Cinema híndi: cultura hindu e recepção

Abstract

Hindi cinema has great popular adherence in India, unlike foreign cinema, which has low receptivity by the national public. This work investigates the relationship of hindi cinema with Indian culture, in an attempt to identify the peculiarities of indian culture, which relate to the national success of audience their cinema has. For that purpose, we analyze twenty box office success hindi films since the 40’s, a time the masala films were consolidated as a typical Bollywood modality. Besides, four films, which flopped box office despite their high budget, produced in the same period are also analyzed. At the end, we observed that cultural aspects of India are strongly linked to the hindu religion at its very base. It was found that hindi cinema is deeply connected to hinduism, strongly showing elements of hindu mythology, both explicitly and implicitly, and is aimed at the traditional hindu culture family. In the end we concluded that films that do not carry basic elements of hindu culture, which is deeply rooted within the India’s society, have little chance of reaching India’s national audience, even if they have high budgets and bear elements of Indian culture, such as dance, without connecting those elements to the hindu system of beliefs and values.