Abstract
Hollywood’s experiences in South Asia reflect a dramatic encounter between the practical realities of industry and the imaginative possibilities of alterity. This entanglement of finance and fantasy stretches back to global Hollywood’s early heyday. In the 1930s, for example, Hollywood’s imperial adventure films sought to engage South Asia as actual territory and narrative theme, following up on the popularity of ‘sepoy stories’ in the 1910s. Among the most popular of the 1930s films was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), which was also one of Adolf Hitler’s favourites, elevated by his belief that the film’s embrace of colonial and racial superiority could be instructive for the SS (Faber, 2008). Der Führer would be surprised to know that it was actually the Indian rebel’s threat in the film – ‘we have ways to make men talk’ – that would live in infamy as Hollywood’s preferred performance of despotic cruelty. Usually rendered in an exaggerated mock German accent – ve haf vays of making you talk! – the insurgent Mohammed Khan’s speech came to signify not only Nazi brutality but barbarism in general, which for much of Hollywood’s history, emerged as a threat from the East.
The film’s production history gives us a sense of how South Asia functioned as a real and diegetic space. As part of an industry-wide interest in foreign production and the boast-worthy authenticity of geographical validation, the film’s producers originally sent their cinematographers to India to shoot location footage for Lives, only to find that film stock deteriorates more rapidly in the tropical environment. The studio then decided to shoot the scenes in the hills surrounding Hollywood where Native Americans masqueraded as Indians (again). We can see here the role that South Asia played in ‘orienting’ Hollywood within histories of racialised global capitalism from empire to entertainment.
From the beginning, Hollywood tried to engage South Asia according to a story that it had already told elsewhere. With robust US ticket sales creating profitable returns on investments in technology, talent and theatres, further consolidating the monopolistic power of a small number of American studios, Hollywood took advantage of comparatively undercapitalised production facilities around the world during the interwar period. Its expansive array of film
Securing revenue streams for the future was another matter. Hollywood’s early success created speculation about American investment in regional theatre networks as a way to rationalise diverse exhibition practices from the hastily constructed tents of rural itinerant shows to the movie palaces designed for Western expats and urban elites. Hollywood was also able to attach itself to existing regional networks established by local European agents and formed para-colonial infrastructures affiliated with and sometimes challenging British regimes (Jaikumar, 2006). However, Hollywood’s attempts to establish formalised distribution arrangements were stymied by the informal structure of South Asian exhibition as well as growing domestic production even before the rise of sound cinema produced in the vernacular regional languages. South Asia therefore remained a kind of limit to the Hollywood imaginary. The region was often the last stop in the global transit of Hollywood film prints, which arrived scratched and worn, marked by the transit of use. Many of these prints were illicit duplicates, inaugurating an entire economy of film piracy that proved to be an enduring challenge for Hollywood.
That is why, a few years before it produced The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Paramount Pictures claimed that exhibition revenue from its South Asian territories marginally exceeded ‘other small places in the world’. While this bitter irony captures frustrations at the time, it also signals the issues that would plague Hollywood’s fortunes over much of the century that followed. For all its fascination with the majesty of South Asian imperial dominion, extending to the popular conception of early Hollywood studio bosses as ‘moguls’, Hollywood’s profits in the subcontinent were meagre. As cinema became an essential component of South Asian public culture, emerging film studios and a clear audience preference for vernacular language cinema relegated Hollywood to a single-digit market share. Yet, because Hollywood is implicated in varied trajectories of circulation – constituted by the movements of material objects, knowledge, expertise, personnel, capital, images and ideas – its impact and influence remained. Nowadays, a lucrative frenzy has again taken root, as Hollywood commands a greater share of the regional market – especially in India, where its fortunes have been buoyed by middle-class disposable income, big-budget franchise films, multiplexes, television and digital streaming – and it has moved from competition to collaboration with nationally based players.
For much of its history, Hollywood’s relative lack of regional economic prosperity, especially in comparison to other Asian markets like Japan, has had both practical and conceptual consequences. Even as Hollywood sought to set the standard for success and failure in global media, South Asia has disrupted the uniformity of Hollywood’s global economic domination. This opens up possibilities for screen studies to engage topics beyond the political-economic determination of profits and market share in South Asia, where Hollywood served as an aspirational horizon but also a cautionary tale. For example, as film magazines grew in popularity during the post-war period, Hollywood stars featured prominently in the burgeoning health and beauty advertising industry. The foreign dispatches of ‘Hollywood correspondents’ in these same publications were equal parts gossip and travelogue, regaling their readers with stories of the opulent and decadent lifestyles of Tinseltown’s rich and famous. In this way, Hollywood offered a vantage point for constant comparative assessment. For example, Hollywood helped to model the ambitions of the emerging regional studios even as Hollywood’s excesses warned against bloated budgets, intransigent stars and the degradation of public morality (Majumdar, 2009). Hollywood’s marketing and promotional machinery was the envy of newly institutionalising industry organisations in the early 1950s. Creative artists intensively studied and disassembled Hollywood cinema, building an entire archive of narratives and film techniques that could be drawn upon. Genre filmmaking was vital to this process, creating aesthetic forms of influence and emulation situated within transnational visual culture, but refashioned, reinvented and alive to local audience pleasures (Thomas, 2015).
Cold War mentalities complicated the relationship between the United States and the newly decolonised region, leading to the exacerbation of a foreign exchange crisis, profit repatriation restrictions, import quotas instituted in the 1960s, import-substitution protections enacted in the 1970s, and recurrent charges of intellectual property theft, which took on special intensity during the videotape, VCD and video parlour era of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, even during periods of geopolitical intensity, the perennial allure of Hollywood glamour and spectacle, the exchange of movie stars, inter-industry delegations and the proliferation of post-war film festivals, promised international camaraderie outside official diplomatic circuits. Regional audiences were delighted by opulent musicals like The King and I (1956), My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965), but the films also articulated the West’s claim as the agent of universal liberty at a time when South Asia was critical to the balance of global power. That’s not to say that audiences are only subject to predictable goals and oppositions in the play of textual politics and social forces. When, in the mid-1990s, the huge success of Jurassic Park (1993) reanimated (pun intended) Hollywood’s regional ambitions, the film actually helped to spur Indian conglomerate interest in corporatising the national media sector, leading to bailouts and joint ventures with the American studios but also a multiplex construction boom that offered new venues for Hollywood release.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Hollywood in South Asia is a conceptual one. ‘Hollywood’s’ etymological past refers to a late-nineteenth-century real estate development in Los Angeles, coinciding neatly with the historical transformations in communication, urbanity and leisure that gave rise to cinema itself. The name of this Los Angeles neighbourhood has propagated internationally, reassembled into portmanteau expressions of local industriousness. No other part of the world has seen such a proliferation of ‘-wood’ suffixes than South Asia. There are cognates informed by spatiality, for example,
The iterative nature of the ‘-wood’ cognate informs an infrastructure of local dynamic variation cohering around a fictional singularity. Like their cosmological brethren, we don’t know if these singularities actually exist or are hypothetical constructs, but they nonetheless exert real effects, particularly as shorthand accounts for understanding how media power is distributed across geographic and cultural difference. Cultural nationalists have consistently misunderstood the ‘-woods’ infrastructure as merely imitative. Hollywood may have inaugurated a way of thinking, a convenient arrangement for industries to recognise themselves, not so much in Hollywood’s image but more as a figural ‘concept-metaphor’ well beyond the predictable confines of dominant retrenchment.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Anjali Arondekar.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.