Page 30 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Introduction >> 17

Without a doubt, the image above does speak to the influence that Hol-
lywood continues to exert on cultural policy, production practices, and,
more broadly, Bombay-based media industries’ imaginations of “going
global” since the early 1990s. And given the long and complex history of
the Bombay film industry looking toward Hollywood, it is not surprising
that recent changes in the Bombay film industry have also been inspired,
certainly in rhetorical terms if not in practice, by Hollywood. On the
42
other hand, Reliance Entertainment’s moves over the past few years also
indicate that it would be a mistake to characterize Bollywood’s relationship
with Hollywood as one of mere imitation. In the image above, Anilesha is
positioned behind the spotlights and the action, looking away, calm and
detached. Is Hollywood now merely another locale of media production
for deities like Anilesha? Perhaps Anilesha’s strategic moves over the past
few years can also be read as a striking assertion of Bombay’s reinvention
as a media capital with global reach and ambitions and, by the same token,
a clear sign that Hollywood’s position as the preeminent center of transna-
tional media flows can no longer be presumed. It is this complex and ongo-
ing transition in the global media landscape at the turn of the twenty-first
century that this book tackles.

Sites, Access, and Limits: A Note on Studying Emergent Media

In recent years a growing number of scholars have turned their attention to
the media industries and their production cultures and, in the process, to
questions of methodology in general and ethnographic approaches in par-
ticular. Recently published anthologies, including Media Industries: History,
Theory, and Method and Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Indus-
tries, have been immensely valuable in bringing together essays that draw
on a range of disciplines to reflect on problems unique to the study of media
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industries. In addition to the question of access to various sites within the
world of media production, there is also the vexing problem of analyzing and
representing industry practices, given the self-reflexivity that marks media
industries today. These and other concerns have been most clearly elaborated
in John Caldwell’s ethnography of film and television industry professionals
in Los Angeles. 44
Indeed, one way to describe my own approach here would be in terms
of what Caldwell calls an “integrated cultural-industrial method of analy-
sis” that involves examining “data from four registers or modes of analysis:
textual analysis of trade and worker artifacts; interviews with film/televi-
sion workers; ethnographic field observation of production spaces and