Modes of communication is the backbone of our existence as a society, and
it has been decades since cinema has evolved as one of them. It has been communicating
countless emotions and ideas that
transcends the visuals, and the poetry on screen has flabbergasted us, many a
times. Modern cinema has evolved into a form of expression, which can touch
your heart, burnish your spirits and revamp your thoughts through the depiction
of stories and events.
There are no clear cut rules ragarding the ingredients of good cinema.
However, in general, we can say that, it should be a slice of life. According
to the legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock, cinema is life, after you take the
dull part out. But this doesn’t defy the role of the unrealistic or surreal
elements. It only means that, the audience should, in some way, relate the
journey of the characters, to some or other aspect of our existence. There are
several examples for the not so real elements in cinema, offering us deep
insights into life. Christopher Nolan’s Batman series is about the existential
crisis and the subsequent struggle of a superhero. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the
rings is a fantasy about the battle between good and evil, depicted with the
help of stunning visuals. Woody Allen’s Oscar winning ‘Midnight in Paris’ uses
an illogical and inexplicable time travel in the story, and still ends up being
an excellent film, which tells a lot about human nature and the soul of a
city.
The intricacies that we can relate to life, woven somewhere inside, is
what makes all these films special. The most excellent movies are made,
usually, using the common things that we see, in life, as raw material.
When we look at Indian cinema, in the same perspective, things are very
interestingly poised. People in different regions of our coutry speak different
languages, and we have different film industries for each. If we were a country
with a single language and culture, our film industry would have been much
bigger, with a huge audience, which would have created a room for bigger
budgets, and more effort behind each film. The biggest film industry in our
country, Bollywood, does not represent our films as a whole, and there are
several well made films coming out, in the regional languages. But the bigger
audience ensures that Hindi films do better business.
We have a fairly big group of audience for the mindless comedies,
logicless hero centric action films, and cliched romantic movies. But apart
from all those, which of course, succeed in the business part, do we see enough
life on our big screen?
Rather than bits and pieces from their films, what we need to take up
from Hollywood, is the way, they adapt true stories and books, into movies. We
have seen how smart screenwriting creates a story out of events as simple as a
King’s fight to speak without stammering (King’s speech), a grave and mundane
book on the economics of baseball (Moneyball), and an unproven theory about who
actually was behind Shakespear’s works (Anonymous). We too, have plenty of
stories happening all around us, and there are a lot of books, worth being
adapted, in our literature.
