Age Of The Laptop Cinema

PANKAJ Advani had a whacky idea. A black comedy about a clumsy, absent-minded, safari-clad hitman who looks like an accountant and loves to read, and an assortment of other such equally colourful characters, among them a small-time car thief, a struggling actor and a porn film actress. And he wasn’t looking at a run-of-the-mill narrative for this tongue-in-cheek film. He wanted to structure it as a string of four distinct stories with a common climax using the hitman as the binding character. Urf Professor (Alias Professor) was certainly not turning out to be the kind of material Advani could have easily found finance for. “No producer would have touched the subject with a bargepole. It’s very edgy, at times rough and crude, and very different in its approach to story-telling,” he says. But Advani found himself making the 120-minute-long film on his own terms. What’s more, he wrapped up the film—which had 19 lead characters enacting 60-65 scenes over some 50 locations—in just 13 days. All thanks to a new cutting-edge technology called digital video or DV.

Urf Professor happens to be one of the 70-odd locally spun Indian digital films to be screened at India’s upcoming, first-ever competitive digital film festival. To be held in Delhi from March 26-30, it’s been organised by city-based Digital Talkies and boasts heavyweights like R.K. Laxman, Shyam Benegal, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Derek Malcolm and Shekhar Kapur as jury members. Participants include established filmmakers like Balu Mahendra, B. Lenin and Muzaffar Ali as well as relative newcomers like Nishit Saran, Siddhartha Srinivasan and Kabir Khan. “The idea is to showcase the nascent medium, to put forward the best of its creative, experimental works,” says Pia Singh, ceo of Digital Talkies.

What exactly are digital films? You could call them filmless films or as Mike Figgis, director of Leaving Las Vegas, puts it, “interesting things coming out of people’s laptops”. Basically it’s a different way of recording the moving image; you put it on tape instead of the conventional reel. Shot on a hi-tech camera, it’s edited online. A more economically viable and accessible way of making films, it helps save on expensive raw stock. You can do as many retakes without having to waste time on rehearsing shots. Paraphernalia and equipment are minimal, the light setup not as elaborate and you don’t need a big crew either. “It makes things happen instantly,” says filmmaker Muzaffar Ali. The medium allows a lot of spontaneity as well. “You can make changes on the sets whereas for celluloid you have to plan things in detail,” says filmmaker Abitha Sethuraman. A handycam also allows you to shoot unobtrusively, a boon for documentary filmmaking. “The huge celluloid cameras alter reality just by their presence, an anathema for documentaries. We can be more discreet with digital cameras,” says filmmaker Kabir Khan.

Most importantly, DV technology cuts down the cost of moviemaking down to a few lakhs instead of crores, allowing even amateurs to dabble in the medium. “No wonder every second person in the Kumbh mela was either a sadhu or a filmmaker,” says Khan. “It’s everyman’s medium. Filmmaking has always been a distant, esoteric art; now one can get closer to it,” says Vishwajyoti Ghosh, creative supervisor, art, hta. Film pros are already looking at DV as a medium to infuse life back into the floundering (some would say dead) alternative, independent, small cinema that’s hit hard by paltry budgets and pressures to conform. “It’s opened a new way of reaching out,” says Ali. “The creative freedom available is wonderful,” says Mahendra. Filmmakers no longer have to wait to find finance. “Not having to look around for budgets, we can now think our scripts better. There are these great ideas that have been just lying around; now we can dust the cobwebs away,” says Sethuraman. “I could never have dreamt of making an independent film,” says Ghosh. He’s now made one—9392888—on the nation’s favourite timepass, Kaun Banega Crorepati. The narrative intercuts between three individuals—a housewife who’s cracked the phone line and is on her way to participate in kbc, a suave executive who’s returned from the shoot without making it to the hotseat and a contractor from Pitampura who’s won Rs 25 lakh.

And Ghosh’s isn’t the lone creative concept. The films at the fest run a gamut of cinematic styles with subjects both eclectic and experimental. Look at Nishit Saran’s love story, A Perfect Day. It shows a boy and a girl in different situations, and explores reel versus real-life love. A documentary style feature, it was virtually a case of making something out of nothing—no money and no experience, no makeup either, no song-n-dance, nor a script. Saran shot for 40-50 hours with the bare thread of a story in mind and made the film on the editing table. “There’s no point in making the same kind of film with new technology,” he says.

As fascinating is Kabir Khan’s Ganga which looks at the river through the eyes of Prof Virbhadra Mishra, who teaches engineering at bhu and is also the head priest of a temple. Muzaffar Ali’s The Shawl is about the life of two women across a timespan of 30-40 years. It has Nafisa Ali and her daughter in the lead roles. Balu Mahendra’s film (as yet untitled) is about a village shopkeeper who stops political goondas from putting posters in his shop only to find his life in a shambles. B. Lenin’s Mottukka is about eight-year-old Arumugham’s fear of a prospective Maths teacher. Siddharth Srinivasan’s Divya Drishti focuses on a charlatan sadhu who keeps drinking cheap liquor at the chai shop.

The medium’s caught on; Digital Talkies received 200-odd entries for its fest. But it still has a long way to go. For one, you cannot make sweeping epics like Pakeezah, Ben Hur or Gladiator digitally. Abroad, digital cinema has raised a big debate about how accessibility and democratisation of the elitist medium is also reducing the quality of content. “It’ll be a free-for-all initially, there’ll be a lot of bad shit but good ideas will definitely emerge,” says Advani.

Digital cinema’s biggest hurdle is of exhibition and distribution. “DV’s revolutionised production but has done nothing for distribution. Anyone can make a film but it’s still difficult to show it,” says Saran. It’s the TV or the Internet—in fact broadband—which are the platforms for digital films. But while a digital film can be distributed and exhibited simultaneously worldwide on the Web and can also allow viewers to rate and review a film instantly, it doesn’t give the pleasure watching movies in 35 mm does, and lacks its romance and mythology. There’s technology to convert digital film to celluloid, but it’s costly. Theatres have the option to instal DV projectors but that’s again an expensive game. But give it time, and theatres will adopt it. “We’ll see a growth of small 150-200 seater theatres,” says Mahendra. Upmarket multiplexes too could invest in digital projection systems. “It’s the medium of the future, no big film fest can ignore digital films now,” predicts Ghosh.

Established names like Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, George Lucas and Mike Figgis are already working in the DV format. Will mainstream Indian film industry embrace it as well? Advani hopes it does. “Mainstream films take a hell of a long time to make, what with their unprofessional ways and its star system. With DV you could make the film in half the time with 50-70 per cent of the money,” he says.

But ask a hardcore cine buff and he’d still go for celluloid. “No digital film can match up to the celluloid,” says Khan. “The colours, depths, variations and tones of the big screen cannot be equalled in the digital format. It’s more two-dimensional,” says Sethuraman. No way will DV make celluloid a thing of the past. “Introduction of one medium doesn’t mean elimination of the other,” says Ghosh. In fact, filmmakers anticipate a coming together of multiple media and style. Already Run Lola Run has made innovative use of the celluloid, animation and DV media in one of its sequences. Ultimately format doesn’t matter. What matters is a good story, and how well it’s told.