Hollywood

Abstract

Hollywood’s experiences in South Asia reflect a dramatic encounter between the practical realities of industry and the imaginative possibilities of alterity. This entanglement of finance and fantasy stretches back to global Hollywood’s early heyday. In the 1930s, for example, Hollywood’s imperial adventure films sought to engage South Asia as actual territory and narrative theme, following up on the popularity of ‘sepoy stories’ in the 1910s. Among the most popular of the 1930s films was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), which was also one of Adolf Hitler’s favourites, elevated by his belief that the film’s embrace of colonial and racial superiority could be instructive for the SS (Faber, 2008). Der Führer would be surprised to know that it was actually the Indian rebel’s threat in the film – ‘we have ways to make men talk’ – that would live in infamy as Hollywood’s preferred performance of despotic cruelty. Usually rendered in an exaggerated mock German accent – ve haf vays of making you talk! – the insurgent Mohammed Khan’s speech came to signify not only Nazi brutality but barbarism in general, which for much of Hollywood’s history, emerged as a threat from the East. The film’s production history gives us a sense of how South Asia functioned as a real and diegetic space. As part of an industry-wide interest in foreign production and the boast-worthy authenticity of geographical validation, the film’s producers originally sent their cinematographers to India to shoot location footage for Lives, only to find that film stock deteriorates more rapidly in the tropical environment. The studio then decided to shoot the scenes in the hills surrounding Hollywood where Native Americans masqueraded as Indians (again). We can see here the role that South Asia played in ‘orienting’ Hollywood within histories of racialised global capitalism from empire to entertainment. From the beginning, Hollywood tried to engage South Asia according to a story that it had already told elsewhere. With robust US ticket sales creating profitable returns on investments in technology, talent and theatres, further consolidating the monopolistic power of a small number of American studios, Hollywood took advantage of comparatively undercapitalised production facilities around the world during the interwar period. Its expansive array of film genres from intimate family melodrama to lavishly expansive epics was anchored in frameworks of racial exclusion, gendered disenfranchisement, heteronormativity and the prioritisation of individual over collective accomplishment as the guarantor of class mobility. Hollywood’s industrial