Author: Anirban Lahiri

Society
Man is a political animal. So reflected Aristotle. He went a step further to see politics and culture as by-products of nature. Man is given speech and moral reason as natural, inborn, gifts. So, any further device, or design, such as politics, must be natural, Aristotle thought.

History is an interesting play of power — domination of one group by another — through socio-economic-cultural class differences. Aristotle named any such play of power politics. Although nobody is pure victim or pure perpetrator of crime — everybody is connected in the dynamics of the social power play – some groups, or people, are more aware of the play, inherent in the social systems, than others. They know what Marx meant by the remark — “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please…” They are the wise people who know the system is not made to change just like that. These people are the perpetrators of the power game to keep the system alive and kicking, and to reap personal fruits too.

On the other end of the power game are the victims. They do not want to know. They feel blessed in ignorance. They complain sometimes, about the lacks in life. But, they fear knowledge. Knowing too much is bad — the comment the new science teacher passed on the fired Mr Rzykrusky in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (2012). Most of us are like the new science teacher. We feel threatened by history. We choose to be ostriches on the face of sandstorm instead. We choose to be puppets.

The third category is that of the critic. The critic is as aware as the perpetrator of the crime. But, s/he chooses not to join the rank of the perpetrators. S/he tries to awaken the victims, from the self-induced slumber. S/he does so when she is a naïve critic. The wiser critic knows that the system cannot change like that. S/he knows that the system would take its own time – like any other automaton it has life. The wise critic plays her/his role, despite knowing that it is impossible, and inadvisable, to crack the system, because s/he sees possibilities of spreading the power over more hands by her/his critique. Society

Critics read culture through its products. The act of close reading is sometimes called deconstruction. Cinema is one such product. However, being one of the last such unitary products (webpage or the multimedia spread over a portal is not really a unitary product), cinema brings a panoply of other cultural products to the study of a text.

A text is any cultural product, or any multiple of socio-political forces or figures, that gives rise to an occasion of reading culture and society, and the shifting power positions in these, at any point of time. Any text changes its meaning with the positional shift of the reader, in her/his space or time. Society

It is interesting to note that Steve Jobs can be a text, along with Pixar, Pixar’s films such as For the Birds (2001), or Inside Out (2015), or even a criticism of any of these.

In other words, ideology may be called the cultural capital.German philosophers used the word ideology quite a lot since the 19th Century. Rarely a precise definition was given, however. What Marx, and most Marxists, meant by the word was: For the power game to be sustained, it must look natural. Everyone must think that is the only way in life; there is no alternative. For that to happen, cultural products that would sustain the logic of their own existence for the next generation of users/consumers must be crafted consciously,as tools of brainwash. This chain of affairs is similar to the definition of Capital in economics – produced means of production – tools, schemes or any other artificial resources to bring out the next cycle of production.

The perpetrator uses such cultural capital to keep the system running. The victim is thoroughly affected by such cultural capital – her/his personality is built on the dominant ideology(ies) — her/him being completely unaware, or ignorant by choice, of the fact.

The critic tries to look at the ideology — its origin, cycles, products, reformation. Society

S/he needs a lot of different cinemas to deconstruct ideology at work, in a better way. Different cinemas – national, cross-over, queer, experimental, personal, accent, to name a few.

In a cosmopolis like Mumbai, it is not easy to find such different flavors of cinema. Popular cinema, centered around the perpetrator-victim axis, overshadows any other flavor. It is easy to go with the rules of the system. They are well-known. They keep the system running. This is what critics mean, when they complain that Hollywood, or Bollywood, does not want anything strikingly new. Their observation is largely true. Ideas too fresh are summarily rejected. Popular cinemas work around sets of worked out schemes, and their safe variations, that would keep the system running.

Of course, this would produce stagnation with time. But, that is another story.

This year’s edition of film festivals would be attended by an increased number of cineastes. What do they expect from the package of films? Are they critics, victims or perpetrators? What do most of them choose to be?

What does the audience want? Is the audience a homogeneous one? What do different audiences want? Why do they want that? Who refurbishes demands in their mind?

What is the role of the critic today?

P.S. Godard said, long ago, “I am still practicing criticism. What can I do if my medium has changed?”

In the Indian subcontinent, the tradition of film festivals goes back to 1952, when the first International Film Festival of India (IFFI) took place, in Mumbai. It gave birth to a new league of Indian filmmakers, such as the Bengali trio Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, who would revolutionize Indian cinema, in the following decades.

Cinema was brought to India by the famous Lumière brothers. We all know how the first screenings, at Kolaba’s Windsor Hotel, in July 1896, kept the audience mesmerized. Soon, Indians started making films themselves. Hiralal Sen from Calcutta, Save Dada from Bombay, and many others from Kolhapur and Nashik started recording actualities and fictions for the screen.

Native commercial ventures began in Maharashtra with Dadasaheb Torne’s Pundalik (1912) and DG Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913). In the following years, the show-business would be dictated by Parsi entrepreneurs and theatre wallahs. Filmmakers and actors came from theatre, those days. Thus, cinema in India, following the global trend, shaped up as filmed play.

Rabindranath Tagore was among the few who advocated change. He wrote, in 1929, in clear words, that cinema should free itself from the dictatorship of the spoken word. He felt that cinema must realize the power of images to find its own identity as the tenth muse. To prove his point, Tagore wrote a feature-length screenplay based on his own narrative poem Shishutirtha, and invited the famous romantic documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty to direct it. Flaherty denied to work on someone else’s screenplay.

However, the message was sent across. Taking the cue from Tagore, a section of the Indian intelligentsia began actively thinking in terms of camera stylo, or camera as pen. The term was popularized only in 1948, by Alexandre Astruc, in the context of  the post-WWII French film industry. However, the idea had been around since Eisenstein and Buñuel since 1929.

It is not possible to realize the power of images without reading the images first hand. Just as a poet goes through the totality of the history of world poetry, a filmmaker needs to know his roots. Without an organized effort to read all key texts, no filmmaker can push the medium further.

The cine-enthusiasts who started Calcutta Film Society in 1947, Madras film chambers in 1938 and Prabhat Chitramandal in 1968 felt this need. Good filmmakers come from a seasoned audience. Regular screening  showcasing the plurality of world cinema leads to that seasoning.  In turn, that puts the total cinematic experience of the populace under pressure. Stale repetitions of genres, themes and styles are finally washed out under this pressure. Viewers watch out for something new, which the filmmakers must create. Cinema evolves this way.

This calls for a regular practice in film studies. Film societies, academic courses, and short appreciation lectures do that. However, the interest is born only when the force is very powerful. That spat of energy is released only through film festivals. Generations of film buffs, critics and filmmakers were created in festivals.

French New Wave was born with the journal Cahiers du Cinema. But, no one believed in its authenticity. When Truffaut wrote the notorious essay “A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema”, he and the Cahiers were blacklisted in the French Cinema circle. Truffaut was banned from the Cannes Film Festival. He and the Cahiers group were badly criticized by the major French filmmakers of that time. Everyone said that Cahiers had gone too far. How could a bunch of critics, who never made a single film themselves, had the audacity to bully such famous filmmakers!

Truffaut made his debut film, Four Hundred Blows (1958), the following year. That film won the best film award in 1959 at Cannes film festival. That opened new vistas for world cinema, where, for the first time, critics (some 14-15 of them) became filmmakers themselves to change the course of filmmaking in the country. New wave was born as much at the Cannes festival as in Cahiers.

In India too, Ray received a major intellectual thrust from the Neo-realist cinema showcased at the ’52 festival. He applied the style very consciously to his debut film Pather Panchali (1955).

Ghatak met Pudovkin, one of the pioneers in the constructivist cinema in the USSR, in the same film festival. The festival and the meeting left their definitive influences on his filming style.

Those waves are very much alive even in our time. Indian filmmakers and students of cinema were introduced to filmmakers whom we can call champions of personal cinema—Haneke, Ken Loach, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Wong Kar Wai, Kim Ki Duk and Dorota Kędzierzawska—through film festivals.

Film festivals can contribute largely to the basic needs for three wide groups—filmmakers and film students, film buffs and the casual movie-goer. That is possible only when such festivals are curated by trained hands. Filmmakers and students of cinema can reap the maximum out of such festivals when they become active spectators.

Most festivals are equipped with master classes by prominent filmmaking personalities, interactive forums and trade analyst meet ups. Many festivals hold film marts too, where films are bought over international territories; here, filmmakers meet each other, and business deals are cracked.

For a vast country like India, with its multiplicity of cultures, city-based festivals were always a need. That need gave birth to the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 1994, the Kolkata International Film Festival in 1995, and the Chennai Film Festival in 2002. In addition, more critical festivals such as Osian’s Cinefan curated by Cinemaya, and International Forum of New Cinema curated by Cine Central, Kolkata try to cater to a relatively advanced spectatorship.

Film festivals are an essential part of the film student’s life. Even in this age when new films from unknown cultures are being aired everyday on film TV channels, only festivals have the magic to offer a sense of euphoria to budding filmmakers.