Reflection of 100 years of Indian Cinema

‘Cinema is a reflection of society’ legendary film maker of Russia Andreai Tarkavosky write these lines in his book ‘sculpting in time’. After studying Indian cinema I live by these lines. I would like to put changes and challenges witnessed and recorded by Indian society in Indian cinema.

Indian society and Indian cinema shaped simultaneously, as both are inter dependant. The very first Indian Filmmaker was Dhundiraj Goving Phalke for Raja Harishchandra released in 1913. It was a completely Indian production. Several Indian silent films were made between 1917 and 1931 on epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

As sound came in cinema during 1930, 1931 Alam Ara, the first Indian talkie film made waves with its fantastic musical score. Indian films had a strong influence of drama or nautanki. Indian cinema is has great influence of drama and mythology. Indian audience has always praised the poetry as it is used to describe the heightened emotions. Song sequence is a unique character of Indian cinema. Indrasabha in 1932contained 70 songs I think this example proves my point.

The decade of 1930s was a revolutionary decade for Indian cinema. Film makers like Dada Saheb Phalake and Baboorao Painter handled many social issues. Subject of cinema changed from mythology to real life. As most of the films were silent and music is played in the background.

In the decade of 1940s Indian cinema developed in cinematography technique. The use of sound in form of music, songs, dance and fantasy has become a part of Indian cinema. Second World War changed the sociopolitical landscape of India. As country is moving through political change and religious unrest many film directors and actors like Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, V Santaram, Mehboob Khan took Indian cinema to other countries. India got independence in 1947. It is a positive indication for Indian cinema. Mythological subjects took the back seat and subjects other than mythology and real life took prominence.

Many film historians note the decade of 1950s as a golden age of Indian cinema. Movies like Awara (1951), Pyaasa (1957), Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), Shree 420 (1955), Mother India(1957), The Apu Trilogy by Satjyajit Ray consisting of Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and Apu Sansar (1959),carved a niche of Indian cinema in world market. Most of these film talked about the subjects like change and challenges of city life and development and displacement.

In the decade of 1960s Indian government has realized the immense potential of Indian cinema as a business and aspect of art in to it. In 1961 Indian government formed Film Finance Corporation, which later became National Film Development Corporation. The motive behind this initiative is to finance and export Indian films. This decade gave us many color films. Films from decade talked about class difference, education and employment changes and challenges of reforms are easily found in this era.

In 1970s decade many people have shifted from villages to towns. Many factories have started; the changes and challenges of human resource, exploitation, poverty and grassroots problems of sanity, food, and issues of middle class. This is the period of emergence of middle class in India. Television altered the perspective of Indian Cinema. People started watching TV serials. This change put up a challenge for scriptwriter and Indian cinema gave importance of character other than story. Films like Mera Naam Joker, Seeta Aur Geeta , Bobby, Ankur, Dharmatma, Deewaar, Sholay, Amar Akbar Anthony are some of the examples.

1980s decade gave us many stars like Amitabh Bachhan, Vinod Khanna, AmirKhan became popular with their devil may care attitude. Changes and challenges in music, trends and society, technology, importance of education and collage shaped society along with cinema. 1990s decade became famous out of new stars like Salman Khan, Govinda, Shahrukh Khan and many made their mark through love stories. The emergence of Cable Television and the job opening frim abroad Changes and challenges to Indian youth they are jolly reflected in Indian Cinema. The role of negative hero played by Shahrukh Khan gave a new twist to the portrayal of character. Films like Baazigar, Darr, Roja, Bandit Queen, Hum Aapke Hai Koun , Pardes , Taal, Satya, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam made Indian audience more open to the character and subject. New millennium 2000s decade came up with challenge of digital technology. Digital photography camera became more famous. Digital Film making became more easy and cost effective. Film makers like Nagesh kookanoor made his film with a very low budget film Hyderabad blues. The other films Monsoon wedding, Mumbai Express followed the league. Changes and challenges of gender, belief, terrorism, NRI marriage, collage life and suffocation of city life are handled very effectively. Indian cinema made a mark for Oscars with the entry of Queen Elizabeth by Shekhar Kapoor.

2010s decade has come up with many changes and challenges. Indian cinema industry in year 2000 got official “industry” status. It helped to raise the finance from bank. Subhash Ghai’s company, Mukta Arts, availed this facility later that same year with a public offering of its shares on the Indian stock market. Many others followed the league. Changes and challenges like, boom in satellite television, global market for Indian movies, large number of Television production houses. It was a blessing in disguise for Producers to earn for selling Tv broadcast rights. Film making became a successful business. Every film makes sure earning by theatrical release, by selling oversea release rights, music rights, by Vcd or Dvd rights or for selling the rights of broadcasting on TV. It is a win-win situation. Now Hollywood studios have started to distribute Indian movies in a small way, although they soon ventured into production.

With the growing number of films are produced every year. Very few film run for a month in theaters. Audience of film has now various options to access the film via internet or TV release. Modern movie multiplex houses are located in major cities of India to lure back its middle class film goers. Many multiplex are coming in India. The add-on facilities and schemes of Multiplex convince middle class to visit back the cinema hall. Very lately Indian cinema has witnessed a paradigm shift of using ‘Red Camera’ to shoot a feature film. Now using a film stock is old and expensive idea. With HD digital camera the clarity of image could be achieved and with no quality loss between any transfers of information. Today Indian cinema image is not depending upon the way they shoot but the way they do the postproduction. I have mentioned the method in table.

The use of Digital SLR for shooting a feature film is a new trend. Many regional film makers are making their film with Digital SLR. This technology offers you an extra ease to move your camera in a small location. This way we save time and money to make a film. LED lights have taken the place of earlier Halogen Baby, Multi lights. LED light can be run on battery or on low energy. This new style of film making offers speed and accuracy. Nonlinear film editing completes a monstrous task in few times. The development of technology has not overtaken the subject of film. Indian cinema has entered in animation and SFX as well. Films like Krish, Don 2, Agent Vinod, Ek Tha Tigher are the few examples of this league. Indian regional cinema has made entry in Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have shown keen interest in preserving the screenplay for their research library. The script of this film is preserved in museum of Academy awards. As we have many languages in country and films are also made in many languages we have a strong base of regional cinema. Regional cinema of south India and West Bengal is already famous in foreign critics. Now many film makers are making their films on shoe string budget with the small but powerful equipments like Digital SLR and portable sound recorder. The boom in technology has created a platform for Indian directors to explore the world of storytelling. Impeccable background of poetry, literature Indian film makers are ready to take the world.

In 2013 Indian cinema has carved its own stand on world cinema. We have completed 100 years of film making very recently. Indian Society has changed with the years of post independence, reform era, Industrial era and post-industrial era. Indian Cinema has witnessed all these changes in it. Indian cinema has now reached to all over the world and it is relished all over the world. World wide release or European release opens a golden opportunity for Film Distributers and Producers.

Indian cinema is deeply rooted in Indian society. As Indian cinema has completed 100 years many film makers are making the sequels of old hits or making films that reflect the old cinema. This particular movement proves the love towards cinema. Now Indian Cinema is studied all over world for its style and narration of film making. I am proud of Indian Cinema which is not only in the basking under the glory of Classical era rather it is making classics. We can read Indian Cinema as a social tool to study the Indian society and its development.
Our legacy must move ahead for another 100 years with pride because ‘picture, abhi baaki hai mere dost!’(om shanti om)

live every moment of life

I learned few days ago that even when we want some things to pass without us seeing them, we will always look back trying to see them.
I thought of how boring life would be without its ups and downs, all that I go through have shaped me. My good practices, my mistakes,my happiness, my sorrows, my disappointments and whatever else I went through was worth it because of who I am now.
I would like to inspire you,don't be sad when things do not work as you want them to, don't give up when people you care about walk away from you just let them go.Everything works for a greater good and that is preparing you for greater things, true love, good understanding of matters,ability to handle greatness and the most important thing is a newer stronger you.

Changing Indian Cinema

Media and Entertainment is one sector which is growing by leaps and bound. Urbanization and penetration of television in the life of the people has given a further boost to this particular industry. The growth rate of the sector is facilitated due to improvement in the standard of living and also the increment in the income of the people and much of the credit can also be given to the advent of ‘corporatism’ in the film industry.
The movies of now are in stark difference from yester year flicks. Earlier movies were produced by individuals with not a strong financial backing. The script written then was with a formula of a heroine, hero, villain and load of songs. So if the movie tasted success then it was a lottery and if it tanked then the life was in the midst of misery. Now the industry survives on mullah and hype because the fore runners of the industry are big Corporate Honchos.
The trend began back in 2004, when Yash Raj Films became YRF with the release of Veer Zaara it became a brand to reckon with. The strategy was to produce 3-4 films a year; these were not mere films but a packaged product for definite consumer. A full proof idea was followed- a huge budget, bigger star cast and good music. This was done with a difference which was a new captain of the ship was appointed every time with a new release. This formula churned out hits like Hum Tum, Dhoom, Chak De India etc. But 2007 was not that great because of the entry of new players in the game who played their game interestingly and differently.
UTV can be named as a second big player of the league. The films UTV opts for are not regular ones but are more story oriented and are powerhouses as far as the acting mind it acting and not actors are concerned. Thus, the films like A Wednesday, Fashion, Dev D, Aamir etc. became their identity. These genres of films were openly welcomed at the box office. Another name worth mentioning is Karan Johar’s Dharma Production which has created a niche for itself from the audience perspective.
Moreover, Anil Ambani’s group BIG Pictures has given films like Jodha Akbar, 3Idiots and also wrecked like Raavan and Kites. They strategically got in the picture of film production, distribution, exhibition and processing. And because of this strategy BIG got freedom of purchasing movies at high price. Hence, success and crunches followed.
All these movies have changed the face of Indian Cinema. It’s no longer three shifts a day industry. The budget is no longer cut at the cost of technology. Nor the stars neither the item songs but its only and only story that matters now. Freedom to make such story based films like Rang De Basanti, Chak De India is what Corporate culture has brought into this money driven industry.
It’s a new era belonging to these kinds of films. It’s all about indulgence to the hilt! And the floodgates for opportunities are waiting.

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."

love without expressing.......you jump i jump

 "I can't. I'm involved now. You let go, and I'm, I'm gonna have to jump in there after you."

"But I'm too involved now. You jump, I jump remember? I can't turn away without knowing you'll be all right... That's all that I want."


Jack: Rose! You're so stupid. Why did you do that, huh? You're so stupid, Rose. Why did you do that? Why?
Rose: You jump, I jump, right?
Like his name-twin in Brokeback Mountain, Jack Dawson never tells Rose that he loves her. When she tries to say it to him, freezing on a door in the Atlantic Ocean, he shuts her down, tells her not to say her good-byes.

But, we know Jack loves Rose. He never says it. My favorite kind of love: the deep, unspoken kind. Love without words is my favorite love.

Delhi Gang Rape (the country crying for you )

That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the newspaper.
Sometimes, when we talk about the history of women in India, we speak in shorthand. The Mathura rape case. The Vishaka guidelines. The Bhanwari Devi case, the Suryanelli affair, the Soni Sori allegations, the business at Kunan Pushpora. Each of these, the names of women and places, mapping a geography of pain; unspeakable damage inflicted on women’s bodies, on the map of India, where you can, if you want, create a constantly updating map of violence against women.
For some, amnesia becomes a way of self-defence: there is only so much darkness you can swallow. They turn away from all the places that have become shorthand for violence beyond measure, preferring not to know about Kashmir or the outrages in Chattisgarh, choosing to forget the Bombay New Year assault, trying not to remember the deaths of a Pallavi Purkayastha, a Thangjam Manorama, Surekha and Priyanka Bhotmange, the mass rapes that marked the riots in Gujarat. Even for those who stay in touch, it isn’t possible for your empathy to keep abreast with the scale of male violence against women in India: who can follow all of the one-paragraph, three-line cases? The three-year-old raped before she can speak, the teenager assaulted by an uncle, the 65-year-old raped as closure to a property dispute, the slum householder raped and violently assaulted on her way to the bathroom. After a while, even memory hardens.
And then you reach a tipping point, and there’s that girl. For some reason, and I don’t really know why, she got through to us. Our words shrivelled in the face of what she’d been subjected to by the six men travelling on that bus, who spent an hour torturing and raping her, savagely beating up her male friend. Horrific, brutal, savage—these tired words point to a loss of language, and none of them express how deeply we identified with her.
She had not asked to become a symbol or a martyr, or a cause; she had intended to lead a normal life, practicing medicine, watching movies, going out with friends. She had not asked to be brave, to be the girl who was so courageous, the woman whose injuries symbolised the violence so many women across the country know so intimately. She had asked for one thing, after she was admitted to Safdarjung Hospital: “I want to live,” she had said to her mother.

But there is always one that gets through the armour that we build around ourselves. In 1972, the first year in which the NCRB recorded rape cases, there were 2,487 rapes reported across India. One of them involved a teenager called Mathura, raped by policemen; we remember her, we remember the history and the laws she changed. (She would be 56 now.)
Some cases stop being cases. Sometimes, an atrocity bites so deep that we have no armour against it, and that was what happened with the 23-year-old physiotherapy student, the one who left a cinema hall and boarded the wrong bus, whose intestines were so badly damaged that the injuries listed on the FIR report made hardened doctors, and then the capital city, cry for her pain.
She died early this morning, in a Singapore hospital where she and her family had been dispatched by the government for what the papers called political, not compassionate, reasons.
The grief hit harder than I’d expected. And I had two thoughts, as across Delhi, I heard some of the finest and toughest men I know break down in their grief, as some of the calmest and strongest women I know called and SMSed to say that she—one of us, this girl who had once had a future and a life of her own to lead—was gone, that it was over.
The first was: enough. Let there be an end to this epidemic of violence, this culture where if we can’t kill off our girls before they are born, we ensure that they live these lives of constant fear. Like many women in India, I rely on a layer of privilege, a network of friends, paranoid security measures and a huge dose of amnesia just to get around the city, just to travel in this country. So many more women have neither the privilege, nor the luxury of amnesia, and this week, perhaps we all stood up to say, “Enough”, no matter how incoherently or angrily we said it.
The second was even simpler. I did not know the name of the girl in the bus, through these last few days. She had a name of her own–it was not Amanat, Damini or Nirbhaya, names the media gratuitously gave her, as though after the rape, she had been issued a new identity. I don’t need to know her name now, especially if her family doesn’t want to share their lives and their grief with us. I think of all the other anonymous women whose stories don’t make it to the front pages, when I think of this woman; I think of the courage that is forced on them, the way their lives are warped in a different direction from the one they had meant to take. Don’t tell me her name; I don’t need to know it, to cry for her.

Battleship Potemkin My favourite ..........

We are talking history, we are talking cinema of the montage, a resurgence of Russian revolt - an epic. So this is tribal....this is primal....this is Sergei Eisenstein’s battleship Potemkin!. An ostentatious masterpiece, it’s about a society where injustice and domination leads to mutiny and emancipation. The film is a powerful deterrent for an ex-soviet citizen speaking of the times the Russians were facing then. It’s That most famous of all Russian films, boasting of all the features that were once a trusted formula in many Hollywood flicks but which have now faded into obscurity while the unsinkable battleship is almost invariably in pride of place.

In Battleship Potemkin, The powerful communist propaganda was treated deftly in its portrayal of a then oppressed Russian society. The history of its release in the west is trailed with constant attempts by the censors to ban the film. 1954 saw the ban lifted in Britain.

The film lives revolutionary method of montage that makes it one of Einstein classic. But it is not answer enough since incendiary as the event may have been it can’t Willy Nelly its way to proclaiming the status of numero uno! Even now in the aftermath of the demise of Russian Communism, the Potemkin battles on. As its two dimensional semblance of  bally- hoo festers, the film has hit upon yet another layer which feeds the eternal need for rabble rousing  (protest) against any form of oppression.

When the film was shot, the use of the twelve apostle’s cruiser had swift impact. For the seven years that saw the film ban from theatres, there were no free seats in German cinemas. Even as Hitler rose to power, the crowds in Munich were craving for a glimpse of the battleship!. Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, called on German film-makers to channel Eisenstein’s brilliance in their own films saying, “I am convinced that if some cinema showed a film which portrayed our epoch in a true way, and if it was a true national socialist Potemkin, in such a cinema all the tickets would be sold Battleship Potemkin would fall flat as poll was called for. Film makers are not too fond of the montage technique anymore, it being dispersed and demystified - becoming a truism. Andrei Tarkovsky, the much celebrated master of “post Stalin” Soviet Cinema, publicly depreciated montage as effeminate and artless, because it "buttonholes", the audience and does not amount to an accurate entirety. The film doesn’t entertain a linear narrative and thought its black and white the absence of shading rather than color is an

People from post war era are much more used to a three-dimensional depiction of the pre-revolutionary aristocracy, members of which were shown advocating decadence, romance, confusion and decline making them more human than some mighty, relentless and outright revolutionaries. Adaptations of Chekov, Bondarchuk and Balgakov were frequently staged and televised inspiring nobility with profound implications. The film on the other hand cultivates a rather subliminal and streamlined story of real events, acted by dull, two-dimensional marionettes but nonetheless it was heartfelt to me for the way it harbors the need to disobey and strive for freedom against any form of inhuman oppression. Not for its numerous interpretations of reality, nor its montage technique. All of us have that basic instinct to crush that which holds us back; establish justice. Potemkin is more “anarchy” than “Communism” - more “early Christianity” than “Marxism-Leninism”. The film only pictures what triggered the mutiny on the ship – (the rotten meat) rather than explain the reasons for the revolution. Even then some scenes from the film strike upon orthodox icons – that lady with the murdered child as the reification of Mary, the mother of Jesus , benign citizens as modern martyrs And the battleship firing its mighty cannons at the tyrants is perhaps the image of God punishing the evil-men. The turbulence that Russia faces as Political chaos clouds the country almost a century after the film is not too different from the images in Eisenstein’s Potemkin!

Legacy: As the soviets' disappointment with the ways of changing the world grew after a decade of romance with the avant-garde, the Bolsheviks’ taste for experimentation was soon gone to be replaced by a sense of predictability that social realism reflects. nevertheless, that flirtation with experimentation resulted in a horde of classics, be it in, sculpture, theatre, painting, literature and of course, cinema – which, quotes Lenin is “the most important of all arts for socialist Russia “And it would be nothing short of blasphemy to question Eisenstein’s genius that evolved during this period. To this day, battleship Potemkin continues to be one of art’s (cinema) triumphant achievements and a favorite of critics and film-makers alike as constant inflow of ideas and innovations plague this extraordinary medium of cinema! off long in advance."Eisenstein's answered in an open letter:"Great art, true portrayal of life and life itself are only possible in the Soviet land.” a student of engineering and architecture, Eisenstein believed in transformation, defying machines and technology. He thought a world revolution was in order. In this belief he was quite a mnemonic deputy of the Russian intelligentsia of that time.