FilmIndia (1940)

Wlty Pictutes fail Gt Ike Box>0§ices Ramlals and Rehmans Need Novelty When Ramlal, or for that matter Rehman, pays his four annas at the box office window of his local cinema does he or does he not expect something definite in return? Apparently he does, for otherwise, there is no reason why out of his hard earned wages every week, or sometimes twice a week, he should pay this amount to sit for three hours in the stifling atmosphere of a darkened theatre. What actually does he seek to warrant this expenditure? It is ESCAPE, escape from the dull monotony of his everyday life. For every day for years at a stretch he labours possibly behind the fast rotating spindles at his textile factory( looking at the ceaseless pace of modern machinery, his ears weary of its nerve-racking drone. His only companions are his fellows at the same trade as prosaic to him as himself, the only women he sees are probably those that carry the spindles in their large baskets over their heads from one room to another. He is tired of them, he must escape if only for a moment from these sordid surroundings and find some outlet for his imprisoned emotions. In the dark seclusion of a motion picture theatre he finds consolation and that emotional escape he both seeks and requires. He is probably seeing "Diamond Queen" with strong burly John Cavas striving to rescue Nadia from the hurtling waters of a treacherous mountain stream. He at once imagines himself in Cavas's shoes and when the heroine is rescued he believes himself to have been the victor. That is Randal's triumph — he has succeeded in escaping, if even for that just three hours the picture has run^ from his daily routine. THE ACTUAL NEED OF THE AUDIENCE Escape then, is the lure which draws people of all ages and aspirations to the motion picture thea B> KRISHNA GOPflL tres. If one therefore seeks to study the problems of motion picture production he must make his approach from this standpoint namely that of escape. From no other angle can the eager student seek to study the situation, for, unlike other arts, the appreciation of the cinema is fundamentally dependent on the vagaries of the audience and on nothing else. We must satisfy the audience to draw from it its appreciation^ and to satisfy it we must give it the Escape it needs. Of late the dwindling of the box office receipts of productions from nearly all the studios has made it doubly necessary for an immediate investigation into these problems, if the industry has at all to be saved. We earnestly believe that it is not the shortage of raw films or the increased cost of production itself that will ever ruin our industry, but it is this failure on our own part to appreciate the problems of what our audience actually demands, that will finally toll the death knell. There has been a belief that the audience wants a certain number of catchy songs in its screen entertainment, for the Escape that it needs, to be perfect ( but the comparative success of a few non-musical pictures recently has cast a doubt on this antique belief. The importance of a story has also been emphasized, but when we consider that the best of Hollywood gatecrashers have contained the flimsiest of stories, we are inclined to doubt this as well. Similarly, stars, settings technique may help to set offer to greater advantage an already good picture, but they can never help the regular "dud" to tide over the box office storm. Coming back to the requirements of Ramlal and Rehman and to the ecape that they both want, we must not forget that we have had motion pictures now for the last 26 years and they have both been seeing them for that long. When they pay their four annas every time they want to seek not only escape, they demand to see something new every time, not the same faces and the same plots over and over again, for then Ramlal would not get just the escape he seeks. But here another factor presents itself. We are not catering — for just one Ramlal or one Rehman. We are catering to several million people most of whom are uneducated and illiterate — and only a few are educated and cultured from the modern standpoint. All these people can scarcely be expected to behave the same way and their ways of seeking escape and getting it must therefore be entirely different. What then is one to do? Why what every mathematician does? Find a common mean and you have the answer. If we can find a formula which will suit the majority of men and women of average age, of average intellect, of average education and average interests, we have our answer. But have we and is it really so easy, to find this common mean? Probably not, but an illustration to point may go a long way. What problem would interest Ramlal most? That of a labourer who is threatened dispossession of his fields by a callous zamindar, or of the Nawab of Hoopnagar who has to choose which of his wives to take with him to the Viceroy's garden party? Is it really difficult to find out which of these problems would interest Ramlal or his brother Rehman more? THEMES THAT BECOME POPULAR In these days of national awakening, there resides in every one of us a pride for all the greatness that India stood for in days gone by. Every one of us secretly nurses a feeling of resentment against anything or anyone that seeks to pre 59