Bollywoodization or ghettoization? The Bangladeshi dream factory is in disarray

Abstract

In this article, I claim that instead of making Bangladeshi films appealing to the Bangladeshi middle-class audience, the hegemony of Bollywood films has ghettoized them. I explain that with the change in the target audience and the production and exhibition of Bollywood films in the 1990s, the Bangladeshi middle-class audience responded to this change – as did the Indian middle-class audience – and was alienated from Bangladeshi commercial films. The absence of middle-class audiences in Bangladeshi cinema halls, however, was quickly filled out by working-class audiences who migrated from rural areas following economic liberalization and the expansion of the ready-made garment, housing and transport industries from the 1990s onwards. Bangladeshi commercial filmmakers then targeted the so-called captive lower-class audience with action-packed vulgar or obscene films. Through analysing the titles of Bangladeshi commercial films produced in the 1990s and the 2000s, I expound on how these films were ghettoized, completely alienating the middle-class audience.

Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

“…It is the industrial context of production and the conventional nature of commercial genre films that have generated criticism and disdain for the genre film, because genre films "outrage [ people's] inherited and unexamined sense of what art should be [rather] than because the films are offensive in theme, characterisation, style, or other artistic quality" (Braudy 2004, 665). Zakir Raju (2013) has explored how a discourse of disdain sets off commercial from alternative cinema in Bangladesh (see also Rahman 2017). Kamu rehearsed exactly such a perspective when he disregarded the Censor Board's evaluation of his film based on their familiarity with unsophisticated and predictable genre films.…”