[Reader-list] mumbai film festival

[sid luther]

i havent seen 'My Mother India' by Safina Uberoi yet but hope to catch it at the screening in delhi on the 25th


but to catch another strain that your posting had I think that the problem with documentaries in India today is that the film makers invariably sit back complacently if they can communicate the content to the audience. the exploration of the content through the form is something that is still an alien concept in the tottering Indian film/video ‘industry’.

having said which it is important to see that cinema today is curtailed to a medium of communication instead of a medium of expression. and I will qualify that dichotomy because it involves an interpretation of the terms. most film makers would rather that their content gets communicated than attempt to explore a depiction of the content in a form that reinforces their stake. 

most film making is from without rather than from with in
an impressionistic technique rather than an expressionistic rendition is the norm when it comes to the choice of subjects or the technique of communication.
                                                                  
the easiest entry point into a visual narrative is the text/dialogue. if we were to take that away from the communication the esoterism of the narrative would sky rocket purely because the audiences over the years have been taught painstakingly in a school of film making that asks them to understand the visual through the dialogue/commentary. that’s one reason why any documentary made today falls back on the much required reinforcement of a voiceover, forcing an interpretation upon the audience irrespective of what the visual language has to say. but should we presume that the audiences are daft and cannot pickup nuances without being spoon-fed the story? 

besides in such a case the command required over the craft of the medium by the film maker or the communicator would be greater. we have perfected the art of the laid back hammock film making. there is no attempt to challenge the bored audiences or the diversity possible in the medium of film/video. we have created the short attention span societies by our conservative, aged and impaired style of film making. 

owing maybe to mainstream popular cinema we have entered into complacency in the visual representation of symbolic language. we have tended to fix in our heads a structure of representation, a graph of emotions and communication which we fall back on and expect the audiences to fall back on when we attempt visual communication in the moving image.

much as we might criticize mainstream fictional narratives for their plain stupidity we continue to handle subjects in non fiction works in similar ways trying to make both ends meet in the process. no denying that the cost of the medium demands that the respective distribution networks absorb the software generated and justify the costs incurred. But is that excuse enough for film makers not to challenge the boundaries of the existing demand and feed happily into a supply channel for which there already exists a well nurtured market? 


anwar and sehjo’s ‘Swaraj’ is a typical example of a narrative feeding onto an extant discourse and attempting to find audiences that agree with it. it’s more akin to preaching to the converted. It tells its viewers that things that are ‘ok’ things, it reinforces normalcy. re-instills our belief in the status quo. it feeds into our self congratulatory egoistical belief and our need to go home feeling that we can understand. it allows us to go home sad that we live in fascist times and the individual cannot win so that we can be angry in parts sad in parts but do nothing on the whole. its like an inverted radicalism. a resolution for a complication that never existed.

based in a desert the cinematography captures the starkness of the landscape. the plot and colours are a persistent hang over of earlier films of a couple of decades ago which then were forging new grounds by creating a brush stroke and a palette of colours alongwith a new discourse if not a consciousness of the content as well as style. 

even the narrative doesn’t have a story to tell that can make you turn and look at it again. it’s an oft repeated a eulogy full of platitude of the main protagonists struggle against the family, society, state. only in this case the protagonist is a woman and therefore our heart is expected to bleed more.  this is not to challenge that for a woman in a male dominated society it is that much more difficult to pursue the self and its goals but in this case i am not starting a feminist debate but making another very different point. 

Cliché has now become a subject category, a genre... a noun that labels a genre of prevalent ideology that goes on reiterating ‘politically correct’ (even the term has become a cliché) thoughts in visual narratives of the moving image to further narratives which stagnate more than inform let alone lead or forge thought.
s

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 Shammi Nanda wrote :
>
>Saw the screening of 'My Mother India' by Safina
>Uberoi  at  the film festival in Mumbai. I found its
>concerns genuine and honest but it’s sad that majority
>of film makers in India are not interested in
>exploring the form. It's a slightly more creative
>‘activist genre’ film which has its origin in cinema
>verite. This form itslef is not so great even form the
>times of Jean Rouch, over and above that it has been
>vulgarised by television, be it National Geographic or
>Doordarhan and the activist genre of film making.
>Watching the films at the festival I was reminded of
>something that Susan Sontag has written about cinema.
>“Cinema's 100 years seem to have the shape of a life
>cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of
>glories and the onset in the last decade of an
>ignominious, irreversible decline. It's not that you
>can't look forward anymore to new films that you can
>admire. But such films not only have to be exceptions
>-- that's true of great achievements in any art. They
>have to be actual violations of the norms and
>practices that now govern movie making everywhere in
>the capitalist and would-be capitalist world -- which
>is to say, everywhere”.
>
>Also saw ‘Swaraj’ by Anwar Jamal and Sehjo Singh,
>after seeing so many posters of it all around the
>venue I had felt some great film is coming from the
>“cottage industry of film making” (as said by the
>director). I think if Balaji Telefilms were asked to
>make this film they would have done a better job!! To
>be honest I Couldn’t sit through for more than half an
>hour. It looked like a ‘Delhi Doordarshan Ki
>Prastuti’. In case any one has found it great it would
>be nice to hear their views. Its sad that films like
>this are being shown all over the world as Indian
>Cinema.
>Shammi
>
>
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