Hollywood is showing its age, but Bollywood is nearly 100 years young and in rude health. The problem will be deciding exactly which film marks the momentous milestone
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It must be hard to organise a party for an entity as fragmented and competitive as Hollywood, but the lack of hullabaloo for the start of its centenary earlier this year was odd. The House of Horror itself, Universal Pictures, was the first US studio to hit 100 – founded by the German Jew Carl Laemmle on 30 April 1912 in New York – but no one seems to have paid much attention. Warner Brothers crosses the line next year, Paramount (under that name, at least) and Fox in 2014; MGM not until 2024. The other studios joining the celebrations might crank up the volume, but perhaps it's the clouds louring overhead – stuck-in-the-mud creativity, uncertain revenue streams, growing global competition – that are responsible for the muted jubilation. Hollywood is 100, and it looks every year of it.
I hope Bollywood doesn't make the same mistake, and that it gets the bunting out. Its main problem is deciding when its centenary actually is. The big cross in the diary has been ostensibly marked in for 3 May 2013, 100th anniversary of when Raja Harischandra, directed by DG Phalke, was first exhibited to the general public in Mumbai. From what survives of its 3,700ft-long, 40 minutes of footage, this adaptation of a story from the great mythological cycles has been generally recognised as the first Indian feature film. (Defined the same way, the Hollywood anniversary would be in 2014, for the release of Cecil B DeMille's The Squaw Man – though there are a couple of other contenders.)
Modern Bollywood dynamo Aamir Khan unveiled a statue of Phalke earlier this year in the runup to the festivities, but hold on a minute … perhaps "the pioneer cine artist of the east", as the helmer was already styling himself, wasn't first out of the blocks. Shree Pundalik, adapted from Ramrao Kirtikar's play about a Hindu saint, went on show a year earlier at the Coronation Cinematograph in Mumbai, the same cinema Raja Harischandra played at. At 20 minutes, it was half the length; and though the director, Dadasaheb Torne, was Indian, the cameraman was British, and the film was sent to London for processing.
The foreign involvement seems to have been what has disqualified it as the first Bollywood feature, which isn't exactly in keeping with today's porous globalised definitions. The other criticism aimed at Shree Pundalik is that it isn't sufficiently cinematic, being a clay-footed, one-camera-angle rendition of the play. It's true that, contrastingly, the extant cuts of Phalke's film are beguiling and alive, with lots of engaging camera trickery and nippy acting. But if aesthetic quality is a litmus test for feature-film eligibility, then three-quarters of Hollywood's output can give up that status right now. And it's debatable whether Raja Harischandra's 40-minute running time truly qualifies as feature-length; if so, it's on the outer-limit. All in all, I feel a bit sorry for Mr Torne.
Both men went on to make significant contributions as the Hindu industry grew (it was quicker than most to reach mass production, turning out 100 a year – more than England, France or the USSR – by the 1920s). Torne became an industry player, who eventually set up his own studio, Saraswati Cinetone. Phalke's Lumiere-like, phantasmagoric spins on Ramayana and Mahabharata staples energised the early Indian scene, but his was the silent-era trailblazer's classic fate, and the coming of sound killed his career.
Bollywood should make a fuss of the pair of them, and generate as much noise as possible internationally about its centenary. The meteoric rise of the Chinese industry is getting all the attention at the moment; you don't have to worry about Bollywood, but it's in danger of losing its rightful share of the global limelight, especially with its reputation for being primarily an insular industry for Indians only. But its work sells healthily across the Middle East and beyond, and it hasn't truly scoped out its global reach yet. This is one centenarian with the potential to go climbing.
• Next week's After Hollywood will focus on Poland's answer to 8-Mile. Meanwhile, what global box-office stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/oct/02/bollywood-centenary-raja-harischandra-aamir-khan
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