The first cinema showing in India was
given by the Lumiere brothers at Watson's Hotel
Bombay on July 7th 1896. The new entertainment
aroused great curiosity. It spread rapidly and
became commercially profitable. Production
centered on Bombay, where the first full-length
feature was made in 1922. Soon after the introduction
of sound, films in Bengali began to be
produced in Calcutta, and in 1934 production of
films in Tamil and Telugu began in Madras.
With few exceptions, the artistic quality of
Indian films is mediocre, aiming to satisfy a relatively
undemanding home public. They are typically slow and lengthy,
contain song and dance sequences arbitrarily inserted without reference
to the narrative, and they are extremely circumspect in the staging of
love scenes.
The director Satyajit Ray (1921- ), however,
is internationally acclaimed, especially for his
superb Apu trilogy about a boy growing up in
modern India: Pather Panchali (1954), Unvanquished (1956),
and The World of Apu (1959). A further loose trilogy, about
contemporary urban life in Bengal, consisted of Days and Nights in
the Forest, The Adversary, and Company Limited,
and these were followed by the prize-winning
Distant Thunder (1973), about the reverberations
of a distant war in an isolated rural community.
Also worthy of mention is the work of the actor-
directors Shiri Shantaram (Two Eyes, Twelve
Hands, 1958), Raj Kapoor (Under Cover of Night,
1957), Bimal Roy (Two Acres of Land, 1954),
and the choreographer Uday Shankar, whose
Kalpana (1949) is the only artistically noteworthy
Indian musical film.
Film Devdas (1955) by Bimal Roy,
the director whose film Two Acres of Land won the Cannes film prize in 1954
and gave a fresh impetus to popular melodrama.
Compiler: C.K.Mohamed/Tellicherry