Analyzing the Narrative Structure of a Tent-Pole Bollywood Film vs. Exclusive Indian OTT Cinema

Introduction

Storytelling is important to humans because it helps them make sense out of the world around them. Listing to poetry recitals brings catharsis, watching play performances makes one a rasic¹; novels are detailed and can create complex discourses, can engulf qualities of other genres and have the same stature in storytelling as epics had in olden times, novel is a complex space and makes one feel intricately involved (Mambrol, 2018). Mythology and folklore bring one close to rustic art and entertainment. Intertextuality and adaptations make these worlds mingle, crossover and still stand distant but creating varied perceptions in the readers’ or audiences’ mind. Cinema emerged much later, it is contentious whether you call it art or entertainment but it is a young-old form of storytelling which has changed its form and style suiting the filmmaker’s needs or the needs of a certain culture and audiences sensibilities.

Sometimes the auteur takes over and presents art in the form of cinema; like the cinema of Avant Gard-ists or Neo-realists or those belonging to art or parallel cinema (margi) as we call it in India (Gupta, 2008). With the onset of digital storytelling the story-world of the audiences has grown by leaps and bounds, stories from all around the world are just a click away, stories by artists, entertainers or amateurs all ready to reveal in fraction of a second, created by the latest and the best technological innovations in moviemaking, but not constricted to that. As Mc Luhan said medium is the message, thus, plethora of mediums merged on this new multifarious medium to give stories in seconds like a short reel or in a few minutes (short film); realistic and experimental narrative (documentary) and feature film whose timespan can be anything from 1.5 to 3 hours. The emergence of various formats and genres on new medium, especially OTT video streaming platforms makes stories and their rendition even more interesting and dynamic. There is no dearth of stories on streaming platforms (whether ad-based or subscription based), maybe they just miss the time, pondering and a sense of authenticity to do with conventional television and film production. Truffaut (qtd. In Film Art (2012)) says: