Masala movies have corrupted our audience: Adoor

Panaji, Dec 1 (IANS) Going by the questions and responses one hears at post-screening audience-filmmaker interactions at the 38th International Film festival of India (IFFI) being held here, it becomes evident that people in general haven't yet learnt the art of appreciating cinema that seeks to stand out from the crowd.

Veteran director Adoor Gopalakrishnan believes that India still has miles to go as a nation of filmgoers.

The reaction came following the screening of "Vidheyan" (The Servile), which played as part of a specially organised Master Class session, when one member of the audience told the filmmaker that she found the silences in the film suffocating. Adoor couldn't help being taken aback.

"Our audiences are conditioned to listening to background music from start to finish," rued Adoor. "Run of the mill commercial cinema reinforces the notion of what cinema should be like."

Adoor has two films in the Indian Panorama this year, including a mesmerising 70-minute documentary on Mohiniyattam, "The Dance of the Enchantress", made in collaboration with French practitioner Brigitte Chataignier.

The trouble, he argued, stems from the fact that "the industry, wilfully or unknowingly, promotes only one kind of cinema and excludes everything else. An alternative to the mainstream film industry structure simply isn't available today and neither an audience".

"How would we know whether or not we have an audience for our kind of cinema if we aren't allowed to reach out to them," he added.

Former IFFI director Malti Sahay shared an experience that speaks volumes about the quality of the movie viewership available in India today.

In the question-answer session following the Cinema of the World screening of a Polish film, "Tricks", somebody in the audience got up and asked director Andrzej Jakimowski: "What are you trying to say through this film?"

Jakimowski was too stumped to respond.

"When an audience is unable to grasp anything but straightforward narrative structures, cinema is in trouble. Good cinema cannot survive without an audience that is ready for it," Sahay said Friday at an Open Forum discussion, which is organised everyday on a chosen topic on the sidelines of IFFI.