Saturday, December 12, 2009

The shaping of Indian-Cinema




Influences: I would try to discuss the influences on both the resident Art-house cinema as also the Commercial cinema - the 'Margi' [classical] and the 'Desi' [regional] according to Sharangadeva's 13th century Sangeeta Ratnakara.:

The ethos, styles and expressions of Indian Cinema were majorly influenced by the following:

1) The great Indian epic-works like the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Panchatantra etc. influenced greatly the thought-process, value-system and imagination of the Indian masses, and also had a profound effect on shaping Indian-Cinema as well.
The well-known cinematographic techniques of side-story (an equally important fictional work where there is a definite start-, mid- and end- included in the main theme), back-story (a history or explanation which led to the present situation; a 'flashback' is a popular means of revealing a back-story), or a story-within-a-story (a 'layered' method of story-telling where one story is told during the continuation of another major story;  for eg. as in Mahabharata, the events of the War are related in great detail to Dhritashtra by Sanjaya thus constituting a story-within -a-story) were adapted from these great works.    

2) Another great influence on the structure of Indian Cinema was the colorful and lively traditional folk theatre of India, which became popular from around the 10th century. These regional traditions were the ‘Jatra’ of Bengal, ‘Ram Lila’ and 'Nautanki' of Bihar and Uttar-Pradesh and the ‘Terukkuttu’ of Tamil Nadu.

3) Ancient Sanskrit drama (led by such powerful playwrights as Kalidasa, Bhasa etc.) had a massive impact on Indian Cinema as well. With it’s highly stylized nature and emphasis on spectacle, where music, dance and gesture, it all combined together to offer an unparalleled dramatic experience. Sanskrit dramas were known as ‘Natya’ (the seminal work of Bharat Muni’s ‘Natya-Shastra’ specifically describes the proper way of staging a sanskrit natya), characterizing them as spectacular dance-dramas.

4) Distinct Parsi theatre effectively blended realism and fantasy, music and dance, narrative and spectacle to integrate into a dramatic discourse of melodrama. They invariably contained crude humor, songs and music, sensationalism and dazzling stagecraft, an influence of which was seen in  many ‘masala’ movies, a genre which started with Manmohan Desai in the 1970’s.

5) The Marxist agenda: Marxism set a model for large-scale state patronage of the arts, especially the cinema.  Marxist ideology-influenced Directors like Ritwick Ghatak, Saeed Mirza, Goutam ghose, Mani Kaul, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Satyajit Ray, Buddhadeb Dasgupta etc. wereimmensely driven by their Proletarian-sympathies and left back some magnificent cinema for all of us to savour.

6) Another influence was Western musical television, particularly MTV, which has had an increasing impact since the 1990s, as is recently seen in the altered pace, camera angles, dance sequences and music of recent Indian films.

I'd like to point out here that the Indian 'Parallal' or Art-house Cinema movement was  greatly influenced, in addition to the above, by a combination of Indian theater (particularly Sanskrit drama), Indian Literature (particularly Bengali literature) and European cinema (the French and Italian neorealism).

Further Reading:

* "Seeing is Believing" Selected Writings in Cinema - Chidananda Das Gupta.
* The Cinema of Satyajit Ray - Chidananda Das Gupta.
* Wikipedia.org

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