It’s a beginner’s guide to world cinema, says Deepa Gahlot 

There is always a shortage of good writing on cinema in India, and it is only recently that the market has opened up for serious as well as light writing on films, filmmakers and stars.

There have been hardly any studies on directors in Indian cinema and one was hoping that gap would be filled by a critic of the seniority and scholarship of MK Raghavendra. However, he chooses to pick directors from all over the world, and while there can hardly be any quarrel with his choice of names, there is also a sense of déjà vu, since many of the directors selected to make up the list of 50 Major Film-makers of the Modern Era have been written about at length and their work analysed ad nauseum.

They are the directors who have cult followings amid the community of cinema buffs; those who attend festivals and keep abreast of trends in world cinema know all about these filmmakers already. For instance, can there be any list of cinema greats without Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Bresson, luis Buñuel, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni and Satyajit RayIJ Raghavendra has covered the post-1960s era, but then most of the filmmakers now venerated as greats are from this period, if one leaves out the pioneers.

Perhaps a book on the filmmakers who have been doing great work, but for some reason (following trends, lazy researching, personal tastes) have not made it to any such lists would be in orderIJ There is also the question of what the writer considers the ‘modern’ era, because discussions have moved on to the post-modern and beyond.  

To be fair, Raghavendra has also included directors like Wong Kar-Wai, Abbas Kiarostami, Atom Egoyan, lars von Trier, Bong Joon-Ho and Quentin Tarantino, who are closer to the hearts of the current movie buff. But it would have been interesting to see if there can be a list of notable filmmakers, perhaps after the 1980s, who left behind the enormous influence of the greats. To name a few, Nanni Moretti, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Fatin Akin, Ang lee or the Coen Brothers. It really is time to take another look at the list and recognise some new masters, keeping in mind the subjectivity of all such undertakings.  

Just an observation: While Hollywood biggies like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are included, when it comes to Indian cinema, there is a curious squeamishness to include any mainstream directors, except Raj Kapoor, so the usual names — Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Govindan  Aravindan — are there. Maybe it’s time for some critics to stick their necks out and give, say, Bimal Roy and Vijay Anand their due... to name just two whose influence on Indian cinema has never been properly acknowledged, while Guru Dutt (not included in this book) got his place in the pantheon because he was discovered by the West.

In the introduction, Raghavendra has given his reasons for choosing these 50 filmmakers for his book and also writes that in “order to correct the prejudice in favour of the acknowledged ‘names’, I will try to make comparisons with film-makers outside the canon”. Which he does in a random way, like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton being mentioned in the piece on Jacques Tati.

That said, the book is a good beginner’s guide to world cinema. The neophyte film buff, after experiencing a heady film festival and discovering there is more to cinema than Karan Johar and Anurag Kashyap, is at a loss as to how and where to begin a film education. Of course, there is always the Net, but the surfeit of information and wildly divergent views may be too much to handle. A book like this would come in handy — in short, simple chapters without resorting to too much academic jargon, Raghavendra tells eager but uninitiated readers which directors to follow. And once they go through this list, they would be able to make their own choices anyway, about the ones who did not make the cut.

The informed film lover might find the writing simplistic and prone to sweeping generalisations like, “Wong Kar-wai’s cinema might have been taken to be ‘lyrical’ because it is so dominated by visual style — if he had not been let down by his weakness at narration.” Or, “Assessed as a comprehensive vision, Kurosawa’s output is lightweight and innocuous.”

But then this book does not promise to be the definitive list of great filmmakers for the cinema aficionado — there can be no such list, because there are as many favourites as there are experts. Raghavendra’s choice of three quotes at the beginning of the book is amusingly apt — the last one is from The Dead Pool, uttered by Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), “Well, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one.” Dirty Harry, right as usual. 

The reviewer is a film critic and writer