Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- List of Abbreviations of Film Titles
- 1 Introduction: The Bollywood Eclipse
- 2 Anti-Bollywood: Traditional Modes of Studying Indian Cinema
- 3 Pedagogic Practices and Newer Approaches to Contemporary Bollywood Cinema
- 4 Postmodernism and India
- 5 Postmodern Bollywood
- 6 Indian Cinema: A History of Repetition
- 7 Contemporary Bollywood Remakes
- 8 Conclusion: A Bollywood Renaissance?
- Bibliography
- List of Additional Reading
- Appendix: Popular Indian Film Remakes
- Filmography
- Index
6 - Indian Cinema: A History of Repetition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- List of Abbreviations of Film Titles
- 1 Introduction: The Bollywood Eclipse
- 2 Anti-Bollywood: Traditional Modes of Studying Indian Cinema
- 3 Pedagogic Practices and Newer Approaches to Contemporary Bollywood Cinema
- 4 Postmodernism and India
- 5 Postmodern Bollywood
- 6 Indian Cinema: A History of Repetition
- 7 Contemporary Bollywood Remakes
- 8 Conclusion: A Bollywood Renaissance?
- Bibliography
- List of Additional Reading
- Appendix: Popular Indian Film Remakes
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
We have already begun to identify that Bollywood cinema's postmodern tendencies partly stem from its investment in remaking and recycling past film texts, styles and conventions as a means of internal commentary, creative innovation and subverting conventional modes of representation (such as cinematic realism). In the following, I provide further examples of such instances of postmodern appropriation in contemporary Indian cinema, demonstrating how widespread such processes are among the diversity of films produced in Bollywood in the 2000s decade. To inform my research, I have viewed and compared over one hundred modern Bollywood remakes alongside their alleged film originals (observing patterns of similarity not simply in narrative content but in style and form, which help to determine appropriation rather than coincidence in formally unacknowledged remakes). Although this study has covered several of the film texts that appear in Nayar's aforementioned discussions of popular 1990s Indian film remakes (1997, 2005), the majority of the films I have chosen to discuss here emerge specifically from within the post-millennium decade. I intend to draw attention to the sheer output of remakes in this period in order to signal a new phenomenon of remaking that is symptomatic of the recent impact of postmodernism, globalisation, modernisation and internationalisation in India and its film industry. In the following discussions I shall employ the term ‘remake genre’ as I believe that the contemporary Bollywood remake has inherited a particular set of (postmodern) agendas and stylistic conventions. It can be recognised as an artistic work with unique form and content, which offers its audiences a particular kind of gratification in viewing and engaging with it.
My Appendix offers a long list of Bollywood films which have either been confirmed as remakes (by their filmmakers) or which the media, academia, or fans and viewers in online forums have simply speculated might be remakes. It therefore broadly includes disputable or unsubstantiated remakes which have emerged from public hearsay, as well as conspicuous plagiarisms, certified homages, and explicit literary adaptations. The list is by no means exhaustive (it excludes numerous remakes of South Indian films), but it does present a substantial body of films demonstrating the strong remaking trend in Bollywood, particularly in the noughties.
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- Information
- Bollywood and PostmodernismPopular Indian Cinema in the 21st Century, pp. 128 - 147Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015