The Great Bollywood

The Great Bollywood

Motion pictures have been around for a long time. They are popular all over the world. When people think of motion pictures, Hollywood always pops in their heads. As great and as popular as Hollywood is, there is a larger film industry in the world, and it's not in the U.S. The largest film industry in the world is called Bollywood and it is located in Bombay, India. Bollywood puts out on the average eight hundred movies a year, which means two movies are cranked out every day. (Ninian pg 1)

The movies are shown to a eleven million people, usually ages twelve to twenty- five, everyday in over 13,000 movies theaters across India. And those numbers don't even count other countries. All of the movies that are produced and made in India are exported to other countries, including America, England, Russia. Indian people, however, watch these movies a lot more because they are so important to them. (Ninian, pg 1)

Now the big question is why is Bollywood so important to India? Well it's a few reasons. First off, it does supply a lot of jobs for people, Bollywood supplies jobs for more then three hundred thousand people and is India's sixth biggest industry. But this isn't all of why Bollywood is important to India. India is proud of Bollywood and what the industry creates, since motion pictures is very important to the country.

Motion pictures started to become big in India back in around back in the early 1900's. All the movies that were shown up until the end of the twenties were silent movies. Silent movies were popular because nothing had to be translated and different languages didn't matter when it came to watching a movie. Hollywood made all the silent movies that were shown, although a lot of them were shot in India. Finally in the 1930's sound came around for movies and India started to produce and make movies. Since now language in movies was a big deal it was hard to know what to use, so they made most of there movies in the widely used language of Hindi- Huru. All the movies that were made all had about the same themes focusing on song and dance from India and also some different social issues were portrayed in films. Most of the movies that were being made were coming from studios in Bombay, so they decided to call it Bollywood and to make the main movie making area. (Ninian, pg2)

As the 1950's rolled around, motion pictures began to change a little bit. All kinds of movies were being made portraying males and females as supreme beings, like super heroes or other immortal beings. This idea in movie kept getting more and more popular through the next couple of decades. This was the thing to have in most movies up until the 1980's. Color tv's came out in India so less and less people were going to the cinemas. So Bollywood had to turn it up a bit and produce bigger and better movies so that it would attract people back to the cinema.

They polished their films, made them more glamourous, and made them more glossier. They added love themes to the movies, more songs and dances, and happier endings. Another thing that was becoming popular was violence in movies, so Bollywood was putting more violence in the super hero movies. (Ninian, pg 3)

The 1990's brought cable and satellite tv to India and this meant it would be an even bigger challenge to keep people in the cinemas. So Bollywood spiced up things even more by having bigger budgets, having bigger stars in there movies, making the films more romantic and adding more song and dance then ever. The progression of movies at reached the top and movies started to not be so great. Bollywood began a gradual descent with barely any hits and sometime just broke even. But Bollywood couldn't stop what they did was too important to India and they would regain themselves some how. (Ninian, pg 3)

After the twenty-first century rolled around Bollywood began to regain themselves by releasing some hits, one of the bigger hits that they released was a movie called Lagaan that was actually nominated for the best foreign film category at the Academy Awards. The film is about these town folk back in the eighteen hundreds that are being pressured to pay taxes to there British rulers. But if they pay them it will ruin there lives because they don't have much at all. So one of the British rulers challenges the town folk to a game of cricket which is a game that is

completely oblivious to them and if they win this game they won't have to pay the taxes. So this film was great to Indian people because it shows there people fighting for there rights