Continuing from the last blog post, I further analyse the concept of the globalised film industry through to crossover cinema. Crossover cinema is used to illustrate an emerging form of cinema that crosses cultural borders at the stage of conceptualization and production and hence manifest hybrid cinematic grammar at the textual level, as well as crossing over on terms of its distribution and reception (Khorana, 2014). This is the incorporation of two different cultural background influencing each other to create an end product, and in this case, a movie. Attempts at cross culturally producing a movie has not been most successful, however, the Hollywood movie, “Slumdog Millionaire” based in Mumbai, India, was a successful attempt at crossover cinemas, winning 8 Oscars, even though the confidence for its success was slim.
According to Khorana S, the inter-text and the extra-text of the cross cultural films is intrinsic to a crossover film. This leads to the emergence of issues such as Bollywood’s attempt at promoting cross cultural film in hopes that one day it will make it into Hollywood and their renowned film statuses. My understanding of this is that if Bollywood’s main aim is to enhance its cross cultural elements in a film in hopes that western audiences would pick up on it and decides to watch it, their search for a Western audience may not come to fruition (Khorana 2014). There is an underlying understanding that there is a certain practice that Hollywood adopts and its secret has been a success for a long time now, other global film industries has been trying to figure out what this practice is and trying to walk in Hollywood’s footstep.
Another issue that arises is audience’s interpretation of a foreign film. Watching today’s news on Middle Eastern countries, all we see is violence and war, murder and rape. Audiences unknowingly succumb to the conception and perception that the media is broadcasting and thereby influences our opinion on Middle Eastern countries. A crossover film may harm a country’s reputation because of an opinion from non-Arabic viewers. Sensitive issues such as suicide bombing and religions in Arabic movie are reflected as “crazy” and “insane” to Hollywood viewers because of their limited understanding of the cultural meaning in a film and the realistic lifestyle of the Middle Eastern and their religion. Here’s a video on the perceptions of Arabs and Americans film:
All in all, what we must really understand is that the success of crossover film industry definitely play a role in portraying globalisation all around the world. The Slumdog Millionaire film was a huge success as it portrays Mumbai poor lifestyle in contrast to the rich lifestyle at Taj Mahal and the fated love story of the characters.
Reference:
Khorana, S 2013, ‘Crossover Cinema: A Genealogical and Conceptual Overview’, Producing a Hybrid Grammar, pp. 1-7.
WASTED Paradise 