The Death of Cinema

By

Siva Wright

• 

The essence of an art is its originality. This originality maybe attained by techniques discovered and used before, but the end product, though influenced by its predecessors, should not be an imitation. If the product stopped being original, that is if there is a lack of innovation and mere imitation replaces influence, all we will be left with is a deformed and violated original. Art cannot survive and progress in imitations. Art progresses in innovations. If innovation and originality dies, the art form will die.

There cannot be a starker example for this than Indian Cinema especially Tamil Cinema. Once this same industry told its own stories – stories from its own myths, legends and of its own people. Though there are one or two films that keep alive this dying light, Tamil cinema as a whole has lost or rather thrown away its originality for foreign imitations. Almost every film produced now is an unlicensed and unaccredited copy of a successful or popular Hollywood film or trope.

Apart from the glaring plagiarism of the scriptwriters, what is more nagging is the question “What happened to ‘our’ stories?” If our scriptwriters are so good at ‘adapting’ other people’s stories, why not adapt our novels or short stories? There are at least thousands in Tamil alone. So what’s the problem? Our songwriters(again less recognized plagiarists of foreign poems’ not everyone, of course) are capable of writing songs for any film no matter whether it requires or even can accommodate a song or not. So what’s the problem?

The answer of course, as usual, is money. No producer or actor or writer/director, however successful, is ready to take a ‘risk’ by doing films such as these. All those Hollywood stories/tropes are already proven successful so it is less of a risk to simply copy them and retain their brains in a jar in a lab somewhere. The result is the films we see on screens today with an utter lack of originality or innovation which will ultimately end in the death of cinema.

But do you know who the real murderers are? The moviegoers. The audience. The ‘fans’. You. Every time you buy a ticket to a film which you know very well is a copy of an Hollywood film/trope or even worse a copy of an Indian film (which itself is often a copy), you support the production of similar films and thereby become an accomplice in the murder of an art form. Every time you ignore the fact that the movie is a base copy just because the movie has your favourite ‘star’ or ‘superstar’ or ‘thala’ or ‘ilaya thalapathy’(recently he became just ‘thalapathy’ probably because he’s getting old, which their ‘die hard’ fans usually decide to ignore) you are killing cinema.

To be fair to the actors, they do try to be a part of experimental films which will help in the growth of the art of movie making, but they actually stop this at one point because even their so-called ‘die hard’ fans tend not to go to such films. At best, they see it once. If this is the case with their ‘fans’, it is understandable why they would think twice before choosing such a film. Therefore, the fault, if not wholly then at least for the most part, lies with the moviegoers. Cinema – good cinema is what I mean, not the majority of shit that comes out in theatres these days – is dying. And it is you who can save it. Stop watching collages of Hollywood and old films just because your favourite actor is in the collage. Without originality, without cinema, he/she won’t be your star in the first place. It is in your own interest to save cinema. So are you going to let cinema die by watching mediocre movies (couple of amateur Atlee films comes to mind) or are you going to save it by boycotting copycats?