Iain Robert Smith

Theorising cult cosmopolitanism: the transnational reception of Bollywood as cult cinema

Abstract Despite India’s status as one of the leading centres of global film production, and the passion for Bollywood exhibited by fans worldwide, it is notable that Indian cinema very rarely features within lists of cult films compiled by scholars or fans in the West. Unlike the popular cinemas of Hong Kong and Japan, which have built up a significant transnational cult following, Bollywood has been relatively absent from the established canons of cult cinema. In recent years, however, a number of websites and fan publications have started to frame Indian cinema as an object of cult interest and this is therefore an opportune moment to explore the cultural politics of this burgeoning form of transnational reception. In proposing that we theorise this as ‘cult cosmopolitanism’ – designating the cosmopolitan embrace of cultural difference through cult reception practices – this article considers the implications that this phenomenon has for our understanding of the transnational circulation of Indian cinema and global popular cinemas more generally.

Memento in Mumbai: ‘A Few More Songs and a Lot More Ass Kicking’

On 25 December 2008, Geetha Arts India released Ghajini, a Hindi language remake of a Tamil film of the same name from 2005. Directed by A.R. Murugadoss, the film closely replicates much of the plot from the earlier film and is representative of a broader trend within the Hindi language industry for producing remakes of South Indian cinema. What is especially significant with Ghajini, however, is that the Tamil film was itself an unacknowledged remake of the American independent film Memento (2000). Borrowing many of the narrative elements from director Christopher Nolan’s film, yet adapting them to fit with the dominant narrative structure of commercial Indian cinema, the case study of the Hindi Ghajini presented in this chapter offers a privileged insight into the adaptation of narrative forms across different national and institutional contexts.

‘You’re Really a Miniature Bond’: Weng Weng and the Transnational Dimensions of Cult Film Stardom

In 2006, the Australian filmmaker and cult cinema fan Andrew Leavold began work on a documentary titled The Search for Weng Weng that celebrated the 2 foot 9 inch tall Filipino film star Weng Weng. Tracing the life story of the man listed in the Guinness World Records as the shortest adult actor to play a lead role in a feature film, the documentary follows Leavold as he visits the Philippines to speak with family members, co-stars and directors about the brief period in the early 1980s in which Weng Weng starred in a series of spy films entitled For Y’ur Height Only (1981), Agent 00 (1981) and The Impossible Kid (1982). Paying tribute to the life of this ‘Filipino midget James Bond’ (Leavold, 2008b), footage from Leavold’s film was eventually utilized in a key sequence in Mark Hartley’s documentary on genre filmmaking in the Philippines, Machete Maidens Unleashed (2010).