Revisiting Indian Cinema of 10's (A Sunday Digest) - When it comes to New Age

What has New Age filmmaking brought to Indian Cinema?

2020 is a landmark year when it comes to movies, with the last decade witnessing a great transformation in Auteurism, Story-telling and of-course, audience. Talk of Content Heroism or Technical brilliance in a movie, the ‘10s flicks peaked the curb over them. The trends which prevailed over the decade influenced both the Veteran, aspiring and on the rise filmmakers along with tailoring the expectations of we as the audience to a high and rich standard.

 The decade of 10s has seen a tremendous rise in young Filmmakers given a chance to prove their worth for the sense of cinema just through Short Films. Earlier, the case was to join as an AD or Writer under Senior Technician and slowly climb up the ladder to become the Film-Maker that one wished for years ago. This Smartphone generation created and earned chances out of their pockets, both literally and figuratively, with their Phone Cameras and a Short story to express. 

This new wave of Short Film to Feature Film Makers cleared the stagnation of Squealing Ideas in the Indian Cinema to give a more Verbose, Nuanced and Artistic Storytelling. 

Take for example Deva Katta’s fascinating but flawed Prasthanam(2010), a bombed political drama, never before made with the Honesty and Vigour for Perplexed Human’s, but also facing the problem of inconsistency in its pacing and Storytelling, creating a Mixed bag for the commercial taste to become a minimum guarantee scheme. Now, Deva Katta is a brilliant Writer(even the script of Prasthanam makes it evident), his temptation for the commercial success also cannot be blamed, but what’s lost in the drivel is a Good Story being told equally Good. 

Let’s take another contrasting example, Karthik Subbaraja’s(then, a Short Film Director) Debut horror flick Pizza(2012), which is a unique story (not the best of horrors, but better), even the ending, after all the Rib-tickers is also Simple and slightly anticipated. But what differs Pizza from Prasthanam, w.r.t story-telling is the abstaining from a Crowd-pleaser and rather preferring to hit the audience with its sheer intensity, and Pizza was a better hit than Prasthanam. This was the pinnacle in terms of how a Filmmaker perceives and stays true to the story he chooses. If this gets done right, then even the audience respect and make the movie a commercial success. 

Last Sunday's Digest (in case you missed) - Perception of Filmmaking

Pizza is one among the many Debut films from Short Film Makers like Sudheer Varma’s Crime-Con-Comedy Swamy Ra Ra(2013), Lijo Jose Pellisery’s Nayakan(2010) and the recent Adithya Dhar’s Uri: The Surgical Strike(2019). A Short Film Director who has also won the “National Award for Best Picture” for his very first feature Rom-com Pellichoopulu(2016) by Tharun Bhasker was both Critically and Commercially acclaimed. These Short filmmakers were clean of their sense of Cinema or more precisely Auteurism and wanted to tell their stories the way they wanted to. This big change led to a Dominoes effect in the Design of this beautiful Art form which will be discussed next Sunday.

of this beautiful Art form which will be discussed next Sunday.