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Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. By RACHEL DWYER and DIVIA PATEL. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 240 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).
Cinema India is a most welcome book on a subject of growing interest in academia, with a common comparison made between Hollywood and Bollywood (Hindi commercial films made in Bombay). Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel's well-researched and scholarly book makes a very significant contribution in the fields of visual studies and film studies. The book will be useful to students and scholars in these fields as well as in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. The authors collaborate successfully with their individual areas of expertise-Dwyer in Indian cinema and Patel in Indian art and design. Their study explores the notion that "Hindi commercial cinema has become part of everyday Indian life" (p. 8). The authors discuss major Indian films over the twentieth century, prominent film directors and actors, advertisement and distribution of films in India, and increasingly in the United States and Britain for a diasporic South Asian community who enjoy these films as part of "global culture."
The book is full of information and delightful illustrations of Hindi film stars and sets of major, even path-breaking productions, both in color and in black and white, that elicit nostalgic memories for those who may have seen the early films of the 1950s and 1960s. The images add greatly to the authors' discussions of the changing film styles, costumes, and sets, as well as advertising methods used in the 1950s versus the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.
The text analyzes the parameters of what is termed a "national cinema" in India-that is, films that use Hindi, which is considered, although not without debate, to be the...