Recently there was an interesting discussion with my friend.

The discussion was Cinema as Art and Career. It started like this: Why none Bollywood movies excel in Artistic sense? Why a Bollywood movie never won an Oscar? Everybody is smart enough to factor the reasons like Star Factor to audience acceptability to marketing etc. If you read various forums and blogs then everything zeroes down to one thing. No producers are ready to take the risk associated with the new kind of content (The artistic ones) but there are film makers willing to do these types of movies. The truth is individual producers have very less idea about the art of movie making and cinema as ART. To elucidate my point, here goes a true fact.

I was reading a blog, where a new director (who was a script writer previously) shows his script to a producer, he agrees to produce the movie but with a condition attached. The script should include a skin showing Item number. The director argues about its absurdity in relevance with the script. The producer threatens to walk out. The director blinks and finally relents because it’s now or never. The critics rap the movie for the same item song.

Are the Indian audiences not ready for the artistic sense in cinemas? This is an important point because in our country illiteracy rate is so high and offbeat cinemas are never accepted easily. Audiences are hardly informed about the technical aspects of movie making and what goes into the process. The priorities of the audiences are Entertainment value & Star Factor. The larger than life image of the stars who are much higher than the movies and higher than GOD sometimes. Audiences exist in India just for their stars.

But again the above points cannot be considered as hard rules because there exists many exceptions also. Quite a few movies are successful due to their freshness and there are movies too which have failed to draw audiences in spite of their star attraction. A general consensus is fresh and strong contents have never lost money if not raked huge profits.

Now let’s delve over the basics, why there is a dearth of Cinemas as ART?

Lack of talent is never the apt word to describe the present situation but we can say that lack of opportunities for the aspirants. There are no defined paths for aspiring masses to reach their platform. The movie industry in India is the least professional in terms of work culture because everything works on contacts and referrals. People work with the team of their comfort zone chocking the entry for new talents.

The whole industry gets fragmented into some cartels who try to push each other. The activities of these cartels include buying negative publicity to negative reviews of movie to pitting release against one another to buying the awards and reviews against their rivals. The system is so bad that talent goes wasted and people never make it to the national level, end their innings being a local talent only.

Our society never encourages people to take ART as career. Every parents/institutions prepare a child to serve a job but never make them independent. The academic of a school is such that it places least importance to ART as career. To quote a true incident, an uncle of my friend in his childhood days ran away from home when his parents forced him to stop painting and chose Engineering as career. The man is a successful painter now in NCR region and is well settled. We subconsciously accept that choosing ART as a career is full of risks. An underlying sense of insecurity prevails from the beginning which slowly eats the dedication and enthusiasm to beat the initial failures. This is a sensitive factor and pushes strugglers back foot.

Scarcity of good institutions and platforms. Good institutions where people can get education on ART is a rare commodity in India. There are few government colleges which are outdated on every term. Compare the same with US, there are various acting and movie schools. Thousands graduate from them every year and it’s a win-win situation for industry as well as academia. The lack of good institutions creates a vacuum which gets filled with mediocre talent and people with strong network come fill the gap.

There is a scarcity workshop, seminars and short term courses to educate people about the various aspects of movie making and writing skills. Vishal Bharadwaj of Kaminey fame got his script for the movie from Kajetan boy (aspiring script writer) and bought it at Rs 2 lakhs. He met the boy at a script writing workshop organized by Mira Nair. More workshops can facilitate the meeting of industry and the talent which can narrow down the gap considerably helping interested people to get a close look about cinema as ART.

Audiences will feed the content what this industry wants them to feed. Luckily things have started to change with the onset of multiplex culture, accessibility of contents to the movie buffs through the proliferation of internet, better awareness through blogs and websites, encouraging aspirants through various online competitions. The greatest boon is the area of technology narrowed the gap between aspirations and realities where one can buy a camera and try to shoot his ideas and share the same with millions of viewers.

To conclude with a quote "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse." - Henry Ford

Yes, I agree that there is insecurity and instability in choosing ART as career but there is a whole different new world waiting for an artist beyond the horizon of social rules. It’s just the creator of ART and admirer with nothing in between.

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written by idiott, December 02, 2009

what do you mean by art?

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written by Santosh, December 03, 2009

The concept of art and commercial cinema has been the topic of debate in Bollywood. The formula films formed the essential part of commercial type of cinema. All films made necessarily adhered to the set formula of good men / women and bad men / women and finally the good prevails in the last shot. The culmination comes around with a dash of romance an item number a few fights and a few songs. Thankfully Bollywood has changed as also the cinegoers. The movie makers are a lot more creative today and films do not sell by star value!!

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written by suman, December 03, 2009

we cannot compare US with India. It is different here, people here are purely commercial. ART does not feed us in India unlike US. In India people struggle for their basics and we cannot expect them to choose ART but I fail to understand why established people also stick to the same commercial stuff. At least they can try exploring more of their talent.
Anyways I m getting distracted.
Nice write up admin. You should write frequently

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