Describing himself as a dinosaur that one found in the Jurassic Park, renowned Polish auteur Krzysztof Zanussi bemoaned at an interaction during the 11th edition of Bengaluru International Film Festival (Biffes) that in today’s rather fast and furious paced age of mass films and equally rapidly changing society and tastes, classicists like him were rendered as fossils.
These mass-produced films leave the audiences so benumbed and in a delirious daze that today’s audiences are unable to distinguish between, and appreciate aesthetic and meaningful cinema as against films made purely for entertainment and more commercial considerations.
There is a certain lack of audience engagement with the cinemas of today as a result of which they are unable to relate to the cinemas of the past and understand aesthetics and values as an art form, the octogenarian auteur pointed out.
Having a panoply of disparate audiences in a thrall the Polish master, who was bestowed with the Lifetime Achievement Award by India at the 43rd International Film Festival of India, in Goa, six years back, observed that with too many films tackling equally multifarious narratives, the level of discourse on cinema, unlike in the past, has trickled down. The audience is awash with the quantity of films than quality that they do not have sufficient time and inclination to reflect and ruminate on them which was a luxury in the past.
Zanussi -- whose films deal with love, death, happiness and conscience, looking at how they manifest themselves in the world today -- felt that such factory line outputs were not only reflective of the society we live in today, but was also turning things rather banal which was not the case in the past.
“Mass cinema is very depressing, the future is frightening and this changing time is rather uneasy,” a concerned Zanussi observed, while pointing out that the film language today was woefully less advanced than it was in the past.
Zanussi, Europe’s definitive cinema directors and among the most intellectual and passionate directors of our times, made a snide remark on how modern-day movie makers are fond of using drones on the slightest pretext.
The audience of today found the aesthetics of earlier classical cinemas too sophisticated to appreciate and distastefully shunned it as non-appealing.
In this regard, the physicist who gave up his profession to pursue his calling in cinema, and made films in one of the turbulent times of history of his country and the world, elucidated that while technology per se had brought in a tsunami of changes to cinema, on the other hand, it has also vacuumed it of all its virtues as a pure play art form.
It is here he noted that the classics of his contemporaries, including his own works, notably that of Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman , would find no resonance with present-day audiences. The level of communication has hit a nadir as a result, he lamented.
Zanussi, who touched upon various aspects of cinema from scripting, casting and developing content, in the course of his tete-a-tete , said he has stopped interfering and given total freedom to the creativity of his cinematographer, editor and music composers and trusting them implicitly to give out their best that elevates his own work.
On a philosophical note, Zanussi, known for his exploration of ethical issues of the modern world with a slow rhythm, long frames, suggestive milieu of images and evocative spiritual moods, capturing the passage of time through the lens, noted that none could take one’s life for granted and one had to justify one’s life to find true meaning to one’s existence.
Cinema reflects society. If society becomes stands still, cinema just follows the suit, Zanussi said counselling the youngsters to take up cinema making, as they are more ambitious and had the potential of creating a new wave.
“In the Russian story, there’s an instance wherein a man dies and finds himself at the gates of paradise, where St Peter takes the call of letting them in or not. The man in question is let in. He enters only to turn back and ask St Peter, can you tell me what in my 60 years of uneventful life amounted to this. St. Peter replies, “Once when you were in a restaurant, a woman asked you to pass on the sugar on your table. You passed it to her. This benign act of yours is the sole reason for you being granted the passage to paradise.”
“Is it not absurd? But, then life’s just like that. We never understand the true sense of our existence, but we have to keep trying anyway,” the philosopher Zanussi quipped with his inimitable amiable manner.