History Of Indian Cinema

History of Indian Cinema

The first time the Indian  audience was introduced to cinema was when the Lumiere Brothers came from France  to present six soundless short films. The screening took place at the Watson Hotel on 7 July on 1896. However, the first experiment with film by an Indian was the production of two short films of Save Dada who exhibited them with the help of Edison’s kinetoscope. Cinema as a new entertainment from, however, took its first steps in India in the 1900's and in less than a century, became the largest film – producing industry in the world .

The man behind the production of India’s first fully indigenous silent feature film , Raja Harishchandra was  Dadasaheb Phalke . He was man a of various talents and he enjoyed a varied and colourful career as a painter, photographer, playwright and magician before he too an interest in films.Dadasaheb Phalke is also known as the father of Indian Cinema for his contribution to the industry. The Dadasaheb Phalke award is the highest award for contribution to cinema and is given at the national film award by the government of India.

This film Raja Harishchandra was an excerpt adapted form the Mahabharta. the titles of the film were both in Hindi and English.

The movie was released on 3 may 1913 at the Coronation Cinema in Mumbai. this laid the cornerstone of what is now known as Bollywood.

most of the films made around this time were adaptations i.e, the stories were taken from already successful novels and short stories that had been published around the time. The films were also often religious in content, drawing events and incident from Indian mythology and folktales.

with the onset of the 1920's, Indian cinema gradually grew into a regular industry, producing silent films. this decade was marked by the arrival of many new filmmakers and production houses. As cinema became a profitable art form, given that it needed to be produced only once and could be presented a number of times and that it charged per viewing, this encouraged filmmakers to further invest their profits in new films and set up infrastructure such as studios, laboratories and theatres that would stilt the industry and take it to the next level.

A momentous event in the history of Indian cinema was the arrival of sound in films in the 1932's. the first such sound film, then known as ‘talkies’ ,was Alam Ara (1931). the talkies soon wiped out the previous tradition of silent films, and longer films with more complex stories started to be made.