NEW CINEMA AND FILM SOCIETY MOVEMENT: CINEMA IN SEARCH OF AN AUDIENCE

Abstract

Film Society Movement in India and its trajectories, spanning from 1947 to 1980. The film society movement initiated and boasted by the prominent Bengali luminaries filmmakers’, such as Chidananda Dasgupta, Satyajit Ray, Bangshi Chandragupta, Harishadhan Dasgupta, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and later on, a gang of film school alumni, Mani Kaul, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Sayed Akhtar Mirza, Girish Kasaravalli, Nirod Mahapatra, Manmohan Mahapatra, Jahnu Barua, etc. were part of it, and alongside a substantial following of film enthusiasts that grew to approximately 100,000 members by 1980. While this movement primarily attracted individuals who regarded themselves as devoted film enthusiasts, it gained momentum through discussions reminiscent of those that animated left-leaning cultural movements originating in late colonial India, especially the Indian People Theatre Movement. It argued that a group of luminaries, those connected to this movement in some capacities, initially had their contributions marked by debates on the cultural and political roles of cinema. The main objectives of film societies were to forge a link between the cinema of the West and Indian art house cinema, as well as Indian audiences, filmmakers, and cinema technicians. After the independence in the second and third five-year plans, the Government of India took the initiative to strengthen the parallel film movement. Their agendas were not only to inspire young people to make but also to perpetuate Indian films in the international film market, where the primary motive would be to make ‘Better films, for Better Audience and Better Society’. So, in this paper, I would like to explore how in the mid-1960s, notable shifts were found within the film societies that shifted the focus to aesthetics rather than a more pronounced political engagement with cinema. Simultaneously, it will also be explained that if it is factually accepted that the central government and other state agencies took affirmative initiatives in introducing and promoting Indian parallel films, why is it assumed that the parallel film movement only addressed the well-educated? If the latter is true, why is it so? Are narrative conventions in art cinema not accessible to those with less education? In this proposal the question of cognition is important for the sake of cinematic narrative on one hand, on the other, for the emotive directionality – that directionality is indeterminate in nature in new wave Indian cinema. This research is not fully based on empirical research, nevertheless, I will take interviews of filmmakers, technicians, producers, art critics. Methodology adopted is qualitative in nature, based upon structured and in‐depth interviews which enabled the respondents to opine regarding their understanding of the pedagogical and cognitive changes from Indian realism to Indian new wave. In this research we propose to use an inter-disciplinary framework where the sociological observations will receive priority because the content of parallel films and sociology are interlinked. Here the parallel new wave films between 1970’s to 80’s will be used as tools of understanding, criticizing and portraying social norms, values and institutions and as well as illustrating principles in the study of socio-political life.