Tehelka - The People's Paper

Political cinema stems from the world around it. It is not afraid to be disturbing. It can laugh at and with the world. It escapes definitions

SUDHIR MISHRA
Director
His new film Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi is a hit with both viewers and critics

Be arrogant. Tell your own stories. Forget the imaginary country where people drive a Mercedes into a consumer sunset

There is a trap here. In the idea of political cinema as commonly understood by elementary political filmmakers of the Stalinist school. They think that a political film is a film that is made to prove an idea or the validity of a particular ideology. I think that reduces cinema. The magic of life and therefore cinema is that it escapes definitions. Just as you think you have grabbed it, it slips away towards surprising unknown areas.

So what is political cinema? In my mind, it is a cinema that stems from the world around it. A cinema that is not naïve and which understands that political systems affect our personal life and that most of them attempt to enslave us while claiming to liberate us as individuals.

A cinema that emerges from a culture but is simultaneously individual and personal.

A cinema that understands that we do not live the best of all ‘possible’ lives and in the best of all ‘possible’ worlds.

And finally a cinema that is not afraid to laugh at and with the world it emerges from.

However having said that this is the kind of cinema, political or otherwise that I would like to see, that there is a regressive politics in much of the popular cinema of today is there for all to see.

So for me, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron was a political film. And so was Ketan Mehta’s Bhavani Bhavai. They were funny and terrifying at the same time. They were simultaneously exhilarating and disturbing and contained within them a yearning for a more humane world which contained the possibility of love while raging against the impossibility of that happening.

I, though, could be accused of being a bit more romantic. I think individuals sometimes escape the systems that seek to trap them. And that they also sometimes succeed in ‘stealing’ moments of human contact that normally elude them. That frail and apparently weak people grab opportunities to be brave. That when the most evil of men dies, the little child in him wonders why you hate him so much.

Also, the Sufi idea that despite knowing that passion might destroy you, you still plunge into it, is extremely appealing to me. Whatever that passion may be!

For me great cinema is in the confused, groping, yearning of Chhoti Bahu in Guru Dutt’s classic Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam as she struggles with her own desires in a world that refuses to recognise them. The titillatory charm of the feudal world is counter pointed by its slow strangulation of a perfectly normal human desire. Notice that there is no so called revolutionary character shouting slogans against the evil zamindars. Chhoti Bahu herself succumbs and becomes subservient to the world that is destroying her. Without saying a word it fills you with loathing for that world. But stop here! It fills you with loathing for that world but not for all its characters. Is Chhoti Bahu’s husband (so brilliantly played by Rehman) an oppressor or victim? And as his elder gives the order to kill Chhoti Bahu, is it the gesture of a ruthless villain or the last stupid, moronic act of a dying man?

There is a lament for the world and a sense of its incredible stupidity. That’s political cinema in the true sense for me.Because the images enter your head and nestle there forever, do they change the world? Does cinema make you act? Most great filmmakers, even those that make political films don’t think so.

Social change happens by a combination of factors. While films may have profound changes on individuals, only when there are many other elements interacting can there be any significant social change. The fantasies of the sloganeering type of filmmakers are only that and nothing else. Anyway their films are so bad and one-dimensional that they leave no permanent impact on the viewer.

Is it the simplistic fantasies they have created that has provoked in the minds of the younger generation of filmmakers, a disdain for politics? The young man or woman may have had no place to run except into the arms of neo conservatives who were waiting for him. Around them, the Nehruvian dream failed, and so they had a reaction against it. They escaped into another country. An imaginary country where they drove a Mercedes into the consumer sunset. Notice how all systems, whether economic, political or religious, have the idea of heaven built into them. That’s what our films also bought into and advertised.

The audience had been fed one kind of crappy dream before. Now they were fed the next one. So most of the films of the last 20 years give us no sense of the world outside the studios. Also another thing happened. The first generation of filmmakers had emerged from a vibrant, volatile, often brutal, world that was India. They had had a real contact with it. Their children who inherited the mantle knew nothing about it. So they told the stories they knew which happened in an imaginary country between London and India. Where things glittered and shone and as long as you wore the right clothes, you got the girl!

And the audience who had been left in the lurch by the political leadership of the country lapped it up.

There is a new lot of filmmakers emerging. To them I would say put yourself in your films.

And when many of you do that, you will create a genuinely vibrant cinema that does not necessarily have to be realistic or naturalistic. All I am asking from you is not to succumb to those who ask you to mimic or imitate.