According to the recent Ormax Media report the Indian gross Box office stood at Rs 10,637 Cr in 2022, just Rs 300 Cr less than 2019, which happened to be the best-grossing year at the India box office. But there was a major shift that was witnessed in the box office numbers of 2022 compared to that of 2019. In 2022, the share of the Hindi box office saw a downward slide from 44% to 33%, while the Telugu box office gained a share, moving up from 13% to 20%. The films from four Southern languages contributed 50% to the country’s box office (Tamil garnered 16%, Kannada share stood at 8% and Malayalam clocked 6%). Moreover, 32% of Hindi box office came from dubbed versions of Southern films like K.G.F: Chapter 2, RRR, Kantara, etc. The upsurge of the South has taken many by surprise, especially the industry pundits and stalwarts. How did we arrive at this scenario? Is this the new normal, a disruption? Or is it a one-off phenomenon that will slowly subside with time?
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“The distinction between male and female serves as a basic organizing principle for every human culture. Although societies differ in the specific tasks they assign to the two sexes, all societies allocate adult roles based on sex and anticipate this allocation in the socialization of their children. Not only are boys and girls expected to acquire sex-specific skills, but they are also expected to have or to acquire sex-specific self-concepts and personality attributes, to be masculine or feminine as defined by that particular culture. The process by which a society thus transmutes male and female into masculine and feminine is known as the process of sex typing.”
In life, there are a very few things that we can truly call eternal. I’ve realised that this portrait of my mother is one of them. Although she left this mortal realm on the 2nd of August, we know that she lives on and guides us through her music and memories.
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After joining the Film and Television Institute in the eighties to study cinematography, the first year was spent shooting still photographs, doing lighting practicals and lab work. We however watched a lot of films, argued more about them and of course dreamt of shooting our own films.
It was only in the second year that we got a chance to shoot on film. I remember my shot in the motion picture exposure practical exercise and it was a panning shot of somebody going into a building.
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India is the world’s largest democracy, but it is also a very unequal country, where some citizens are more equal than others. Convicted criminals, who are rich and powerful, seem to get out of jail well before their sentences have been completed. This is in sharp contrast to the lives of thousands of under trails languishing in jails not having access to a lawyer or even getting a chance for a fair trial. However, in the darkened “Halls of Cinema”, Good always wins over Evil and the Long Arm of the Law would eventually catch up with the criminals.
I walked out of the theatre after watching “Wonder Woman” feeling a complete sense of empowerment and self-belief that I can take on the world. I can’t remember feeling invincible or this elated after any film that I have seen and this is one of the reasons why this film is a global blockbuster success. Grossing $572 million worldwide it has set records for the biggest opening for a female-centric film. Superhero movies so far empowered only half the world’s population. Patty Jenkins, the first woman director of a studio super-heroine movie, empowers the other half.
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When Rajiv and I were preparing to shoot Kadal, we saw lot of films which involved shooting in the sea. Very few Indian films were shot in the sea, but one film which caught our attention was Chemmeen, based on the famous book by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, directed by Ramu Kariat and shot by Marcus Bartley the legend. It is still a classic and even today, some of the shots take your breath away.
I watched “Rogue One” in 3D last night with all its spectacular special effects, animated characters and breathtaking visuals. While I wouldn’t say it is the best of the Star Wars series, what impressed me was the way the female protagonist (Jyn) held the whole story together. This is a mainstream Hollywood, big- budget action film targeting a worldwide audience yet they chose to cast a young, relatively unknown actress to play a strong, brave and inspiring character with the mission to save her planet. Threatened by being annihilated by the Death Star – a weapon capable of apocalyptic destruction forcibly created by her kidnapped father – she is unafraid to go on this dangerous mission alone.
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The concept of using miniatures in cinema to create an illusion of a real object has existed since the inception of filmmaking.
When circumstances do not allow us to carry out shoots in real locations with real objects, it necessitates the scenario of miniature shooting. It may be due to technical reasons, safety restrictions, economics of production, time constraints, or the non availability of the actual object or location.
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As a child my first impression of English films was seeing Mackenna’s Gold, a big budget western film, where cowboys went looking for the mountain of gold and got corrupted and died by its lure. I was fascinated by Cowboys, read cowboy comics, tied a handkerchief around my neck galloped around my house waiting to lasso a wild horse. Since I used to live in a flat in Bombay, I could only lasso, the carpet that was rolled and kept under our divan, which would be spread out when visitors came in the evening. How did the image of the cowboy and westerns come to dominate world cinema, how did this uniquely American invention become one of the great cultural exports of America?
