Social Responsibility of a Film-Maker

[NOTE: One from the archives. I wrote this on Friday the 12th of November, 2010. The slight evolution in my writing style is perceptible to me when I compare this huge article to those I have written more recently, more 'offhandedly'.] 

It is never an artist’s ambition to accommodate the expectations of his audience into his art form. The visual art of filmmaking is hardly any different. Commercial cinema, as it has been so branded today, is not only a sham, a façade, but also a very audacious and wounding ignominy to art forms in totality.
The first rule, as Tyler Durden oh-so famously bellowed, of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. Extending this pop-culture referencing analogy to the topic of my (self proclaimed) rant, what I mean to say here is that real, lauded, hard-hitting cinema is never for its own sake. It has the power, the boldness, and the smugness to step up, be judge and provide solutions to the very problems it poses in its 120 minutes timeframe. It can never be utterly a disconnected world of its own; in its basic emotions such as greed, happiness, joy and envy, it is very much a social statement, because no artist can undo the constant sculpting of their thoughts at the hands of their circumstances and milieu, however badly they might try to.
Let’s take A Clockwork Orange for instance. It is a film laden with ideas, brimming and at times spilling over with passionate expression and honest brutality. A visual, mental and auditory ‘kick’. A running social commentary and darkly satirical undertones is what makes the film meaningful. It is not for art for the heck of it, or for the lately much-in-use (or more aptly, abuse) ‘entertainment’ value of it.
It is hence inherent that cinema carries the responsibility of shaping up the ideas of an entire generation, given that a proper, concerted solution is also provided as an epilogue, because a satire is incomplete without providing a way out of the situation it parodies. If otherwise, then it is a satire of itself, it parodies its own impotence and futility.
They say that a pen is mightier than the sword. I propose a rather contemporary overhaul to this age-old adage. The camera has replaced the pen, and the sword is well, anything that helps impose one’s beliefs over another, be it an AK-47, be it a nuclear weapon, or be it hard cash.
We live in times dubbed as the ‘ghor kalyug’, translated to English as the clichéd ‘bad times’. In any given era we look back into, we’ve always have had that one, looming, impending danger ahead of us that hangs like the sword of Damocles overhead, a danger to humanity as a whole. In the middle 20th century, it was the fear of human race being wiped out at the hands of a third, final world-war, with big-wiggies like USA and Russia threatening to tear each other to shreds with their mammoth arsenal of nuclear warheads. As the USSR disintegrated into a dozen countries, and North Korea grew weak economically, this once-pounding fear went dormant, and is now almost unheard of. It has been, however, duly replaced by the next big impending peril, what we term as ‘global warming’.
And so, every period of humanity has its own idiosyncrasies, its own icing-on-the-cake, its own perception of lifestyle and its own whitewashed sense of sensibilities. This, in part, gets reflected in our cinema. At the time when the USA-Russia cold war was underway, we saw a dramatic shift of our cinema to subjects like espionage, double-crossing spies, and undercover secret agents, what with Ethan Hunt and James Bond leading the pack. So, in a way, a majority of movies cash in on the fear housed inside the audience’s hearts, and also inside the filmmaker’s own.
But then, there is another crop of movies, a la Fight Club, Memento, Dark City, and The Matrix that expend their own ideas rather than borrowing it from actual events. Of course, they can never be completely disconnected to our world; in fact they are more in sync with our lives’ pertinent issues than outlandish, society-borrowing films. Therefore, in order to being about a change in the society, in the social skeleton, it is a duty of the film maker to mould a film that not only is a result of its environment, but also very much a solution in itself. A problem left unsolved is merely stating the obvious, it is hence said that cinema is not just a reflection; it is how-to guide to self improvement.
It is also questionable as to what intelligence level the filmmaker holds. In times when a Hi-definition camcorder is as ubiquitous as a cell phone, any idiot armed with this device can go one making their own movies. This is exponentially dangerous when these self proclaimed flag bearers of intelligent cinema pass them off as ‘art’ films. Art cinema certainly is the ideal playfield for these pseudo-filmmakers to try and mould the minds of people they cater to. A few close-ups here, a few serious shots there, and lo, you have your average artsy film that the critics love and the audience love to hate. Hence, a film being an art film alone can never be a cent percent assurance of it being socially relevant and essential.
The audience should be as good as non-existent for a filmmaker when he’s shooting a movie. For it to be hard hitting and powerful, a film has to be no-holds-barred and relentless, without as much of a hint of cringing and whining at sensitive issues or controversial topics. Filmmaking (excellent filmmaking, that is) is always and always has been, very much a personal project, never with the accommodation of how the audience will react to it. One of the most glimmering examples to this claim is the entire career of auteur Guru Dutt, who made timeless, impeccable and not to forget, very personal films.
Many people opine that moviemaking has its own limitations when juxtaposed against book reading, which is, the pen has no precincts, no confining boundaries of the physical world. Whereas, the camera does have these confines, it is captive to the three dimensional world, with the damned Laws of Physics limiting its freedom. In today’s times, however, this once-seemingly unassailable advantage that writing a book had over making a film has, to an extent, been overcome. With cutting edge technology and a gazillion dollars at your disposal, making a movie is no longer bound to a camera shooting images. It is a computer producing these images, choreographing spectacular, out-of-the-world (literally, in some cases) scenarios and scenes. The boundaries in filmmaking have receded back in fear; the daunting fear of technology and the sinew resolution of man’s wild creativity. Truly, filmmaking has stood the test of time, and has not allowed time to bind it down just to a camera shooting movies. It has evolved from a solely optical viewing to a whole experience, a treat to all the senses, what with 3D and even 4D (as they call it) movies being made.
Also, films have a direct connect to a large bracket of audience, be it rich or poor (I myself once saw a film in a multiplex and paid in all, Rs. 30), old or young, even literate or illiterate. It thus has more power than any other medium to bring about the done to death ‘change’ we have been talking about. A film that is permanent, timeless in its portrayal, goes down into the pages of history and inspires not only one generation, but multitudes of generations to come, and I exemplify this with Charlie Chaplin’s magnum opus ‘The Great Dictator’, which released over half-a-century ago, but refuses to wither out of film lovers’ memories, standing rock-strong of the fact that one man had the guts to parody a dictator who had the whole of Europe gasping and running amok with sheer fear. And there are multiple examples to back this idea of mine, the most recent being Fahrenheit 9/11, a resounding slap at the George Bush regime and its outlook towards the War in Afghanistan.
We have arrived at a time when creativity can never touch the limitations of cinema. If you can dream it, you can film it. Therefore, in order to make a social impact, we must keep a level head and make movies with a certain responsibility, in fact as a repayment of people’s trust in you that has made you competent enough to film it in the first place. Of course, the most easily affected audience is the teenage bracket, which gets swayed by the apparent ‘coolness’ with which the actors smoke cigarette after cigarette on-screen, or how intoxicatingly beautiful does the intake of drugs look in films like Trainspotting or Requiem For A Dream. Of course, to a sensible, mature audience, these activities are see-through and they can actually read between the lines to get the real message of the film, but it the adolescent, young-adults who have this ardent desire to look cool at all times, and movies being so easily stylised, they get wooed into ill habits very easily.
But then again, this is an impediment of the audience and not the filmmaker. This is just the dormant monstrosity of our young adults, which begs to come out, and eventually does come out under the sheath of movies and cinema. It is only the fickle minded that get infatuated by every bad thing that is put to exhibition in the movies, hence the blame is not as much of the moviemaker as it is of the audience.
To conclude my ramble, I would say that films and filmmakers have quite much of a responsibility, and the first and foremost of them is, making movies to the best of their intelligence. To cheat your own self and lowering the level of intelligence (or even elevating it beyond your level of intelligence) of your films is, by my books, the biggest ‘artistic’ crime that can ever be committed. Cinema that is pretentious is the most hateable of all insults to filmmaking. Even if a film is bad, callously terrible in its execution, but completely honest in its level of interpretation of the subject, it is infinitely better than a film that is very well made but dishonest and showy.
In the end, I would like to quote the poet Vladimir Mayakovski, whose poems were as tragic as the story of his life:
 “Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.”