What defines a country’s cinema? Let’s take India for example… is India defined by the best it has produced, judged on terms of recognition bestowed by the west – take a Monsoon Wedding (winner at the Venice Film Festival) or a Lagaan and Mother India (Oscar nominees for best foreign film) or is it to be defined by the median that bisects the melee that is Bollywood, Tollywood, Mollywood and Kollywood? Is it about how good we can be? Or is it about how much more we can tow the line of mediocrity to pander to an audience who is sluggishly waking up to good cinema?

First of all, what is good cinema? Film, to a lesser degree, is a lot like abstract expressionism: easy to dismiss and difficult to comprehend in it’s entirety. A good film, therefore, is entirely subjective. In brief, here is what I think are the ingredients of an accomplished film: An eventful story well told through strong central and (importantly) secondary performances, innovative camerawork, unnoticeable sound, and editing of all repetition all coming together to create an experience that an audience appreciates. What clearly don’t matter are budgets and stars. Given this framework, we need to dissect the corpus of celluloid produced in India (a little under 1000 films annually) to understand why we have such poor cinema. Here are the top reasons:

Very little originality – Directors like Abbas-Mustan and Vikram Bhatt are old hands at this. So much so, their indigenized creations are almost at par (at least technically) with their inspirations. Then there are makers like Sanjay Leela Bhansali whose arrogance blinds him to a point where he rips off obscure (for an unsuspecting audience) classics and expect them to go on to win Oscars. And then there is the Sanjay Gupta category – those go all out to a point where plagiarism seems too derisory a word. Sanjay Gupta, after Kaante (Resevoir Dogs, set in LA, not even in Mumbai), Musafir (U-Turn without any surprises), and now Zinda (every wig, every lighting setup, everything is an exact replica of Old Boy) has now announced that he’s going to be doing a collection of 10 shorts titled Dus Kahania modeled after The Decalogue. I wonder how Kieslowski would feel about this. Does he see this as a tribute to his inspirational cross-cultural ideas or Indian morality hitting the Mariana Trench? Personally, I have very little respect for filmmakers (who call themselves one) who do a Sanjay Gupta. I refuse to watch their movies (having already seen the originals) because I cannot contribute to people’s pockets who make films only for cash. It is an easy trap to fall into, for sure, given that everyone from financers, producers, filmmakers, exhibitionists, and audiences will swallow just about anything as long as it’s ‘sellable’. I am going to define this word for you in the Bollywood context shortly.

Identity crisis – This is a huge problem Bollywood is struggling with. The stories that are being told on celluloid are either aping their counterparts in Hollywood or regressive as they are re-inventing the wheel with their style and technique. Indian cinema has reached a point where it doesn’t know where it’s heading. People keep saying we’re 20 years behind Hollywood in cinema. Are we really? And if we are, are audiences going to accept that, given the simultaneous release of high on SFX Hollywood films released in India, not to mention DVD accessibility? What’s the way forward? Certainly not films like Krrish. One can understand the success of the first super hero film with okayish special effects, but how many more jump-suited heroes can we see leaping across buildings one minute and prancing around trees with the heroine the next? Surely it cannot become a trend! What about Golmaal, Masti, Hungama, Phir Hera Pheri, and No Entry? Surely there is a limit to these crass comedies. And if there isn’t – please – this fare belongs to non-primetime television. And then of course there is the Karan Johar/Yash Chopra genre, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna was nowhere close to Kal Ho Na Ho, proving that even the great KJ is not infallible and as for the Chopra camp, well Fanaa says it all as it is a most regressive film. As of this 2006 so far, only 3 films deserve some credit. Rang De Basanti for its rock solid style and treatment, Omakara as a mega budget art film with no compromise on the script, performances, and even the camerawork, and finally Lage Raho Munnabhai for it’s striving for perfection and relevance and achieving it. These are the only films all of this year that indicate a path forward for our cinema. And if you’ve seen them, you know how different they are from each other. The only common factor is strong original ideas backed by solid direction.

Star Power – There is an adage – Stars make or break a film. As of today, this has never been truer. This alone could be the only raison d’etre for the lack of any experimentation or sustained quality in cinema. Having experienced it first-hand, allow me to explain the methodology of ‘making a film.’ New Indian directors and writers, whose favorite films are more likely to be a Fellini rather than Manmohan Desai, are constantly looking to break barriers and change (or at least multidimensionalize) the identity of Indian cinema. Once a script is done, what do they do? Say the below-the-line cost is upward of Rs. 3 crore (a meager $650,000), the first natural step would be to approach producers. What they hear is this: Given the cost of production, the film will not recover its money (they haven’t even read the script yet.) Your best bet would be to get a star onboard. Okay, how? Oh, that’s up to you of course, producers can’t get the makers the stars. Get a star and we’ll do it.

Note the last line carefully. Get a star and we’ll do it. Nobody has even glanced at the script (in fact, it’s pointless to even carry one to meeting with a producer.) They’re making a commitment based on nothing except the basic amount of ticket sales, overseas and satellite rights rate that the star’s popularity can muster. They’re just assuming that if something moves on screen with the bloke’s pancaked head in the frame, it’ll “recover costs” at the very least.

So the young director’s sojourn to get a star begins. How does he get a meeting with a star? There are no agents (only sleazy secretaries), no formal approach, nothing. He needs to depend on his networking skills to somehow get a number, call, call, call again till he finally gets through, somehow (an impossible process) get a 15 minute meeting and cram a full screenplay, his track record, answer all questions regarding the script, producers in those precious moments. If the actor is convinced, he’ll nod. It’s a cakewalk from then on. The director will have a line of producers at his doorstep. And herein lies the problem. We all know that the cumulative IQ of Indian stars is a shade below the average eight grader’s, and in the circumstances the star has made a commitment based on his ‘judgment’. So much for quality control. Is it any surprise that in Bollywood, films get made based on people skills and past relationships, rather than lesser important ingredients such as good scripts?

Nepotism is another niggling problem. Either you AD and network for half your life or you need a Godfather in the industry to reach a point where someone is willing to back you as a filmmaker. There is no system in place to recognize fresh, original talent. It’s a wonder that any independent films get made at all in India.

Lack of options – Given the case, what’re the options filmmakers have? To make any kind of cinema that reaches out to an audience (and all cinema must), there has to be at least some basic financial backing. With the dissolution of NFDC, most filmmakers will now never get a chance for that crucial first film. This is the system that enabled makers like Kundan Shah and Vidhu Vinod Chopra to make their mark with films like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron and Khamosh and now the only real government agency that helped aid such films and discovered makers has shut down because it was a loss making venture. Pathetic. Instead of re-inventing itself by, say, enabling low budget films converted-from-DV and enforcing it in multiplexes (what are all the tax-sops for?), they just throw their hands up in the air and give-up! So what do you do? No sensible production house or financer is going to back you till you have a star. How do you get a star? As of today, there are barely 5 lead actors who you can sign on and make a film with a decent budget and a wide release. 5. That’s it. How many quality directors out there? At least 2000 for a conservative estimate? They have no option. The mathematics cannot work like the way it does in Hollywood because in America, even a film with all new faces has a budget equaling our top grossers.

And what about the ones who do manage to sign these 5 big guns on? What do they do? They try their very, very best to try and stick to tried and tested subjects that they know will work. All films must have a love angle, the must have songs, and so on and so forth. They’re diffident of experiments, because the fickleness of the industry doesn’t allow leeway for failure. And so, there is an abject lack of subjects; all films are beginning to merge and look like one continuous never-ending reel.

And it’s not just stars and subjects. Every maker would like Himesh Reshammiya, Farah Khan, Anil Mehta, everyone shoots at the same locations… it’s all about a lack of options and a fear of experimentation. A film needs to be sellable (to the star, then the producer, and then the audience) and what will sell best? Something that’s been sold in the past. This is where ‘pop’ cinema comes from isn’t it?

Distribution pains – It’s a miracle films make money theatrically. Certainly we have come a long way from days when distributors were expected to finance the songs of a film, before they were shot. It was an amazingly stupid way to work and distributors now have a cushier life with little monetary risk. But with the currently scenario, one just wonders if it’s not just better to get into the ‘business’ of piracy. Almost every non-discerning film-goer would rather just wait a day or two till an illegal copy of the film is available on the streets in either VCD or DVD formats. To hell with the fact that it is a camera-print and that people might keep walking past the camera, that the sound quality is abysmal, and that the picture pans left to right depending on the action on screen. They really don’t care. They just want to know what happens next. Why is this happening? Prohibitive cinema ticket prices? Laziness? Perhaps it’s just bad cinema and these guys just need a break with a remote to skip the boring parts? So how do we fix this? We need wider distribution. This is happening with the 30-cr plus films with over 1000 prints releasing on the opening day. Otherwise they travel from A centers to B to C centers. There is significant activity on to install digital cinema projectors in B and C centers so that films can be released simultaneously in more theaters. However, implementation is taking ages for reasons best known to them. We need more affordable cinema-going experiences. A night out for a family of 4 to watch a new release is well over Rs. 1000. 35% of this figure is entertainment tax. It’s senseless. Even people who want to watch films regularly cannot. Films are mass entertainment and the value-chain involved is too pre-occupied to not lose money. A regulation fixed here and some common-sense applied there will drive hordes of people back to the theaters and films can be watched the way they were intended to be.

Lack of appreciation of good films – The audience is completely to blame here; they don’t know a good film when they see one. It’s no secret that in our film-crazy country, film-literacy is very low. Parallels to Hollywood are inevitable, but we need to take a leaf out of Europe. Obsessing with Bollywood and turning a blind eye to alternate Indian and world cinema is a bad sign. Kerela has taken major strides in the last few years with even rural villages being exposed to film camps and seminars that regularly show Bergman and Bertolucci; but why isn’t this concept permeating to the rest of the country especially the metros? The handful of film clubs are too elitist insisting that the cover charge include a glass of wine or at least beer. Exhibition honchos are of course only concerned about maintaining the 40% capacity-rate that they need to fill for every show. Needless to say chances of them allocating off-beat films a screening a day will severely affect their bottom-line. But I have a solution. What’s the one kind of film that all audiences will watch regardless of where they’re coming from? R rated ones. I propose that this is where theaters should begin: screen classics with nudity. The Canterbury Tales, Last Tango in Paris, and Y Tu Mama Tambien, will all find an audience. Then steadily, wean them away and simply show them good films. Women will come too, coaxed by their husbands and boyfriends: this is not porn, this is cinema. But of course, there is one major flaw in this plan: our good ol’ government and its whims of

Censorship – With our dear health minister Ramadoss’ capricious ban on showing smoking on screen, censorship in India is taking regressive steps. While there is more kissing, risqué content is getting sidelined. However, I strongly feel this is something that really can be fixed overnight if the right people take over. Here is the only aspect we need to ape the west and put a stringent rating system in place with appropriate warning tags for all films. It’s really that simple as far as the law goes. Enforcing it is where the difficulty lies and the responsibility is the audience’s too.

So who is to blame? Filmmakers and producers for not trying too hard, distributors and exhibitors for only looking after their interests, the government for their arcane regulations, the audiences for not giving more-deserving films a fair chance and creating stars out of actors; in short, everyone really.

- with thanks from textonthebeach.com, a multi-topic blog that looks at India in the 21st century from the deck chair.