The cinema is characteristically a modern device. It has a wider appeal and greater mobility; it has an illustrious (= colourful) record of over a century and a half and it has a varied foci (pl. of focus) through which it influences viewers.
The days of movies when there were no dialogues or other sounds are now almost antiquated (= become things of the past). But the cinema, as it stands for today, has a hoary (= bright) past Great classics, directors, actors-actresses scored applauses and were etched/carved into the viewers’ mind and senses. The extraneous devices like light, sound, colour or the glamour of landscapes of locales were meagre. Sometimes men were obliged to read unread or little read books, when filmed brilliantly. There was a commendable cross-fertilization of taste between films and popular taste. It prevailed through several decades.
Today the Indian cinema industry stands on a crossroad. The ‘Bollywood’- a corrupted version of Bombay-Hollywood – has sprung up like an imp of the film-factory. It exploits to the absurdest limit the ‘extraneous’ devices referred to above; exploits sensationalism, horror and the element of macabre (= preference for the fearful or gruesome); carries the house (= wins) by drafting a charismatic (= magical) figure. Sometimes there is little story, only a theme intelligently deployed through a concatenation (= a chain or link) of shots. It caters to all kinds of taste: sensual, spiritual, emotional and what not. Once a great Indo-English writer was himself overawed by witnessing his own book in the Press- show – it was not even the ghost of his own book!
Where’s the rub, one ponders! It seems there is a conspiracy of forces. There is a tendency to inculcate wrong or false values like swashbuckling (= parading) heroism or defiance of all familial and traditional values in the face of a vulgar and erotic passion. Some good directors successfully keep such social or romantic excesses on a lower key as their purpose is to present the tragic irony of our life where such things dominate. These are intellectual presentation and are little regarded by the mass. The latter prefers to see such excesses with louder appeals and there is no want of producers or directors that would cater to them.
Today glamour-girls and derring-doers (= actors famous for heroic facts) make or mar a film according to their popular appeal or otherwise. Even the film-journals and feature-pages of dailies flaunt (= wave attractively) them as values. Do we not see in this a suicidal departure from the earlier stage of the cinema?
Now it is almost difficult to assess who spoils whom in the increasing rot: the films corrupt the people or vice-versa. Once the Ganga was inviolate (= not to be polluted) as she wasted the impurities and carried them into the ocean. But today even the oceans are being polluted, says science. If the metaphor is applied to our subject, we shall realize that a ‘point of no return’ is not very far.
On this threshold of the millennium one has to pause. The cinema, today, is a household commodity; thanks to the television. The rates at the cine-halls are at times exorbitant and there is a question of choice. But the epidemic of television-fever infects the mass like a virus. One feels helpless.
Question of value, which is surely a tenable (= that which avails) argument, against pose problems. There is, today, a sharp division between permissive and restrictive approach. The two votaries (= worshippers) of art and morality are both armed with lethal weapons. Some films with designs of reform and exposure are prevented staging by various methods.
The problem that faces the industry is a hard truth of our contemporary life, that the sounder values are muddled with the commercial ones. Moreover in the coming set-up of things, the producers may have to vie with (= compete with) the foreign films. Naturally the erosion of our cultural roots that is, today, in its seminal (= initial) form, shall face us like a deluge. One fears that we have no means in our institutional backing to stem such an occurrence. What with our sophisticated syllabus, our intellectual pretensions, the Prasar Varati or the NCERT or other bodies, our school or college chaps, teenager girls or their older ilks (= varieties) are being swept off their feet by film-borne vulgarities.
This element, as hinted above, is what is wrong with the cinema today. It must be aware of the quality of its contribution to the human spirit. If money or wealth is the chief force, there are other avenues. But to destroy such a powerful industry by flaunting cheap wares is a kind of suicide for us. Her (of the cinema) past does not the kind of neglect that seems so evident in the general run of films today.
Change that history brings about is unavoidable. It is a sign of our wisdom that our films reflect this change. But the presentation ought to be in a healthier fashion. We are indeed too fast today; we have now greater resources; we are bold enough, also. We need a kind of restraint – even self-restraint – to set off the speed of progress by ‘inner check’ or other means.
