Evolution Of Cinema Essay

Other important themes in the films of Anjan Chowdhury and others of his school were the domestic servant’s romance and marriage with his employer’s daughter (or generally a woman above his own class), and the aged domestic help as the father-figure who keeps the middle-class family together; themes which were relevant with reference to Bengali cinema’s crisis of viewership as it had emerged in the 1980s. With Calcutta’s urban middle-class public favouring Hindi films, or turning away from the film theatres to television, the industry had started to look at other audiences for its primary viewership. It reached out to the lesser sectors of the film market, and aggressively targeted the rural hinterland, with films now opening in smaller theatres

In 1991, the industry had its biggest hit of the time, Beder Meye Jyotsna (Jyotsna, the Snake Charmer’s Daughter), which was an India-Bangladesh joint venture, and was based on a folktale of the love-story of a prince and a girl brought up among snake charmers. The film drew heavily on the cult of snake worship prevalent in rural Bengal and the related folk culture, and was severely criticised for being like the jatra or indigenous theatrical performance popular in both rural West Bengal and Bangladesh. For many industry persons, it was a non-film, generally considered Bengali cinema’s lowest ebb for its theatricality and high melodrama. Yet, by the end of its first year, it was declared the industry’s biggest success of the time. Chiranjeet Chatterjee who played the film’s male lead, said in an interview, “Millions of people over the years have thronged cinema halls to see this film over and over again. I have met hundreds of people who told me that they had seen it more than 25 times”. Beder Meye spawned a whole genre of folk in Bengali films, which was a significant departure from the industry’s established ethos of social