It’s official: India is the new Hollywood. In 2009, the country produced a total of 2961 films on celluloid, including a staggering 1288 feature films, far outstripping its American rivals.

Film is everywhere in India; in the most unlikely little shops, in buses, in doctors’ offices, and of course, in the huge cinemas that one finds in even the smallest towns. One such town is Sivakasi, in Tamil Nadu, south India, where I spent two months in 2009. Tamil cinema has been thriving since the 1990s and is now the third largest film industry in the country in terms of the number of movies it produces each year. There were two new films showing at the Sivakasi cinema each week, and the evenings we spent there were some of the most entertaining of my trip.

The first thing you must know about Indian films is they are often of a prodigious length. We went to see ‘Ayan’, a Tamil thriller written and directed by K.V. Anand, and it lasted for well over two hours. Its length apparently necessitated two intervals, resulting in a three and a half hour excursion. The films are so long generally because they are punctuated with song and dance routines – which, although enjoyable, contribute little to the plot – and because they cater to a taste for lengthy, and surprisingly violent, fight scenes (complete with comic ‘biff’ and ‘slam’ noises). Given that we had no idea what the characters were saying in ‘Ayan’ (it was unlikely that a provincial cinema would provide English subtitles) it was a fantastic film, and a great example of the variety that one should expect from Indian cinema: beautiful women dancing in the desert, a conspicuously evil drug-lord, family drama, angry mothers, police chases, brawls, an attractive hero, and even an unpleasant murder scene in which a character is slit open so that the bags of drugs in his stomach can be removed.

The focus, in Tamil films at least, tends to be on familial issues, centring on arranged marriages and love affairs, which meant that we were usually able to understand the plots of the movies that were played at the front of otherwise decrepit buses, often on loop for an interminable length of time. As we bounced along potholed roads, the jangly, high-pitched music would blare out, another angry father would start punching a wayward boy after his daughter, a mother would lament the behaviour of her children, and then they would all pull some amazing dance moves to lift the mood.
Yet Indian films are not only important for their entertainment value; many of them deal with problems in society that might otherwise be taboo. The problems caused by caste, for example, which can drive young lovers to suicide in order to avoid family disgrace and disownment. The perennial issue of poverty is also explored by Indian films like the superb ‘Salaam Bombay!’, (1988) which follows the lives of young thieves and prostitutes in Mumbai’s notorious red-light district.

But don’t just take my word for it: the large Indian community in England has meant that we now have more access than ever before to Indian films on DVD and their soundtracks (often the best part). So get watching – they might even have subtitles.

Fancy yourself as a photographer?

Want your photographs from around and about Oxford seen by the thousands of people who visit the Cherwell website every day?

If so, why not send a few of your snaps into [email protected]

Saturday – Longwall – Jessica Goodman

Friday – Balliol boat burning – Wojtek Szymczak

Thursday – Wicker Man in South Parks – Sara Reguilon

Wednesday – Fireworks over Oxford – Sonali Campion

Tuesday – Fireworks in Jericho – Jessica Goodman

Monday – London – Alexander Coupe

Sunday – Autumn at Hugh’s – William Granger

In the run up to Armistice Day, Sinclair Productions take us down to the trenches once more for an “intense reworking” of R C Sherriff’s Journey’s End. It is the story of Raleigh, a new recruit fresh out of public school and “rugger” games, who follows his schoolboy hero into the officers’ dugout. Yet as he discovers that Stanhope has become another victim of this war of attrition, director Sam Bell needs to work hard to make this production stand out from swathes of First World War literature we’ve all become so desensitised to – to the conclusions we can already predict.

There are moments which really work. Ironically whilst Sherriff’s play was originally rejected by theatre managers because it lacked a leading lady, this production finally offers us one. Casting a woman in the role of the young and vulnerable Raleigh might seem an easy way of emphasising the gulf that lies between this wet-behind-the-ears recruit, eager to prove himself a man, and the weathered Stanhope, but Rebecca Moore brings much more than this to the part. In a final scene which risks becoming either static or melodramatic, it is Moore’s humble yet somehow enthralling presence which draws us in. Her portrayal of a boy on the cusp of manhood, clutching at life even as he realises it’s slipping away, brings a quiet sense of understated tragedy to the climax of the play, and when her sudden cry of pain rips through the silent tension, you can’t help wincing along with Stanhope.

Yet the final moments are churned out with a haste that undermines the poignancy Moore has worked so carefully to build. Rather than make full use of the silence which follows, the remaining characters seem in a rush to leave the stage. This is the problem with Sam Bell’s production of Journey’s End: it seems interested only in the dramatic interchanges between characters. Admittedly, as Hibbert and Stanhope clash against one another in a dispute which leaves them exactly where they started – trapped in the trenches – the dialogue echoes the barrage above ground which so haunt the men below. But what it doesn’t capture is the excruciating boredom, the mundane everyday life and suffering, the tortuous waiting to go up the ladder which Sherriff’s original script so starkly evokes. The scenes I saw were more First World War soap opera than “powerful and touching” reworking: actors are only on stage long enough to shout, cry and make up before they are whisked away and the next drama begins. The almost constant intensity of tone and pace becomes desensitising at times, and similarly there was a lack of movement in the scenes I saw. Rather than restrained, these characters seem static and complacent in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the dugout. A little more use of the stage might have helped to make us more aware of the stifling confinement which so frustrates them.

Yet with more than a week to go these are problems which can easily be ironed out, and the acting itself is there. At times Alex Fisher and Benedict Nicholson work beautifully in opposition to one another – watching Nicholson’s tortured, twitching Hibbert collide against Fisher’s granite figure in one scene, you really feel his sense impotence and frustration. It’s just that these sort of high-intensity exchanges need to be balanced with an emphasis on the pauses, silences, and more understated moments of dialogue which are already there in the script. We need to understand the agonizing lack of event or drama, constant repression and tension which are the cause of these outbursts. If this can be done, you’ll find a genuinely moving piece of theatre at the O’Reilly next week, one which will certainly put your 5th Week Blues into perspective.