What ails Indian Cinema?

A wrong title at a wrong time, given the mass orgasm Indians are having at the success of ‘Slumdog etc etc…’

The media is almost making us believe that we’ve arrived; the age of cosmetic cinema in the shinning multiplexes of a ‘shinning new India’. With reports of Bollywood movies grossing millions and receiving awards in the International space, it may appear indeed that Indian cinema is at an all-time high. A closer scrutiny, however, may reveal a different picture...

Firstly, the millions (so proudly reported by the Indian T.V channels) flow-in primarily because of the NRI population, rather than a true broad-based International audience. Organizing a Filmfare award in Dubai or Maldives in itself can hardly create a global audience. Secondly, the self congratulatory myth of Bollywood finally making it big internationally is largely created by a myopic and popularity-focused media taking recourse to selective highlighting. Films from countries like Japan, Iran, Korea, etc. (producing far lesser films in numbers) have a much bigger and broader international following. The Indian media is either ignorant of these, or chooses to keep its audience comfortably basking in a narrow, parochial self-glory.

Cinematic tradition, like any other art form, has a historical context and continuity. While sifting through my memory, trying to dig out what cinema had meant to me, I couldn’t resist repeating Bergman: “Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”

Unfortunately for us, Bergman, like Ray, Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini, etc., is dead. While in many countries, a new generation of filmmakers, like Gus Van Sant (USA), Zhang Yimou (China), Wong Kar-wai (Hong-Kong), Majid Majidi, (Iran), Richard Linklater (USA), Tareque Masud (Bangladesh), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), etc. are trying to keep the experimenting tradition alive and to create their own cinematic language, in India, we’re a generation without memory, without history, without knowledge, basking in the transience of junk entertainment, a T.V promoted ‘make-believe’. Unfortunately, we still do not know the difference between acting and modeling. We are primarily concerned with copying, stealing, and organizing Filmfare awards, flushing everything with vulgar glamor and money.


One of the most deep-rooted causes of the problem is the tendency of the film-makers to be formulaic (dance, action, melodrama). Most of the film-makers in India are driven not by any artistic urge but by a vague, mythical notion of ‘what sells’, altogether bypassing the rigor and discipline of creation. As a result, there’s neither much experimentation with the art form, nor much variety in themes. This, precisely, is the problem with formula: it eventually replaces the imagination of the creator, creating a tendency towards short-cut and mass manufacturing; while in true art, there’s neither a short-cut, nor a chance to replicate or mass manufacture. Hemingway had once said: ‘For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning, where he tried again for something which is beyond attainment.’

Well… what’s true for literature is true for cinema as well.

Another troubling trait in the Indian film industry is a wholesale focus on packaging and promotion (though again in formulaic patterns), while neglecting the product itself. Unscrupulous self-promotion to grab attention in an over-crowded space, plagiarism, and manipulation is sadly replacing the art and the essence of film-making. While packaging and promotion may serve some purpose, but in itself cannot substitute for the product itself. Hence, irrespective of the self-congratulatory statements and uncouth media promotions, the fact remains that a large part of Bollywood and Indian cinema continues to cater only to junk entertainment.

The industry is much too cluttered with dynastic heredity and much too focused on instant fame and big money to have space left for the true artists, for creativity, or for experimentation. The sad aspect is that even if there are exceptions (like ‘Ocean of an Old Man’; a brilliant, evocative film by FTII graduate Rajesh Shera), even if there are encouraging initiatives like FulMarxx Shorts Fest, these hardly find their way through the manipulative nexus of the industry or the mainstream media.

Unless the industry finds ways of encouraging new voices and new experiments in syntax and themes, unless the media takes the responsibility of constructive criticism and highlight new artistic voices (a classical example is André Bazin’s Cahiers du cinema in the fifties and the sixties of France) , unless the audience becomes matured and open enough to appreciate and patronize (in some form) non-mainstream films (media again needs to play a big role here), Indian cinema will continue to be what it is: an ugly, grotesque, money-making machinery capitalizing on titillating a mass of junk-focused audience.

- Siddhartha
You can also read this essay at http://passionforcinema.com/what-ails-indian-cinema

Once again

What is monsoon

if not memories


of narrow streets

watched through the window


the grey sky

the freedom

to go out

and wash away


- Siddhartha (April 14, 2009)

As I move on

December 24, 2008 (a few days before I moved to Mumbai, leaving so much behind...)

As the strange beckoning of the unknown makes my soul restless once again, as wanderlust pulls me out of my moss-grown comfort and sends me packing, as my last days of stay within the comfort of 'a sleepy hometown' draws to an end, I look back once again through the multitudinous memories of the past few years. How had it been to remain firmly rooted for so long (rare indeed, considering the times in which we live)?

During the last five years, on an average, I'd spent about fifteen odd days every month travelling. The arrangement, on a whole served me well. While enjoying the stability of staying at home, the constant traveling kept my restless wanderlust at check, ensuring my 'rolling stone' status, with my mental window always open to the outside world. My travels had taken me through the laid-back beach town of Alibagh (the unforgettable monsoon) to the fast and happening KL, the lush green tea gardens of Assam and Dooars to the desert countries of the Middle-East, the small industrial towns like Rourkela to the nostalgic and surprisingly cosmopolitan Dhaka.

Now, as my five years of ‘staying at home’ is coming to a close, I have a feeling that the warmth and camaraderie of my colleagues and the wonderful memories associated with these travels (as my picture albums will vouch) will remain as my most significant professional 'takeaways'. As I retrospect through these bylanes of memories, my mind is getting filled with the endless tapestry of faces, landscapes, and anecdotes associated with these travels, reminding me once again of the inexhaustible possibilities and richness of the human life.

However, the pictures in my albums will only tell half the story. The pictures will ramble (like tell-tale) about everything that can be captured with a camera. Yet, there’ll still remain many an image which the camera could not capture, images which even reminiscences will not be able to recreate. These are pictures which make travel worthwhile. It's in search for these pictures that I'm packing my bags once again. Being brought up on tales of travel and adventure, I'm always weary of gathering moss. And as I'm once again leaving behind all comfort and getting ready to roll-on, I remember those inspiring (and challenging?) words of Dylan – 'How does it feel...?'

I wish I could tell.

Here. Now.

The pale blue sky and the drifting birds!

perceived

through the grey haze of urban smog


the rickety bylanes

of memory and wanderlust

washed away

in the monsoon rain

like smoke-filled teardrops

yet refusing to fade away


coming

back every winter

like the passion in our ageing soul

or the bespectacled man

on the street

refusing to die


Yes…

we will



- Siddhartha Banerjee

Ritwik Ghatak, the lone voice

Ghatak’s films were an artist’s rebellious, painful, naked howl that cuts through the entire façade of so called decorative and bourgeois art; screaming with a brave and indifferent ‘I deny’.


Creativity, more than the art-form, is concerned with ideas and thoughts; the medium or the art-form doing as much as to ‘support’ the expression. The greatest of the artists (Kafka being a notable example) were almost always spontaneous, where the creative ideas/ inspirations have literally ‘exploded’ out, without any ‘dressing’. Great works of art (like Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’), are in many cases incomplete, yet bursting with inspiration and intensity.

Like Dostoevsky, Ritwik Ghatak too lived his thoughts and ideas in his personal life; suffering not only theoretically, but also physically, from acute alcoholism, alienation, isolation, etc. As Shahani (one of his prized pupil) had once explained, Ritwik Ghatak was “disenchanted with those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not, implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and movement.” A curious parallel can be drawn from the characters in his films: when they smoke (which is mostly ‘bidi’), they smoke with a tremendous intensity and hatred, in stark contrast to Ray’s characters (smoking cigarettes) who smoke elegantly, intellectually. This is not to speak anything against Ray’s work in any way. Ray is and will always remain one of the greatest directors that world cinema has ever produced.

Ghatak, like Joyce (or Ginsberg) in literature, had created his own style (like usage of sound alongwith deep-focus to create different layers of background) in order to express himself. His style was tailored to express ideas, problems, and issues deeply rooted in the epoch in which he lived; and yet, transcending beyond boundaries and epochs. Capturing Bengal in the 50s to 70s, his films revolved around themes of partition, alienation, existential struggle, always seen from an individual’s view-point, never impersonal. The artist’s spontaneity, pain and empathy were always visible.

Ghatak consciously held out against succumbing to the upper-middle class Bengali audience (often called the ‘intelligentsia’), who were far removed from ground-level problems like famine and partition. As a result, Ghatak could never reach upto their cozy, fashionable drawing rooms (like the bust of Goethe described in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf). His films spoke with a self-consuming intensity which never gave any comfort to the audience. Only those ready to face it with all its stark cruelty were welcome to his myriad world. This lack of ‘feel-good’ factor was a key reason for his limited appeal in India and the West (there were other reasons though, like planned sabotage by political establishments). He himself once said – “I do not believe in 'entertainment' as they say it or slogan mongering. Rather, I believe in thinking deeply of the universe, the world at large, the international situation, my country and finally my own people. I make films for them. I may be a failure. That is for the people to judge.”

As Ghatak is being rediscovered these days, as generations to come will wonder at his films, as his films will continue to speak across the boundaries which had systematically tried to finish him off, a dark question will again and again come to haunt us - ‘Are we too, not responsible?’

- Siddhartha Banerjee, http://passionforcinema.com/ritwik-ghatak-the-lone-voice/