FilmIndia (1946)

December, 1946 FlLMlNDI A This "Dhamki" and "Tadbir" muddle deserves the urgent attention of our popular ministries. These two pictures show our insurance business in a despicably bad light giving our people a lasting impression" that all insurance people are crooks and all insurance companies are fraudulent institutions. Apart from the future interests of our insurance business, in the larger interests of our nation these two pictures must be recensored after deleting the offensive portions. Will the Home Member, Mr. Morarji Desai, move in this matter urgently? He should as a conscientious nationalist. FOREIGN TECHNICIANS There was quite a stir among the producers the other dav over the report that a well-known film studio has engaged the services of a foreign technician. That usually moribund institution, the Association of Cine Technicians, suddenly took breath and vehemently protested against this act saying that producers had no right to employ foreign technicians thereby depriving Indians of their legitimate emplovment" Another thing the Association said was that the Indian technicians were fully trained to do all that was asked by the producers and there was, therefore, no need to employ foreigners. We shall always back the Indian against the foreigner when it is a straight question of mere employment. In India, Indians first and the rest of the world afterwards. But in the matter of film technicians, it is not just a simple matter of mere employment. Technicians needed for the film industry must have the requisite technical knowledge to ensure their employment by producers. How many technicians in India are trained in the manner we find the foreign technicians, versed in theory and practice? Let us be brutally frank and state that there is not one technician in the entire film industry of India who can be called a technician in the sense this term is understood in Hollywood. All our technicians have been products of practical training. A few of them know a few obscure tricks of the profession and all praise to them because of their enterprise in learning things by the method of trial and error without any encouragement from the producers. But all these men combined cannot possibly compete with a single full-fledged technician of Hollywood for the very simple reason that our technicians have had no scientific theoretical training. In all the technical departments of our motion picture production and exhibition we have been using half-baked practical workers who lack scientific knowledge and personal efficiency. With a national future on the horizon, our film industry must be planned on scientific lines and our technicians, the present and the future ones, must get scientific training. In the absence of a Government institution to train people in this manner, the only possible way, presenting itself at present, is the Madan Mohan, son of Rai Bahadur Chuni Lall, has taken up the screen as a career. Here he is in his first assignment, "Parda" produced by Rasik Productions. He looks better than his father's anaemic heroes of Filmistan. employment of well-qualified foreign technicians in the different departments of our studios. These foreigners can be taken for a temporary period of five years or less, but their employment is inevitable if our industry is ever to compete with foreign production in technical standard. The protest of the Association of Cine Technicians sounds, therefore, a bit self-assertive and as such calculated to retard the technical progress of our film industry. We have to learn a lot of things yet and by all means let us have some qualified foreigners if they are willing to teach us. YOU'LL HARDLY BELIEVE: That according to Actress Shanta Apte all film studios in India are cowsheds and godowns. Producers must therefore be cowherds and godownkeepers. Is Shanta herself a cow in the shed or junk in the godown? That Shanta Apte started acting as a challenge to prove that she can act. Can she, however? And after so many pictures ! That Shanta Apte complains that the camera distorts her appearance. It does give her a potato appearance, huge hips and a bulb-like nose. Had it not been for the lens, Shanta would have looked slim, well-chiselled and beautiful. Ah! Ah! That Shanta Apte wants the "play-back" deception to be stopped to give her a chance to shriek 15