Apparently Bollywood outproduces Hollywood by strides and lengths. And obviously have enormous influence inside India. But it still doesn’t seem to have anywhere near the same worldwide influence as Hollywood, either culturally or politically or in the global awareness. Personally I’ve seen just a bit of a few Bollywood musicals. And couldn’t on my life name even a single Bollywood producer or director, actor or actress or even a single Bollywood movie or production company. Hollywood people on the other hand, are here and there and everywhere. And everybody I know could probably offhand name at least 20-30 companies, movies, actors and actresses (here’s my first twelve: Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, George Lucas, Columbia Pictures, United Artist Studios, ET, Star Wars, George Lucas, Arnold Swatznegger, Terminator, Mulholland Drive, Lost in Translation) Or is my perspective skewered? Do people outside Europe and North America watch as much Bollywood as Hollywood? Would someone from Brazil or Japan, etc. be as likely to name a Bolly movie as a Holly?
English is the current lingua franca, which helps enormously with Hollywood’s widespread exposure, not to mention the marketing machine behind it, and the general exposure of Europe to US media. Very few people of a non-Indian ethnicity speak Hindi, and subtitles are only so much fun. More importantly, the ‘style’ is also pretty different.
I end up doing this very often…but once more…
There are no Bollywood “musicals”! A Bollywood movie, by default, has songs. The anomalies are the ones without.**
Not sure about Brazil/Japan, but the Middle East, South East Asia & parts of Central Asia have a steady exposure to Bollywood. So does UK, where a few Bollywood movies have broken into the top ten, mostly thanks to the patronage of Indian expatriates.
Ok. I was unaware of the distinction. Actually “a movie with songs” - isn’t that the definition of a musical?
dictionary.com says: Musical: A play or movie that contains musical numbers.
Anyway another discussion.
Yes, but since almost all Bollywood movies have songs, it’s a regular feature and using the term ‘musical’ makes it sounds like a special category of movies, which is not the case.
It’s a different film pardigm.
Film is a language- a language that is changing and evolving. For example, a few decades ago a jump cut was jarring and would not make sense to the viewer. Now, they are regularly used and we don’t bat an eye when we see one. We added the jump cut in to our cinematic language and now we can use it, just like a word, to convey something.
Bollywood has a different film language. There is a learning curve to get it- why are they suddenly in the Swiss Alps? What’s with the sound effects? When will this thing be over? I thought this was an action flick! We don’t automatically “get” it. Things that look bizarre and nonsensical to use make perfect sense to an audience that is used to the language of Bollywood. I watch a lot of Bollywood, but even well-regarded fairly serious pieces seem pretty “wacky” and “random” to me a lot of the time.
In that way, it’s a lot like anime, which is often inexplicable to a first time viewer.
Most of us don’t have a good reason to learn the Bollywood film language, and even if we did so much of it requires additional knowledge of Indian culture and geography (for example, to know why the forbidden lovers are so forbidden you need to be able to pick up on sometimes subtle class/caste/religion/region cues) to get everything out of it. In areas where western films are less popular and the tropes and references they make are less familiar (through much of Asia and the Middle East) Bollywood enjoys great popularity and is more familiar than Hollywood. It’s all about what film language you are most used to and what cultural references you are most likely to be familiar with.