ABSTRACT
Musical films had a heyday in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s, but since then, films that feature lip-synched song or song-and-dance sequences have become a subsidiary part of the mainstream cinemas of the Western world. In India, on the other hand, until recently it has only been a small handful of films that did not feature musical scenes, and these episodes became the most famous marker of the distinctiveness of Indian commercial cinema. However, although song sequences have been a near constant in India, the nature of the musical format has changed greatly since the first sound film was made in 1931. The earliest films, for example, were suffused with short snippets of song, rather than being dependent on distinct ‘numbers,’ which later became the norm; from the 1960s and 1970s, song sequences became much longer, and dance has become steadily more important, since the 1990s in particular. Most recently, since around 2010, Hindi films have started to eschew lip-synched songs, favoring non-diegetic background songs, or song-and-dance sequences that are staged diegetically in the narrative (a scene in a nightclub, for example). Ironically, this has taken place as hyperbolic and large-scale song-and-dance expression has been most strongly celebrated as iconic of ‘Bollywood,’ a term that only arose in the 1990s.
