Orienting Hollywood

A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay

Nitin Govil

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780814760635
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

A new understanding of the culturally rich and historic relationship between Hollywood and Bollywood. With American cinema facing intense technological and financial challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years. Many accounts have proclaimed India’s transformation in a relatively short period from a Hollywood outpost to a frontier of opportunity. Orienting Hollywood moves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources, policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections were imagined over a century of screen exchange. Employing a comparative framework, Govil details the history of influence, traces the nature of interoperability, and textures the contact between Hollywood and Bombay cinema by exploring both the reality and imagination of encounter.

1

Framing the Copy

Media Industries and the Poetics of Resemblance

An Indian approach to filmmaking, which by the very fact of its being Indian acquires a universal significance, is what is required. Imitation may be our sincerest form of flattering Hollywood, but it is no key to unlock any of the non-traditional markets for our films. We have long suffered India through Hollywood’s eyes; let us at least use our own. A camera is nothing without a conscience.

“Market in America?” Filmfare, November 27, 1964

As I noted in the introduction, contemporary media discourse imagines Hollywood and Bombay cinema in a dance of difference and similarity: in one moment, facing each other as opposites; in another, joined in partnership. Bombay cinema is often described in terms of excess, chaos, prolixity, and national particularity, while Hollywood is defined by efficiency, transparency, economy, and global universality.

In this chapter, I engage these dynamics of contrast and identity to reimagine the historical relations between Hollywood and Bombay cinema. My focus here is the copy, which I understand as ideology, analytic, practice, and artifact. As an extended meditation on the copy—conceived traditionally as forgery—this chapter troubles the master narrative of originality as the conventional standard of cultural value. Addressing the problematic of the copy highlights the persistence of the structuring binaries—original/counterfeit, reality/mimesis, truth/artifice—that inform the comparative evaluation of film industries.

Beyond simple imitation, copying signifies that which is transformative, dynamic, and emergent. Moving through a series of case studies across a century of industrial interconnection, I show how the copy conceptualizes the work of analogy between Bombay and Hollywood, creating frameworks of comprehension and comparison between them. Not only does the copy produce similarity between the industries—that seems obvious—but the figurative analogue also signifies distinctiveness.

Copying is often associated with Bombay cinema, whose common reference as “Bollywood” seems inevitable. With Bollywood linked to imitation, inspiration, and translation, Hollywood appears in relief as the standard bearer of originality. Piracy kills Hollywood yet makes Bollywood possible, or so the script of innumerable headlines goes. Hollywood is innovative and authentic, while Bollywood is derivative and fake. Moreover, with the legislative prominence of “intellectual property,” piracy now saturates the discourse of the copy. The overwhelming statutory focus on piracy sensationalizes its market impact, demonizes media practitioners as thieves and terrorists, and instrumentalizes what Lawrence Liang calls the “porous legality” of commodity life in the Indian mediaspace.1

This chapter insists that we venture beyond the legal justification of copyright not simply to mount a defense of media piracy as has been done elsewhere,2 but to pluralize the copy across a broader domain. Despite its dominance as metaphor, piracy does not encapsulate the array of practices and meanings associated with copying. The copy resonates far beyond the register of media piracy.

Appreciating how the copy “frames” the interactions between Bombay cinema and Hollywood means paying attention to the boundaries of constraint and possibility mobilized through media industry practice. My use of “framing” performs multiple functions here. Framing refers to the structuring yet largely unseen ways through which the copy enacts the relationship of one media industry to another.3 Framing also refers to how the copy has been indicted by the spectacularly criminalized discourses of piracy.4

Although the copy frames comparison between media industries, it does not flatten out the asymmetries between them. In fact, the copy attests to the fundamental inequalities of comparison and the struggles over the meaning of influence in the global media. Mapping a trajectory that is both historical and spatial, this chapter investigates a number of arenas in which the work of analogy takes place. I begin by outlining the geopolitical transformations that institutionalized imitation in order to preserve structural domination between the West and “the Rest.” I then focus on intellectual property as a specific manifestation of this institutional logic of imitation to show how copying in the historical formation of Bombay cinema became a problem for Hollywood. I end with a close analysis of contemporary Bollywood remake culture, which demonstrates how the copy is evoked as a way to draw distinctions between the global media industries.

While it is often cast as the underside of industrial relations, the copy is critical to transformation in cultural practice. In investigating the material, symbolic, and discursive flows between Hollywood and Bombay, this chapter offers ways to interpret the copy as well as account for its emergence as a key paradigm of comparison in the media industries.

Imitation, Development, and the National

In a 1941 polemic against wartime isolationism, publisher Henry Luce argued for the United States to become “the powerhouse from which ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts.”5 The agencies charged with exercising this mysterious progressive force were to be assembled in the decades to come. The doctrine of “development” served as the ideological core of Luce’s upgraded vision of manifest destiny.

Development was the outcome of economic trajectories beginning in the fifteenth century, as European territorial expansion created networks of center–periphery relationships to be fully exploited as colonialism advanced.6 Five centuries later, colonialism was recast with a more benevolent face. Twentieth-century development promised the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of literacy, and the betterment of public health, all implemented through the state’s massive investment in infrastructure. Development came to embody the very essence of social transformation, exiling imaginations of other possible futures to the periphery.7 From dream to partial reality to nightmare, the itinerary of modern development was enabled by a catastrophic alignment between militarist geopolitics, trade liberalization, and the rapacious extraction of human and nonhuman resources.

Development is driven by two core beliefs: first, that there are predictable paths to and through the modern; and second, that the national is a sufficiently modular form of difference to serve as a placeholder in modernity’s evolutionary queue. These beliefs also enabled modernization theory and the other functionalist orthodoxies that formed the dominant intellectual justification for area studies beginning in the 1940s. These intellectual movements, holding sway over decades of economic and social policy, understood the national as a distinctive organic totality, where “modern” nations were simply more advanced than “traditional” ones. This conception of the national was central to the missions of American foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, and others. These agencies offered Western support for nationalist elites to implement state media monopolies in the Global South.

In this way, development helped to secure the geopolitical alignment between intellectual movements, foundations, markets, and governments. What could serve as the motive energy of development, propelling Henry Luce’s mysterious force of progress? The answer, according to some American theorists of media development, was to institutionalize copying in the broadest possible way. In the Indian case, the developmental role of imitation was best exemplified in Daniel Lerner’s speech at the new Indian Institute for Mass Communications (IIMC) in 1968, which insisted that modernization could be achieved if the newly developing nations imitated the West.

The IIMC’s infrastructure had been put in place some years before, in consultation with the Ford Foundation and the communications theorist Wilbur Schramm, both key figures in the institutionalization of socioeconomic development through the media. In his 1968 speech celebrating the opening of the IIMC, Lerner encapsulated the affirmative spirit of developmental imitation, noting that the Western professional communicator conveys to “a large audience of people . . . a picture of their own future.”8 This mimetic formulation was represented on the small and the big screen alike.

By the time that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other American agencies were helping to advance Indian electronic technology in the early 1970s, particularly the creation of a satellite television network, Hollywood had long embodied the developmental standard for the Indian media industries.9 “What Hollywood does today, the world does tomorrow,” noted E. P. Menon in 1938, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the “founding” of the Indian film industry.10

As Hollywood closes in on its first hundred years in India, this aspirational function has evolved. Hollywood functions “as a crucial marker of film form” and “the locus of both envy and resentment” in setting the Indian film industries’ standards for technical and promotional sophistication.11 In addition, Hollywood often serves as the benchmark, with India getting the short end of the comparison. For example, in the 1930s one commentator noted that “India has four hundred movie houses only, compared with 20,500 of U.S.A., with one-third the population.”12 After independence, the Indian film industry’s underdevelopment in comparison with Hollywood was seen as a consequence of its emergent status. As William Allen put it in 1950, India’s geographically disparate film institutions and looser labor obligations were “an obviously unsound but natural state of affairs in a new and rapidly changing civilization.”13 These developmental frameworks demonstrate that Hollywood has furnished the imagination of media modernity, defining the path along which all other cinemas must necessarily travel. For India, Hollywood historically represented both a culture of aspiration and one of anticipation. The imitative logic of development situates Bombay cinema somewhere between a not-quite and a not-yet Hollywood.14

Relatively marginal support from Indian state and market institutions undermined the relationship between cinema and indigenous development. After independence in 1947, the Indian state’s commitment to rapid modernization focused on nationalizing banking, transportation, postal, telecommunication, and electronic sectors.15 Cinema was not included among the key projects of Indian developmental modernity. However, it did serve as a vehicle for social reformers who understood it as indecent, akin to gambling and prostitution, in need of regulation through taxation and censorship.16 Beginning in the 1950s, the alignment between the regulation of screen consumption and the management of civic virtue underscored the creation of import/export councils, development corporations, and inquiry committees that allowed the state to function as both “patron and disciplinarian” for the Indian film industries.17

During this national transition, Hollywood served a critical role in marshaling arguments for greater Indian film industry subsidy.18 These arguments hinged on Hollywood’s centrality to American economic power and insisted on following a similar model in India. For example, a 1939 pamphlet titled The Place of Film in National Planning, written by K. S. Hirlekar, a key figure in the early institutional organization of Indian film industries, argued that film “is playing an important role in the progress of all advanced nations of the world,” and that the neglect of cinema by central and provincial Indian governments demonstrates that they have “not fully realized the tremendous latent power . . . of film in educating the masses, especially the illiterates, for individual and national advancement.”19 A few years later, as secretary to an Indian delegation on a study tour of American and British studios in 1945, Hirlekar noted the importance of the film industries to domestic economies, claiming that “it is urgently necessary that an organized and centralized effort must be made to put the film industry in this country . . . on a stable and progressive foundation,” and that “it is the State, and the State alone which can take the lead in supplying the finance for its organized and well-thought-out development.”20

On the other hand, K. A. Abbas’s long experience with political progressivism allowed for a recognition of the animating contradictions of an imitation-led development. Speaking at a symposium on development and cinema organized by the IIMC, the famed writer and director rejected the need for the Indian film industries to “improve” by investing in imported technology. Rather than place Indian cinema in a position of inferiority to Hollywood—the classic position of the developmental paradigm—Abbas activated the strategic possibilities of an indigenous cultural sovereignty, resignifying the “primitivism” vilified by development as a form of cultural value.

Echoing Julio García Espinosa’s call for a revolutionary “imperfect cinema,” Abbas saw material and technological scarcity as a cultural resource.21 “‘Resources’—hardware like studios, cameras, lighting equipment, sound-recording apparatus,” argued Abbas, “may be imported (if not indigenously produced) . . . but ‘Creativity’ which is much more important, indeed it is the sine qua non of film production—cannot be imported or taken on loan.”22 Abbas’s suggestion that indigenous artistic development was directly linked to industrial deprivation inverts the logic of development without completely rejecting it. Reiterating Swadeshi (national self-sufficiency) as well as import-substitution industrialization’s claim...