Fogarty & Evans/Movies, Moves and Music, 11. Looking for the Past in Pastiche: Intertextuality in Bollywood Song-and-Dance Sequences

Contemporary Bollywood cinema is marked by a proliferation of references to earlier Hindi films. Pastiche, tribute, and parody are familiar structuring principles, the very profusion of these intertextual devices pointing to a certain kind of ‘memorialization’ in this self-reflexive cinema. Analysing the political economy of the repeated cinematic sign in light of India’s globalizing economy allows for an exploration of the nature of Bollywood cinema’s investment in the past. Given the extensive quotation in its films, and the recent interest in remakes and tributes, the principal questions of this essay are: what kind of narrative does Bollywood produce about itself through this intertextuality and, what is its investment in producing this account? One of the most striking forms of intertextuality in Bollywood films are the song-and-dance sequences, composed of a collage of earlier styles of dance, music, choreography combined with mise-en-scene. In discussing the cultures of memory evoked and enlisted by th