FilmIndia (1940)

Is Direction an Hrt or a Science ? Is Success B Result of Inspiration or Chance ? By: Krishna Gopal B. Sc. During the last fifteen years or so of my experience in motion pictures, inspite of the rather humble capacity in which I have always worked, I have been privileged to study at very close quarters most of our industry's top-notch directors. Nearly every one, I have found, disagrees with every body else in his methods of work, but they are nearly all unanimous in their abhorrence of being classed as anything but "artists."' They always have insisted on drawing a sharp line of demarcation between their art and the work of, say, the sound or camera crews. They have persisted in always relying upon the existence of favourable 'moods' for the performance of their work, which, they have argued, the other workers by no stretch of imagination can possibly require. To them their art is based not on any fundamental principles, but on extremely vague and indefinite circumstances that they call inspiration and which the man in the street refers to as chance. INTELLECTUAL SNOBBISHNESS I have known one or two that are so obsessed with this mood influence that even the slightest noise on the set such as the dropping of a pin supposedly disintegrates their mechanism of thought and they find themselves at sea, or at least that what they want us to believe. That they should devote any of their time to thinking on the set which is primarily a place for action and that any thinking that may be necessary should have been finished much earlier, are maxims that this particular type of director chooses to disregard if only for the empty glory of being classified with the popular concept of 'intellectual philosophers.' To me, however, the director has always been the most prosaic of all workers engaged upon the business of film production. It is on him that rests the responsibility of manufacturing a product (even if it be the canned emotions of a group of players) so that the pleasurable reactions which it creates may be marketed at its best possible value. It is obvious that a director fails in his duty if the reactions his product create in the buyer, who is in this case the audience, are not sufficiently pleasurable or will I say, acceptable, to justify the buyer in parting with his money. All very complicated it is true, but it boils down to this, that a director must know what and how to extract from' his players and his technical staff of their best, and to please his audience. And this knowledge, I believe, is not a result of mere chance, but is KRISHNA GOPAL based on fixed and unalterable principles, like so many of our other laws of Nature, only a minute study of which can help us to achieve even a moderate amount of success in our endeavours. INVISIBLE YET DEFINITE RULES I have always given the analogy of a director's work with that of his paintings are hung in the salons a scenic or portrait painter. When of the world, there are thousands that come and praise "this thing of beauty", admire the charming subject and go away, some of them possibly paying tribute to the great artist that its creator must be. But not one really knows that the work they have seen has really been one of intensive study. "Consider the extremely pleasing compos tion. The strong line of the black dress carries the eye to the perfect oval of face and hood, which is most Vishnupant Pagnis and Vimal Sardesai have a moment to themselves in "Narsi Bhagat" a Prakash picture. 55