Cinema

 Author- Utkarsha Pol - 2164.

"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world". - Jean-Luc Godard.

The journey of Indian Cinema from Raja Harishchandra a silent black and white film to the action-packed sci-fi colorful films have been iconic. Indian Cinema consists of many industries like Bollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood, etc. There are innumerable genres of film like action, thriller, horror, sci-fi, romance, comedy, drama, crime, adventure, narrative, fantasy, documentary, musical, historical, animation, etc.

Source: Primary genres in Indian films till date as per IMDB.

Cinema continues to provide entertainment to a large mass of people. In this era, the internet provide access to almost everything. But the depiction in a movie is not possibly ethical. The masala tinge given to a movie to tame the audience might not be ethical. Most of the time, movies are made on a commercial basis where it is observed what people expect, what people want to see. Once that recipe to the potion is known the basic outline of a movie is the same other than some little changes in the movie to give a new outlook. Not only this but the style that characters follow is obscene which is followed by children without knowing it's real meaning. The language used, the costumes, the act, expressions, everything is followed blindly like a trend from top to toe.

Who should be blamed, the writer or the actor?

The ethics of the making of a film are manifested in various ways in the film's aesthetics. Most viewers sense the filmmaker's attitude toward their subjects be it contempt or respect, compassion or cynicism, arrogance or humility. Even a documentary reveals qualities of its maker as well as its subject. The way subjects are framed, the shots they're juxtaposed to, the images their voices are laid over, how long they're allowed to talk for and what about, the revelation of a camera pan or tilt, whether the style disguises or discloses the filmmaker's authorial presence in all these ways an audience pieces together clues about the filmmaker's intellectual and behavioral point of view.

What has followed the character or the actor's real personality or the glamor?

Reality is depicted in the movies but some movie scenes are forged as criminal activities. For example, the recent Delhi murder case in which the boyfriend killed his girlfriend brutally was inspired by the American series Dexter. And the Indian series like Crime Patrol.

What is the craze behind such things?

What is the consumer's psychology?

People's psychology has always been negative. And it is like they always want someone to take them out of a difficult situation which is the basic portrayal of any movie's hero. It is scientifically proven that people support the portrayal of characters' qualities or materialistic things which they don't have. The mass likes to see the portrayal of what they don't have in their lives. The pleasure is in experiencing it through movies.

The reason behind celebrating a movie release on a mass scale or giving a milk bath to a superhero's poster. How much is this important?

Instead, we help people who are in need instead of spending valuable time and not getting involved in such things. 

For example, fans pray for their superhero Amitabh Bachan when he was hospitalized. It is said that heroes are known by their fans and vice-versa but how much does an actor know a fan who prayed for him?

For these fans, the star is a larger-than-life figure, conjured up in their minds by combining the elements of his onscreen character and offscreen persona. For instance look how Vijay treats his fans well, despite being in such a stature of stardom. The nuisance created by fans during the celebration of the movie release is not liked by everyone. 

Cinema has its dark part but the hope that it gives cannot be denied. In Indian scholarship, talking to fans has led to the discovery that they gain strength, not weakness, from their fandom.  Rajnikanth isn’t just about young boys climbing billboards and dancing in the street, it is about the underclass gaining a sense of dignity and power.  Helen isn’t just about sexy songs, she is about bringing sexuality into public life in a non-judgmental way.  And Amitabh is about “Agneepath”, about finding inspiration and the strength to keep going somehow even when you have nothing left.  Fans are finding something they need.

There was news coming out during the lockdowns explaining that horror movie fans may be better equipped to deal with COVID-19 because the fictional situations provided by the horror genre or fictional movies like Apocalypse, etc are said to imagine themselves in that position and the redressal mechanism in them starts working. Thus, the presence of or tackling of the issue or the preparedness is generated among them. So watching movies may not support negative points of view. 

The movie business is a big business, with global box office revenue reaching a record $42.5 billion in 2019. But this huge figure doesn't mean that all movies are money makers; in fact, many movies end up being losing bets.

Indeed, although there are thousands of movies made every year, only a percentage of those become feature films with the big budgets we often associate with the Hollywood movie-making business. And though the occasional independent, low-budget film will break out and become a runaway hit, most blockbusters are on the high-budget end. 

After Covid-19 numbers declined, people started to go out again to watch movies in movie theaters but this could be only temporary due to the excitement to be out after a long period of lockdown. The film production industry will go on whether it will be mainly consumed in movie theaters or streaming. It is the delivery channels that are under disruption and shift now and might decide the cost of a movie depending on the price to pay to watch. On its own, film investments appears to be an asset class unto itself—uncorrelated to the other types of investments. Movies are somewhat recession-resistant because even in hard times, people still need quality entertainment. so they will not stop going to the movies or streaming them online.

Well cinema does provide employment but as an audience we get nothing out of it speaking in monetary terms. People involved in movies gain just because we watch it. Though there are several excellent movies who make us aware of the social issues, moral values, our own history and culture, etc. Cinema is not totally bad but whenever something gets out of control it is bad.