Good Cinema, Bad Cinema

good cinema, bad cinema

It was Independence and the linguistic reorganisation of the States that gave a fillip to the growth of regional languages and led to a renaissance in the arts, literature, theatre, painting, and, importantly, cinema in India. The films of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen in West Bengal inspired a new kind of cinema in several languages — Oriya, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Manipuri, and, to an extent, Hindi as well.

I do not think good cinema will disappear. It will thrive through the individual efforts of filmmakers. In fact, there is no other way. Good art is not often the result of a congenial situation. Adverse factors have produced very good literature and films.

Early government initiatives to promote good films led to the formation of several institutions such as the Film Institute of India, the Film Financing Corporation, the National Film Archives and the National Film Awards. Many State governments too made efforts to encourage the growth of better cinema. Throughout the country there were initiatives at the non-governmental level, the film society movement being an important one.

But for good cinema to be sustained, it has to have popular acceptance and support, and become a people’s movement. Or else it emerges as merely a trend, only to disappear. In spite of all the initial efforts and support from the government, we failed to take new cinema in India to the people at large.

It was roughly around that time that television became popular in India. As elsewhere in the world, there was a sudden shift in people’s attention and interest from cinema to television. Television could at once offer people many things — entertainment, information, education. So, from then on, and unlike in other countries, Indian cinema never really regained its strength.

Instead, with the popularity of entertainment programmes, the so called sit-coms or tele-serials, and the limited reach and resources of regional television, TV producers began to cut costs on basic things like the minimum time required for the production of a programme, or for a proper script to be written and so on. Professionalism was thrown to the winds. The standard of programmes went down. In contrast, in the West, after the initial hiccups, television soon became a partner in the production of good films.

Gradually, Indian audiences became even more non-discerning. There was a fall in standards in their expectations about the audio-visual fare, including films. Cinema began to cater to a section of people who wanted pure escapist fare, and a sizeable section of discerning audiences moved away from it, as it could not satisfy them.

At this stage, the government too withdrew from the active role of promoting good cinema, claiming, among some strange reasons, that television had better reach. But there too, it had no control over the quality of programmes as it was not possible or advisable to have such control over private channels.

All this has made serious cinema work an impossible task, which is strange, as early exposure to the audio-visual medium ought to have made our young people more demanding and more cine-literate. Instead, they became addicts. This situation still prevails, strangely, only in India — a reflection of the general decline in our values and aspirations, perhaps.

Going to the movies has become a pleasurable experience all over the world, not one that involves dealing with rats and cockroaches — as in most parts of India. Cinema owners say they are not investing more because there is no audience; and the audience stays away because the owners are not providing them basic necessities like good viewing conditions and a healthy and clean environment.

One of the main objectives of the National Film Development Corporation at the time of its formation was the building of small theatres in all important cities and towns for the screening of offbeat cinema. Such a chain would have provided the outlets as well as proper returns for our new cinema. There is indeed an audience for such films everywhere, all the time. But there is no facility today that caters to them.

Our national channel, Doordarshan, has adopted an extremely commercialised attitude, and is today just like any other private entrepreneur. It has stopped screening good films from India or abroad, even those films from the Indian Panorama screened at major festivals.

Very few producers are willing to sponsor good films today as the audience is not large enough for such films to be commercially viable. Some of us have managed to survive because we have found an audience abroad too.

A revival of interest in cinema is in evidence all over the world, except in India. Much of the problem is the result of mindless commercialism in our films. Look at Hollywood. It too produces a number of ‘popular films’, But there they incorporate a lot of innovation, and continually adopt new ideas and new technology. What we do instead is to fill the film with all that is banal and vulgar and then gleefully call it ‘Bollywood’ and imagine it is a brand name to promote.

In the 1960s and 1970s, even popular cinema used to adapt literary works. The advantage was that the perception about life and reality in the original work would be reflected in the film too, though at times, only in a faint and unrecognisable form. That was the strength of those films. But today filmmakers believe that people are not interested in films that are in some way connected to life and that adapting a literary work will not lead to financial success. So they sit together and cook up their corporate script.

A director of popular films in Malayalam recently said that the farther his films were from the realities of life, the better their chances of becoming commercially successful. But I think filmmakers should have a responsibility to their audience. They should not cheat the people, ignore them or assume they are intellectually inferior. Filmmakers need to have a lot of respect for their audience. Only then will their movies become worthwhile works of art. Most popular filmmakers take their audiences for granted. This is the most important difference between the makers of popular films and those of better films.

Earlier there was another notion that people would not understand good cinema. They were used to a certain ‘formula’ and did not like films that deviated from it. What they did not ‘like,’ they said, they did not ‘understand.’ But then, what do they understand when they watch run-of-the-mill films? The fact is, today, audiences do not expect anything at all from a film.

We go to a movie to see something new, to enliven our minds and our brains. We do it for the same reason we read a good book — to know what we don’t, to transport ourselves into experiences that we have not known, to look through another’s eyes. A work of art, whether it is literature or cinema, attains a certain importance when it enables us to experience life at close quarters. Such literature and films surely give pleasure — real entertainment to their audiences.

Unfortunately, the media and others have popularised an impression that the purpose of cinema is to entertain people without engaging them in any sort of cerebral exercise. The notion is that a film should never conclude leaving unanswered questions, and should let the audience go home untouched and unaffected.

We cannot predict the future of good cinema. All the same, I do not think good cinema will disappear. It will thrive through the individual efforts of filmmakers. In fact, there is no other way. Good art is not often the result of a congenial situation. Adverse factors have produced very good literature and films.

Popular cinema will continue to be made. Because it is in the very nature of cinema that it needs an audience. The need for popularity is ingrained in the medium. Today a filmmaker certainly cannot say, I have made a great film, but I don’t have an audience and I don’t care. He cannot afford such an attitude because then he will not make another film.

The challenge is to make films that will be popularly accepted, without making compromises to suit the audience’s tastes, and to give them something new, interesting and inventive every time. That is the dharma of all art. It is not to estrange audiences but to befriend them without making compromises.

This is as told to R. Krishnakumar, Deputy Editor, Frontline.
[Courtesy: ‘The Hindu’]

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