Bollywood stands for the Hindi film industry which is located in the business capital of India, Mumbai. In earlier days, Mumbai was known as Bombay. Like Hollywood, the Hindi film industry with its base in Bombay came to be called, Bollywood.
India was exposed to motion pictures for the very first time on July 7, 1896, with the screening of six short soundless films by the Lumiere Brothers’ at Watson Hotel. Thereafter, it was in 1910 when Dada Saheb Phalke attended the screening of “The Life of Christ” at P. B. Mehta’s American-Indian Cinema that he chose to become a filmmaker and produced India’s first silent feature film called Raja Harishchandra on May 3, 1913. It had titles in as well as Hindi to make it understandable. Later, the year 1931 saw the release of Alam Ara, on March 14, which was directed by Ardeshir Irani. This was India’s first feature film with sound, was appreciated a lot by people and revolutionized Hindi cinema.
The thirties and forties brought with it social disturbances in the country which reflected in the movies made in the era. Color films were introduced in the fifties, but the black and white ones didn’t lose their followers till the sixties. During this period, films spun around romance and melodrama, but soon after action films became the trend till the early 1990s.
In the 1990s the focus shifted to love stories and family dramas. Art films also started becoming popular around this time. The 1990s also saw the release of a few films in English, such as Miss Beatty’s Children and English August.
In 2000s, the industry became the center of attraction of even from overseas and also making nominations for more prestigious world.
It has indeed been a long and eventful nine decades for Bollywood since it began its journey with a few shaky images and morphed into the largest film producer in the world.
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