“Bollywood is a vulgar, simplistic, childish idea of India. It has been promoting hypocrisy beyond belief,” said Ratna Pathak Shah, a theatre and television actor. The actor expressed her opinion about Bollywood when she was questioned about her criticism of the film Dabangg during the session,“ Coming of age: the mainstreaming of parallel cinema”. Earlier the actor criticized the film saying that the film sent out scary, objectionable messages about women and does not talk well about the Indian civilisation.
According to Ms Shah, Bollywood is not India. Bollywood has been wrongly interpreted as the representative of Indian cinema while a lot of experimentation is happening in various film industries across the country. The actor said, “It’s like saying that all of the American civilisation is Hollywood.”
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Suhasini Maniratnam, a prominent figure in South Indian cinema and the wife of director Maniratnam, spoke about the emergence and influence of digitalisation in today’s cinema. According to her, one can watch the film at one’s convenience, and then divide it between commercial and parallel. She opined that not all art films are great and some can even put the audience to sleep. She also acknowledged the coming up of directors who were not using cinema to make statements or to get noticed like Amit Masurkar who was the director of the critically acclaimed movie, Newton.
Ms.Suhasini said that the audience was the key to filling up the divide between mainstream cinema and commercial cinema when she was questioned about the role of actors in bridging the gap between the two. She also cited the examples of Sivaji Ganesan and Kamal Haasan who experimented with small, new films in Tamil cinema. She believes that even Bollywood stars like Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Akshay Kumar are doing the same nowadays.
However, Ms Shah had a different opinion and hoped that actors would be cast for their suitability than their stardom. According to her, filmstars carry a certain amount of tantrums which can cause depletion to the directors. This opinion was seconded by director Amit Masurkar who said that actors like Rajkumar Rao, who is hardly a star, work hard so as to survive in the industry as they have no filmy background. The opinion can be seen as a dig at the trend of Nepotism which is very much prevalent in Bollywood.
Mr Masurkar believes that he might be one of the first directors who has learnt filmmaking from the Internet. According to him independent films are no more confined to a small urban niche. His film Newton was released in various rural areas in states like Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and ran well.
Ms Suhasini also spoke about her days in film school where she was the only girl among 120 men. Even that did not prepare her for her tryst with international cinema. She said that she broke down while watching the classic movie Bicycle Thieves. It made her realise the power of cinema and also about her future in filmmaking.
Ms Shah, who claims that the audience has changed radically, hopes that cinema will have a much more literate audience in two generations. According to her, it is high time for the filmmakers and the audience to take cinema to the next level.
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