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At the Film & TelevisionInstitute, the other day, Ifound myself doing whatI increasingly do at placeslike that: To check the

most recent films that students mayhave either downloaded or ripped.Obviously, in return I would givewhatever I had. This time my haul

included almost 40 GB of Japanesefilm, including controversial Japa-nese filmmaker Sion SonosSuicideCircle series. In turn, I passed on major films by ChinasSixth Generation filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai, includinghis now famousFrozen, andSo Close to Paradise (bet-ter known as The Girl from Vietnam).

Wangs official arrival in India was only lastNovember, when the Kolkata International FilmFestival awarded 11 Flowers the NETPACAward. Longbefore that, he was well known among young filmmak-ers and cinephiles for his 2001 classic Beijing Bicycle.Both filmmakers reputations, along with existing hard-disk circuit classicsKim Ki-DukandJia Zhangke, weremade well before they were seen on any officia l screensin India, by the kind of excited sharing and equally ex-cited discovery of new masters by film students acrossthe country. On numerous occasions, as with Wang

Xiaoshuai, it is only this kind of informal curationascinephiles play curators, post their recommendationsonline and share, share, sharethat has led to festivalsacquiring and screening films.

Earlier this year, on a bravura programming exer-cise at the newly refurbished Osians festival at DelhisSiri Fort and other venues, film scholar KaushikBhaumik juxtaposed Anurag Kashyap (the completetwo-part Gangs Of Wasseypur) and Rituparno GhoshsChitrangada alongside a major retrospective ofJapanese pink film, and then also showed some edgyPasolini (Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom) to make an ar-gument about film history that I think is completely newto film programming. To make the point still further,Osians brought over the filmmaker Q (whose contro-versial Gandu has been making the informal circuiteven though its official release in India is still nowherein sight) along with his band Gandu Circus to DelhisBlue Frog. Rounding it off, with a most unlikely originof all this, was a major and full retrospective of avantgarde master Mani Kaul.

It is fairly well known that there is a new energy inalmost all languages of Indian cinema. What is star-tlingly, even mind-numbingly new is the global contextwithin which our films now consciously set their work.

And with it, what has enabled this new ecosystem to de-velop. It is arguable the new spaces of showing, whichinclude numerous and ever-expanding informal areas,from art galleries to cafes, are preceded by what I canonly call new circuits of curation, performance and ex-

JANUARY 14, 2013 N INDIA TODAY 51

FORECAST2013 NEWWAVE CINEMA

AshishRajadhyaksha

G U E S T

C O L U M N

FARHAN AKHTAR IN

BHAAG MILKHA BHAAG

FROMMUMBAITO BIHARA new wave of gritty

realistic cinema is

eliminating the

rural-urban

divide on screen

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hibition bring together numerous live practices and in-stallation art to help restructure and redefine our en-counter with the moving image.

This could not have been envisaged even a decadeago, when someone like Mani Kaul was still strugglingto make films in the face of rank state indifference, crip-plingly low budgets and the impossibility of distribution.Today, Kauls student Gurvinder Singh, who dedicates to

Kaul his extraordinary debutAnhe Ghore da Daan, aPunjabi film showing 24 hours in the life of a village nearBhatinda, has found his film released by the NationalFilm Development Corporation, and will be seen in its useof non-professional actors and its extraordinary syncsoundtrack to be a worthy equivalent of Jia Zhangkes

justly celebratedStill Life, set in the Three Gorges Dam.

Anyone can be a film buff nowTo many, the major public face of this new cinema is

Anurag Kashyap, as much in his capacity of filmmakeras that of producer. As things are, Kashyap is produc-ing Qs next Tasher Desh in Bengali, Marathi filmmakerSachin KundalkarsAiyya, and already has BedabrataPains Chittagong out. He would have produced Kaulsown next film but that wasnt to be, with Kauls suddenand tragic demise, so he is now producing a documen-tary on Kaul. For many, Kashyaps appropriation of thisnew space is something of an act of opportunism, an ap-propriation of a diverse set of practices by no means lim-ited to his own priorities. To others, however, hisselection of both people to supportVikramadityaMotwane, to take just an instanceas well as films fromdiverse languages and contexts, remains a marker ofhow old-style film production can be now combined wi tha new curatorial instinct. Films like KashyapsMumbaiCutting, comprising eleven shorts by such names asSudhir Mishra, Kundan Shah, Jahnu Barua andRituparno Ghosh, bears some similarity to a film studentcurating his hard disk, sharing stuff both with friends

and with unknown fellow cinephiles online and, some-times, extending it into a filmmaking practice.

Both styles are sufficiently well established for us tolook back and see what kind of filmmaking and film his-tory can emerge. There are discernible trends: for one,films are being watched and assembled. A hundredyears of Indian cinema does not, it appears, any longerneed a film archive; any film students 1 TB disk can do.

It is less easy to define the kind of filmmaking prac-tice emerging from all this, but there are enough strawsin the wind to make some kind of informed sense ofwhats going on. Here are a few speculative suggestions .The emphasis on gritty realism is certainly in: Wassey-

pur is only the most recent in a long series of films thatmay well have started, in hindsight, with the Mumbaigangster movie of the 1980s and 90s. This is RealismMark II, we may say, and it certainly replaces an entirelegacy of post-Independence cinematic realisms. Forone, it eliminates what used to be the key distinction cen-tral to earlier realismsbetween country and city. Wa-sseypur is somewhere between the two, a mobiledystopic space at once the heart of Mumbai and Bihar.

Such realism relies on a completely new soundscape :At one level sync sound is in, but at another, the extentof sound manipulation is such that sync may be bettercomprehended through Sneha Khanwalkars SoundTrippinthan through fidelity to location. Location sound,then, mediated through sampling to produce literally theexact sonic equivalent of nowhereland.

Havent we seen it before?You cant now conceive of todaysfilmmaking style without firstunderstanding yesterdays:

All film language has

thickened, even curdled, into such a dense communica-tive idiom that you cannot unpack it in any simple way:you need to first get a lexicon of a near-century old filmpractice. And so the remake genre: TheSaheb Biwi aurGangster genre, and the mode retro of Bollywood whereyou cant understand, say, Om Shanti Om, unless youknow the 70s movie. Most interestingly, perhaps, forme, the way an entire substructure of cinematic mem-

ory undergirds new narratives. My most interesting ex-ample here has been Srijit Mukherjees 2010 BengalifilmAutograph, in which Prasenjit plays a movie su-

perstar now acting in a fictional remake of Satyajit RaysNayakand reprising the covert knowledge of star-pred-ecessor Uttam Kumar.

Much more than just a movieA third trend within the gritty-realism movie is thecharacterisation structure: Drawn as much, I think,from gaming experience as from cinema itself. We dont

yet have an Indian equivalent of, say, the Arkham gamesof Batman, but it is clear to me that this kind of cinemais straining at the leash, wanting to break out into a po-tentially interactive idiom. And so what we have is a re-lay of characters, and literal movement from character

to character, as we weave through a story almost asthough we had an X-Box console in our hands.

The last is almost the most interesting of thethree, partly because what we now see is a narra-tive imperative to do something in India that issimply not supported by the economy: The disas-ter of theRa-Onegame on Sony Playstation 3 be-ing only one example. The need, in a Rajinikant

movie likeRobot, or Shah Rukh Khans superheroambitions, is to go beyond the cinemato see thecinema indeed like a glass cage in which they aretrappeddefine a drive that is larger than even

these stars: A drive to push Indian cinema into aspace for which neither is the market ready northe technology.

But then this in itself is not new to Indiancinema, which has often functioned without

established market support, forcing a spectator-ial alliance to do their bit to see films through. Now

the only difference is spectatorship is appended to abrand new set of hard disks.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is senior fellow, Centre for the

Study of Culture & Society, and the author of

Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema.

52 INDIA TODAY N JANUARY 14, 2013 JANUARY 14, 2013 N INDIA TODAY 53

MOVIETRENDS OFTHE YEARIn a year of AamirKhans Dhoom 3,SRKs ChennaiExpressdirectedby Rohit Shetty,Salman Khans ac-tion film directedby brother Sohail,there are lots ofother pleasures

TRIPLE TREATS

KHANC

LASHES

Aamir KhanDhoom 3isexpected to bereleased aroundthe year-end.

Shah Rukh KhanHis road movieChennai Expressisexpected in mid-2013.

IMRAN KHAN AND ANUSHKA

SHARMAIN MATRU KI

BIJLEE KA MANDOLA

Dhoom 3Aamir is the villain.DirectorVijay Krishna Acharya willbe if he doesnt deliver a hit.

Murder 3Emraan didnt want to do a third.

But uncle Mahesh Bhatts brand-wagon wasnt going to wait.

Krrish 3Hrithik returns as superheroin 3D.Vivek Oberoi is baddieKaal.The Roshans are on a roll.

Madhuri Dixit in SoumikSens Gulab Gangwith JuhiChawla as her politicianantagonist.

Kangna Ranaut as a solohoneymooner in Vikas

Bahls quirky Queen.

Vidya Balan in a sequelto Kahaani.

Priyanka Chopra withArjun Kapoor andRanveer Singh in Gunday.

Nautanki Saala:(Who said it: AmitabhBachchan,Sholay,1975)Director Rohan SippyStars Ayushmann Khurrana.Connection Rohans father directed Sholay.

Phata Poster Nikla Hero: (Who said it:Naseeruddin Shah, Hero Hiralal,1988)Director Rajkumar SantoshiStars Shahid Kapur,Ileana DCruz.

Connection Shahid Kapurs father andNaseeruddin are married to sisters.

Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani: (Who sang it:Randhir Kapoor/Kishore Kumar, JawaniDiwani,1972) Director Ayan MukherjiStars Ranbir Kapoor,Deepika Padukone.Connection Randhir is Ranbirs uncle.

INSPIREDBYSONGS,

DIALOGUES

Salman KhanNo film on thefloor but SherKhancould makeit in time for an Eidrelease in August.

FORECAST2013 NEWWAVE CINEMA