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The film at crossroads: An essay by Balraj Sahni, from the HT archives

ByBalraj Sahni
Jan 25, 2025 12:15 AM IST

HT’s Republic@75 special: Good intentions are only part of filmmaking. It also takes science – knowledge, experience, craft – to represent reality, Sahni says.

On the busy street two cyclists banged into each other. An argument developed, a crowd gathered, the traffic was held up.

Sahni in the 1953 Bimal Roy classic, Do Bigha Zamin. (HT Archives) PREMIUM
Sahni in the 1953 Bimal Roy classic, Do Bigha Zamin. (HT Archives)

You happened to be watching this from the first-storey window of your house. “How silly of people to flock around like that,” you thought, “and over such a small thing! What a waste of time and energy.” But all the same you too went on watching the show, wasting time and energy.

Why? What was it that held your attention? You stood there for the good part of an hour!

As against this, try to recollect a road accident that you may have seen in a Hindustani film. Weren’t you bored with it? Yes, you were; despite the fact that it hardly took two minutes to happen on the screen. It didn’t seem to make sense. It looked so unnatural.

It’s good you used that word. It is neither the story, nor songs, nor the dances, nor the stars, that make a motion picture; but the presentation of a piece of life naturally and convincingly. That is what holds interest. It may be any piece of life, a road accident or a love affair.

The very simplicity of this statement, however, makes its practice in art extremely complicated and difficult. Suppose at your next tea-party you asked your friends to co-operate in acting out the road accident you saw from your window. Your success would depend not only on your previous training as actor or director but also on how closely you watched the behaviour of the crowd, its movements, its composition, its mood, its individual characteristics. Good wishes in art are only one part. The other part is science.

I have yet to meet a person, whether inside or outside the film industry, who is not sad over the lack of realism in our pictures. It would be more helpful, however, if we shifted our attention to the technique of “realism” and its history.

After renaissance

About the same time as Christopher Columbus discovered America the artists of Europe discovered “realism”. It is difficult to say which of the two discoveries was more important. Students of literature at universities call the happy event Renaissance.

’It is the duty of our Government to encourage the artist to depict contemporary life bravely and truthfully,’ Sahni writes.
’It is the duty of our Government to encourage the artist to depict contemporary life bravely and truthfully,’ Sahni writes.

A comparative study of the pre-Renaissance (or pre-Shakespearean, if you like!) and the post-Renaissance theatre reveals fundamental differences, and is of immense value for the student of the film art today.

Some of the characteristic features of pre-Shakespearean medieval drama are: (1) It is religious and mystical. It is an act of worship and has little to do with the problems of contemporary social life. (2) It is un-national. The writers regard their mother-tongues as inferior to Latin. They copy the classical style slavishly. (3) The characters of these plays are not living people but embodiments of certain qualities. Being mere puppets, they move within the framework of a pre-manufactured plot, which is in no way influenced by their inner necessity. The hero and the villain are mutually exclusive — one being completely good and the other completely evil.

Medieval films

Returning to the scene of the Hindustani film, we find that nine films out of ten seem to fall in the medieval category.

It hurts one’s pride to admit this, but correct remedies can be found only after a correct diagnosis. It is well known that we still make quite a large number of religious or quasi-religious films. Even when we take up historical subjects, we treat them mythologically, hoping to convert the patronage of the audience into an act of worship, no matter to what length truth gets distorted in the process.

Also our films are un-national, their producers seem to suffer from a chronic inferiority complex. Copying successful foreign films has become an established, time-honoured practice in Bombay. And lastly, the concept of the hero being white like snow, and the villain black as soot, is still with us. A galaxy of waxy idols, in crazy costumes and crazier settings, flit about from screen to screen, mouthing the same flowery language and doing exactly the same sort of thing over and over again.

The cure

And now for the cure.

Renaissance in Europe was heralded by great advances in the economic and political spheres. Human beings received concrete proof that life on this earth was better than the next, that man could be nature’s master and not her slave, that in the realm of art “the proper study of mankind is man”.

In contrast, the past few centuries for our countrymen have been dreary. And to be honest, even today the artist finds himself in an atmosphere of frustration and misery. Realism needs a healthier climate. Fresh winds must blow in our social life — as they are blowing in our sister country China — to give the artist inspiration.

First and foremost, it is the duty of our Government to encourage the artist to depict contemporary life bravely and truthfully, to expose the evils that bar the way to social progress. It must remove the fear of untold censorships — written and unwritten — from the artist’s mind. Our first free Government should place the film art in the hands of progress, secularism and democracy. No longer should this powerful medium of entertainment perpetuate fossilized medieval ideas and methods. It should radiate the light of conscious and vigorous optimism.

Need of training

Efforts should be made that every instrument required for film-making is manufactured in our own country. As in every other advanced country, our universities should provide theoretical as well as practical training for youthful artistes and technicians. Our studios must cease to be a happy hunting ground for charlatans, however impressive may they sometimes be!

But the true artist does not merely wait for opportunities. He creates them. Fortunately the force of life itself is ushering in a mighty demand for better films. At this juncture it is all the more pertinent to warn the aspiring realists that good wishes and noble intentions alone are not enough. They must possess a “lust for life”. They must master the technique which the great realists from the time of Shakespeare to the present day have perfected.

It is not enough to copy Chaplin, Steinbeck, De Sica or Pudovkin. Nay, it is worse than useless. The thing to do is to find out how and why those people make a simple road accident look real and eloquent on the screen and we don’t.

[Balraj Sahni (1913-1973) was an actor, playwright and writer. He is best known for his role in the landmark 1953 Bimal Roy film, Do Bigha Zamin. This article was originally published on January 26, 1953]

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