We Have a Button for Every Job, But We Have No Button to Help Us Cry : G/localising Bollywood in Germany

• Hell broke loose when Bollywood megastar Shahrukh Khan arrived at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival. While until then popular Hindi cinema and its star system had gone practically unnoticed in the German mainstream media, SRK's visit to the Berlinale epitomised that Germany, like Israel and the Gulf nations, despite its comparatively small numbers of NRIs, is an expanding market for the Hindi film industry.My aim in this paper is two-fold. First, instead of offering empirical audience research, I would like to emphasise the importance of the industrial context for the reception of film. Therefore, I am going to have a closer look at how distribution and marketing have contributed to changing the reception of Bollywood from being a diasporic cultural practice among NRIs (as well as for instance Turkish and Afghan immigrants) to attracting (female) audiences of the German majority. While reception studies often deal with the function of Bollywood for diasporic audiences, my focus lies thus on the discursive shift from margin to centre.Second, using the city of Hamburg as an example, I would like to complicate the category of “nation” in reception studies. Therefore, I am interested in aspects of how physical spaces like cities shape the reception of cultural products. In what ways have Bollywood films been distributed and circulated in Hamburg? What impact did the shift from community screenings in cinemas to video rentals in Desi stores to DVD consumption have? Does the internet eventually contribute to outweighing localised cultural practice? In short: what are the defining factors that the German reception of Bollywood can no longer be exclusively conceptualised in terms of “where you're from”, but of “what you're at”?

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Filmvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Studies on Film (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Bollywood

German reception

diasporic audiences

Film

Filmvetenskap

Filmvetenskap

Film Studies

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)