Indian Parallel Cinema
While Indian Cinema known as Bollywood was thriving in the 1950s, the film industry also saw the emergence of a new Parallel Cinema movement. A group of film-makers broke with the past traditions and made exciting, experimental and innovating films (Gupta 11). Indian Parallel Cinema is a specific genre of Indian cinema which is known for its serious content, realism and naturalism, which reflected social and politics during those times (Gupta 14). Indian parallel cinema represents a change of direction or a break with the traditional Indian cinema. Early examples of Hindi films in this movement include Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar (1946) and Bimal Roy's Two Acres of Land (1953). Their critical acclaim, as well as the commercial success, created a way for Indian neo realism called as Indian Parallel Cinema (Kabir 53). Some of the internationally-acclaimed Bollywood filmmakers involved in the movement included Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Ketan Mehta, Govind Nihalani, Shyam Benegal and Vijaya Mehta. This Parallel Cinema movement takes off in three areas of the country: the Malayalam speaking southernmost state of Kerala, West Bengal in the east and in to an extant in the southern state of Karnataka. The Indian Parallel Cinema is influenced from Italian Neo-Realism and French Parallel Cinema which were taking place during the same time. It is also influenced from the literature of India. The Parallel Cinema was a cinema by intellectuals and for the intellectuals who were frustrated with the mindless song-dance dramas made typically in Bollywood films (Gupta 21). They wanted to break the film industry boundaries and do things differently and they did. They wanted to capture India in its true color, no space for nonhuman heroism, no melodrama to make the script sell, moving away from the stereotype that large budget, big star movies are the one’s which are good to see(Gupta 18). They wanted to translate their...
Cited: Gupta, Chidananda Das . New Directions in Indian Cinema. University of California Press, 1980.
Kabir, Nasreen Munni. Bollywood, The Indian Cinema Story. Pan MacMillan Ltd, 2001.
Mast, Gerald, and Kawin Bruce. A Short History of the Movies. 10th. Longman, 2008.
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