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CINE TECHNICIAN
July 1955
"MUNNA": OUTSTANDING FILM FROM INDIA
Realist Producer K. A. ABBAS
talks to Chris Brunei
INDIA has made some 5,000 talkies in the last 25 years, but only now has she made one without songs being artificially introduced into the story. Those who have perhaps been out East and seen Indian films will know the way, just as the story is getting interesting, the characters burst into a four-minute song and hold up the action.
The unique film, Munna, in which this does not happen, has just been shown at the first Indian Film Festival in London, and a very moving film it is. As I had met its director, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, when I was in the Army in Bombay nine years ago, I decided to tackle him about his " revolutionary " venture
" Our silent cinema," he explained, " did not mature." Indian films only began to develop during the era of sound, and so the Indian cinema borrowed directly from Indian musical operas which accounted for the presence of the songs. As a script-writer him
self, K. A. Abbas never wrote any songs into his scripts unless they arose naturally from the development of the story, and he tried to persuade producers to take the daring step of making the picture as scripted.
" No," they told him, " but do it yourself, if you like." Now as an independent producer and a director, Mr. Abbas has been able to do so. Munna, however, contains a lively musical accompaniment by the talented composer Anil Biswas.
Having seen another of Mr. Abbas's pictures, when in Bombay, a most realistic story of tin terrible Bengal famine, Children of the Earth, I recognised him as being of the same school as the ^rcat Italian realist directors like De Sica, Rossellini and Blasetti. Mr. Abbas paid great tribute to the post-war Italian films, and told me how a festival of such films held in Bombay some three years ago had spurred Indian producers to make pictures on realistic themes,
Two Acres of Land, which is soon to be shown commercially in London, had sprung directly from these outstanding Italian movies.
The national characteristics in these Indian films were, of course, catching on in India itself, but they made them popular outside India as well, to such an extent that their foreign sales were for the first time in the history of the Indian film industry becoming an important aspect.
I told Mr. Abbas that in Britain we found that trying to please the international market, especially the American market, often made our producers water down their films. " Isn't there a danger for Indian producers, too." I asked, " if they count too much on foreign sales? "
Mr. Abbas believed that one can break into the film market on two planes — the artistic plane with films of national appeal and realism, and the plane that has mainly colour. spectacle and pageantry.