A recent discussion held at the Krishnakriti Festival of Arts and Culture, organised in Hyderabad, saw some of the brightest minds from the entertainment industry talk about the problems that Indian cinema is facing at present
Indian cinema has its share of unethical practices being followed by both the people in the industry as well as by film buffs, according to experts, who generally wanted censorship in the field to end. A seminar held as part of Krishnakriti Festival of Arts and Culture here saw speakers bemoaning certain unhealthy practices in the world of celluloid even while coming up homilies from self-experience gained over years of experience and acquaintance.
Renowned actor Amol Palekar went to the extent of straightaway calling for a scrap of the Censor Board of Film Certification, saying the government-appointed body’s conduct often bordered on “dangerous” and “absurd”.
“A violent rape seen would be okayed, but use of cuss words—they could be essential in a context—might get cut,” he cited an example at the discussion ‘So Many Cinemas: Do Filmmakers Have to be Responsible to Their AudiencesIJ” by a six-member panel at four-day Krishnakriti 2016 that concluded in Hyderabad.
Selvaggia Velo, who is the director of the annual River to River Florence India Festival, moderated the hour-long session at Madhapur Centre for Cultural Resources and Training, where her fellow speakers were television features producer Pawan Manvi, film actress-designer Elahe Hiptoola, creative sciences scholar Hariharan Krishnan and sociologist Samuel Berthet.
Septuagenarian Amol Palekar, who is a director-producer besides having acted in Hindi and a range of regional Indian movies, said it was illogical that films alone had to go through a pre-presentation filter, which was not applicable to TV serials.
As in movies, the credits should be shown at the start—and not at the end when the seats in the cinema houses go empty. “They should of at latest 14-point font size and be displayed for a minimum eight seconds,” he specified adding that film adapted from literary works should give credit first to the original author and not the screenplay writer.
While cinema should not engage in gender discrimination when it comes to remuneration, it should also not let unsafe stunt scenes or shoot without the crew being insured. “As for the audience, it is bad for them to be engaged in heckling and passing loud comments while watching a film,” said Amol Palekar, who is also a painter. “But the worst thing the public can do is to forcibly stop the screening of a film, thus obstructing others as well.”
Manvi, who has an association with Doordarshan dating back to the mid-1970s, trashed current television industry, saying its obsession with eyeballs and TRP ratings was leading to a huge rot in ethics. “Today, you have a television serial with a silly little story being extended to years of monotony on the mini screen,” he noted, saying “the advertising revenues decide everything” in India, which had no less than 750 channels.
Elahe, who is the producer of Hyderabad Blues 2, said her films sought to tacitly weave in the idea of secularism. For instance, her sports drama film Iqbal (2005) never prompted the viewer to see the central character as a Muslim boy, but a deaf-and-mute village boy struggling to make it to the upper echelons of cricket in his country.
Taking cue from this point, Hariharan Krishnan, professor at Mahindra Ecrole Centrale, said Mother India had its top five personalities all Muslims, yet the iconic 20th-century movie borrowed from Hindu mythology.
The speaker also took the debate to different level by noting that Mahatma Gandhi’s antipathy for cinema as based on a fallacy. “The great leader thought the youth were wasting time on this entertainment, when cinema of those days actually was promoting a discourse on various societal issues,” he said.
Also, Indian cinema had an international connection even in the pre-Independence era. For instance, the 1945 Tamil film Meera starring musician MS Subbulakshmi had its historical protagonist from north India and the director Ellis R Dungan from America, he pointed out.
Brethet, who teaches in Noida, said Indian cinema should no more toe the line of “we give audience trash because the audience wants it”.
A second session in the evening on ‘Discussing Pluralities/Marginalities in Contemporary Indian Art’ was addressed by experts Susie Tharu, Anand Gapada, Jayram Poduval, Rahul Bhattacharya and Anshuman Dasgupta.