Indian Cinema and the market forces

Indian Cinema and the market forces

“The best films of a country are produced in times of stress. Look what the war has done to Italian films. Look at Brief Encounter. I don’t think a great film like that would have been made possible without all those air raids London had to suffer. I think what Hollywood really needs is a good bombing.”
These words were said by Jean Renoir to Satyajit Ray.
So, what do we need? A nuclear attack? Why after having a history of more than 100 years our film industry has made a very few number of internationally acclaimed good films. The reason is not that we can’t make good films but we don’t want to. The reason is we Indians are scared of originality.

Cinema is an art form which needs audience to survive. A film maker is scared of originality because he will not find enough audience to payback his financers and he will not be able to make another film. The audience is scared of originality because of their reluctance to change. Change is not welcomed in India. That is why we see same kind of movies and make them successful. By same kind I mean the commercially successful films made by YRF, Mahesh Bhatt and Karan Johar (including all the film makers associated with them who make the camp). All these films are nearly the same. That doesn’t mean that these makers are not capable of making different, innovative, good films. But they don’t want to.

Cinema no more reflects the society because we no more live in a society. Today we live in a market. And like all other products the market forces also control cinema. The camps mentioned above were early in realizing this fact and they changed accordingly. Because in the past we have seen them making great movies. This art has now become just a source of making money.

Who is responsible for that?
It’s a collective effort of film makers, audience and the external environment (which we can’t control). For the decades the camps are showing us the films made in accordance with the market forces of demand and supply. And today we are in the stage of habit formation. We are habituated to watching that kind of cinema. That is why whenever a different and good film is made it is appreciated by a very few people, forget the commerce part. I am not saying that their films are bad but they are the same every single time.

Why most of the good films made in India are low budget? Because the maker is aware of the fact that he will not get enough audience. This fear starts affecting the film making process right at the first stage, the thinking stage. The maker starts thinking more about cost cutting than the concept. If you want to make a commercially successful film it must have a hero, a heroine, a villain, five to six songs because majority of the audience want exactly this. They don’t want to watch a film that is made differently, in an unconventional way. Here I would like to mention again what Renoir said to Ray about audience.

“It was as if someone had opened a secret door of communication between the film maker and his audience. it was a great feeling. Everything we did the audience understood. The French cinema could not have made those enormous strides towards maturity without this wonderfully perceptive audience. They helped us all along the way, and I for one feel grateful to them.”

So what can be done to bring Indian audience to that level? Changing their pattern of watching cinema is the only answer. We have seen that number of people acknowledging and appreciating good cinema has increased. Because today good cinema is reaching to more and more audience. But the penetration needs to be accelerated. Today we have some production houses which are backing good cinema and we have makers who are making it knowing the fact that it will not make money. That is a good sign and a ray of hope. It is our duty to increase the awareness of the people about cinema as an art. And a day will come when people, I would say majority of people would watch good cinema and they will not be known as good but commercially flops.