Cinema beyond a formula theme

``Our film-making, commercially, is yet to transcend the six- song, three-fight culture...When Indian English is mainstream, why can't we make Indo-Anglican cinema. It all boils down to how to market the subject that has to go international. Take the Indian experience and make it international,'' film-maker Rajiv Menon says, days after he learnt that `Kandukondain...' made it into the prestigious London Film Festival.

``Our stories have confined themselves to love and revenge themes because we are addressing this market, whose history is full of these themes-Stree Labham or Shatru Samharam. We have to come out of it, move away and grow. We have to learn,'' he says reflecting on Indian commercial cinema today, in a chat with Sudhish Kamath.

Rajiv Menon

THE MAN did his bit to break convention. While songs were used to show the key-twists and turns in the story in his debut `Minsara Kanavu', `Kandukondain..' shorn of masala (albeit the songs which he says were necessary to get the money back) defied the conventional protocols, making the characters very close to reality.

To an extent it was poetry on film, with metaphors galore, and sensitive handling of the multi-cast storyline. The only crib many would have, would be the dreamy picture perfect picturisations of song sequences.

``Music is a very important part of our narrative structure in Indian cinema. Our cinema has had music and melodrama over the years unlike say, Iranian cinema,'' he argues.

Talk about parallel or art cinema and he says, ``it is the cinema of nothingness...a negation of everything...you negate songs, you negate melodrama and what do you get? Finally cinema has to reach people, films have to move them''.

``We are in a very peculiar state. In the 1960s, our films went to North Africa, Russia. By now, we should have grown and been only next to Hollywood. But what happened, Hollywood is after people from other countries like Hong Kong-Matrix, M:I-2, all are influenced by Hong Kong...,'' he goes on.

``With the Indian diaspora abroad, money is growing, contribution from overseas markets has put us on a threshold where we can go International. The subject hence has to be international, conflict must be timeless and boundary-less. It should be a human conflict. If we pull that off, we would be able to send our commercial cinema into International film festivals,'' is his observation.

``It would make people abroad sit up and take notice of the `other cinema' which is mainstream here. I'm not advocating to make subjects international, I'm saying we need to experiment and grow. Here we have a problem of herd-mentality. Language develops with time. We are a product of visual culture for the last 80 years. We cannot write a language that is 50 years old, especially film-making which is alive and evolving,'' says Rajiv.

Being an ad-film-maker doesn't it tempt him to try sneaking in products in films, James Bond style? ``I'm on a different track, really struggling to tell a story. My priority is to get the emotion, make the people listen to the story, feel for the characters, communicate a strong conflict. Ads would distract the narrative process. I'm not confident of making it work,'' he says quite candidly.

For this self-styled learner, an entry into the London Film Festival is only beginning of a long long journey.

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