Sunday, January 20, 2008
Jism
Channel 4 in the UK has been showing a late night season of Bollywood movies . I have to be brutally honest and say this holds little interest for me since I can't be bothered with watching a three hour movie padded out with song and dance numbers but JISM pricked my interest somewhat since it had caused some controversy . It was marketed as a steamy erotic Bollywood remake of Lawrence Kasdan's BODY HEAT and Bollywood movies are very puritanical where sex is concerned so I watched mainly to see how erotic it could be
The truth is that there seems to be no Hindi word for " erotic " , every time the two protagonists Kabir and Sonia get it on the action cuts to the bedroom after they've had sex . If you're going to watch JISM for purely the wrong reason ( And let me reiterate I was just watching out of curiosity ) then you're going to be bitterly disappointed . That said the film still works because the leads John Abraham and Bipasha Basu really do burn up the screen with their sexual chemistry
This tall dusky beauty after having cat walked many miles has now entered the meandering pathways of Bollywood. Bipasha was born in Delhi and has spent most of her life in Calcutta. Of course now she resides in Mumbai. Like many others of her ilk, she also had different plans about her career earlier. Her desire to become a doctor made her study science, till her twelfth class. Later she opted for Chartered Accountancy.
But it was a chance audience with Mehr Jessia, the famous model that changed her life forever. Mehr told her to take part in Godrej Super Model Contest. She won this contest at the tender age of 17 and set foot on the glamorous world of modelling in a big way. Besides winning this contest she has cat walked for all leading designers.
A large number of commercials too came her way and who can forget her in Sonu Nigam’s Kismet. To prove herself on the International scene, she went to USA and Paris. In the States, she had worked with a topmost modelling agency Ford. She also worked for the World famous photographer Steven Mizhel and featured for the vogue Magazine.
Aishwarya Rai to slip into a bikini in Dhoom 2
My view "This is a huge deal for the bollywood industry, as bollywood has maintained a mainstream of films with a portrayal of women not just as sex symbols, but with acting talent, not just items of beauty. But, recently those views and roles have changed for women, and are now becoming mere objects of sex appeal."
The director had this to say...
"She'll look unlike anything anyone has seen before", promises director Sanjay Gadhvi.
After giving Esha Deol a complete makeover in Dhoom, director Sanjay Gadhvi is set to create a spectacle with Aishwarya Rai, by changing her on-screen image.
According to our sources, Aishwarya Rai has agreed to sport a bikini in Dhoom 2 – her first film shoot in a two--piece swimsuit. She has signed a contract which stated that Ash will have to wear certain kind of costume which would be revealing, but yet be aesthetically defined.
Earlier, Ash had refused to perform onscreen kissing or love--making scenes, but since Shabd with Sanjay Dutt, the actress has been trying to break the beatific image with greater sex appeal. Sanjay Gadhvi said, "I would not like to spoil the suspense of the film. But yes, people will get a pleasant surprise in my film.
Ash will look different and unlike anything anyone has seen before." Ash underwent rigorous training to shed the extra kilos to match co-star Hrithik who has also worked hard on his body.
The buzz is Ash won't be the only one baring skin in the film. Bipasha Basu will also be seen in a bikini. Wonder if Ash will manage to dethrone the 'official' sex goddess of Bollywood.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Portrayal of women in Bollywood then, now and in the past.
Bollywood in the seventies and eighties
Bollywood in the seventies and eighties
Mulling over the portayal of women in Bollywood, one very significant aspect that I thought about was how Bollywood shows the character of women by the way they dress.
When I was growing up in the late seventies and eighties most of the Bollywood movies I saw showed girls in sarees as virtuous and the girls in jeans as naughty, or spoilt. I found this odd because I didn’t see this replicated in society. In fact the most “notorious” girl in our lane always wore a saree and never talked to boys freely in public. She walked with her head down. But her “night exploits” were well known to one and all. On the other hand, my friend and me always walked to college in jeans and a T-shirt and were pretty much heckled on the way, and had to put up with a lot of cheap comments. We talked openly with boys in our college, had coffee with them, but neither of us were sleeping around. In fact we often wondered why society thought girls in sarees were “good.” Why was virtue being confused with dress? Luckily both of us belonged to broadminded educated families and had no problems on that score.
In fact, because of false stereotypes (perpetuated by Bollywood) about dress, people often use attire to deliberately mislead people. For example a rapist could wear an orange robe and pretend to be holy, a woman or a man who lead bohemian lives may deliberately dress mutely to avoid attracting attention, a terrorist might deliberately wear western clothes to dupe the police, a traditional girl might choose to wear jeans to show the world how modern she is. What I am basically saying is, your clothes may be you, or they may not. In any case, everything western is not bad and everything eastern is not good.
Bollywood Recently
Bollywood movies are not so bad today, in this sense. Movies nowadays don’t always show girls in western dress as sluts, but those who are sluts invariably wear western clothes. Funnily, even if a heroine wears mini skirts, she often has to prove her Indianness. One such example is of the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. When Rani Mukherjee arrives from London in a micro-mini, its alright, as long as she proves her Indianness. And she does this by singing a devotional Hindi song!
Bollywood Now
We have moved on since then. Take Dhoom. Abhishek’s wife is shown to be sexy, dressed in skimpy western attire but hardworking and loving and thankfully does not have prove her Indianness by conducting poojas and dressing in sarees! That was like a breath of fresh air and broke the stereotype. However a lot of other Bollywood movies show heroines who wear western attire, but change it after marriage. As if that ensures their life long devotion to their husbands!
Bollywood nowadays also has girls speaking up and doing their own thing. Like Kajol in Fanaa for example. But there are still too few movies which show women in strong roles.
Bollywood in the seventies and eighties
Mulling over the portayal of women in Bollywood, one very significant aspect that I thought about was how Bollywood shows the character of women by the way they dress.
When I was growing up in the late seventies and eighties most of the Bollywood movies I saw showed girls in sarees as virtuous and the girls in jeans as naughty, or spoilt. I found this odd because I didn’t see this replicated in society. In fact the most “notorious” girl in our lane always wore a saree and never talked to boys freely in public. She walked with her head down. But her “night exploits” were well known to one and all. On the other hand, my friend and me always walked to college in jeans and a T-shirt and were pretty much heckled on the way, and had to put up with a lot of cheap comments. We talked openly with boys in our college, had coffee with them, but neither of us were sleeping around. In fact we often wondered why society thought girls in sarees were “good.” Why was virtue being confused with dress? Luckily both of us belonged to broadminded educated families and had no problems on that score.
In fact, because of false stereotypes (perpetuated by Bollywood) about dress, people often use attire to deliberately mislead people. For example a rapist could wear an orange robe and pretend to be holy, a woman or a man who lead bohemian lives may deliberately dress mutely to avoid attracting attention, a terrorist might deliberately wear western clothes to dupe the police, a traditional girl might choose to wear jeans to show the world how modern she is. What I am basically saying is, your clothes may be you, or they may not. In any case, everything western is not bad and everything eastern is not good.
Bollywood Recently
Bollywood movies are not so bad today, in this sense. Movies nowadays don’t always show girls in western dress as sluts, but those who are sluts invariably wear western clothes. Funnily, even if a heroine wears mini skirts, she often has to prove her Indianness. One such example is of the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. When Rani Mukherjee arrives from London in a micro-mini, its alright, as long as she proves her Indianness. And she does this by singing a devotional Hindi song!
Bollywood Now
We have moved on since then. Take Dhoom. Abhishek’s wife is shown to be sexy, dressed in skimpy western attire but hardworking and loving and thankfully does not have prove her Indianness by conducting poojas and dressing in sarees! That was like a breath of fresh air and broke the stereotype. However a lot of other Bollywood movies show heroines who wear western attire, but change it after marriage. As if that ensures their life long devotion to their husbands!
Bollywood nowadays also has girls speaking up and doing their own thing. Like Kajol in Fanaa for example. But there are still too few movies which show women in strong roles.
The New York Times
FILM; In 'Bollywood,' Women Are Wronged or Revered
Shabana Azmi shook her head at the memory, her cheeks reddening in anger. "This director showed me a script about a woman who was an ugly duckling -- she was dark-complexioned. She is forcibly married to this guy, but he leaves her for a light-skinned woman. Then the ugly duckling is adopted by the light-skinned woman. In the end, both women fall at the feet of the man. The director was giving me the part of the ugly duckling. I said, of course, I will not do the film.
"That's one of the problems with popular movies here," she continued. "Women are not treated as sex objects. They are treated as mindless objects, which is worse."
Ms. Azmi, who most recently acted in two American movies made in India, "City of Joy" and "The Return of the Pink Panther," is one of India's best-known actresses. She has managed to work both in the wildly popular Hindi films -- the meat and potatoes of Bollywood, Bombay's assembly-line movie industry -- as well as in India's small, serious movie industry, which is referred to as the parallel cinema. (The parallel cinema, unlike popular movies, explores real-life issues in Indian society in meaningful ways; perhaps its greatest practitioner was Satyajit Ray, who died in Calcutta last year.)
In 1991, more than 200 movies were cranked out in Bollywood (tales of family conflict, love of a sort, revenge, jealousy, of black hats and white knights and, always, of women subservient to men). Though Hindu-Muslim clashes in Bombay have crippled film making and other businesses, the movie industry is expected to be one of the first to recover. For this is a dynamic city that has long prized commerce -- and film.
Here, the traditional roles for men and women, for caste and religious groups, have been slowly crumbling. As a result, both actresses and women directors are becoming increasingly critical and vociferous about what they see as the destructive stereotypes propagated by popular Hindi films.
Shabana Azmi shook her head at the memory, her cheeks reddening in anger. "This director showed me a script about a woman who was an ugly duckling -- she was dark-complexioned. She is forcibly married to this guy, but he leaves her for a light-skinned woman. Then the ugly duckling is adopted by the light-skinned woman. In the end, both women fall at the feet of the man. The director was giving me the part of the ugly duckling. I said, of course, I will not do the film.
"That's one of the problems with popular movies here," she continued. "Women are not treated as sex objects. They are treated as mindless objects, which is worse."
Ms. Azmi, who most recently acted in two American movies made in India, "City of Joy" and "The Return of the Pink Panther," is one of India's best-known actresses. She has managed to work both in the wildly popular Hindi films -- the meat and potatoes of Bollywood, Bombay's assembly-line movie industry -- as well as in India's small, serious movie industry, which is referred to as the parallel cinema. (The parallel cinema, unlike popular movies, explores real-life issues in Indian society in meaningful ways; perhaps its greatest practitioner was Satyajit Ray, who died in Calcutta last year.)
In 1991, more than 200 movies were cranked out in Bollywood (tales of family conflict, love of a sort, revenge, jealousy, of black hats and white knights and, always, of women subservient to men). Though Hindu-Muslim clashes in Bombay have crippled film making and other businesses, the movie industry is expected to be one of the first to recover. For this is a dynamic city that has long prized commerce -- and film.
Here, the traditional roles for men and women, for caste and religious groups, have been slowly crumbling. As a result, both actresses and women directors are becoming increasingly critical and vociferous about what they see as the destructive stereotypes propagated by popular Hindi films.
Bollywood Women
The women of Bollywood do not have the same independence and recognition as the Hollywood Actresses. In many ways,Bollywood actresses are still oppressed even in their privileged world.
There are film industries all over the world, but none have come close to producing as many films as Bollywood of Mumbai, India. Unofficially dubbed “dream factory” by most in and out of the bollywood industry, it is an industry that produces more than 900 feature films during any given year. Most all of these films come down to only a handful of different plots, with the main theme involving a young man and woman. There has to always be some moral values of family and traditions to be included into these plots, and many times, a woman being saved. It is the women of Bollywood that I have chosen for my main focus of this paper.
Bollywood is an industry focused upon the main leading men like Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan. These men and a handful of well known others make it big to almost literally monopolize the Bollywood movie industry. They are the “Stars” of Bollywood. The women of Bollywood have had it much harder for succeeding in making it big to carry their fame through the years of a long-term career. There is always so much worry of growing older and being pushed out by the younger fresher ones that are constantly being brought into the Bollywood industry and the fact of Bollywood still being a male dominated industry.
During the late 80’s and early 90’s, three of the most popular actresses in Bollywood were Rekha, Dimple, and Sredevi. But there are also a handful of others who would dance in and out of the starlight when they were on a role in Bollywood successes. Smita Patil is one of these successful actresses. In an interview with Elizabeth Bumiller, Smita speaks of how hard it truly is to be an actress in Bollywood, professionally and personally. “Women who work in this industry have no time for any kind of normal life”, she said. “You’re working ten or twelve hours a day with different men all the time. “You’re constantly demanded to emote, and it tends to become a very high-strung existence emotionally, which leads into your personal involvements. The line is very thin”.
Although Smita was a college educated woman who was aware of worldly issues and a feminist mind set, she was well known for the typical rape scenes and demeaning roles often written into many of the Hindi films. To be an actress within the Hindi film industry, the actress was given little choice but to accept these types of roles unless they chose to make less money and less fame playing in roles for the upper class art films. In commercial Hindi films, there are certain audience expectations, and one is of the man being the one who needs to save the woman from some sort of terrible event. There must be a hero and a victim, and the abuse of a woman gives a good dramatic reason for the man to come along and be the woman’s rescuer. This is quite often the excuse looked for to also throw in a good bloody beating of the bad guy or guys trying to hurt the weak woman.
While Hindi films are infamous for their well known weak and demure roles for the women actresses, they are also just as popular in portraying the woman into the passive sex object. As the woman dances around in the expected sultry overtone, the man gazes at her in an over exaggerated glare. Almost always in a semi trance, he does not hide his desires from all of those who are also watching with a collective approval upon their smiling faces. This dancing young goddess may be dancing around in revealing clothes in the beginning, but three hours later you almost always can count on her being fully dressed in a traditional sari happily playing the role of the demure wife to the man who had been almost drooling over her original seductiveness
There are film industries all over the world, but none have come close to producing as many films as Bollywood of Mumbai, India. Unofficially dubbed “dream factory” by most in and out of the bollywood industry, it is an industry that produces more than 900 feature films during any given year. Most all of these films come down to only a handful of different plots, with the main theme involving a young man and woman. There has to always be some moral values of family and traditions to be included into these plots, and many times, a woman being saved. It is the women of Bollywood that I have chosen for my main focus of this paper.
Bollywood is an industry focused upon the main leading men like Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan. These men and a handful of well known others make it big to almost literally monopolize the Bollywood movie industry. They are the “Stars” of Bollywood. The women of Bollywood have had it much harder for succeeding in making it big to carry their fame through the years of a long-term career. There is always so much worry of growing older and being pushed out by the younger fresher ones that are constantly being brought into the Bollywood industry and the fact of Bollywood still being a male dominated industry.
During the late 80’s and early 90’s, three of the most popular actresses in Bollywood were Rekha, Dimple, and Sredevi. But there are also a handful of others who would dance in and out of the starlight when they were on a role in Bollywood successes. Smita Patil is one of these successful actresses. In an interview with Elizabeth Bumiller, Smita speaks of how hard it truly is to be an actress in Bollywood, professionally and personally. “Women who work in this industry have no time for any kind of normal life”, she said. “You’re working ten or twelve hours a day with different men all the time. “You’re constantly demanded to emote, and it tends to become a very high-strung existence emotionally, which leads into your personal involvements. The line is very thin”.
Although Smita was a college educated woman who was aware of worldly issues and a feminist mind set, she was well known for the typical rape scenes and demeaning roles often written into many of the Hindi films. To be an actress within the Hindi film industry, the actress was given little choice but to accept these types of roles unless they chose to make less money and less fame playing in roles for the upper class art films. In commercial Hindi films, there are certain audience expectations, and one is of the man being the one who needs to save the woman from some sort of terrible event. There must be a hero and a victim, and the abuse of a woman gives a good dramatic reason for the man to come along and be the woman’s rescuer. This is quite often the excuse looked for to also throw in a good bloody beating of the bad guy or guys trying to hurt the weak woman.
While Hindi films are infamous for their well known weak and demure roles for the women actresses, they are also just as popular in portraying the woman into the passive sex object. As the woman dances around in the expected sultry overtone, the man gazes at her in an over exaggerated glare. Almost always in a semi trance, he does not hide his desires from all of those who are also watching with a collective approval upon their smiling faces. This dancing young goddess may be dancing around in revealing clothes in the beginning, but three hours later you almost always can count on her being fully dressed in a traditional sari happily playing the role of the demure wife to the man who had been almost drooling over her original seductiveness
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