The changing role of film societies in cinema

I remember being quite awed by some of the short documentary films they would screen just before the main feature began in the movie halls. These usually happened after a slew of advertisements ranging from cigarettes to tooth powder. The shift from the vapid to cinema vérité was probably a good transition. “The official organ of the Government of India for the production and distribution of information films and newsreels,” it says on its website. A Films Division short on an earthquake and its consequences disturbed me so much that I walked out half-way of some Hollywood blockbuster I had gone to see. This was much before the 2001 Bhuj disaster and the grainy black and white footage was overwhelming.
Within weeks of joining my first job, a friend and I became members of a film club. It was not the

Calcutta Film Society

, our first choice, but some other. CFS was being snooty then, so we went for next best. While we did get to see a number of films from abroad, what we also saw were Indian documentary films. The film society movement in Calcutta and India, has been largely responsible for birthing some of our great filmmakers of an earlier vintage. The common grouse nowadays is that because of the multiple choices available to watch films, the Film Society movement is destined to collapse, if it hasn’t already.
Everyone agrees our film-watching has become narrowly focused on commercial cinema from the many Woods. Those who don’t particularly care to pay a fortune to watch on a big screen, are happy enough to see it at home on a smaller screen either by paying for online streaming, torrent downloads, or DVDs borrowed and purchased. That really just takes care of the popular market, the ones that gain from heavy media exposure. It is still difficult to see good films, mostly low-budget, which never receive even half the media exposure they deserve. Some of them recover some money from festival screenings but physical film distribution is skewed to what is appraised as a commercial success. Anything that even hints of risk generally gets discarded at the pre-production stage, leaving the director to go ahead on his or her own steam, or settle for even lower budgets than originally estimated.
Of course these filmmakers are really the ones who keep cinema vibrant, creating a space that is not a series of much-hyped, crashing bores. There are angel investors around who do fund such films, but the depth of their pockets and their ability to reach out is limited. Besides, it is time the government acknowledged and corrected the fact that censorship by the

CBFC

is illicit when all they are meant to do is certify viewership.
The film societies played a significant and empowering role in those days for such films and their makers. Perhaps a formal collaboration of film societies with standalone theatres could set up a web portal and charge reasonably for the streaming of low-budget films, more for downloads? Online interactions with the makers are also doable, emulating face-to-face ones. Something is certainly better than nothing at all.
What is really unfortunate is that documentary films no longer enjoy captive audiences. We have not a single theatre or plex to regularly screen such creations. Almost every Indian documentary film I have seen over the last 10 or more years has been a film I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone. Very few have received significant funding from Indian producers. Foreign institutions end up funding such films, resulting in their near-invisibility in India. Yet they have usually dealt with subjects, content, and filmmaking in ways that commercial filmmakers would find difficult to achieve. Director Suman Ghosh rues the lack of a documentary film viewing culture in India. His film on Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian, is probably the rare documentary film to have been released in multiple venues last week.
Some passionate souls in our city have created festivals to screen such films, like

Kalpanirjhar

for the last 15 years, Cult Film, Kolkata Shorts, and a few others. The foreign cultural institutions are sadly lackadaisical here in Calcutta, seemingly reserving their efforts for Delhi alone. Though that was not the case earlier. The People’s Film Collective say they are “independent, autonomous, people-funded cultural-political collective based in West Bengal. Formed in 2013, it believes in the power of films as a weapon of pedagogy of the oppressed as well as alternative media for people. PFC organises monthly film screenings in Kolkata. It travels in Bengal with films & movemental videos”.
The other place that seems to have re-energised itself is Chitrabani. That Jesuit-formed cinema learning institution of yore contributed in no mean measure to filmmaking in this city. While they have been in the doldrums for quite a while, their new monthly initiative, Open Space, is a good effort which the priest currently heading the place said was designed for people to voice their opinion without fear or favour, going on with understated wit that one could be “anti-national” too, if one wanted.
Music and film are a natural combination. Music For Films is an album from the 1970s that has short pieces of ‘ambient music’ meant for imaginary films. Created by Brian Eno, the music straddles genres and is considered avant-garde. Eno, known for his early use of synthesizers, is an artist, musician, producer and a big influence on modern music. He also did an album called Music For Airports.
To reach the author, write to patrick.ghose@gmail.com.