KOCHI: Critic, film historian, and curator Amrit Gangar on Wednesday rued the paradoxes that have come to rule cinema, a medium of art that had now been reduced to a commodity.
Giving the John Abraham Lecture at the ongoing SiGNS documentary and short film festival at the Ernakulam Town Hall, he said these days makers spent more on marketing films than on producing them. “₹16 crore spent on the film Pulimurugan made it a rage which helped it collect at the box office. It wasn’t about the theme,” he observed.
The advent of multiplexes, he said, created a monopoly of screening spaces, as they provided a commercial environment from which serious cinema was eliminated. “They [multiplexes] are the new killing fields, which have created a commercial mindset, where the popcorn-munching crowd seeks ‘manoranjan’ [entertainment].”
Another paradox is that analogue technology had produced more non-linear narratives in cinema than the digital era, where most films suddenly became linear. Mr. Gangar recalled directors like Mani Kaul and Godard who let their creativity rule their narrative and worked without a conservative script.
Dwelling on the realpolik of the times, he said colours such as saffron, the colour of renunciation, were appropriated by some, and it should be recaptured. On his association with John Abraham, he recalled their meeting in Mumbai (then Bombay) when after a screening of Amma Ariyan , they walked to a nearby country liquor shop at Santacruz and spotted a dead body shrouded in a white cloth, which made John think of a similar scene in his film.
“That made him sad, and the whole evening, as we drank the local brew, he was talking about it,” he said. Mr. Gangar said John never made a film with the marketing element on his mind. “When you say his film was made with crowd funding, it is wrong. You can’t make the people who lovingly contributed to it anonymous. Faceless. John had a humanitarian approach to cinema, which the people who helped him make films shared,” he said.
Noted director K.G. George will be present at the fest on Thursday afternoon when the documentary, 81/2 intercuts: life and films of K.G. George will be screened.
