Film remakes as cross-cultural connections between North and South: A case study of the Telugu film industry's contribution to Indian filmmaking

Abstract

Remakes have been a phenomenon for many years in the global film industry. The Indian cinema industry, one of the world's largest industries, has been drawn towards remakes since the beginning of the talkie era (1931) for their ability to ensure profits and high grosses. Moreover, remakes offer a great opportunity to directors and producers to produce a known film in a different way. Although attempts to classify remakes of traditional Hollywood films have been made by Druxman, Horton and McDougal, Forrest and Koos, Frow, Stern and Leitch, no attempts have been made to explain remakes in the Indian film industry, in which the cross-cultural influences on a pluralistic society such as India offer a fertile area of research to explore. The present study, which is heuristic and based on hermeneutics coupled with moving image analysis, is the first to attempt to build a theoretical construct at the intersection of cross-culturalism, industry, and inter-textuality, and posits that a cinema industry with more cultural diversity has a greater probability of producing remakes for wider audiences. For the first time in an Indian context, this study identifies the cross-cultural indices that would offer the necessary environment to produce the best and largest number of remakes in terms of the industry and inter-textuality. Emphasising the cross-cultural significance of Indian film remakes, which the previous studies on Hollywood remakes have neglected, the present article aims to study the contribution of the Telugu film industry as a cross-cultural connection between North and South India. Efforts have been made to show how the identified cross-cultural indices have enabled the Telugu film industry which has the entire infrastructure necessary to produce the largest number of remakes independently every year since 1931 in a wide variety of languages, such as Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, English (Hollywood) and Telugu.