When doing research for this blog post I found an interesting article in the New York Times entitled In Bollywood, Female Directors Find New Respect. The article touched upon the career of four female Bollywood directors; Zoya Akhtar, Mira Nair, Kiran Rao, and Farah Khan. I found myself extremely interested in the career of Farah Khan. According to the article, in 2004 Ms. Khan debuted the second highest grossing film of that year. Ms. Khan has experienced great success with her career.
Initially I found this article and the directors involved to be interesting and quite successful especially Farah Khan. In America, we often critique the inequalities and the fences that divide us because of our gender. Although this is true, women in other countries often experience worse forms of discrimination. I appreciated the female presence within Bollywood.
Farah Khan rose to success as a choreographer. She studied sociology in St. Xavier’s College and inspired to be a choreographer after seeing Michael Jackson” Thriller. She received many awards for her choreography within Bollywood cinema. “The first contemporary female filmmaker to break the all-male stranglehold on the box office…”. Her film debut “Main Hoon Na” (I Am Here of You) became a hit and was followed by another hit in 2007, “Om Shanti Om,”
The NY Times article brought up a point that completely changed my view on Khan and the other featured female directors of Bollywood. “Interestingly, unlike earlier female filmmakers, this new generation isn’t making women centric cinema. Ms. Akhtar said that she never considered turning the friends in ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ into women because that ‘would have been a very different journey.’” When asked about her latest project she is working on now she considered her latest work to be Ocean’s Eleven meets The Full Monty. “It will take testosterone to another level.”
Khan is a female director that has no interest in telling stories for women or about women. I began to further believe her success would not be as great if her career choices had been any different. That is if her subject matters changed. “…the history of that cinema as the self expressive signatures of Hollywood directors rather than a collection of ideas to which these signatures were signed. A move towards the notion that a film’s structure produces the author’s viewpoint…” The means of camera technique, lighting and editing are all part of how the film is “written” not so much the subject matter of the film. “If their films don’t focus on women, these directors have nonetheless created female characters who tend to have more texture than the usual Bollywood heroine. The difference in Khan’s treatments is most obvious in Ms.Khan’s songs… Still, they wear their accomplishments and gender politics lightly.”
I began to ask a lot of questions as I looked into Khan’s career. As I looked through a series of interviews she had done most of the interviews were about her expecting triplets and what kind of mother she would be. I had yet to find an interview written in English about her presence as a female within Bollywood cinema. Is Khan expected to pave some type of way for female characters and female subject matters because of her commercial success? Would she have achieved the same level of success had she not made action films or films that cater to men? Upon reading “Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory And Feminist Film” I began to wonder does your gender affect the means in which you will tell a story. After a discussion in class I learned that the answer is no. Within this article women such as Marleen Gorris who won an Oscar for her “gendered preoccupations and styles…A Question of Silence and Broken Mirror being elaborately women centered films about women’s experiences of sexual exploitation, violence, the everyday domestic ‘abuses’ of heterosexuality and sexual division…”. Similar to Kathryn Bigelow, are we content with simply seeing women becoming successful in cinema for making a “mans film”? Should women be expected to make film for women and about women simply because they are women?
Work Cited:
-http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/movies/zoya-akhtar-and-farah-khan-bollywood-directors.html
-Author/Auteur:Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film
Farah Khan is actually one of my mom's favorite people on tv so I had to read this article lol.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea that she was a director. My mom watches many of her shows on television and she's usually a judge. She's a judge mostly on singing and dancing shows and that's how I knew that she choreographed. I looked up the movies that she directed, and I watched "Mein Hoo Naa" when I was younger and to be honest it wasn't the greatest movie in the world, but I was for sure that the director was a male. The main female in the movie barely had a role, she was basically eye candy. Most of her on screen time involves her passing through the hallways in slow motion while the men are drooling over her. I don't even remember what role she actually played other than the "chick who walks through the hall in slow motion". It's interesting that this movie was one of her most successful films with the highest grossing. I think it's because the leading male actor was Sharukh Khan and people in India or Bangladesh would watch anything that he's in.
This was really interesting. Ms. Khan seems to completely turn the tables on the concept of the male gaze by creating a "female gaze" in a sense. She's presenting men through a female perspective in her films. In regards to your last question,I don't think it should be an expectation at all, rather it's refreshing to experience a new, oppositional viewpoint to what we normally see in mainstream cinema. Then again, it is also important for female directors to make movies about females themselves because it opens the public's eyes to many issues and new perspectives that are otherwise neglected or altogether ignored in mainstream cinema.
ReplyDeleteI have recently been viewing a few bollywood films, which is primarily the reason this article caught my attention. Yet another reason is that I had always viewed not just the bollywood scene, but India as a nation that promotes a conservative fundamentally patriarchal system. To see a woman like Ms. Khan gain success and incorporate the very unorthodox view of a "female gaze" that Zuleyka before me posted, seems like a very bold and refreshing concept. I may catch one of her films. Any suggestions?
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