Indian Cinema and the market forces
“The best films of a country are produced in times of stress. Look what the war has done to Italian films. Look at Brief Encounter. I don’t think a great film like that would have been made possible without all those air raids London had to suffer. I think what Hollywood really needs is a good bombing.”
These words were said by Jean Renoir to Satyajit Ray.
So, what do we need? A nuclear attack? Why after having a history of more than 100 years our film industry has made a very few number of internationally acclaimed good films. The reason is not that we can’t make good films but we don’t want to. The reason is we Indians are scared of originality.
Cinema is an art form which needs audience to survive. A film maker is scared of originality because he will not find enough audience to payback his financers and he will not be able to make another film. The audience is scared of originality because of their reluctance to change. Change is not welcomed in India. That is why we see same kind of movies and make them successful. By same kind I mean the commercially successful films made by YRF, Mahesh Bhatt and Karan Johar (including all the film makers associated with them who make the camp). All these films are nearly the same. That doesn’t mean that these makers are not capable of making different, innovative, good films. But they don’t want to.
Cinema no more reflects the society because we no more live in a society. Today we live in a market. And like all other products the market forces also control cinema. The camps mentioned above were early in realizing this fact and they changed accordingly. Because in the past we have seen them making great movies. This art has now become just a source of making money.
Who is responsible for that?
It’s a collective effort of film makers, audience and the external environment (which we can’t control). For the decades the camps are showing us the films made in accordance with the market forces of demand and supply. And today we are in the stage of habit formation. We are habituated to watching that kind of cinema. That is why whenever a different and good film is made it is appreciated by a very few people, forget the commerce part. I am not saying that their films are bad but they are the same every single time.
Why most of the good films made in India are low budget? Because the maker is aware of the fact that he will not get enough audience. This fear starts affecting the film making process right at the first stage, the thinking stage. The maker starts thinking more about cost cutting than the concept. If you want to make a commercially successful film it must have a hero, a heroine, a villain, five to six songs because majority of the audience want exactly this. They don’t want to watch a film that is made differently, in an unconventional way.
Here I would like to mention again what Renoir said to Ray about audience.
“It was as if someone had opened a secret door of communication between the film maker and his audience. it was a great feeling. Everything we did the audience understood. The French cinema could not have made those enormous strides towards maturity without this wonderfully perceptive audience. They helped us all along the way, and I for one feel grateful to them.”
So what can be done to bring Indian audience to that level? Changing their pattern of watching cinema is the only answer. We have seen that number of people acknowledging and appreciating good cinema has increased. Because today good cinema is reaching to more and more audience. But the penetration needs to be accelerated. Today we have some production houses which are backing good cinema and we have makers who are making it knowing the fact that it will not make money. That is a good sign and a ray of hope. It is our duty to increase the awareness of the people about cinema as an art. And a day will come when people, I would say majority of people would watch good cinema and they will not be known as good but commercially flops.
Tags: Economics, market, Money
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
@disturbingbehaviour, Short and exact bang on the target.Bravo.
In the land of bolly, kolly and tolly etc wood, who will know the value of cinema as an art. I think that cinema and audience evolves mutually with each other. And artistic and real cinema are always made in India but never accepeted as a part of mainstream. We are in the fight of social acceptance and recognization. Market forces drove Johar, Chopra and Ghai now to foreign shores.. We are like manufacturing clones of hollywood cinema. For more views of Satyajit Ray read this
http://windsfromtheeast.blogspot.com/2008/12/satyajit-ray-whats-wrong-with-indian.html
“Cinema no more reflects the society because we no more live in a society. Today we live in a market. And like all other products the market forces also control cinema.” This para has given me new POV to review our society, not just cinema only. Thanks for that.
A passionate post for sure. Although I would disagree in some ways. Film and art have always been in a market. Markets are an important component of every society – since eons. These are not alternatives. And art and business do work together. Leonarda da Vinci was able to create most of his work because it was commissioned by some rich dude (although that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a direct relation between money and art). Films in India have always played to the market. The problem is it is not a developed market. Indian cinema is less diverse because the Indian viewer has not been allowed to be an advanced consumer. There is just not enough access; the distribution channels for cinema were very limited.
“Cinema no more reflects the society because we no more live in a society.” Not true. Now more than ever our films reflect our society more. Why? Because of more access (multiple tv channels, multiplex), more disposable income (people voting with tickets) producers can become less risk averse because the cost of experimenting has considerably reduced. Indian cinema is only going to get better because of the development of the market. I am thrilled about these recent progresses: UTV hindi films are now available on netflix (most of them on instant play), BigFlix (reliance) has got into the netflix business both in India and the US. This will be awesome for Indian cinema.
Hollywood is more orgainsed market than us.Did it means, hollywood produces better quality of cinema ?
“Quality”, as an absolute term, has no place for me in a subjective field as cinema. I don’t believe one film is higher quality than another. It is a personal choice. The problem with Indian cinema that most of us feel is not that we don’t make high quality films but that we don’t make movies that some of us in the vast India like. What matters is diversity and speed of innovation/churn. I don’t really mind if people keep making Yash Raj films for their audience as long as there are also movies being made that I like to watch. That is what matters: choice. And in that regard, hollywood accomplishes to do that.
For the sake of being diplomatic and politically correct you can say that movies are subjective since it’s an art but can you really possibly compare “Do Beegha Zameen” and “Raja Babu”, If you had compared “Anand” and “Parichay” you could have said the same thing, but we are not really comparing two quality movies are we ? We are comparing good cinema and commercial bullshit….
Frankly, there is no need for me to be diplomatic to say that there is no universal quality scale to be applied to movies. It is a personal scale.
Everything is commercial. Khosla ka Ghosla, apparently made good money. I and many others here found it to be extremely good. The difference is only between a film made for the largest audience which engineers it for the lowest common denominator, and a film that is based on the sensibilities of a group you are a part of and can hence relate/appreciate (and even that is suited to the LCD of that smaller group, just that the difference is marginal). Without Khosla ka Ghosla there is no OLLO.
You think a lot of the films are commercial bullshit because they are not made for you, and those producers are not making films for you because they don’t have historic records to show that it is worth spending time capitalizing you. But with the new wave showing results it has proved this new crowd too is credible and responds to certain kind of cinema. KJo is all praise about Kaminey. He’ll soon fund a film on those sensibilities. It is all commercial – good, bad, ugly.
I suck at economics. The graphs ‘disturb’ my filmi sensibilities, or the lack.
We can’t blame audience for this..coz they are used to bollywood masala flicks and they like it.That’s what happening for all these years.It all depends on our prominent filmmakers who should atleast try to make different movies.We have productions houses like UTV who are trying to put money on different cinema..All we need is an encouragement..The good thing is,atleast we have people like Vishal bhardwaj who is trying to bring revolution in Indian cinema.And we should not forget RGV,who actually brought that change in Inidan cinema by making films like sathya and company.
I had written on a similar thing in my last post
http://passionforcinema.com/death-of-the-idealist/ as long as we just sit and let ourselves be fooled by this illusion called market we can never make great cinema.
The audiences are the biggest culprit, we are a nation kept on a high opium dose of religion, caste and now TV. “As long as I get my share of the dose(read heroin/opium/ganja) why should I bother”…that’s the belief system we nurture.
I didn;t like rest of the thing but i would like a nuclear attack and sunny side up please
I can show some ‘initiative’, like got some explosives o somethin…keep ‘em ‘detonator squad’ away though…heh heh