Opinion How the pictures got small

I had come from Agra,where I was brought up on a regular Hindi film diet — I grew up familiar with everything,from Guru Dutt to Anil Kapoor to out-of-the-way small films. But like many other adults,I was embarrassed of the stuff I watched,growing up. I wanted to discuss Truffaut and Godard and Scorcese,and all the other names that were thrown around by people I hung out with,drank or smoked with. In everything I watched,I was in search of cinema,for what was cinematic,aesthetic.

Long long ago,when movies were born,they were taken on their own terms. Hollywood during and after World War II became the hub for foreign and local talent. As it became the most popular source of entertainment,studios and filmmakers and technicians kept pushing the envelope to make big screen viewing even bigger and better. Aspect-ratios and negative-formats were invented and patented. Model-building and set-building grew into a large industry for genres like science fiction. Sound had a journey of its own from silent to talkies to Mono,Stereo and now 5.1. Hollywood gave the movies ambition.

Like the rest of the world,Hindi films also looked to Hollywood. From silent black-and-whites of Dadasaheb Phalke,we came to the era of Raj Kapoor,Bimal Roy,Guru Dutt,Mehboob Khan and K. Asif,to the Eastman Color explosion of the ’60s. We were still trying to make the screen experience bigger,with films like Mughal-E-Azam,Mother India and Mera Naam Joker. Then came Ramesh Sippy came with his 70 mm Sholay in 1975,determined to make it look as good as any Hollywood western. The Sippys gambled on the film’s success — had it not,they might have been on the verge of bankruptcy. But never again was that vainglory repeated — “ambition” became a bad thing in the industry (apart from,perhaps,Boney Kapoor and Shekhar Kapur’s Mr India).

Someone recently asked me why a filmmaker in Bombay receives only a handful of scripts to look at,as opposed to the 50 or 60 that a Hollywood director picks between. I told him that we essentially have only three or four genres in Hindi films — comedy,crime,romance and family. We can do a permutation-combination within these — comic-crime,family-romance,violent-love-story,etc — but we don’t have genres like war (unless you want to count films like Border),science-fiction (unless you want to count Koi Mil Gaya),fantasy (Ra.One?),espionage (hold that thought for a bit). And you don’t even have to look as far as Hollywood for a reality check. Look at film industries that grew up alongside ours,like China (Zhang Yimou’s Flowers of War) or South Korea (Bong Joon Ho’s The Host). The problem is not that we have only a few films in such genres. The problem is how many of these can claim the bravado of Sippy’s Sholay — to make it as good and engaging as any Hollywood movie.

Bollywood can afford this slumber,perhaps. Hindi television is no competition (unlike in the US and UK),it’s not even up to the old Doordarshan standard. Documentaries don’t have good distribution/exhibition,shorts and animation are still at a very nascent stage. Nothing can take our movie-going audience away for now.

And to be fair,there are some worthwhile attempts on the “cinema” side of things. But even then,there is a comfort zone — small-town north India. We rarely move out of UP,Bihar,Punjab and sometimes,New Delhi (and this can go on for a while,because regional cinema in these areas is not as robust as Tamil or Marathi). Hindi films,though,need to wake up and really look around.

Going back to that man in Ram Gopal Varma’s office,he was struggling over a film he was making. Every day,he would struggle with questions like,“Urmila has to escape in this scene,we know that,the audience knows that,so how can I still keep them at the edge of their seats” or “the best thing would be if Urmila’s revenge is still to come,five minutes before the end. Can what looks impossible be suddenly made possible”? I never understood his struggle back then.

Now that man,Sriram Raghavan,has made a film called Agent Vinod. And in making it,he has taken out “all the tack” from ’60s and ’70s Bollywood capers,infused it with tonnes of that missing thing,ambition,and truly sweated to make it a big screen spectacle. If only Bollywood could take away,from his movie,what they missed 37 years ago with Sholay — the need for story and spectacle. And yes,now you can strike out “espionage” from that list of things we don’t do.

Sabharwal is a screenwriter and director based in Mumbai