“I belong to a time when we talked about great art and culture when we spoke about India,” Ratna Pathak Shah, theatre, film and television actor, said regretting the fact that suddenly all that seems to represent the nation, especially outside of our own shores, seems to be Bollywood.
“It’s like saying that all of American civilisation is Hollywood,” she said. For her, Bollywood is not India. “It’s a vulgar, simplistic, childish idea of India. It has been promoting hypocrisy beyond belief,” she said, setting off a blistering start to the session titled “Coming of age: the mainstreaming of parallel cinema”. She felt Bollywood was “overly representative” of Indian cinema when a lot of experimentation is happening in cinema in all languages across India.
The scathing attack on Bollywood came in light of a query by Veena Venugopal, moderator and Associate Editor, The Hindu, about Shah’s recent criticism of Dabangg. She felt that the film sent out scary, objectionable messages about women. “It does not talk well about our civilisation,” she said.
Varied pursuits
Actor-director Suhasini Mani Ratnam compared watching a film with reading a book. You see a film at a go, can’t stop midway, nor put it down like a book and come back to it later. But if, with digitisation, you can watch the film at your convenience, then the divide between commercial and parallel cinema will be wiped off, she said, carrying the debate forward. She went back to the roots of art house cinema —how it emerged as an act of rebellion against oppression. “All art cinema is not great; some of the films can put you to sleep,” she said. But she felt that there was a growing breed of filmmakers now who were not using cinema to make a statement or to get noticed.
One of them, Amit Masurkar, the director of the critically acclaimed Newton, spoke about how people wondered why he was making a film on politics. They had this perception that the youth were not interested in politics, while Masurkar believed politics was another form of entertainment for people. For an independent-minded filmmaker like him, the struggle was not about getting a film made or selling and exhibiting it. “The struggle is in getting the right ideas,” he said.
When quizzed about the role of actors in bridging the gap between mainstream and commercial cinema, Suhasini Mani Ratnam said that it was the audience that was the key in filling up the divide. “[But] If an actor decides to support a good film, nothing like it,” she said. In Tamil cinema, Shivaji Ganesan experimented with small, new films, followed by Kamal Hassan and Rajinikanth in the beginning; Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Akshay Kumar had been trying it in Bollywood.
Shah differed hoping that actors would be cast for their suitability than their stardom. She spoke about the young filmmakers of the 1970s who gravitated towards stars. They depleted the directors rather than feed them. “Even a well-meaning star brings a certain amount of baggage,” she said.
In response to that, Masurkar spoke about working with younger actors like Rajkummar Rao, who do not come from film families. “They realise that they will have to work hard to go ahead,” he said.
He spoke of himself as the first generation of filmmakers who did not just discover films online but even picked up his filmmaking skills from the Internet.
But can that equal being in a film school with passionate mentors and peers for company and constant conversations on cinema? Suhasini evocatively spoke about being the only woman among 120 men in the film school. Even that did not prepare her for her tryst with international cinema. She broke down on watching Bicycle Thieves.
It made her realise what cinema could do, what her future in filmmaking was going to be like. “In 1979, at the age of 16, it could only happen at a film institute,” she said.
Masurkar disagreed vehemently that independent films like his were still confined to a small urban niche. Newton was released in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Gorakhpur. It ran for four weeks in Dalli Rajhara.
Shah said the audience had changed radically. In two generations, there would be a much more literate audience. In a nutshell, a fertile ground and time to take cinema to its next level forward.
