A decade and a half ago, a filmmaker friend decided to become a world cinema auteur. Their chosen film school: the Mumbai Film Festival, MAMI, where they watched films from Iran, Taiwan, Romania, Chile, and absorbed not just their narratives but figured out their architecture. Now, World Cinema is supposed to be like free-verse poetry. But my friend found the syllabus hidden in plain sight in these arthouse fare: the pregnant silences, melancholic moods, a deliberate, almost punishing slowness of pace, stories and themes invariably rooted in the local yet esoteric enough, leaning left of the centre and wrapped in a loose, seemingly unstructured form that felt intentionally distant from the mainstream. My friend didn’t just appreciate these films; they reverse-engineered their way to the awards podium, to become a darling of the global festival circuit.
Had this friend studied at an Indian film school, such as FTII or SRFTI, they’d have received a magnificent education in film theory, technique, and history. Still, they might also have absorbed a sort of artistic snootiness, an attitude of disdain for the audience as a badge of honour. One that considers accessibility as a vulgar compromise and clarity of storytelling, even form, as a creative failure. The attitude they wear is of an artist, perpetually wronged by a philistine ecosystem. They bemoan the lack of screens, the absence of audiences, and the neglect by distributors, painting themselves as tortured souls who want to change the world with their creativity, if only the world would allow them. This wailing rears its head now and then, and at times it is indeed justified. But often this torture is nothing but a self-inflicted wound, a direct result of making work that deliberately pushes viewers away, succeeding in doing so, then ironically lamenting their own success. Eat your cake and own the cake factory too?
How do I know this? Not only have I been with a lot of such folks myself in the last two decades, but I have also been that snooty world cinema acolyte with a stiff upper lip that cocked a snook at any cinema that seemed remotely commercial.
I didn’t get there by attending film school or seeing masterpieces in some small film club or festival. It began in the mid-2000s, as my IIT graduate colleagues hunted down the most obscure films from across the planet on early peer-to-peer networks with a singular passion. I was introduced to the likes of Kiarostami, and Haneke, and Herzog, and Angelopoulos and ‘the’ Bergman, with the result that I attended my first film festival, not as a casual viewer but as an acolyte, and within a few years, I had perfected the persona: the World Cinema Snob. I landed a job at Palador Pictures, where we tried to bring world cinema DVDs to Indian homes. I made my taste my identity. I rejected anything that even smelled of commercial intent, and just in case a low-budget indie became a commercial hit, I’d dismiss it as a “sell-out.” My social circle became a gang of aspiring auteurs, many of whom would go on to make award-winning films and series themselves – our shared identity: that of World Cinema purists.
And therein, I think, lies the irony because World Cinema is not a genre; its form is meant to be fluid, its shape intended to be formless, and its story supposed to emerge from its unique cultural, social and political soil. Yet, in the Mumbai indie scene back in the days, it had hardened into a strict, manicured template. Just like my friend studying MAMI films, people have found its shape, its form, its identifiable structure, and have replicated it religiously. Instead of discovering their own unique voice – no mean feat, I can tell you that – they force a pre-approved, international-festival-ready aesthetic onto the story they wanted to tell, whether it deserved that treatment or not. The tragicomedy, at least to me, becomes complete when these same filmmakers cry wolf about empty theatres. The empty theatre is the reward you’ve given yourself by deliberately, painstakingly making your work oblique and emotionally guarded, and obscure. So why mourn your own success?
Today, I am a reformed World Cinema addict. My love for the vast, wondrous landscape of global cinema is deeper than ever. But the two decades in cinema’s wilderness has given me a sharp nose for the faker. I can sense, from a mile away, the filmmaker who has mistaken obscurity for depth, stillness for profundity, and audience alienation for artistic integrity. A lot of those who cloak themselves in the superhero cape of the “artist” are simply those trying to warp their stories into a formula: make the meaning elusive and obscure, and it’ll make you profound.
No. It. Doesn’t.
For me, the soul of true world cinema – or any great cinema – lies in the power of metaphors, in the crafting of layers that reveal themselves upon reflection. It is not about a prescribed form, but about finding the right shape for the story you are attracted to and want to tell. The form must emerge from the soil of the narrative, not be imposed upon it like a duplicate skin in plastic surgery. Your duty as a filmmaker is not to let your auteurial “vision” overpower the story’s needs; it is to submerge your ego and serve the story, to allow the film’s authentic form to emerge in the process.
This requires shedding the sneering disdain for other cinematic languages. I now understand that pulpy, massy films have as vital a place in our cultural imagination as the most austere arthouse fare. Want proof? Ask your 10-year-old self. The adolescent me was moved to delight by three words: Salim-Javed-Amitabh. Yet, during my snooty world cinema phase, I dismissed them as thieves of plots, which isn’t wrong. Yet today, as a screenwriter myself, I revere them as masterful craftsmen of the scene. Last winter, I stood in line to watch a special restored print of Sholay. The visuals were blurry, making me realise that the passion for 35mm print is also just that, snobbishness. In the film, I knew every plot turn and every line of dialogue. Yet, what stunned me was the architectural genius of each scene – the precise pacing, the strategic entrances and exits, the building of tension. The story might have been a pastiche of other plots, the intention might have been to titillate the masses, but the crafting was sophisticated. Much like Shakespeare, who we today consider classy, but back in the day wrote accessible plays for the masses. And was popular for it.
Yet, I’m sure in every nation and filmmaking centre, there is a contingent of filmmakers who wear incomprehensibility as a medal of honour. I’ve personally known those who ape Tarkovsky’s long takes or Bresson’s asceticism without understanding the philosophical insights that gave birth to those styles. They want to be aesthetes like Mani Kaul or Kumar Shahani, yet do they understand the raw, melodramatic fury of a Ritwik Ghatak? Even Satyajit Ray had no singular, ego-driven style. He followed the grain of the story, which meant that the lyrical quietude of Pather Panchali was worlds apart from the boisterous, theatrical energy of Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen. He did not force a style; he made his choices based on the tale, and that became his style. And if you genuinely observe, it is the same with every filmmaker worth their salt. Your dedication to the story, and on top of it the tools and money to make the film, should give birth to your style.
What about the many movements that have shaped cinema? Italian Neorealism wasn’t conceived by a desire to be complex or incomprehensible; it was born out of an undeniable necessity. In post-World War II Italy, studios were bombed, resources were scarce, and filmmakers took to the streets which were, to them, like free sets. Their form was a product of their everyday material reality. The French New Wave, of course, was the articulation of this neorealism by French critics and aspiring filmmakers and emerged from a conscious experiment and a burst of creative energy. Yet, Godard’s Breathless (his last few films be damned) or Truffaut’s The 400 Blows were not attempts at being obscure; they were desperate, vibrant attempts to tell stories in a new, electrifying way they had figured out in their heated debates, which, at their heart, were deeply communicative.
From these experiments, extremists like Bresson and Tarkovsky (and late-stage Godard) did emerge, taking their form to its minimalist and poetic extremes. Yet, their style was a relentless, thoughtful pursuit of a specific truth, a way to translate internal spiritual and philosophical battles onto the big screen. They weren’t trying to copy each other, or the great past or World Cinema; they were merely attempting to invent a new language for the unique metaphors that lay in their stories. Hence, when a filmmaker today slavishly copies a five-minute Tarkovskian landscape shot, the result, as I have often seen in films of friends, isn’t homage, but a cheap pastiche – obnoxious and missing the point entirely.
The world around – our streets, our homes, our conflicted hearts – is bursting with stories yet to be told. These stories don’t need to be forced into a borrowed, film festival or World Cinema form. They need to be heard in their own authentic voice. Your ego, your desire to be seen as an “artist” by a tiny, approving coterie, is the heaviest burden you can place on a story, and on yourself. Set it aside. Be at the service of the story, and not a style. Serve the narrative, not the reputation you think you have or want to create, or what you talk endlessly about in discussions and forums. Listen to what your tale demands, and have the courage to follow it, even if you think it leads to a place that feels simple, emotional, or direct to you. And don’t crib about what others are doing or what the industry is not doing. Hemingway said: Write the truest sentence that you know. You? You go and film the truest scene you know. Tell the story that only you can tell, with clarity and heart. The rest is just noise.
