Cinema - A Modern Maverick? (ASSIGNMENT 1, ARTICLE 1 - IDM)

Walt Disney once said, "We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make movies". We resort to movies when we feel happy, sad, angry, confused, and make them a part of ourselves, so much so that all we need to do is ask “ Which house do you belong to?” to bond with a complete stranger (Context Harry Potter!). But are movies made just to entertain us? What do movies do to us? And why are they so important?

Movies have come a long way ever since the Lumiere Bros screened their first footage. Gradually we started to use the technique to narrate stories and we today use visual effects and computer graphics to enhance our film viewing experience. 

But movies or 'films', to use the technical word, have been a trigger to stir change in society. When rightly used, it's a tool that could build great empires, and destroy them when not. This is evident from the many incidents which have gone down in history showcasing both the extremes. Which is why we have more than enough examples to showcase both the extremes in history. 

We make a lot of films every year. Why do we not watch all of them? Or to be precise, what is a good film? With my limited knowledge, let me try to pen down the parts of a good film. 

1. Premise - A good film always has a premise. Without a premise, a film loses its soul. The premise sets the 'why' of the film.

2. Character - After the premise is set, it is important to stage the relevance of the premise with its final vision through the characters of the film. 

3. Journey - It does not have to be fixed, but the journey of a character should start at a point that justifies the premise. 

Good directors adopt unique techniques of the craft to effectively express a character's stand and it has more often than not resulted in expanding the horizons of the craft. A few such films include The Godfather, Prestige, Interstellar, Pulp Fiction, Seven, Saving Private Ryan, Psycho and Visaranai. Film-making has different schools of thought and various kinds of representational techniques. It is marrying visual sensibilities with a story and turning it into a string of events. These different schools have come a long way, with artists, writers, singers, actors, and craftsmen contributing to its legacy, and hence it is vital to treat it with integrity. The numerous film societies and film institutions aid that. When films become intellectual and stop catering to the people's wants, a series of conversations start and somewhere in those hidden conversations an idea is sparked that could make another trivial but important difference. 

While film institutes provide theoretical and practical knowledge, film societies and communities collect and screen films to provoke fresh minds to come up with unique and path-breaking ways of storytelling. This is not only interesting to witness, but also healthy for a community to indulge and invest in. 

Although film-making is an intellectual business, it is also the entertainment generator. And it need not necessarily be a bad thing, because why can't entertainment be learning? Commercialization is not bad, but what we as responsible students need to understand is that a story, after all, emerges out of a conflict. And that conflict has to always remain in the story. Or to rephrase it, a story at the end of the day needs to be genuine.

Speaking of commercialization; Big studios like Disney are slowly conquering the production world and that is rather disturbing because imagine one person controlling what we see. It will eventually kill the creativity involved in this whole process, as big-budget films give very little scope to experiment with scripts and start becoming repetitive and money-centric (which Walt Disney was completely against). Films lose their essence when served in a platter to us with utter perfection. They feel plastic and made up. It is hence important to encourage independent filmmakers to come up with new and interesting content because true cinema emerges out of real emotions.