The Art Of Moving Pictures

Pictures capture moments, scenes and little bits of the world around us, when pictures start moving from their stillness, films are made. Just like love affairs are forbidden to a student for they are supposed to divert their mind from studies, so is another thing forbidden to almost any average young person and that is taking films seriously. Why is it so?

In India, films have always been made in mainly 3 regions- Madras, Mumbai, and very own Kolkata. The Hindi movie industry in India today has acquired fantastic dimensions. It has a nationwide market and an overseas one too, most of the best talents in our country, and some rich elite people are ready to finance it. Made over a formula revised and re-revised, these films are branded “unrealistic”, and allegedly put wrong ideas into the heads of the youths of the nation. The point at any of these and the elders will say, “Life is not like that.” True, it isn’t. Do then, films never take a closer look at life? They do, and in fact, like any other form of art, they are inseparably linked with life.

Ninety out of hundred people do not know that a very different world of cinema exists beyond what Mumbai produces every week. This genre of films includes those made by Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Charles Chaplin, Akira Kurosawa, and many such big names.

A good film need not be an art film. A good film is not that which pretends to be very intellectual and leaves its audience wondering what it meant. It simply conveys its statement in clear and precise terms. What words are to literature, colors are to paintings, photography and pictures are to a film. In films, everything one sees on screen has its own part of the story to tell.

Just like a good book, a good film involves and satisfies its audience, is honest and sincere to its subjects and can live through the years.

I have grown up on a regular diet of very average Bollywood films. What “classic” films are, how good they can be, I learned much later. I hope others, especially the young generation starts to appreciate cinema as an art. Let us learn from these moving pictures. Movies often feed own mind and soul with lessons you won’t find elsewhere. It helps to heal your broken heart and to make you laugh even through your toughest times. These days the cinema has evolved a lot and is continuing to touch people’s hearts every single day.