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iView Author: Vishesh Mankal (New Delhi, India)

Email: Vishesh_Mankal [at] hotmail [dot] com

The Shells of Pride

Even though cinema is a very young art form compared to its predecessors it has already been subject to many controversies and theories. Over the years, films have been divided into many camps but the most enduring battle has been fought between the “Artistic” and the “Commercial” camps. Due to a lack of art films in India, this battle is instead fought by “Realistic” films. These films can be traced as far back as Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North”, but to not give Grierson the credit he deserves for coining and defining the term documentary would be a crime, as his thoughts have had a major impact on the way fictional stories are told today. Filmmakers like Rossellini and De Sica borrowed heavily from the documentary way of the telling stories when they began the Italian New Wave. The birth of realistic films in India happened around the same time with Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” and Bimal Roy’s “Do Bigha Zameen”. Commercial cinema, however, has existed in India for almost as long as it has in the West, the birth of which of course is credited to Dada Saheb Phalke and his film “Raja Harishchandra”. The real battle between the two camps began in India in the 1970s. This was when the Films Division of India took a stronger stance and began producing films for filmmakers like Shyam Benegal and Ketan Mehta. This forced commercial filmmakers to compete for their audiences. Eventually, commercial cinema won the battle. Now, after thirty odd years both camps have now had enough time to form their arguments. While commercial cinema revels in the revenue of ticket sales, realistic cinema seems to found its pot of gold in touring the festival circuit. The truth is, however, that neither seems to have impressed the audiences in a major way in a long time. Sure, a handful of films come out every few years or so that grab the attention of the audiences, but most disappear in the abyss of obscurity, drowned by the every increasing complacency of their makers. The ratio of quality is dismal.

The simple fact of life is that films are, by nature, made for an audience. One just cannot get around it. While realistic filmmakers often take a high handed stance and say that their films are meant for a “mature” or an “enlightened” audience, commercial filmmakers simply act to gather their audiences in large numbers. These kinds of event films rely more on factors like promotion and casting for success rather than traditional elements like a good screenplay and solid execution. What escapes their notice is that this system only works because the audiences have to pay in advance, having based their assumptions on such factors as advertising and publicity and not the actual film. If people had to pay after watching a film, so many films would not be able to generate a fraction of their present revenue. Similarly, so many realistic filmmakers attribute the failure of their films to the lack of a good audience when oftentimes the real reason is poor filmmaking. This is not to say that all realistic films are poorly made or that the audience is always the final judge on all films. Indeed there have been many films that escape the notice of audiences simply because they are way ahead of their times. There have been some great films that suffered this fate, but so many times filmmakers hide themselves behind the veil of high handedness by quoting such reasons, instead of simply trying to make better films.

It is apparent that somewhere along the line both types of filmmakers have become complacent. They have found their niches and strive to stay put instead of trying new things. It gets extremely frustrating when one watches the interviews of major Bollywood stars where they dish out things like “the audiences want to have a good time” and that “people don’t go in to cry” when any half-way sensible person knows that tragedies have enjoyed as many takers as comedies throughout history, if not more. If this wasn’t the case, then how come anyone living within the radius of civilization has heard of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”? Or how come the tragedy of India’s very own “Mahabharata” is so endearing? Similarly, realistic filmmakers forget that no matter how hard they try, they can never emulate reality. Even documentary filmmakers, the sworn protectors of reality in the medium, can never be a hundred percent real. Even if one ignores the fact that all films are edited and therefore manipulated, all one needs to do is understand that the camera can never be objective; it is always placed in a specific position, mounted with a specific lens size, composed for a specific image size and so on. So with so many specifics to guide the visuals, how can one ever assume that it is totally objective? Therefore, realistic filmmakers must understand that a good film is not made on the pretense of reality, but on the sense of storytelling. This storytelling is what is ignored by both camps.
Both camps are stopped by their sense of security it seems. It makes them unwilling to try new things for fear of losing their comforts. This fear was the main reason that so many great films came out of the 1970’s from both camps. It was the conflict between the two that made them yearn for success. It made them come out of their shells and pursue their goals. Now that the battle has been won by one side and the losing side has found its niche, there can be no growth, for there is no challenge. Film history has shown that whoever gets stuck in time and refuses to grow eventually forces himself out the door. If that wasn’t the case, then Mithun Chakroborty would still be a superstar and the political thrillers of the nineties would still be prevailing. The simple fact is that time is constantly moving; it shapes people, it changes people and whoever refuses to change, perishes. So, instead of working to build a shell of formulas around themselves, filmmakers should constantly be trying to outdo themselves. Complacency is a virus that breeds incompetence and slowly destroys its host. In art forms the pursuit of success consists of honesty of intention and not methodical calculations; one should always be looking ahead instead of deciphering the reasons behind one’s past successes. Cinema is still a very young art form to have conventions, there is still so much to do and so much to see and if filmmakers don’t realize that then they would be denying themselves, more than the audiences, their true potential. Fortunately, though, a handful of films have come out in the recent past that honor cinema more than the personal politics of the makers. Slowly, but surely, the face of Indian cinema is changing.

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“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. ”
-Isaac Newton

“Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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