The Future of Film & Media Education in India

In response to Paromita Vohra's write-up on Subhash Ghai and Whistling Woods in Mid-Day: 

Vohra’s logic is so sloppy that to deal with it comprehensively, one would need more space than what this forum allows. Though I have been a professor at WW since its inception, I am not its spokesperson by any means and I resolutely maintain my critical distance with it. However, certain things need to be pointed out. The state of film education in India is a serious matter that needs to be addressed with the right degree of seriousness and certainly not with flippant social analysis which trivializes the entire issue with mere claptrap. Vohra might get some cheap thrills out of ridiculing the “international” aspect of WWI but I bear witness to what the Dean of UCLA (one of the world’s leading film schools) had once said: “We do not have anything like this in the US”.  Having seen all major film schools in India from the inside (and several major film schools abroad), I have not come across any institution where curriculum issues and teaching methodologies are discussed and debated in detail for months on end and constantly updated by some of the best minds in the Indian film industry. Student responses are constantly assessed and courses are redesigned in almost every semester. Personally, I have never witnessed such positive energy, seriousness of purpose and academic rigour anywhere else, far less in our state-run film schools which are in a pathetic state of decay.  

At a time when the Indian state acknowledges its own failure in creating worthwhile institutions and is emulating successful ideas developed and implemented at WW (entrusting it to develop, for example, the CBSE curriculum), it is a fundamentally regressive mode of thinking that creates false oppositions of “state vs. private” (or legit subsidy vs. lusty profit) as if it was a good guy vs. bad guy encounter of a “Bollywood” thriller. At a time when India is on the verge of ushering in private universities to play a lead role in defining India’s intellectual future, individuals like Vohra need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the state’s role in enabling the creation of such institutions, which may often have to include generous land grants/subsidies without which it is impossible to make such educational ventures possible, specially  in a city like Bombay. In any case, the whole hoopla around the legitimacy of the land grant is based on a false premise. WW does not even own the land. It is convenient to ignore such small details. 

There are several things in WW that one would be critical about but the fact remains that rarely in India has one seen such an efficient set-up where everything seems to work with clockwork precision. What I personally consider extraordinary about Subhash Ghai’s achievement is not necessarily the films he has made but the fact that he has made WW grow beyond himself and if one looks closely, one would find that ALL the teachers who are moulding the “next-generation” filmmakers of the mainstream industry actually belong to the opposite camp of “parallel cinema”, thus imbibing students with a sensibility that can perhaps change the face of our cinema. In this regard, Ghai’s extraordinary dedication and sincerity takes on the dimension of some kind of “public service”. Add to this the fabulous infrastructure and the beautiful architecture! 

Far from being a rhetoric, the ‘international’ dimension in WWI is real in that there are several members of faculty, staff and students who are from abroad and the curriculum is not at all narrowly ‘Bollywood’. The overwhelming number of films that I personally show and analyse in my Film Appreciation classes are a far cry from what goes by the name of Bollywood. We have even shown extremely “mediocre” Indian documentaries and put them up for debate. Vora should be thankful for that.

The prohibitive fees is definitely the major talking point, always. However, the student profile seems to be changing gradually. They are not rich-kids always; many of them have inner-town middle-class backgrounds, empowered by loans at a time when Indian middle classes have consciously realized that education is their best investment.

It is fundamentally dishonest to ask WW to show results in terms of “stars” that it has churned out. It is common knowledge that hardly anyone makes an impact in the film industry in less than 15 years and WW’s first batch graduated only 4 years ago. A proper assessment can only be made at least a decade later but to dismiss all the significant achievements already accomplished, is to trivialize the debate about film/media education and the creative role of the private sector. Every film institute in the world, overtly or covertly, has a certain ideological stance (and agenda) with regard to mainstream industry. It is obvious that a film school located in the heart of the world’s biggest film industry would be resolutely industry-oriented like many film schools in US. It does not serve any purpose to resort to simplistic, prejudiced stereotypes that refuse to see the cultural battles that are being fought on daily basis by people who have chosen to be inside the bastion of commercial filmmaking with the hope of making it a bit more sensitive to the world around us.

Finally, I would leave Vohra with the thought to honestly ponder over whether she would go to a state-run subsidised hospital or go to any extent to avail the services of an efficiently-run but expensive private hospital, in case she is confronted with a severe cardiac arrest.  

Do classics have an expiry date?

Of late I have been wondering whether all the films we used to call ‘classics’ or ‘masterpieces’ are ‘forever’, as they were supposed to be! Do some have earlier expiry dates than others?

My job as a professor of cinema has thrown up certain questions that I am still trying to answer. While teaching at a glitzy film school in Mumbai’s Film City, I have found a strange and challenging phenomenon - most students of filmmaking cannot really connect to many of the standard classics of world cinema. I had rarely encountered this problem to this extent but now that my livelihood depends on this, I intensely speculate on a daily basis whether a certain film, notwithstanding its status as a ‘classic’ would work with my students. May be this is specific to the place where I teach, which is a predominantly up-market institute that happens to attract students who are Bollywood-obsessed and have enough money to pay the high fees. We are aware to what extent in India, economic status determines – to a large extent - one’s cultural orientation, exposure and degree of rootless-ness. This, however, only partly explains the conundrum.

There are also other easy but valid answers: most students are frivolous, they are more enamored with glamour than with cinema per se, some of them are too immature, etc. And yet these also do not satisfy me though all of them carry a grain of truth. Even while teaching a group of ultra-serious IIT students, I have sometimes not found the desired emotional impact.

Is it my personal failure that I cannot excite students about these films? Is it the failure of these ‘classics’ that they have failed to transcend across time and space unlike earlier? After all, La Dolce Vita as a film hasn’t changed inherently. It has only become more accessible in its DVD avatar but its reception may have changed.

Then, is this the impact of Time? Has the world around us changed so much that ideas and emotions that excited us earlier do not move us any more? Has cinema (film language) changed so much that some of the great films do not ‘talk’ to us any more with the same degree of intimacy and instead look ‘slow’ and pretentious?

I guess there must a be a bit of truth in each one these possibilities. I do not intend to say at all that none of the classics work; in fact, several of them still work even with the uninitiated but even my response to certain films is not so enthusiastic any more and several films just fail to impact. The important aspect of this phenomenon is that this does not seem to happen with the traditional arts such as literature, painting or music. Only in the case of cinema, the classics seem to run the risk of being ephemeral.

I was delighted to find that Umberto Eco raised exactly the same question in one of his extraordinary essays titled ‘The Multiplication of the Media’ in his riveting collection of essays titled ‘Travels in Hyperreality’ (Picador, 1987). It happened to him when he was looking forward to a TV viewing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey after several years but was hugely disappointed by the experience.

… That film which had stunned us only a few years ago with its extraordinary technical and figurative invention, its metaphysical breadth, now seemed to repeat wearily things we had seen a thousand times before…. The final images are kitsch, a lot of pseudo-philosophical vagueness in which anyone can put the allegory he wants… (p 145)

He goes on to provide a sophisticated and elaborate explanation for this disenchantment for which neither Kubrick nor the viewer can be blamed:

… every new invention sets off a chain reaction of inventions, produces a sort of common language. They have no memory because, when the chain of imitations has been produced, no one can remember who started it, and the head of the clan is confused with the latest great grandson. …The spaceships of Star Wars, shamelessly descended from Kubrick’s, are more complex and plausible than their ancestor, and now the ancestor seems to be their imitator….(p146)

In other words, if Citizen Kane makes little impact on the audience of today, it may not be so because Orson Welles seems a less dazzling genius in hindsight but simply because all the technical and narrative innovations of the film have been cannibalised to such an extent that the film is reduced to a matter of historical curiosity. If this is a phenomenon unique to cinema, it is because it is a supremely technological form and therefore technology plays a crucial role in its accelerated growth and reception. Imagine watching Sin City ten years from now! We will not even understand why we were at all impressed with the film once upon a time. If Normal Mclaren’s Horizontal/ Parallel Lines do not work at all now, blame Windows MediaPlayer’s randomized visualiser for that which is actually far more sophisticated than what Mclaren could ever do.

Films whose reputation depend on technical or narrative virtuosity are more likely to get jaded earlier but this does not guarantee that films that depend more on the depth of its content are likely to have a longer shelf life. This is where our social atmosphere influences our tastes. When I see a Alain Resnais film with my students, I really wish that the editing was faster though I do not feel the same when I see the same film alone. I saw My Night at Maud’s a few months back and found it impossibly pretentious and boring. I am not sure whether it is so because these films are actually ‘boring’ or ‘slow’ but simply because now there is far lesser appreciation and tolerance for films that aspire to be discursive rather than narrative. So this is the extent to which the world around us changes us, imperceptibly. The supremacy of Hollywood storytelling has no one right now to challenge its aesthetic claim to universality.

May be a more interesting question would be to ask why certain films from the distant past and B&W still ‘work’ with the uninitiated. There are many such examples: Sunset Boulevard, Twelve Angry Men, Taxidriver, High Noon (all American examples) or Uday Shankar’s Kalpana or Shombhu Mitra/Raj Kapoor’s Jaagte Raho. Consider an ultra-avant garde film like Last Year at Marienbad. It was rated as the greatest film of all time ahead of Citizen Kane by the Sight & Sound board of film critics through the 1960s, 70s and 80s and then suddenly thereafter it disappeared from all lists into utter oblivion. Or consider Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism. I have rarely heard any film student or even scholar talking about these films in recent years. Something seems to have happened by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s – a kind of shift in popular consciousness and our collective aesthetic judgment.

Even as I try to disentangle this mystery about so-called ‘classics’ and need to get ready with the films for my class, I choose the ones which are popular among students for all the wrong reasons and then use them to deepen an understanding of cinema. As usual, life also brings surprises: our good old Man with a Movie Camera (1929) works with every batch because our students who are mostly hooked on hardcore computer games think it is a cool MTV-style music video, never mind it was invented in the context of a communist revolution.

And yes, sex is no longer a safe bet. ‘Classics’ that came with liberal doses of sex had viewers glued to the screens, if not for anything else. Last Tango in Paris, Salo or Sweet Movie doesn’t work as it did earlier. Only after the screenings did I realize that most of the students possibly have several GBs of hardcore porn on their laptops, far more potent in their evocative power than the stories with their narrative pretensions. Sex in European art cinema which was the uncredited staple diet of India’s film society movement is now ineffective. So, my films in the next few weeks are going to be City of God, Clockwork Orange, Amores Perros, Havana Blues…

What do I care if they are declared ‘classics’ from some pulpit or not! They ‘work’ better with my students than the most sublime of Bergman’s films.

Film Appreciation Course at NCPA, Bombay

Here are the outlines of the lectures that I shall deliver at NCPA through the month of August. In case you are interested in attending them, please register directly with NCPA by writing to Kavita Ogale kogale@ncpamumbai.com.

1^st Session: 7^th Aug, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – The Landscape of Cinema

Though certain kinds of cinemas have greater visibility than others, there is a vast diversity in the films made around the world. The general character of Hollywood cinema, ‘Bollywood’ and its relationship with ‘Indian Cinema’ and concepts such as ‘independent’, ‘parallel’, ‘regional’ and ‘world’ cinemas would be understood as stepping-stones for celebrating cinema in relation to the cultures and contexts from which they emerge.

2^nd Session: 8^th Aug, Sun, 2pm to 6pm – Visual Storytelling: Time and Space in Cinema

What is it in cinema that makes it unique from other forms? Is it a language with a certain grammar which we learn innately? Perhaps the better films are those that use this grammar more effectively by telling their stories visually rather than through words. If cinema fragments time and space and then brings them together, how does it manage to give us a coherent vision of an imaginary world seen through the window of the film screen?

3^rd Session: 14^th Aug, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – Evolution of Film Language and the Early Comedies

From its embryonic form in the closing years of the 19^th century, we trace the emergence of cinema through the early 20^th century until it grows into a dominant cultural form, both as art and industry. Some of the great filmmakers of the early years were comedians, many of whom have now been sadly forgotten. Films that we once saw as just hilarious are now perceived as works of great artists who explored and expanded the expressive power of cinema.

4^th Session: 15^th Aug, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – Understanding Story Structure in Films

What makes some stories more compelling than others? What dramatic devices do films often use to give ‘structure’ to a human experience that transforms character? There seem to be some general principles that work for films across cultures and these conventional notions of structure are referred as ‘classical’. However, wherever there are rules, there are exceptions. Is there any specifically ‘Indian’ way of telling stories? How does the Indian popular cinema draw upon the storytelling traditions in India?

5^th Session: 21^st Aug, Sun, 2pm to 6pm – American Cinema: Hollywood and the ‘indie’ film

Though film language was creatively explored in France, it was in USA that the cinema developed into a huge industry as early as 1919. While a few big corporations monopolised filmmaking and developed their own signature styles and dominated the world, the studio system gradually declined and took a different form. In resistance to the studio-system, there developed in America an off-Hollywood independent cinema tradition that subverts the mainstream and yet, it is from this alternative cinema that Hollywood continues to draw its fresh blood.

6^th Session: 22^nd Aug, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – Major European Film Movements

While in USA, cinema was primarily seen as an industry and films as consumer commodities, in Europe it has often been perceived as an art form and an expression of culture and history. Thus films often grew out of vibrant social, political and artistic movements that explored new avenues and deepened cinema’s engagement with the world. These pioneering movements had tremendous impact not only on Hollywood cinema but on cinemas around the world, including India.

7^th Session: 23^rd Aug, Sun, 2pm to 6pm – Mise-en-scène and Film Styles

Mise-en-scène refers to the articulation of cinematic space and defines the style of individual filmmakers. It involves almost everything that goes into the making of a shot: composition, movement of camera and characters, lighting, set design and sound design. Some films drive the story forward with every element in the frame contributing to that end while others invite viewers to pause and reflect on the compositional spaces of the narrative.

8^th Session: 30^th September, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – Concepts of genre and auteur

The idea of genre has defined Hollywood film production to a large extent where films are targeted at specific audiences who have certain expectations. Indian popular cinema, however, addresses its audience differently though it is increasingly embracing the concept. While the supremacy of genre obliges filmmakers to work within certain conventions, master filmmakers (auteurs) manage to transcend them and leave their signatures in terms of style and content on every film they make.

INDRANIL CHAKRAVARTY is Professor of Film Appreciation at Whistling Woods International in Mumbai’s Film City. He graduated in Film Direction from International School of Film & TV(EICTV) in Havana (Cuba) where he studied under the Nobel Laureate, Gabriel García Márquez. He was screenplay consultant for the European Union Cross-Cultural Programme. He has taught screenplay-writing and Film Appreciation at several universities and institutes in India and abroad. His book on Latin American cinema is now a reference text at several universities. He has also published a study of the Indian film industry and several essays in English, Spanish and Bengali. He was Manager of the Osians’ Film Archive and Convenor of the First All-India Screenwriters’ Conference held at FTII, Pune and has been on the jury of film festivals in Brazil, Mexico, Cuba and Spain. He is also the director of a foundation called ILACI (Indo-Latin American Cultural Initiative) which has exclusive collaborative arrangements with UNESCO and IberMedia and is currently producing a documentary series.