Cannes Musings

Over the past three decades, Indian cinema’s track record at the Cannes Film Festival has been particularly miserable, if not a matter of national disgrace commensurate with our performance in the Olympics. It is not that it is any better at the other A-level festivals (Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Toronto) but despite the deep-rooted eurocentric bias, Cannes certainly has an ability to discern quality films from any part of the world irrespective of  the scale of film production in that country. Granted that the Cannes Festival is fiercely competitive, a country with a production of 900 films a year should fair better than Sri Lanka or a country like Brazil with 40 films a year which manages to get an average of two films selected every year.

How do we explain the misery of Indian cinema? We rub our noses so much in the dirt trying to keep our films ‘popular’ and ‘commercial’ that we hardly ever manage to make them any more memorable than yesterday’s newspaper. American cinema has the same intentions but it still manages to produce a few films every year that transcend their time. Since 90% of our popular films fail even at the box-office, they cannot actually be called either popular or commercial. Another lame excuse is that our film language is so unique (songs, dance, melodrama etc) that no one else in the world is capable of appreciating us! Why should we lionize Cannes or Venice as the true upholders of quality cinema? Why should we judge ourselves based on others’ criteria? Belligerence apart, it is a classic alibi that is tantamount to justifying our 132^nd position on FIFA world rankings on the ground that we could get entry into the World Cup only if the whole world played soccer according to our rules, whatever that may be. As a nation we are so deeply ensconced in our mediocrity that we have either refused to look at the larger picture of our position in the world (contrary to our aspirations to be part of the global village) or constantly need justifications based on jingoistic claims to uniqueness.

 

In that sense, Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap may have redeemed some degree of our cinematic self-respect though the selection of Udaan  at Cannes was in the Un Certain Regard category and not in the prestigious competitive section.  The last Indian film to get into competition was Murali Nair’s Pattiyude Divasam (A Dog's Day) in 2001 and the last film in Un Certain Regard was also Murali Nair’s Arimpara (2003). The last Indian film to get an award at Cannes competition was also a Murali Nair film, Marana Singhasanam (Throne of Death, 1999). Since Nair is based in UK and also financed from there, these cannot be considered ‘Indian’ achievements not unlike Chandrasekhar’s Nobel Prize but this is just the other face of globalization. Where does all this leave us? Twenty five years of solitude!

The 2010 Cannes edition, however, had two more Indian films in its selection. They take us back to 1983 (Mrinal Sen’s Kandahar - The Ruins) in the ‘Cannes Classics’ section and to 1973 (Ritwik Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam – A River called Titash) in the ‘World Cinema Foundation’ section. It is an irony that we still have to live off Ray, Sen, Ghatak and Gopalakrishnan for many more years to come.

The really sad part of the story is that the best of Indian cinema rarely gets seen in India. Let us first learn to respect our own selves before we can demand respect from others. World cinema can never be a substitute for our own cinema because it is from there that our filmmakers have to draw sustenance. As Gandhi said, ‘I want to open up all the doors and windows of my house so that the wind from all directions can blow into it on the condition that  I am not uprooted’.

NFDC has done a great disservice to our nation by making some of the most adventurous and landmark films in our history and then allowing them to rot in the cans without getting distribution. These films are not yet available even on DVD so that they may enter into our contemporary debates or shown in film classes. They have forced those films to be forgotten and thereby failed to make them contribute to the consolidation of a more substantial film culture. Even Satyajit Ray’s films are rarely seen in our country beyond Bengal and the only watchable DVD copies of Ray or Ghatak that exist come to us from UK or USA. We have had to wait for Martin Scorsese to restore Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948), the most extraordinary film made in India before Pather Panchali (1955)!

In other words, we reap what we sow. No country in the world is so disconnected with its own cinematic past and at the same time burdened by the baggage of film memory. I could not agree more with Anurag Kashyap whom I heard recently saying that more than innovative screenwriters, what we need in our country are creative producers. ‘Creative’ in this case means producers who are driven not solely by the dream of profit but also informed by film culture with a strong desire to push the bandwith of Indian popular cinema, making films with passion and conviction that any story can sell which has a ring of truth in it.