The Hindu : 'Movie-makers have not learnt from Satyajit Ray'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Nov 15, 2002

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'Movie-makers have not learnt from Satyajit Ray'

By Gautaman Bhaskaran

KOLKATA NOV. 14 . As the Kolkata Film Festival entered its fourth day here, it is not just cinema that provokes us into profound thinking. At times, its makers provide you with that little something more they miss telling in their movies.

Marco Bechis, maker of the Argentinean film, ``Sons and Daughters'', had an extremely interesting point to make. ``Cinema is not sunshine and locations. It is not beautiful people. It is about actors and actresses. It is about how they convey their emotions, emotions that form segments of a story'', he said.

But most Indian films pay a lot of attention to frills such as costume, scenery and grease paint, leaving actors/actresses with little scope or inclination to act. May be, this is an easy way out.

It is so simple to enrapture an audience with colour, gloss, pretty faces and a more-or-less continuous background score which tells you when to cry, when to laugh, when to expect just about anything. What is unfortunate here — even in Kolkata where the so-called industry participation in the Festival is very strong — is that there is virtually no mood to learn and adapt from international cinema.

Soumitra Chatterjee, veteran performer who is so often addressed outside Kolkata as a Bengali rather than an Indian actor, rued that the movie-makers here had not even learnt from Satyajit Ray, whose brilliant creations helped the world to look at our cinema with awe and respect. In Bengal, he is nothing

short of an icon, but the desire to learn from his wonderful films is missing.

What is more, Mr Chatterjee told The Hindu that despite this kind of attendance by movie men and women here, the Bengali industry continued to ape cheap Bollywood stuff, which again is a copy of Hollywood — at least much of it is.

Curious as it may sound, a Bengali director may idolise a Godard or a Truffaut or a Kurosawa or a Ray, but he seldom sets himself the kind of standards these masters adopted to weave images on the screen that captivated and enslaved generations of men and women.

Mr. Chatterjee had one possible explanation for this: cinema was caught in a middle class mould where excellence was unimportant, where the quest to make money was killing some of the finest creative urges that Bengalis were known for. ``So, lift Bollywood fare and try and make some bucks'', the hero of Charulata smiled. However, he felt that this would not succeed in the long run.

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