Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry Read Online Free PDF Page B

filmmakers’ drive for social distinction and efforts to manage uncertainty, which have contributed to the gentrification of the film industry and Hindi cinema, enabling them to become “Bollywood. ” These chapters are organized along three main themes: the social status of films and filmmakers; the social and material practices of filmmaking; and the social, material, and discursive practices of audience-making. Chapters one through three establish the wider social and historical context of Hindi filmmaking, dealing explicitly with issues of cultural legitimacy and social respectability connected to the social world of Hindi filmmakers and the politico-historical field of film production. Chapters four through seven address the practices of film production and filmmakers’ efforts to make sense of and manage uncertainty. Chapters eight and nine examine the ways that audiences are imagined, discussed, and classified by the Hindi film industry as an essential manifestation of the sentiment of disdain and as an attempt to manage uncertainty.

The Social Status of Films and Filmmakers
    Chapter one examines the Indian state’s attitudes and policies toward the cinematic medium and its relationship with the Hindi film industry over time, revealing the complicated place of cinema in the politics of national prestige, nation-building, and modernization. This chapter provides the context to understand Bombay filmmakers’ own self-positioning and quest for cultural legitimacy, which I discuss in subsequent chapters. It details the shift in official attitudes from a Nehruviandevelopmentalist paradigm, in which film was solely valued for its pedagogical and communicative potential, to the contemporary neoliberal juncture, where prolific filmmaking traditions are regarded as examples of native ingenuity and a source of economic growth.
    By examining filmmakers’ narratives about the changes occurring in Hindi cinema and filmmaking from the mid-1990s, in chapter two I identify the sentiment of disdain that permeates the industry’s production culture. This chapter focuses on the discourse of progress, most frequently articulated as “coolness, ” demonstrating the connections between the sentiment of disdain, the category of coolness, the process of gentrification, and the construction of Hindi filmmakers’ subjectivities. I argue that filmmaking is an intersubjective enterprise, in which bothaudiences and technology serve to mediate filmmakers’ presentation of their selves.
    Chapter three extends an examination of the sentiment of disdain into the social world of filmmakers by focusing on the tremendous concern around the notion of respectability, which has been a longstanding anxiety, dating back to the early days of cinema in India. Here I describe how members of the film industry define, display, and perform respectability, relying primarily upon the trope of the “good family. ” By examining the gendered dimensions of behavior on film sets, filmmakers’ narratives about how they joined the industry, and their valorization of formal, higher education, this chapter reveals the normative power of a particular idea of middle-classness within the social world of the industry.

The Practices and Processes of Production
    Chapter four delves into the everyday life of Hindi film production, but it is distinct from the other chapters in terms of style and presentation. It offers a “thick description ” of an average day on a Hindi film set and is written in a narrative style, incorporating dialogue and conversations. My goal with such a rendering is twofold: to make the quotidian life of film production palpable for readers, and to convey how one can discern valuable social and cultural insights through participant-observation on a film set. Although written in a narrative and descriptive style, this chapter is no less analytical than the others, for it is governed by specific decisions of what to include and exclude. Each