Teaching Indian cinema : problems and prspects

The eminent film scholar Christian Metz once remarked that 'the cinema is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand.'. This paradoxical statement highlights the central problem of teaching films. Everyone knows what film is; everyone enjoys films. Hence, many voice the opinion, that there is nothing to teach about cinema. Clearly, this is wrongheaded. Cinema, like literature or music, is a complex art and it draws significantly on both of them. Therefore, it is very important, at the very outset, to establish the fact that there is much to be taught regarding the art of cinema as indeed as literature.

I have been teaching Asian cinema in Western and Eastern Universities - cinemas of India, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Philippines etc. - for over four decades. I have published a large number of scholarly books on Asian cinema, and come to know many of the leading film directors in these countries personally. One area of Asian cinema that I find particularly interesting is Indian cinema. Indian cinema has much in common in our own cinema. Hence, I thought of reflecting on teaching of Asian cinema as a way of re-focusing on some of the salient issues related to Sri Lankan cinema.

Films constitute a very important cultural practice. It influences society deeply and in complex ways. At the same time, it also reflects society in important ways. When we teach cinema it is important to bear in mind this fact - that films both reflect and shape societies and cultures. When we examine Indian cinema, as it has grown over a period of nearly one hundred years, we begin to appreciate this fact. Films are forms of entertainment; they are also art.

Films involve technology in a way that most other expressive art forms do not. Films are involved with questions of power and ideology. All these facts go to form the idea of film as a cultural practice. Hence, when we teach films in the classroom, we need to focus on the artistic, entertainment, technological, ideological aspects of cinema concurrently and not separately. These facets form a complex unity.

When we tech films, whether they are from India or Great Britain or United States, we invariably tend to focus on a broad gamut of themes. These are some of the more important among them.

1. The historical evolution of a cinema in a given culture.

2. The outstanding artists - directors, scriptwriters, actors etc. - associated with a given tradition of cinema

3. The impact of cinema on society; the way it has brought about important changes and transformations in a society.

4. A study of the techniques and styles associated with a given culture - the distinctive use of the camera, mise-en-scene, forms of acting, use of music and so on that are associated with a specific tradition of cinema.

5. Films do not develop in isolation. Hence, the ways in which films draw on other arts such as novels, theatre and music.

6. The industrial base of a given tradition of cinema and the complex interactions between economics, politics and culture.

7. The way audiences in specific cultures respond to films. Audiences, as we now know, are not passive absorbers of cinema or cultural dupes; they are active co-creators of meaning.

8. The diverse institutions that influence cinema - censorship, film scholarship etc.

These, then, are some of the areas that deserve our attention as we focus on the question of teaching cinema in the classroom. This is not to say that these are self-contained categories and that there is no interaction among them. Indeed, these areas of inquiry are interconnected in complex ways, and in teaching cinema to students, we need to keep this fact constantly in mind.

Therefore, in order to attain a better understanding of Indian films, it is important that we recognize the distinctive features of Indian film culture and society. India is still the largest film producing country in the world. Film continues to be a dominant form of entertainment among the vast mass of people, inflecting their consciousness, outlook on life and world view in fascinating ways. Unlike in a country like Japan, in India films are produced in nearly fifteen different languages. Therefore, the concept of regional cinema figures very prominently in Indian film culture. Bengali, Malayali, Tamil, Marathi cinemas, for example, have produced outstanding work.

India is multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual country. Hence, one has to be careful not to discuss Indian cinema in monolithic terms ignoring its many-sidedness. There are three main streams of Indian cinema - popular cinema, artistic cinema and middle cinema. All three streams need to be examined if we are to gain a true understanding of Indian cinema. Although cinema is a comparatively new art, India can lay claim to rich and complex civilization that has evolved over thousands of years.

There is a long tradition of literature and art. In more recent times, India has been in the forefront of certain intellectual movements such as postcolonial studies and subaltern studies which have served to open new spaces of human inquiry. All these facts are vitally connected with Indian filmmaking, Indian film culture and Indian film scholarship. Hence, when we tech Indian films in the classroom we need to bear in mind the aforementioned distinctiveness of Indian society, culture and cinema.

One useful point of entry into a deeper understanding of Indian cinema is through the interplay of the global and the local. Film as an art form was introduced to India, as it was to other Asian countries, from the West over a century ago. However, it quickly put down roots in the national soil and the consciousness of the people and became a distinctively Indian form of mass entertainment. The so-called Bollywood cinema bears testimony to this fact. Bollywood represents the interplay of the global and the local in interesting ways, despite the puerility of many of them. As we seek to examine the complex ways in which forces of localism and globalism interact within the field of Indian cinema, it is important to bear in mind the ways in which consumption of popular culture can be meaningfully understood and taught. Film constitutes the most dominant form of entertainment in India, and hence it becomes a useful site for the interrogation of the production, circulation and consumption of popular culture. One has only to study the ways in which product placement operates in Indian films.

In examining the nexus between cinema and popular culture in the class room, first, I discuss what I think are some important aspects of the discourse of popular culture and the ways in which we need to frame them so as to get closer to the dynamics of popular cinema as a significant cultural practice. Secondly, I call attention to the vital interplay of globalism and localism and the expanding imperatives related to the production of locality. Thirdly, I focus on Indian popular cinema and the inter-animation of local conjunctures and global processes in the work of somee of the most influential popular filmmakers and actors of India like Raj Kapoor. Fourthly, I venture to explore the intriguing ways in which audiences consume popular cinema - how they derive pleasure, meaning, how they construct distinctive subject-positions in relation to film texts and their libidinal investments in filmic discourses - once again keeping in mind the mutual embeddedness of the local and the global as an exegetical horizon.

Until very recent times, popular culture was relegated to the margins of intellectual discourse and analysis, being almost always treated as a residual category. There was the high culture patronized by the elites which privileged notions of sophisticated taste, refinement of sensibility, canonicity, exclusivity, and the aesthetic sublime; on the other hand, there was the folk-culture which was the property of the untutored peasants and which was deemed unsophisticated, unrefined, often coarse and deeply and unflinchingly invested in oral tradition. Popular culture, which was by and large, de-valorized as superficial, hybrid, crude, appealing to the lowest common denominator in terms of sensibility and social understanding, belonged to the open space unoccupied by elite culture and folk culture. Andreas Huyssen captures a significant aspect of this de-valorized otherness when he observes that popular culture can be regarded as the absent other in modernism.

Fortunately for us, the newer conceptual pathways opened up by contemporary cultural analysts and theorists have served to demonstrate the emptiness of the conventional wisdoms on popular culture and approach it with a much deeper appreciation for the complex dynamics associated with the production of meaning and pressures in everyday life, the interface between technology, politics and culture, the pervasiveness and polysemy of signs. The work of such important cultural theorists as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Umbert Eco, Michel de Certeu, Raymond Williams, Jean Baudrillard, Stuart Hall, in their different ways, and from their diverse vantage points, enable us to re-understand and re-conceptualize popular culture as a discursive domain with an enlarged frame of awareness. These theorists can prove to be extremely useful in discussing popular culture and cinema in the classroom.

One of the most significant approaches to the location and study of popular culture is represented in the work of the Frankfurt School, most notably, that of Adorno and Horkheimer. Despite its excesses, it still generates great interest. It is contended that popular culture, which is closely linked to cultural production within a capitalist framework, has the effect of fashioning homogenized masses. The pre-packaged and standardized products of popular culture, according to this line of thinking, have a most harmful impact on the consuming publics. The applicability and relevance of such a line of thinking is evident in the case of Indian cinema.

These issues, which I have confronted in university class rooms in teaching Indian cinema, I believe, have a deep relevance to the proper understanding of some facets of Sri Lankan cinema as well.