Monday, July 21, 2008

Adoor Gopalakrishnan on “commercial film” and “Indian films vs. Bollywood films”



"The moment I release my films in cinema houses, the moment people are buying tickets to see the film, it’s a commercial film. Unfortunately, we believe only singing and dancing and the improbabilities shown on the screen make commercial cinema. It’s not true. This misconception about what is cinema is widespread. Not only in our country but even abroad, Indian cinema means Bollywood. In India, we have many Indian cinemas. People tend to say, there is Hindi cinema and then there is regional cinema. It’s a wrong term to use. The best of Hindi cinema is regional. Bollywood is a cinema that doesn’t belong to anything, because it doesn’t address any particular problem. You are made to dream, but these are dreams that you wake up from feeling extremely bad. Whereas the function of art is to make you live, to love life in the most affectionate way. It should equip you to understand yourself, to make you understand the people around you, the society you live in."

----Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Indian film director

With four decades of film-making behind him, Adoor Gopalakrishnan is also the best-known Indian film-maker abroad after Satyajit Ray. He talks about why he terms all his films as commercial, the fact that his films are about Kerala, his home state, and how films reflect the changing times.

1 Earthling’s comments:

[G@ttoGiallo] said...

I bet Adoor is a Viswanadhan's friend and almost sure he knows Nadine Tarbouriech (Paris, France and Madras).

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