Who would not want to dance with Priety Zinta? Or rather not drive all those Aston Martins like James Bond? Fly through crowded cities like Superman? Or even pull off weird motor cycle stunts like the Dhoom movies?
This is what had always appealed to me about movies. There was a sense of complete dislocation from our grim realities and a drive into what we always dreamt of—something that we hoped we could do, yet always knew that it was just as distant as perhaps finding the pot of gold at the edge of the rainbow. Movies, as I grew up watching, were all pot boilers for me—the motif of a willing suspension of disbelief always took a grip over me and I would forget myself in the 14 or 16 reels that a normal Yashraj picture would have.
Such was my love and perhaps even addiction for the unreal, for the visit to fantasy land, that I even started bunking school to go and watch my delusory dramas. And at that time, fortunately for me, there were no plexes and this was happening in Kolkata. I shall never forget the joy of watching movies in single-screen theatres, not so much for the inexpensive tickets which were more suited to a schoolboy’s thin wallet, but because of the warmth that you shared with your fellow audience. That time in Border, when we were all getting equally frustrated watching our men die because our planes could not take off in the night—I heard the man next to me get off his chair and yell at Jackie Shroff of the IAF, “Come on, move, you son of a b****!” Or that time in Mission Kashmir, when Sanjay Dutt bared his fangs at the IAS officer, bridging the communal divide with powerful rhetoric; the whole hall would break into peals of contagious applause and thereby a state of collective consciousness somehow got fatally instilled into my brain map.
And then there was a gradual shift. With time there came a greater exposure. Not so much for the shift in movie making, but in the cosmos of DVD players and their resultant DVDs. With the market coming into some stability, a period of plenty was initiated and thereby, directors like Griffith, Fellini, Truffaut, Goddard and many more to mention here, sprung up. The influence also came in more powerfully from my own socio-cultural milieu, in the form of the movies of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak. Obviously, with the dearth of contemporary progressive concepts, a reflective outlook become almost spontaneous with those movies—fighting with the protagonist in Ray’s Pratidwandi (The Adversary), or trying to understand the camera of the ‘other’ through Ritwik Ghatak’s brilliance. And thereby was a great awakening in me—the final comprehension of the medium, a means of expression with more that the uni-dimensional constraints of most art forms. Cinema offered to me a whole process, perhaps the closest imitation of reality, with space for graphic breaks and parallel paths for self-realisation. This was where I crossed the Rubicon.
And that is where I realized the importance of the structure. Filmmakers are not mere entertainers as they are made out to be worldwide. There is much more to them. I read in one of Satyajit Ray’s articles, named ‘The Confronting Question’, his views on the troubles of film making—where he raised a very pertinent point.
“… one hold’s one’s breath on location in fear of a crowd emerging out of the blue… come to watch the film (how can shooting ever be work?)…”
It is from this mentality that one has to break free. It is from this mentality that the approach to film making has to be re-visualized. Making a movie isn’t all fun and games as it is made out to be. Ray goes on his article,
“… No wonder film makers are so prone to heart diseases…”
It is true that most of the grey hairs come with the first film of a director.
There is a whole new element that has to be taken into focus when dealing with film making. If you go through Fellini’s 8½, it may at first seem to be a hotch-potch. It may seem to have no unified progression and that itself can be very nerve racking for most audiences, especially the one we have in India. But within this otherwise translucent zig-zagging, comes a more creative propaganda—one which describes a film maker’s problem of choice, of decision, of breaking the shackles and finding a new path. This was believed to be Fellini’s problem at the time of making this movie and therefore the odd name—8½ (standing for 8 features and one short film)—a seemingly benevolent title if one sees the kind of rigmarole it had to go through. Therefore, it proves that to a filmmaker, nothing is as simple as it seems.
And this was an example of the absurd genre of film making. Let us get to the more political ones or the ones with revolutionary ideals enmeshed in them. And I will not run Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to get to my point. I’ll map the chart back home, through Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti and Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munnabhai. Mehra uses five disillusioned youths to break through a corrupt bureaucracy and become martyrs. While this may assume the shape of crass melodrama to the yet disillusioned people, the fact remains that there was a message—a plea for change and the director believed that the change would come in through the youth, a band of citizens yet holding on to the ideals of Utopia and a certain idealism yet not marred by corruption and dubious methodology. For the purpose of this thesis, it is necessary to keep in mind that the director provides these few boys and girls, the tool of, not violence in the exact sense of the term, but rather the offensive. The youth kill to obtain freedom. And then on the other hand, we have Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munnabhai, where the director returns to Gandhian methods of struggle. Non-violence and flowers become tools of self-assertiveness and action. But the end result is common—the pursuit of freedom, a pursuit of Utopia. Mark that these films released with a difference of some months and both attained a great level of popular success and critical acclaim. Within the Indian tradition, both these films contained songs, dances and the other paraphernalia that go with the usual conventional films. But where they marked their difference from the usual, was in the form of rationality and precision. Everything had a purpose (even the completely purposeless youth of Rang De Basanti had a purpose). The films banked heavily on content and where they marked the real difference, was that they contained their package with a lot of style. This is where the future of Indian Cinema has to be.
Even though we always harp about the lack of thought in Indian Cinema, we also acknowledge the fact that Indian Cinema has produced some of the sharpest intellectual brains in the whole world. From Shyam Benegal’s inquisitive Ankur, to Govind Nehalani’s hard-hitting Ardhya Satta, Indian films also have a progressive parallel tract. However, the reason that can be chiefly attributed to the box-office doom of these films (not all, but for the majority of them), is the lack of style. I am not stating that these films didn’t have style—but what I am trying to emphasize is that style in India films have to based on the Hollywood action flicks (Mission Impossible Series, Bourne Trilogy, Michael Clayton, the Matrix Trilogy, and so on…). We cannot try and bring in style elements from French New Wave films, or from the Italian Neo-Realists as factors like the Jump Cut and Jumbled Progression go way beyond the simple comprehension skills of the Indian audience. Proof—a classic Fellinisque film like No Smoking sunk without a trace in the recent past, casting doomsday for the director. We are not ready!
And see the effect the other movies have created—like Rang De Basanti and Lage Raho Munnabhai—a total case of mass hysteria, which has severely altered the course of Indian history. There have been major upheavals in the democratic and judiciary circuits, these films have made justice possible for millions of victims of Indian corruption and power-politics. With directors like Omprakash Mehra and Rajkumar Hirani, the process of change has begun. Indian films are finally doing what cinema tends to do—create the real out of the unreal. For Indian Cinema, the time is now!
