Bollywood : 100 years

It all began with a cross-dressing, wet Sari scene 

             

Dhundiraj Govind Phalke's black-and-white silent film Raja Harischandra :

was screened in Mumbai on 3 May, 1913.

It is a tale of a righteous Indian king who never told a lie.

One of the most famous scenes is the bathtub sequence where the king comes

to call on his wife Taramati.

tbc 

She is in the tub with attendants and they are all drenched,

their saris and blouses clinging to their bodies -

but they are all in fact male actors dressed as women.!! 

Raja Harishchandra, India's first silent film, was released 100 years ago

                                                 

A kiss lasted four minutes - in the 1930s  :-* :-*

Devika Rani locked lips with her real life husband on screen in the 1933 film, Karma.

It took four minutes.

Rani's kiss lasts four minutes

                             

Indians buy 2.7 billion movie tickets annually, the highest in the world.

But average ticket prices are among the lowest in the world

so revenues are a fraction of Hollywood's.

For a country that is obsessed with films, there are still very few cinema screens.

India has fewer than 13,000 screens

compared with nearly 40,000 screens in the US.