Getting Serious

Three new books about Indian popular cinema have been issued by the British Film Institute, and it's tempting to view this as a conscious symbolic gesture. Gayatri Chatterjee's Mother India adds a Bollywood blockbuster to the honor roll of bfi Film Classics, while Rachel Dwyer's biography of Yash Chopra ushers a genre-defining Bombay filmmaker into the new World Directors series. Both books are impressive achievements, throwing so much light on their immediate subjects that they illuminate an entire industry. But their status as emblems seems even more significant. In effect the bfi is endorsing the view that Bollywood can no longer be regarded as a Third World poor relation to the real movie industries of the West, that it is a unique and coherent idiom in its own right.

The third volume in the bfi barrage, Lalitha Gopalan's Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema, addresses this point head on, taking aim at the elements that Westerners find most off-putting in Bollywood films. She demonstrates that in the crime films of respected auteurs like Mani Rathnam, J.P. Dutta, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, plot patterns appropriated from Hollywood have been transformed into something distinctively Indian, through the skillful use of supposedly digressive devices such as interpolated song-and-dance sequences and mid-movie intermissions. These artists, she suggests, "demonstrate a confidence in filmmaking that is most evident in the strengthening of local conventions."

At times Gopalan comes within hailing distance of David Bordwell's landmark study Planet Hong Kong, with its respectful close analysis of the practices of skilled craftsmen cranking out entertainment. (Her demonstration that most Bollywood narratives fall naturally into a two-part structure around the interval break parallels Bordwell's account of the nine-reel format of many Hong Kong films.) But Gopalan herself introduces quite a few "interruptions" into the "diegesis," freeze-framing her discussions of movies at regular intervals to ponder the findings of other theorists. And then you stub your toe on a phrase like "bifurcating the two part paradigm," and your heart sinks.

In the pre-DVD era, when it could be safely assumed that only Hindi-speaking specialists would have access to the movies, there may have been some justification for writing about Indian popular cinema in the regional dialect of academic film studies. But those days are over, as witness the bfi's recent publication schedule. Cinema of Interruptions is a cut above the long-march academic norm in the originality of its ideas and in its frank affection for its subject. Very little of it feels received or second-hand. But Professor Gopalan is much less adventurous as a writer than as a thinker. She has couched her strong and necessary concepts in the conventional idiom of her trade, which has evolved into something so ingrown and parochial (and so clotted and ugly) that the language itself sends a clear exclusionary message: no civilians need apply.

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