nalini Jaywant, didn’t get to travel to the locations. That honour went to Raj Kapoor, whose production Sangam (1964) kickstarted the trend of shooting abroad to film both songs and scenes.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION

Thanks largely to the serialised epics and filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterjee and Kundan Shah creating shows for Doordarshan, its viewership went up from about 15 million in 1982 to an estimated 75 million by the end of the decade.

INDUSTRY TAG

The film sector was granted industry status in 2000, enabling filmmakers to seek bank credit to fund their passion projects and reducing their dependence on ‘black money’ finance and underworld ties. It also ushered in the era of corporatisation, leading to the advent of foreign studios.

THE STREAMING REVOLUTION

As cinemas across India downed their shutters in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, Indians turned to streaming platforms and were spoilt for choice. Freed from the diktats of the box office, filmmakers turned to long-format narratives and studios set up digital content branches to meet the soaring demand.