Satyajit Ray on why Indian Cinema was shit

Writing in the deeply racist Calcutta Statesman, in 1948, Satyajit Ray explained that what was wrong with Indian films was that firstly they were films and films aren't Indian and, secondly, things from India are utterly shit because India is a shithole.  

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.

The cinema was never a toy. No doubt, the cinema camera is mechanical. But so are cars and planes and submarines. Ray didn't understand that what turned cinema into a potent and versatile art form was that there was a big market for entertainment. People were willing to pay money to watch films. Not the sort of films he wanted to make, but films like those his uncle made which had good playback singing and a bit of melodrama and romance.  

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.

No. It was used for entertainment- stuff people would pay for. There was no 'chameleon like phase'. There were, what might be termed, novelty acts and then, very quickly, there were newsreels and serials and feature films. This happened at almost the same pace in Europe, America and Japan. Even India did not lag very much behind.  

By the twenties, the cynics and know-all had stopped smirking and turned down their nose.

He meant they stopped looking down their nose at the cinema. James Joyce was the greatest writer of his time. Yet he didn't consider it beneath him to try to get rich setting up Cinema halls in Dublin. There was money to be made in this industry just as there was money to be made in the automobile industry. People were willing to pay for both cars and films because they made their lives better. Ray did not understand this.  

Today, the cinema commands respect accorded to any other form of creative expression.

Fuck respect. The cinema commanded money and fame and political influence because it provided a valuable service to millions of people.

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.

Because it was like theatre and opera. If it was boring and stupid, it did not make money. Sadly, Ray thought being boring and stupid was virtuous- at least if you were Indian.  

It also combines the cold logic of science with the subtlest abstractions of the human imagination.

Science combines cold logic and 'subtle abstractions'. The Cinema improved rapidly because of improvements in science and technology.  

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

about money. It costs money to make a film. People will pay for entertainment. Even 'propaganda pieces' have to capture the interest of the audience. Bums on seats matter.  

the expression of a concept or concepts in aesthetic terms;

entertaining, not aesthetic, terms. One may say comedy or tragedy or romance are aesthetic concepts. A comedy or tragedy or romantic film must be entertaining. If it is as boring as shit nobody will watch it. The money spent on making it would have been wasted.  

terms which have crystallized through the incredibly short years of its existence.

No such terms crystallised. There was the cowboy film and there was film noir and, in India, the mythological film and the social film and so on.  A genre is not an aesthetic concept though it may focus on certain 'rasas' to the exclusion of others. 

It was perhaps inevitable that the cinema should have found the greatest impetus in America.

Because its people were richest. Also, America had a lot of Ashkenazi Jews who had both entrepreneurial ability and a great indigenous popular theatrical tradition. 

A country without any deep-rooted cultural and artistic traditions was perhaps best able to appraise the new medium objectively.

That country had immigrants with deep-rooted cultural and artistic traditions. Moreover, it could import the best actors and directors and script-writers. 

Thanks to pioneers like Griffith, and to the vast-sensation mongering public with its constant clamor for something new,

Ray thinks the public should clamour for old and boring shite 

the basic style of filmmaking was evolved and the tolls of its production perfected

I suppose he means 'techniques of production were improved' 

much quicker than would be normally possible.

No. Cinema evolved at the same pace as the automobile and the aeroplane.  

The cinema has now attained a stage where it can handle Shakespeare and psychiatry with equal facility.

Because the Cinema is itself theatre. Ray thought it should be old, boring, shite incapable of producing any sensation other than catatonia in its audience.  

Technically, in the black and white field, the cinema is supremely at east.

Or in Colour.  

Newer development in color and three-dimensional photography are imminent, and it’s possible that before the decade is out, the aesthetics of film making will have seen far-reaching changes.

India's first colour film had come out in 1937.  

Meanwhile, ‘studios sprang up’ to quote an American writer in Screenwriter, ‘ even in such unlikely lands as Indian and China’

Why quote an American? M.L Tandon, who had studied film at USC, had brought Ellis Dungan and  Michael Omalov back with him in 1930. Dungan had a big impact on Tamil cinema. 

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.

Nor surprisingly. Thanks to the Brits, Bombay and Calcutta and even Madras were doing quite well.  

One might ask why Calcutta fell behind Bombay. One reason is that the Hindu buddhijivis of Calcutta were intolerant of and uninterested in the Muslim majority in their own province. By contrast, the Bombay film industry was at ease with Islam and the Urdu language. It could remake Bengali Hindu dramas to good effect but, more particularly after Independence, it could also do entirely Muslim movies- both 'social' and 'historical'- which were a big hit with Hindu audiences. Consider Guru Dutt's 'Pyaasa'. It is set in Calcutta- establishing the protagonists Brahminical credentials,  but the protagonist is an Urdu poet helped by a Muslim 'shampoo-wallah'! Soon enough, Guru Dutt could play an Ashraf Muslim role in a purely Islamic movie set in Lucknow. One may say that Bollywood sided with Urdu and thus Islam because their poetry was superior but the truth is Urdu makes some effort to be entertaining. It doesn't set out to scold and bore its audience to death. Moreover, what is dramatic about Romance is the business of falling in love and wooing and getting jelly and having lover's tiffs. It isn't about a beautiful woman silently reproaching the protagonist for his failure to develop a capacious Capabilities approach to refusing to do any actual Development more particularly if he is stuck with a job in the private sector. 

The first short was produced in 1907 and the first feature in 1913. By the twenties it had reached the status of big business.

All business is bad. Concentrate on scolding everybody who isn't starving to death for not starving to death by reason of being engaged in some profitable line of 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?

Yes. 

Why are our films now shown abroad?

Indian tastes were different but not too different from tastes in parts of Asia and Africa and even Europe- e.g. Greece. Still, one or two Indian films had done quite well in England and even America.

Is it solely because India offers a potential market for her own products?

As America offered a potential market for its products. What is Ray getting at? Capitalism is very evil? Americans are trash? 

Perhaps the symbolism employed is too obscure for foreigners?

Fuck symbolism. Foreign languages are unintelligible though it was already very worthwhile to learn English. 

On the other hand, it is true that 'Bicycle thieves' has plenty of symbolism for the excellent reason that the book on which the film was based was by a painter and poet. Its director had been an actor in Mussolini's Cinecita complex and the film is full of references to other films and vignettes of the resurgence of Rome's artistic and intellectual life albeit under the austere conditions of post-War reconstruction. It is obvious by the end of the film, not to speak of the reception of the film, that Italy will rise up rapidly and surpass anything previously achieved- at least for ordinary people. Ray's films were the reverse. Bengal would sink and sink. 

Or are we just plain ashamed of our films?

Ray was- though his Uncle was a big Director in Mumbai and his wife had been a successful actress and playback singer. 

To anyone familiar with the relative standards of the best foreign and Indian films, the answers must come easily.

American movies had bigger budgets. Their Studio system was very well financed and had a superb distribution network. This meant that 'production values' could be consistently high.  

Les us face the truth. There has yet been no India Film which could be acclaimed on all counts.

No film can be acclaimed on all counts.  Battleship Potemkin was severely criticized for the glaring lack of slapstick comedy. 

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’.

A film by Chetan Anand won the top prize at Cannes in 1946. It wasn't released in India because it was, after all, a miserabilist art movie intended for export alone.  Even the Soviets preferred to import musical romances rather than concentrate solely on miserabilist shite like 'Dharti ke Lal'. 

No doubt this lack of maturity can be attributed to several factors.

 Two of which are- India is a shithole and, secondly, Indians are shitty. 

The producers will tell you about the mysterious entity ‘the mass’, which ‘goes in for this sort of things’,

Ray means the 'market'- i.e. whether people will pay to watch a movie. This has to do with whether it is entertaining or as boring as shit.  

the technicians 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 point.

Mussolini, it must be said, had invested heavily in the industry. Despite the brief vogue of Caligrafismo, Italian audiences didn't like being bored shitless. Sad.  

The reason lies elsewhere. I think it will be found in the fundamentals of film making.

The fundamental thing is to get lots of people to pay to watch the film.  

In the primitive state films were much alike, no matter where they were produced.

No. The Japanese kabuki/Samurai short was nothing like the Charlie Chaplin slapstick short of the Perils of Pauline short or the cowboy short.  

As the pioneers began to sense the uniqueness of the medium,

Previously, they would get confused and think cooking was part and parcel of the medium 

the language of the cinema gradually evolved.

Cinema evolved. This meant it had more and more 'languages' even within genres- e.g. the Vampire movie had a different idiom to the Egyptian Mummy movie and so on.  

And once the all important functions of the cinema-eg movement- was grasped, the sophistication of style and content, and refinement of technique were only a matter of time.

God alone knows what this means. The fact is, just like the automobile industry, Cinema too identified different market segments and supplied a different article to appeal to different segments. The 'family movie' might have a fight scene for the little boys and a romantic tenor crooning for Mummy and a burlesque sequence for Daddy and a bit of religion to keep Granny happy. 

In India it would seem that the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic pattern existence of time was generally misunderstood.

There is no such 'fundamental concept'. I suppose what Ray was getting at was the notion that films should be boring and shitty. The audience should want to top itself. Nobody should make any money off the thing.  

Often by queer process of reasoning, movement was equated with action and action with melodrama.

Movement should not involve any action. Also there should be no drama- melo or otherwise. The thing should bore the pants off you.  

The analogy with music failed in our case because Indian music is largely improvisational.

& Jazz isn't? The fact is, Ray's Uncle helped give Indian movies their killer app- viz. the playback song. This wasn't improvised at all. There was a score and an orchestra and a lyricist and a studio.  

This elementary confusion,

Indians got confused and thought movies should have some action and drama. The reverse was the case. Films should be as boring as shit. 

plus the influence of the American cinema

German cinema had a direct influence on Bombay thanks to Himangshu Rai 

are the two main factors responsible for the present state of Indian films.

That state was very good though, no doubt, Calcutta was already declining relative to the Bombay to which Ray's Uncle had escaped.  

The superficial aspects the American style, no matter how outlandish the content, were imitated with reverence.

Ray wanted to imitate Italians.  

Almost every passing phase of the American cinema has had its repercussion on the Indian film.

This was also true of the Italian cinema of the Thirties. So what?  

Stories have been written based on Hollywood success and the clichéd preserved with care.

Very true. Films about Indian Saints or drunkards like Devdas are typical Hollywood fare. Come to think of it, M.L Tandon produced one of the first big budget 'kathakalakshepham' Tamil film with great Carnatic singers in the starring roles. Obviously, 'Nandanar' was based on King Kong. 

Even where the story has been genuinely Indian one, the background has revealed an irrepressible penchant for the jazz idiom.

As opposed to the idiom of boring the fucking pants off you. 

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.

Purpose of filmic interpretation is to bore the fucking pants off you. Mind it kindly. 

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.

Films depict ways of life at utter variance with our own. Few members of Cinema audiences were cowboys or gangsters or millionaire playboys. Most worked in factories or coal mines. But they preferred to watch movies about guys shooting each other or ones which involved gallant playboys caught in complicated love triangles with beautiful heiresses.  

Moreover, the high technical polish which is the hallmark of the standard Hollywood products, would be impossible to achieve under existing Indian condition.

Not really. Indeed, the production values in many Indian films was superior to those in British movies.  

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.

Ray thought the function of the medium was to bore the fucking pants off you. The limitation of the medium had to with the fact that it cost money to make films. If the film is boring nobody will watch it and so there will be no money to make an even more artistic and imaginative boring piece of shit.  

After all, we do possess the primary tools of film making. The complaint of the technician 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.

We did get this, thanks to some German dude and some other American dude and various Jews and so forth.  Ray thought being boring and miserabilist was uniquely Indian. He was wrong but worked hard to prove his case.

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.

Thanks to Nehru & Co, independent India would have substantially less of such things. 

But within the limits of 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.

 What's wrong with that? I suppose the answer is, if her lover was a song-writer and she made a practice of wrapping her arms and legs around any beggar who sang his lyrics, then the film would have been X rated and made a lot of money. 

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.

Why didn't she just run over him? The answer is that if you want to hug and get smoochy with a person who is on foot, you have to bring your car to a halt and get out of it and run up to the dude in question.  

The majority of our film are replete with visual dissonances’.

Indian people should not be shown in juxtaposition with cars or radios or 'streamlined architecture'. Just film them starving to death in some jhuggi.  

In Kalpana, Uday Shankar used such dissonances in a conscious and consistent manner so that they became part of his cinematic style.

He made only one film. It was unwatchable.  

But the truly Indian film should steer clear of such inconsistencies and look for its material in the more basic aspects of Indian life,

e.g people starving to death. On the other hand, it is wrong to film a person dying of dysentery. Loose motion is still motion.  

where habit and speech, dress and manner, background and foreground, blend into a harmonious whole.

and then starve to death. What isn't harmonious is having to watch people shit themselves to death.  

It is only in drastic simplification of style and content that hope for the Indian cinema resides.

Ray's hope for Indian cinema was despair for Indian cinema goers. Why go to a movie theatre to watch people starving to death? Just look out of your window in Calcutta.  

At present, it would appear that nearly all the prevailing practices go against such simplification.

Because that simplification could dispense with the film camera. Looking out of the window would be just as good. 

Starting a production without adequate planning, some-times 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 situation; the scope, and at the same time when all other countries are turning to the documentary for inspiration- all these stand in the way of the evolution of a distinctive style.

No. This ad hoc approach shows that a distinctive style already exists. Still, if one song becomes a hit, you may make money. Even if you don't, the film will be less boring than a documentary about people starving to death.  

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.

Communist propaganda. It suppresses the truth. Suhrawardy had enriched his cronies- most notably the Ipsahanis. The film puts all the blame on greedy Hindus.  

Shankar’s Kalpana, and inimitable to the peak of cinematic achievement. The satisfying photography which marks the UN documentary of Paul Zils shows what a discerning camera can do with the Indian landscape.

In 1952 he directed Zalzala, a thriller with a love triangle with some catchy songs. It is based on Tagore's '4 chapters' which features an utterly nihilistic, sociopathic, 'terrorist'. Ray was careful to only choose boring and miserabilist Tagore stories to film.  

The raw material of the cinema is life itself.

Ray's raw material was novels by Bibhuti or Tagore or Shankar.  

It is incredible that a country which has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film maker.

Ray's movies inspired many an Indian to try to move the fuck out of India. 

He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears.

What about his nostrils?  

Let him do so.

But, to be a film-maker somebody must open their wallet. The problem here is that if those wallets aren't refilled by box-office receipts, then no further films will be made- unless the Government is persuaded to subsidize boring shite.