University of California Press

Chapter Title: WHAT IS WRONG WITH INDIAN FILMS? (India, 1948)

Chapter Author(s): Satyajit Ray

Book Title: Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures

Book Subtitle: A Critical Anthology
Book Author(s): Scott MacKenzie
Published by: University of California Press. (2014)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt5vk01n.43

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 Five: at any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators,
from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film
they are working on.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH INDIAN FILMS?

(India, 1948)
Satyajit Ray

[First appeared in the Calcutta Statesman, 1948.]

Written the year after Indian Independence, this manifesto by Satyajit Ray laments
the state of Indian cinema and the fact that Indian films never play outside of India.
He claims that the language of the cinema, as it presently stands, is an American
idiom but can easily be adapted to other cultures. Ray wrote this manifesto shortly
before beginning Pather Panchali (India, 1955), which placed Indian realist cinema on
the international map alongside Italian neorealism, a movement that greatly influ-
enced Ray. “What Is Wrong with Indian Films” also echoes the thesis of la caméra
stylo put forward by Alexandre Astruc the same year, namely that the cinema “can
handle Shakespeare and psychiatry with equal facility” (see Astruc, “The Birth of a
New Avant Garde” in chap. 11 of this volume).

One of the most significant phenomena of our time has been the development of the
cinema from a turn-of-the-century mechanical toy into the century’s most potent and
versatile art form. In its early chameleon-like phase the cinema was used variously as an
extension of photography, as a substitute for the theater and the music hall, and as a part
of the magician’s paraphernalia. By the twenties, the cynics and know-alls had stopped
smirking and turned down their nose.
Today, the cinema commands respect accorded to any other form of creative expres-
sion. In the immense complexity of its creative process, it combines in various measures
the functions of poetry, music, painting, drama, architecture and a host of other arts,
major and minor. It also combines the cold logic of science with the subtlest abstractions
of the human imagination. No matter what goes into the making of it, no matter who
uses it and how—producer for financial profits, a political body for propaganda or an
avant-garde intellectual for the satisfaction of an aesthetic urge—the cinema is basically
the expression of a concept or concepts in aesthetic terms; terms which have crystallized
through the incredibly short years of its existence.
It was perhaps inevitable that the cinema should have found the greatest impetus in
America. A country without any deep-rooted cultural and artistic traditions was perhaps

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best able to appraise the new medium objectively. Thanks to pioneers like Griffith, and
to the vast-sensation mongering public with its constant clamor for something new, the
basic style of filmmaking was evolved and the tolls of its production perfected much
quicker than would be normally possible. The cinema has now attained a stage where it
can handle Shakespeare and psychiatry with equal facility. Technically, in the black and
white field, the cinema is supremely at ease. Newer development in color and three-di-
mensional photography are imminent, and it’s possible that before the decade is out, the
aesthetics of film making will have seen far-reaching changes.
Meanwhile, “studios sprang up” to quote an American writer in Screenwriter, “even in
such unlikely lands as India and China.” One may note in passing that this spring up has
been happening in India for nearly forty years. For a country so far removed from the
centre of things, India took up film production surprisingly early.
The first short was produced in 1907 and the first feature in 1913. By the twenties it
had reached the status of big business. It is easy to tell the world that film production in
India is quantitatively second only to Hollywood; for that is a statistical fact. But can the
same be said of its quality? Why are our films not shown abroad? Is it solely because
India offers a potential market for her own products? Perhaps the symbolism employed
is too obscure for foreigners? Or are we just plain ashamed of our films?
To anyone familiar with the relative standards of the best foreign and Indian films,
the answers must come easily. Let us face the truth. There has yet been no Indian film
which could be acclaimed on all counts. Where other countries have achieved, we have
only attempted and that too not always with honesty, so that even our best films have to
be accepted with the gently apologetic proviso that it is “after all an Indian film.”
No doubt this lack of maturity can be attributed to several factors. The producers will tell
you about the mysterious entity “the mass,” which “goes in for this sort of thing,” the tech-
nicians will blame the tools and the director will have much to say about the wonderful things
he had in mind but could not achieve. In any case, better things have been achieved under
much worse conditions. The internationally acclaimed post-war Italian cinema is a case in
point. The reason lies elsewhere. I think it will be found in the fundamentals of film-making.
In the primitive state films were much alike, no matter where they were produced. As
the pioneers began to sense the uniqueness of the medium, the language of the cinema
gradually evolved. And once the all important function of the cinema—e.g., movement—was
grasped, the sophistication of style and content, and refinement of technique were only a
matter of time. In India it would seem that the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic
pattern existence of time was generally misunderstood.
Often by a queer process of reasoning, movement was equated with action and action
with melodrama. The analogy with music failed in our case because Indian music is
largely improvisational.
This elementary confusion plus the influence of the American cinema are the two
main factors responsible for the present state of Indian films. The superficial aspects [of]
the American style, no matter how outlandish the content, were imitated with reverence.

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Almost every passing phase of the American cinema has had its repercussion on the
Indian film. Stories have been written based on Hollywood success and the clichéd pre-
served with care. Even where the story has been [a] genuinely Indian one, the background
has revealed an irrepressible penchant for the jazz idiom.
In the adoptions of novels, one of two courses has been followed: either the story has been
distorted to conform to the Hollywood formula, or it has been produced with such devout
faithfulness to the original that the purpose of filmic interpretations has been defeated.
It should be realized that the average American film is a bad model, if only because it
depicts a way of life so utterly at variance with our own. Moreover, the high technical
polish which is the hallmark of the standard Hollywood products, would be impossible
to achieve under existing Indian conditions. What the Indian cinema needs today is not
more gloss, but more imagination, more integrity, and a more intelligent appreciation of
the limitations of the medium.
After all, we do possess the primary tools of film-making. The complaint of the techni-
cian notwithstanding, mechanical devices such as the crane shot and the process shot are
useful, but by no means indispensable. In fact, what tools we have, have been used on
occasion with real intelligence. What our cinema needs above everything else is a style, an
idiom, a sort of iconography of cinema, which would be uniquely and recognizably Indian.
There are some obstacles to this, particularly in the representation of the contemporary
scene. The influence of Western civilization has created anomalies which are apparent
in almost every aspect of our life. We accept the motor car, the radio, the telephone,
streamlined architecture, European costume, as functional elements of our existence.
But within the limits of [the] cinema frame, their incongruity is sometimes exaggerated
to the point of burlesque. I recall a scene in a popular Bengali film which shows the
heroine weeping to distraction with her arms around a wireless—an object she associates
in her mind with her estranged lover who was once a radio singer.
Another example, a typical Hollywood finale, shows the heroine speeding forth in a
sleek convertible in order to catch up with her frustrated love who has left town on foot;
as she sights her man; she abandons the car in a sort of a symbolic gesture and runs up
the rest of the way to meet him.
The majority of our films are replete with visual dissonances. In Kalpana, Uday Shan-
kar used such dissonances in a conscious and consistent manner so that they became
part of his cinematic style. But the truly Indian film should steer clear of such inconsis-
tencies and look for its material in the more basic aspects of Indian life, where habit and
speech, dress and manner, background and foreground, blend into a harmonious whole.
It is only in drastic simplification of style and content that hope for the Indian cinema
resides. At present, it would appear that nearly all the prevailing practices go against such
simplification.
Starting a production without adequate planning, sometimes even without a shooting
script; a penchant for convolutions of plot and counter-plot rather than the strong, simple
unidirectional narrative; the practice of sandwiching musical numbers in the most unlyrical

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situation; the scope, and at the same time when all other countries are turning to the docu-
mentary for inspiration—all these stand in the way of the evolution of a distinctive style.
There have been rare glimpses of an enlightened approach in a handful of recent films.
IPTA’s Dharti ke Lal is an instance of a strong simple theme put over with style, honesty
and technical competence. Shankar’s Kalpana, an inimitable and highly individual ex-
periment, shows a grasp to the peak of cinematic achievement. The satisfying photogra-
phy which marks the UN documentary of Paul Zils shows what a discerning camera can
do with the Indian landscape.
The raw material of the cinema is life itself. It is incredible that a country which has
inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film-maker. He
has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.

BUÑUEL THE POET (Mexico, 1951)

Octavio Paz

[First distributed at the Cannes Film Festival, 4 April 1951. First published in Neuvo
ciné (Mexico), 1961. First published in English in Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others
(New York: Arcade, 1990), 152–156. Trans. Michael Schmidt.]

For the international release of Buñuel’s third Mexican film, Los Olvidados (1950),
Mexican writer, poet, diplomat, and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz wrote this manifesto
on the surrealist filmmaker and his new film, which was circulated at the Cannes Film
Festival in 1951, where Buñuel went on to win the Best Director prize for the film that
year. Paz coxtextualizes Buñuel’s latest film in relation to his earlier works with Sal-
vador Dalí and his surrealist documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan (Land without
Bread [Spain, 1933]).

The release of L’Age d’or and Un chien andalou signals the first considered irruption of poetry
into the art of cinematography. The marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating
a new reality, inevitably appeared scandalous and subversive—as indeed it was. The sub-
versive nature of Buñuel’s early films resides in the fact that, hardly touched by the hand of
poetry, the insubstantial conventions (social, moral, or artistic) of which our reality is made
fall away. And from those ruins rises a new truth, that of man and his desire. Buñuel shows
us that a man with his hands tied can, by simply shutting his eyes, make the world jump.
Those films are something more than a fierce attack on so-called reality; they are the revela-
tion of another reality which contemporary civilization has humiliated. The man in L’Age
d’or slumbers in each of us and waits only for a signal to awake: the signal of love. This film
is one of the few attempts in modern art to reveal the terrible face of love at liberty.

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