Indian film industry is the largest in the world. It releases 1000 plus movies annually. Most films are made in South Indian languages (viz., Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam). Nevertheless, Hindi films take the largest box office share. India has 12,000 plus cinema halls and this industry churns out 1000 plus films a year. This book gives a brief history of the world's most exciting industrial enterprise. It gives the details, facts and vital sets of data of Indian cinema with amazing finesse. Its simple style and low cost enable all reader genres to read it. Renu Saran has penned this book for the lovers of Indian cinema. She has given many good books to our valued readers. She has worked very hard to collect data and analyze information sets. That is why this book has become one of the best in its genre.

Between 1931 and 2000, India's popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country's prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.

The Indian cinema sells 2.9 billion movie tickets annually, the largest in the world. Yet, as an economic entity, the Indian movie industry remains small, with an annual revenue that is 5% of Hollywood's. This volume throws light on the history of Indian cinema and the circumstances that saw the birth of one of the world's great countercultures.

The largest film industry in the world after Hollywood is celebrated in this updated and expanded edition of a now classic work of reference. Covering the full range of Indian film, this new revised edition of the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema includes vastly expanded coverage of mainstream productions from the 1970s to the 1990s and, for the first time, a comprehensive name index. Illustrated throughout, there is no comparable guide to the incredible vitality and diversity of historical and contemporary Indian film.

What remains of the “national” when the nation unravels at the birth of the independent state? The political truncation of India at the end of British colonial rule in 1947 led to a social cataclysm in which roughly one million people died and ten to twelve million were displaced. Combining film studies, trauma theory, and South Asian cultural history, Bhaskar Sarkar follows the shifting traces of this event in Indian cinema over the next six decades. He argues that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia and that its representation on screen enables forms of historical engagement that are largely opaque to standard historiography. Sarkar tracks the initial reticence to engage with the trauma of 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a strong Partition discourse, revealing both the silence and the eventual “return of the repressed” as strands of one complex process. Connecting the relative silence of the early decades after Partition to a project of postcolonial nation-building and to trauma’s disjunctive temporal structure, Sarkar develops an allegorical reading of the silence as a form of mourning. He relates the proliferation of explicit Partition narratives in films made since the mid-1980s to disillusionment with post-independence achievements, and he discusses how current cinematic memorializations of 1947 are influenced by economic liberalization and the rise of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism. Traversing Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television, Sarkar provides a history of Indian cinema that interrogates the national (a central category organizing cinema studies) and participates in a wider process of mourning the modernist promises of the nation form.

Pivoting on the nation as a central preoccupation in Hindi films, Virdi (communication and film and media studies, U. of Windsor, Canada) contends that Hindi cinema appropriates familiar Hollywood cinematic strategies for its own distinctive aesthetics and poetics. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

THEODORE BASKARAN weaves the magic and matter of South Indian films into a rich tapestry of readable essays. They cover such topics as early cinema in the south, trade unionism in South Indian film industry, and the need for historicizing southern cinema. Baskaran also investigates how Tamil cinema is struggling to get free from the legacy of company drama and the persistence of stage features. While his sharper focus rests on Tamil cinema, this collection will interest historians and students of Indian film, and the general readers who look for a sprightly introduction to the world of South Indian films. Chapter titles include.

In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a guide to the cultural, social and political significance of Hindi cinema, outlining the history and structure of the Bombay film industry, and the development of popular Hindi filmmaking since the 1930s. Providing information and commentary on the key players in Bollywood, including composers, directors and stars, as well as material from current filmmakers themselves, the areas covered in Bollywood include: history of Indian cinema main themes and characteristics of Hindi cinema significant films, directors and stars production and distribution of Bollywood films interviews with actors, directors and screenwriters. Anyone interested in, or studying Bollywood cinema will find this a valuable purchase.

In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan shows how Indian cinema's many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was (and is) understood, experienced, and present in everyday life in myriad ways. Employing methods of media archaeology, close textual analysis, archival research, and cultural theory, Mahadevan digs into the history of photography, print media, practices of piracy and showmanship, and contemporary everyday imaginations of the cinema to offer an understanding of how the cinema came to be such a dominant force of culture in India. The result is an open-ended and innovative account of Indian cinema's "many origins."

- Rare behind-the-scenes photographs from personal archive of cinematographer Josef Wirsching - Seeks to situate a film pioneer back into the history of Bombay cinema - Select images of cast and crew, production stills, and publicity images from early days of Indian cinema - Brings to light the historical and imaginative value of Wirsching's photographic archive Ever since cinema became a popular medium of mass entertainment, audiences have been intensely curious about life and work on a film set. How are films made, we have wondered, hoping that first-hand knowledge of a film set will explain the hold cinema has on us. This book presents rare behind-the-scenes photographs from the personal archive of the cinematographer Josef Wirsching, a pioneer of Indian cinema. Most of these photographs were taken in the 1930s and '40s when Wirsching was employed at the legendary film studio, Bombay Talkies Ltd. The essays by a variety of scholars and film historians help us understand the historical and imaginative value of Wirsching's photographic archive. Shot across film sets and outdoor locations, the images comprising of the cast and crew, production stills, and publicity images from the early days of Indian cinema show us that history, and cinema itself, is a vital ongoing project. Published in association with The Alkazi of Collection of Photography, New Delhi.