Portrayal of mental disorders in Bollywood film- A case Study of the film My Name is Khan

Introduction

1.1 Defining Films and Bollywood film

According to the dictionary a film means a strip of transparent material, usually cellulose triacetate, covered with a photographic emulsion and perforated along one or both edges, intended for the recording and reproduction of images. In other words, a motion picture means, a sequence of consecutive pictures of objects photographed in motion by a specially designed camera i.e. motion-picture camera and thrown on a screen by a projector i.e. motion-picture projector in such rapid succession as to give the illusion of natural movement. A film according to Google is a medium that disseminates moving pictures.

India is a centre of regional films. It has the highest number of languages spoken in the world. In India, Hindi films are referred to as Bollywood films. The word Bollywood is an informal way of saying popular Mumbai based Film industry in India. The term has been incorrectly used to refer to the whole of Indian Cinema. It is only a part of the total Indian film industry, which includes several regional film industries sorted by language. The term ‘Bollywood’ has its origin in the 1970’s, when India overtook America as the world’s largest film producer. The credit for the term has been claimed by several different people, including the lyricist, filmmaker and scholar Amit Khanna and the journalist Bewinda Collaco. The naming for Bollywood was inspired by ‘Tollywood’, the name that was used to refer to the cinema of west Bengal. Dating back to 1932, ‘Tollywood’ was the earliest Hollywood-inspired name, referring to the Bengal film industry based in Tollygunge, which rhymed with the concept or word ‘Hollywood’ and was the centre of the cinema of India at the time. The name ‘Bollywood’ later arose as the Bombay based film industry overtook the one in Tollygunge as the centre of the Indian film industry. Today this word has made entry into the oxford English Dictionary.

There are different types of films: Feature films, Art films and Documentary films.

Feature films: these films are full length films, usually 80 to 210 minutes. Since 1971, the country with the highest feature output has been India, which produces a thousand films in more than twelve Indian languages each year. They have their own themes and stories. These films are usually screened at the theatres and enact the story sound and sequence of images giving the illusion of continuous movement.

Art films: these films are very serious in nature. They are independently made films that are subjected to only few or selected audience. They are not aimed at mass audience. They also deal with concepts of social reality. Moreover, they are low budget films which are not released in theatres. In short, they are not commercial films.

Documentary films: these films an elaborative method of recording the lives and activities of the real people, but are constructed or recreated to tell an interesting story. Documentary film is a method of recording aspects of reality, interpreted either by factual shooting or by sincere reconstruction in order to appeal to the reason or emotion and for the purpose of widening of human knowledge and understanding of the problems and their solutions in relation to economic, culture and humans.