Friday, May 08, 2015

Class struggle in Bollywood films

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTO-Dm5-XYY Minai has written about the choreography here.
The full film is available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi4vJQC-QJU (the two dances posted by Minai are around 3 and 14:40 minutes and look clearer to me in the film). From a review by Dustedoff, it seems Satyajit Ray saw the film and wanted to be an assistant director to Chetan Anand.
Surprisingly it is omitted from 'a listing of ten top Hindi films on class struggle, workers’ rights and unions'  in the article 'Lal Salaam On Screen'. Richard Singer on my wall " I think there are tons of movies from the '40s and '50s that could have been included in this list.....Or if they wanted to seriously pursue the "Laal Salam" theme and talk about real socialist films, they could have started with Dharti Ke Laal, the only Hindi film actually produced by the IPTA.

And so many films by Raj Kapoor... What about Mehboob Khan, whose studio logo was a hammer and sickle? I've seen a whole bunch of his films, and he really did stick the class struggle theme into everything, in sub-plots or dialogues, no matter how blockbuster-ish, swashbuckling, etc., the movie was. 

I've noticed that so many people in mainstream Indian journals write mainly about the films of the '70s and Amitabh, etc. I guess that's what a lot of people grew up with and the era that everyone thinks about. Since I didn't grow up with these films and came to classic Indian films from my own strange angle in the 21st century, maybe that's why I wouldn't look to the ''70s first. But wasn't the '50s the Golden Age?"

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