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What the Scroll@10 retrospective covers
Published as Scroll marked its first decade, the Reel retrospective looks back across stories about cinema and related forms. Scroll’s opening frame is that Indian cinema continues to “thrive, surprise and provoke,” even as the Hindi film industry faces ideological pressure and scrutiny. That is Scroll’s editorial framing, rather than a measured industry ranking.
The selection moves between contemporary debates and historical appreciations, and across languages and media. Its stories approach films through politics, audience expectations, celebrity, craft and cultural discovery—not through box-office results.
Hindi cinema amid political pressure and changing tastes
Scroll describes censorship, online trolling, scrutiny of film personalities and the treatment of interfaith romance in films as features of the political climate around Hindi cinema. Its phrase “Age of Akshay” refers to Akshay Kumar’s public and film-industry positioning.
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The retrospective also revisits the pandemic-era “Death of Bollywood” discussion: some audiences were turning away from Hindi productions in favor of dubbed South Indian films. An unnamed Hindi film industry expert told Scroll, “The Hindi film industry doesn’t seem to have kept pace with the way taste has evolved over the last few years… There is a general upping of audience expectations in terms of style, the way of telling a story.” The passage presents this as an expert’s assessment, not a quantified account of audience behavior.
Streaming, subtitles and stories across languages
Scroll points to South Korean films and series, including Crash Landing on You, as part of the streaming-era shift toward viewing across language boundaries. Its retrospective notes the role of subtitles in helping audiences accept films and shows in languages they do not speak.
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Anita Vachharajani compares K-dramas with mass-market romance novels; that is her characterization, not a universal definition of the genre. The example sits alongside the wider idea that viewers can travel between cultures through stories without speaking the language on screen.
Film history, performance and visual style
Several selections turn from current industry debates to the history and craft of cinema:
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- A centenary profile revisits cinematographer Subrata Mitra and his work with filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
- Filmmaker Sriram Raghavan writes about Dev Anand’s morally ambiguous roles and their place in Bombay noir: “Much before Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, much more than Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor, it was Dev Anand’s bold film choices that shaped what is called the Bombay noir.”
- Nandini Ramnath examines reflective surfaces in Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar, writing: “The illusion of lasting happiness created by cinema is undermined by events beyond the screen. Mirrors, so crucial to the filmmaking process, provide handy backdrops for important incidents in the narrative.”
- The retrospective also notes the later attention received by actors from the Kannada independent film Thithi.
Together, these examples show how the selection treats film as both an art of images and a record of changing ideas about performance, memory and cultural attention.
Music as part of the film conversation
Devarsi Ghosh revisits film and pop songs of the 1990s. His succinct distinction is: “Music is not poetry. If the lyrics are poetry, that’s a bonus.” The inclusion of this piece broadens the retrospective beyond films and series to the songs that also shape popular screen culture.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to read the selection
The Reel anniversary piece is most useful as a map of Scroll’s cultural coverage across a decade: political critique and audience taste sit beside cross-language viewing, film history, visual analysis and music writing. It does not claim that the highlighted works are the definitive best of the decade, nor does it establish where any referenced title can currently be watched.
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