In order to be eligible for an Oscar nomination, a film in India must have had a theatrical release. The deadline for this release, as set by the Film Federation of India last year, was September 30. The month leading up to it was clogged with the release of several independent movies that had varying levels of success at international film festivals: Aranya Sahay’s Humans in the Loop, Varsha Bharath’s Bad Girl, Raam Reddy’s Jugnuma, Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sundance-winning Sabar Bonda, and Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, which ended up winning a BAFTA for Best Children’s & Family Film.

The theatrical releases were often limited to a few screens in the big cities, and the box-office collections were negligible, though the theatrical success of these films should be assessed on the basis of the limited nature of their release. A different threshold for commercial success, perhaps, if such a threshold is even needed. The question of whether independent movies in India can have a theatrical afterlife and perhaps another afterlife on streaming, post their festival run, has been floated about often. September offered a sense of fragile hope.

The producer and campaign strategist Neha Kaul told me: “We need a habit shift and consistency. You need to know every Wednesday that if I go to so-and-so theatre, I can see an independent film.” That promise quickly faded after September, as the release of such films dwindled to a trickle.

There is, however, the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image’s (MAMI) recently launched weekly screenings, where Indian independent feature films are paired with short films screened at previous editions of the MAMI festival. Outside this, however, there is a dearth of a consistent institutional space for independent cinema, barring film festivals. A handful of films end up on streaming platforms, but most wither into oblivion. Most cannot even be pirated.

Alongside this, there are institutional initiatives that introduce India to artefacts of world cinema: the Film Heritage Foundation showing old, iconic, often restored films every Thursday evening at Regal Cinema in Mumbai; Vikalp showing politically conscious films on the last Friday of every month at Prithvi House for the past decade and a half, also in Mumbai; and the National Film Archive of India in Pune and the National Museum of Indian Cinema in Mumbai screening films every Saturday. Film societies and cultural organisations from Goa to Bhubaneswar try to marshal people into cinephilia, building what is definitely a habit, but not necessarily a culture. For without criticism, there is no culture.

The more foundational question, then, lurks: today, is it possible to have a film viewing culture at all?

The Film Society movement

The early film societies, as Rochona Majumdar writes in Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India, were “propelled by debates similar to those that animated left-oriented cultural movements… [like] the Progressive Writers Association in 1936, and the Indian People’s Theatre Association in 1942”. The written word was where these debates unfolded.

The Calcutta Film Society, founded in 1947, for example, produced a journal, and though it produced only one edition, film journals mushroomed around the society. Filmmakers from Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak to G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan grew their love for cinema and the desire to make cinema here.

A film society is not just a place to spectate but also to secrete cinema and question what “good” cinema even is. The “film society activists” that Majumdar writes about actively “struggled” with this question. It is true they also held on to their own biases against commercial cinema. But they struggled with that bias, too. Today, this struggle is missing because, perhaps, it feels resolved.

Majumdar notes that even within the film society movement, there was a schism that the film society activists of the 1960s engaged with, critiquing Satyajit Ray and the Calcutta Film Society’s preoccupation with aesthetics, preferring to champion “politically engaged cinema”. Nation-building was on their mind.

What we have today, then, are communal viewing spaces, where we can build our sense of film history, though they might not be geared, necessarily, to the making of film history. Has the time for that lapsed? Can we speak of cinema ideologically, not in the sense of what ideology cinema has but of cinema as ideology?

As contemporary independent cinema gravitates towards intimate explorations of identity, without taking on the additional burden of generating or changing political consciousness, is there space within it to create friction? Perhaps the time for that kind of cinema, too, has lapsed. We can celebrate John Abraham’s stiff but trenchant Amma Ariyan (1986) today—restored and screened at Cannes this year—but only as a relic of the past.

In May, two independent films were released theatrically: Ritwik Pareek’s Dug Dug and Tribeny Rai’s Shape of Momo. Both films required established names to come on board as executive producers: Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane, Nikhil Advani, and Vasan Bala for the former and Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, and Payal Kapadia for the latter.

Both films offer a respite from mainstream commercial fare. Dug Dug is an exemplar of how to stretch a film with editing that turns repetition into rhythm, while Shape of Momo questions the rural idyll of Sikkim, complicating the question of gender by setting it against class, resulting in an unstable and unresolved film that offers feeble answers to hard-edged questions.

Increasingly, we must be grateful for the spaces that offer communal film viewings and for the executive producers who push independent movies into PVRs, but this gratitude can and must exist alongside a larger demand: a film-viewing culture that is both circumspect and not self-congratulatory, that builds a language of critique alongside that of taste. 

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online. 

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