Art Cinema

Abstract

Art cinema represents what art historian George Kubler would term as a ‘connected’ global series that responds to the specific problem of popular cinema’s commercialisation and formulisation of film (Kubler, 1962). Alongside modernist and avant-garde film practices, art cinema has epitomised an internal critique of popular film genres by privileging realism and subjective expression in cinematic narration. In Indian cinema, such a critique has consistently been identified with the cinema of Satyajit Ray, but one could trace the advocacy for film as art to figures like Manik Lal Tandon who, in The International Photographer in 1934, denounced the adamantine clasp of song-and-dance routines and called for a film aesthetic built around montage. In the literature of film festivals, art cinema is unambiguously associated with the production of films of ‘quality’ (Confédération Internationale, n.d.). Even though that adjective recalls with potent irony Francois Truffaut’s vitriolic manifesto against the screenwriter’s tradition of ‘well-made’, ‘quality’ films, it signifies for the Indian film historian the language used by the Film Finance Corporation (FFC, set up in 1960 and later became the National Film Development Corporation or NFDC) and other journalistic opinions in the 1960s to champion the films of the Indian New Wave (also known as ‘parallel’ or ‘new’ cinema) that were considered superior to commercial fare by virtue of their style (neorealism and artistic experiments) and politics (a ‘humanist’ approach). These ‘quality’ films by Satyajit Ray and the FFC-backed films of the New Wave generation not only won national film awards but they also represented Indian cinema’s auteurist and realist practice in international film festivals, a practice that had indeed been informed and even influenced by a transnational phalanx of auteurs such as Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Consequently, in terms of film reception, the term ‘art film’ came, contradictorily, to signify for the Indian film-going public either an elitist work that failed to speak to the common man or an aesthetic but critically poised vehicle that addressed issues such as caste, gender and communal conflicts. This double perception of art cinema as both obscure and articulative rather curiously reflects the cultural prestige