Frames per second: Why are audiences loving re-released Bollywood films?

In recent months, a number of older Hindi films have been re-released in cinemas — with some box office success. These include blockbusters such as Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Pardes (1997), and Taal (1999), as well as hits from this century: Veer Zaara (2004), Jab We Met (2007), Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011), Rockstar (2011), Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (2013), and Dangal (2016). A few films that did not do so well when they were initially released —Rehnaa Hai Terre Dil Mein (2001) and Laila Majnu (2018) — have also been rereleased, possibly to cash in on their enduring popularity or the newly gained stardom of their actors such as Triptii Dimri in the latter.

 

 

These films are doing good business. According to an India Today report, though several of these films failed to individually breach the Rs 1-crore mark at the box office, they have collectively raked in about Rs 50-60 crore. This is not a small figure in a relatively dry year for the Hindi film industry. While horror-comedy Stree 2, released in August, earned Rs 600 crore, most of the other big ventures — Maidaan, Shaitaan, Fighter, Bad Newz — have failed to make a mark at the box office. The re-released films have been a saving grace. With very little costs, whatever they earn can be chalked up as profit by their producers. In fact, the success of some of these films has also prompted future ventures. For example, the 2018 horror film Tumbbad, which has earned nearly Rs 40 crore after a re-release in October this year, will now have a sequel.

 

Industry observers have suggested several reasons for this phenomenon. Some have claimed that the nostalgic appeal of these films — for both the older audience, who watched these at the time of their original release, and a younger audience, who have heard about them — have drawn people to the multiplexes. Others have suggested that a lack of good content on the big screen and fatigue with OTT platforms such as Netflix and Amazon are giving a fresh lease of life to these older films. India is, in fact, late to the party. According to the Screen magazine, the Christmas classic Home Alone and the 1993 science fiction adventure film Jurassic Park earned £875,000 (Rs 9.5 crore) and £542,000 (Rs 5.89 crore), respectively, on being re-released in 2023. “These are numbers that many new releases would struggle to achieve,” claims the article.

 

The Indian film industry, the largest in the world as per the number of releases, has also not recovered fully from the Covid 19-induced downturn. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, the film industry was valued at Rs 191 billion, according to German data website Statista. The next year, with cinemas closed and film releases postponed, its value fell to Rs 72 billion. Since then, the value of the film industry inched up to Rs 197 billion last year and is expected to go past the Rs 200 billion mark this year. But evidently, this is a slow recovery — with rather damp prospects for growth. 

 

But none of this really explains the cultural phenomenon of people re-watching Bollywood films. What pleasures do they derive from it, besides the rather nebulous appeal to nostalgia? Indian-American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai decodes the pleasures of rewatching Bollywood films in his essay, “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films” (2019). “Repeat viewing is… a common part of the everyday parlance of film appreciation in Bombay (Mumbai), where people will often tell one another that they have seen a film ten or fifteen times,” he writes. “Although it is not always clear that these numerical claims are exactly accurate, they indicate an aesthetic in which repeat viewing is a sign of the committed connoisseur. It is part of a language of connoisseurship and appreciation.”

 

Such cinephilic bravado is not uncommon to any film buff in India, many of whom take great pride in performing their encyclopaedic knowledge of popular Indian cinema by recollecting trivia about the films they have watched again and again. For instance, any lover of the 1975 curry western Sholay will tell you that there are two Hari Singhs in the film — one is the father of the iconic villain Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan), and the other is a barber in a jail where the protagonists, Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) are locked up.

 

Appadurai draws on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s ideas of repetition and difference, elaborated in his magnum opus Difference and Repetition (1968), to explain the phenomenon. Appadurai writes that for Deleuze, “repetition is not the recurrence of the same experience at two different moments, but a repetition of difference... a new experience that does not rely on sameness, just as difference does not presuppose identity.”

 

Applied to Bollywood films, this idea helps us understand that rewatching a film is not a repetition of the experience we had while watching it earlier. It is a new experience, where music plays a major part in evoking a pleasurable déjà vu. It is perhaps in search of this déjà vu that audiences are flocking to the cinemas to re-watch films they once loved. But looking backwards while going forward can prove to be a tricky business. Hopefully, Bollywood — and other film industries in India — will soon discover a way to go forward with eyes straight ahead.

 

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist 

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