Udaan [Soaring], the first film Vikramaditya Motwani as a director, was acclaimed by critics when it debuted in 2010. It was also the first Indian film in seven years to be part of the selection at Cannes (in the section "Un certain regard") and won the award for best film and best director for Star Screen Awards 2011 [the 'Indian equivalent of the Oscars].
Udaan is a story of learning the story of a teenager whose literary aspirations are thwarted by a domineering father. The film casts doubt on the troubling time when the action takes place. The first scene shows four boys, including the hero, Rohan, making the wall of their boarding school to see a porn movie in town.
The boys are caught and exclude the hotel. Rohan returns home to Jamshedpur [in the state of Jharkhand, in central India], dragging an old canteen similar to those once used as the rich. It's like being in the 1990s or perhaps earlier. The father of Rohan, Bhairav, led a Contessa (a car we no longer manufactures since 2002), there are no computers in offices and decoration of interiors and furnishings are outdated.
It is true that none of these elements is quite significant: there must still have offices without electronics and people who drive Contessa. This accumulation gives the impression of a story vaguely located in the past, but the elements are not specific enough that one can distinguish precisely the time and frame.
However, few details seem to allude to a period close: the state of Jharkhand [established in 2000] is mentioned in a subtitle, Calcutta is pronounced "Kolkata" [a change that was in 2001] and mobile phones and Recent models of cars appear several times. All this would not matter much if any interest was Udaan film.
Unfortunately, it suffers from framing, lighting and a purely utilitarian and pace of the inconsistency of the character of Bhairav. We have a brutal father and egocentric enough to let Rohan in his internship for eight years without ever visiting him. And then in a crucial scene, he's interrupting an important business meeting to get his son expelled from school for a trivial reason.
A man of that ilk would certainly say to the teacher on the phone: "I'm busy, my son has only expect on a bench for an hour or two." Only now, it would have deprived the film's twists . The six reasons for a decline There's a little over fifty years, another film by learning a new director had been shown at Cannes and was awarded the prize of human document [in 1956].
For his first film, Satyajit Ray [1921-1992] had budget constraints much more important than the authors of Udaan [whose screenplay was written by Anurag Kashyap and Motwani], but he was careful to situate Pather Panchali [The Lament of the trail] in the 1920s. In one of the most famous scenes in the film, Durga and Apu's brother walking in a field of tall grass and arrived near a railroad track when a train goes rumbling.
Amazement that reads their faces at the sight rails and power lines would not have been credible if the film had taken place in the 1950s. Compare Vikramaditya Motwani and Satyajit Ray may seem unfair, especially since Motwani is modest vis-à-vis his work. But when comparing these films, it is implicitly compared two periods of Indian cinema.
In the ten years since the release of Pather Panchali, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak [1925-1976] has made at least two indisputable masterpieces [including The Hidden Star, 1960] and filmmakers like Bimal Roy [ 1909-1966], Guru Dutt [1925-1964] and K. Asif [1922-1971] have produced a series of classics.
It would be hard to find works of this quality in the past decade. Less than a dozen great movies were released since 2000, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi including (2005), Omkara (2006), Dev D (2009), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) and a few other successes signed Aamir Khan and Rajkumar Hiran.
It is a ridiculous figure when we see the number of new films released every week [on average more than five]. The meltdown we experienced from the summits embodied by Ghatak, Ray, Roy and Dutt has been overshadowed in recent years by a number of factors, not all negative in itself elsewhere.
Firstly, because of its booming economy, India has asserted itself in cultural terms. Then, and not unrelated, it yal'engouement for Bollywood movies that we see in the West over the last decade. Added to this an increased interest in popular culture by scholars. Indian intellectuals who espoused the cause of pop culture often overlap analysis and praise of Bollywood.
The decline in our cinema has been established, it remains to examine the reasons why. I identified six major causes: the cliques, censorship, copyright, complexity, conflict and color. The cliques are the single most widely accepted. The film industry is controlled by a handful of families whose offspring are mostly self-centered and reluctant to question it.
Persistent weight Abhishek Bachchan [mediocre actor and son of the star Amitabh Bachchan] is probably the best example of the power of this oligarchy. Those who make the movies more interesting - starting with Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bharadwaj and Dibakar Banerjee - are not from the feudal hierarchy.
They are dependent on a nascent niche market that does not yet offer the kind of alternative space provided by grants from the National Film Development Corporation [funding agency that supports independent film] even in the 1990s. The symbolism at the expense of reality if the feudal culture of India led to an industry dominated by a few families, his conservatism is also the source of some of the largest obstacles to freedom of expression.
These barriers have always existed, but they were not as invasive during the golden age of Indian cinema, because films of this period were relatively consistent throughout. Everything has changed in the world with the sexual revolution and political turmoil of the 1960s. We started to tackle head on issues discussed previously in veiled terms.
India was hampered by laws ambivalent, for communities willing to express their discontent through threats and violence, but also by a population generally less liberal than the country's legal system. In this context, the best filmmakers in India have realized it could be unwise to discuss sensitive issues or news.
Anurag Kashyap has probably done more than any other, the cost of this fact. His first film, Paanchi [Five, 2003], was refused permission to broadcast because he did not offer a "healthy distraction." Output of Black Friday [Black Friday, 2004], a docudrama of same director on the series of bombings in Bombay in 1993, was prevented at the last moment by the courts, then suspended for years, arguing that the trial of the accused was still in [the film was finally released in cinemas in 2007].
Given the time taken for trial in India, the ban on Black Friday disincentive to wear contemporary political scandals on the screen. And no need to wait a Indian equivalent of The Social Network or Borat: biopics on the living persons and works can be interpreted as an insult to a country are also excluded.
The censorship rules have become increasingly oppressive time the National Democratic Alliance [coalition led by the Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party from 1998 to 2004], have historically been somewhat relaxed, the flexibility remains very small. If it is primarily the political right that they should be restrictions on freedom of expression, the left was involved in silencing of creativity in criticizing the regime of intellectual property and copyright.
About the lawyer Lawrence Liang, founder of the NGO Alternative Law Forum [Alternative Law Forum], are representative of the position of the left on this issue: "The commodification of producing images by using the threat to copyright of this art activity, an activity without a soul. "This view raises the creativity and money as irreconcilable and fails to consider that art can be both a vocation and a profession, and that disciplines such as film and architecture are, by their very nature, compromises between art and commerce.
Despite all its flaws, the copyright is the best tool to ensure that the fruits of their creative work. For their part, producers find it advantageous to copy movies to success rather than ordering original stories. It is therefore not surprising that the most frequent criticism made in Indian films is the weakness of their scripts.
I mentioned earlier the cultural disruption of the 1960s and content changes it has engendered in world cinema. The films have not only begun to explore sensitive topics, they also adopted a radically different styles to describe experiences extremes. If the Oscar for Best Film was awarded to My Fair Lady in 1964 and The Sound of Music in 1965, he went to Midnight Cowboy in 1969 and The French Connection in 1971.
The cinema of that time became more and more "overdetermined," that is to say that a complex web of cause and effect has been deployed in stories and images that are difficult to digest in one viewing . The Indian narrative tradition, based on repetition, symbolism and melodrama, was not adapted to these new forms of storytelling complex, and therefore our films have appeared increasingly obsolete.
The Indian film business has appropriated certain stylistic mannerisms of Hollywood, but without adopting the increasing complexity of the narrative. Our products continue to move towards the symbolic at the expense of real and tangible: the leaders do nothing to enlighten us on the kitchen, guitarists can barely scrape their instruments, the role of doctors has resulted in a white blouse and a process resolved.
Love Aaj Kal [Love yesterday and tomorrow, 2009] Imtiaz Ali perfectly illustrates this pitfall. Actors Deepika Padukone and Saif Ali Khan play lovers and city dwellers who released both work in architecture. The character played by Khan dream of working on a project related to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, but it is unclear what could be the bridge since this project already exists.
Although very voluble, lovers have nothing interesting to say about their profession. Top Bollywood screenwriters of the 1970s, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, always placed a dramatic conflict at the heart of their plots, giving their works a psychological point of support. Strangely, Bollywood bazard recent years the formula he knew so well and replaced by bland productions featuring isolated moments of entertainment without any compelling premise.
At a time when one seeks to avoid conflict at all costs, the rebellion has largely disappeared from the screens, as well as social concerns. We propose that instead of learning stories as insipid and stultifying Wake Up Sid [Wake up Sid, 2009]. "Journal of Learning 'is now the buzzword in Bollywood, and one of two scenarios prevalent in contemporary commercial cinema, the other model is the story of a boy and a girl who confess their love until the end of the film, while the public had long understood.
Wake Up Sid, however, al'incroyable daring to combine the two fields. Sid is a spoiled child who learns to cook eggs, symbolizing his entry into adulthood. In the last scene, he discovers that he loves Konkona Sen Sharma, the woman who taught her to cook eggs, and makes a statement. Audience of young graduates in 2009, the favorite movie of the public and critics was 3 Idiots Rajkumar Hirani, in which [the Bollywood star] Aamir Khan plays a student struggling with academic authoritarianism.
In 1984, Aamir Khan was already playing in Ketan Mehta's Holi, the role of a student struggling with academic authoritarianism. I compare the two films to attract attention from the data that are diametrically opposed to the conflict in both films. On Holi, the students rebelled and end up in prison, while in 3 Idiots, the protagonists are settled amicably with the authorities and enter into successful careers.
The change of mindset among Holi and 3 Idiots is obviously due to better prospects for graduates in India liberalized. That's the audience today by most producers: the young urban graduates of higher education that fill the multiplexes. Unwilling to disturb the new optimism in this social category, the filmmakers give us movies anesthetics and avoid any diving deep into society and human relationships.
If the harsh light of commercial films today are not built around a dramatic conflict, this is offset by greater technical finesse. The best films from filmmakers to big success of Manmohan Desai [1937-1994] and Prakash Mehra [1939 - 2009] were perhaps very entertaining, but the shooting, sound and editing were so primitive that enough was embarrassing.
However, progress is hindered by a factor that is rarely mentioned when talking about the history of Indian cinema: the representation of light and colors of India. Our best filmmakers have created images that emphasize the lyrical character of a vibrant country that sticks to the skin of India.
But in their desire to embellish everything, they are reluctant to show the harsh light and disorder that are also part of our visual reality. I find it unfortunate that the American film The Bourne Supremacy [The Bourne Supremacy, 2004] and the British film Slumdog Millionaire [2008] are able to interpret the light, color, architecture and Indian artifacts in a much more fruitful than indigenous productions.
The black and white differs intrinsically from our natural vision, which removes the details without giving a false impression. The color, however, requires more real on camera. It is instructive that many of the best photographers in India, like Ram Rahman, Dayanita Singh and Ketaki Sheth, have retained a predilection for black and white.
It is also noteworthy that, among the best Indian filmmakers who started with black and white, very few people who have delivered movies in color matching the quality of their early works. The Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaj [The rustle of beautiful anklets, 1955] Screaming and saturated color of V.
Shantaram [1901-1990] offers a striking contrast with the Do Aankhen Barah award winning Haath [Two Eyes Twelve Hands], filmed a year later in black and white, not to mention his masterpieces of the 1930s. This is not entirely a coincidence that we stopped making good movies at about the time we left the black and white. 
Udaan is a story of learning the story of a teenager whose literary aspirations are thwarted by a domineering father. The film casts doubt on the troubling time when the action takes place. The first scene shows four boys, including the hero, Rohan, making the wall of their boarding school to see a porn movie in town.
The boys are caught and exclude the hotel. Rohan returns home to Jamshedpur [in the state of Jharkhand, in central India], dragging an old canteen similar to those once used as the rich. It's like being in the 1990s or perhaps earlier. The father of Rohan, Bhairav, led a Contessa (a car we no longer manufactures since 2002), there are no computers in offices and decoration of interiors and furnishings are outdated.
It is true that none of these elements is quite significant: there must still have offices without electronics and people who drive Contessa. This accumulation gives the impression of a story vaguely located in the past, but the elements are not specific enough that one can distinguish precisely the time and frame.
However, few details seem to allude to a period close: the state of Jharkhand [established in 2000] is mentioned in a subtitle, Calcutta is pronounced "Kolkata" [a change that was in 2001] and mobile phones and Recent models of cars appear several times. All this would not matter much if any interest was Udaan film.
Unfortunately, it suffers from framing, lighting and a purely utilitarian and pace of the inconsistency of the character of Bhairav. We have a brutal father and egocentric enough to let Rohan in his internship for eight years without ever visiting him. And then in a crucial scene, he's interrupting an important business meeting to get his son expelled from school for a trivial reason.
A man of that ilk would certainly say to the teacher on the phone: "I'm busy, my son has only expect on a bench for an hour or two." Only now, it would have deprived the film's twists . The six reasons for a decline There's a little over fifty years, another film by learning a new director had been shown at Cannes and was awarded the prize of human document [in 1956].
For his first film, Satyajit Ray [1921-1992] had budget constraints much more important than the authors of Udaan [whose screenplay was written by Anurag Kashyap and Motwani], but he was careful to situate Pather Panchali [The Lament of the trail] in the 1920s. In one of the most famous scenes in the film, Durga and Apu's brother walking in a field of tall grass and arrived near a railroad track when a train goes rumbling.
Amazement that reads their faces at the sight rails and power lines would not have been credible if the film had taken place in the 1950s. Compare Vikramaditya Motwani and Satyajit Ray may seem unfair, especially since Motwani is modest vis-à-vis his work. But when comparing these films, it is implicitly compared two periods of Indian cinema.
In the ten years since the release of Pather Panchali, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak [1925-1976] has made at least two indisputable masterpieces [including The Hidden Star, 1960] and filmmakers like Bimal Roy [ 1909-1966], Guru Dutt [1925-1964] and K. Asif [1922-1971] have produced a series of classics.
It would be hard to find works of this quality in the past decade. Less than a dozen great movies were released since 2000, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi including (2005), Omkara (2006), Dev D (2009), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) and a few other successes signed Aamir Khan and Rajkumar Hiran.
It is a ridiculous figure when we see the number of new films released every week [on average more than five]. The meltdown we experienced from the summits embodied by Ghatak, Ray, Roy and Dutt has been overshadowed in recent years by a number of factors, not all negative in itself elsewhere.
Firstly, because of its booming economy, India has asserted itself in cultural terms. Then, and not unrelated, it yal'engouement for Bollywood movies that we see in the West over the last decade. Added to this an increased interest in popular culture by scholars. Indian intellectuals who espoused the cause of pop culture often overlap analysis and praise of Bollywood.
The decline in our cinema has been established, it remains to examine the reasons why. I identified six major causes: the cliques, censorship, copyright, complexity, conflict and color. The cliques are the single most widely accepted. The film industry is controlled by a handful of families whose offspring are mostly self-centered and reluctant to question it.
Persistent weight Abhishek Bachchan [mediocre actor and son of the star Amitabh Bachchan] is probably the best example of the power of this oligarchy. Those who make the movies more interesting - starting with Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bharadwaj and Dibakar Banerjee - are not from the feudal hierarchy.
They are dependent on a nascent niche market that does not yet offer the kind of alternative space provided by grants from the National Film Development Corporation [funding agency that supports independent film] even in the 1990s. The symbolism at the expense of reality if the feudal culture of India led to an industry dominated by a few families, his conservatism is also the source of some of the largest obstacles to freedom of expression.
These barriers have always existed, but they were not as invasive during the golden age of Indian cinema, because films of this period were relatively consistent throughout. Everything has changed in the world with the sexual revolution and political turmoil of the 1960s. We started to tackle head on issues discussed previously in veiled terms.
India was hampered by laws ambivalent, for communities willing to express their discontent through threats and violence, but also by a population generally less liberal than the country's legal system. In this context, the best filmmakers in India have realized it could be unwise to discuss sensitive issues or news.
Anurag Kashyap has probably done more than any other, the cost of this fact. His first film, Paanchi [Five, 2003], was refused permission to broadcast because he did not offer a "healthy distraction." Output of Black Friday [Black Friday, 2004], a docudrama of same director on the series of bombings in Bombay in 1993, was prevented at the last moment by the courts, then suspended for years, arguing that the trial of the accused was still in [the film was finally released in cinemas in 2007].
Given the time taken for trial in India, the ban on Black Friday disincentive to wear contemporary political scandals on the screen. And no need to wait a Indian equivalent of The Social Network or Borat: biopics on the living persons and works can be interpreted as an insult to a country are also excluded.
The censorship rules have become increasingly oppressive time the National Democratic Alliance [coalition led by the Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party from 1998 to 2004], have historically been somewhat relaxed, the flexibility remains very small. If it is primarily the political right that they should be restrictions on freedom of expression, the left was involved in silencing of creativity in criticizing the regime of intellectual property and copyright.
About the lawyer Lawrence Liang, founder of the NGO Alternative Law Forum [Alternative Law Forum], are representative of the position of the left on this issue: "The commodification of producing images by using the threat to copyright of this art activity, an activity without a soul. "This view raises the creativity and money as irreconcilable and fails to consider that art can be both a vocation and a profession, and that disciplines such as film and architecture are, by their very nature, compromises between art and commerce.
Despite all its flaws, the copyright is the best tool to ensure that the fruits of their creative work. For their part, producers find it advantageous to copy movies to success rather than ordering original stories. It is therefore not surprising that the most frequent criticism made in Indian films is the weakness of their scripts.
I mentioned earlier the cultural disruption of the 1960s and content changes it has engendered in world cinema. The films have not only begun to explore sensitive topics, they also adopted a radically different styles to describe experiences extremes. If the Oscar for Best Film was awarded to My Fair Lady in 1964 and The Sound of Music in 1965, he went to Midnight Cowboy in 1969 and The French Connection in 1971.
The cinema of that time became more and more "overdetermined," that is to say that a complex web of cause and effect has been deployed in stories and images that are difficult to digest in one viewing . The Indian narrative tradition, based on repetition, symbolism and melodrama, was not adapted to these new forms of storytelling complex, and therefore our films have appeared increasingly obsolete.
The Indian film business has appropriated certain stylistic mannerisms of Hollywood, but without adopting the increasing complexity of the narrative. Our products continue to move towards the symbolic at the expense of real and tangible: the leaders do nothing to enlighten us on the kitchen, guitarists can barely scrape their instruments, the role of doctors has resulted in a white blouse and a process resolved.
Love Aaj Kal [Love yesterday and tomorrow, 2009] Imtiaz Ali perfectly illustrates this pitfall. Actors Deepika Padukone and Saif Ali Khan play lovers and city dwellers who released both work in architecture. The character played by Khan dream of working on a project related to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, but it is unclear what could be the bridge since this project already exists.
Although very voluble, lovers have nothing interesting to say about their profession. Top Bollywood screenwriters of the 1970s, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, always placed a dramatic conflict at the heart of their plots, giving their works a psychological point of support. Strangely, Bollywood bazard recent years the formula he knew so well and replaced by bland productions featuring isolated moments of entertainment without any compelling premise.
At a time when one seeks to avoid conflict at all costs, the rebellion has largely disappeared from the screens, as well as social concerns. We propose that instead of learning stories as insipid and stultifying Wake Up Sid [Wake up Sid, 2009]. "Journal of Learning 'is now the buzzword in Bollywood, and one of two scenarios prevalent in contemporary commercial cinema, the other model is the story of a boy and a girl who confess their love until the end of the film, while the public had long understood.
Wake Up Sid, however, al'incroyable daring to combine the two fields. Sid is a spoiled child who learns to cook eggs, symbolizing his entry into adulthood. In the last scene, he discovers that he loves Konkona Sen Sharma, the woman who taught her to cook eggs, and makes a statement. Audience of young graduates in 2009, the favorite movie of the public and critics was 3 Idiots Rajkumar Hirani, in which [the Bollywood star] Aamir Khan plays a student struggling with academic authoritarianism.
In 1984, Aamir Khan was already playing in Ketan Mehta's Holi, the role of a student struggling with academic authoritarianism. I compare the two films to attract attention from the data that are diametrically opposed to the conflict in both films. On Holi, the students rebelled and end up in prison, while in 3 Idiots, the protagonists are settled amicably with the authorities and enter into successful careers.
The change of mindset among Holi and 3 Idiots is obviously due to better prospects for graduates in India liberalized. That's the audience today by most producers: the young urban graduates of higher education that fill the multiplexes. Unwilling to disturb the new optimism in this social category, the filmmakers give us movies anesthetics and avoid any diving deep into society and human relationships.
If the harsh light of commercial films today are not built around a dramatic conflict, this is offset by greater technical finesse. The best films from filmmakers to big success of Manmohan Desai [1937-1994] and Prakash Mehra [1939 - 2009] were perhaps very entertaining, but the shooting, sound and editing were so primitive that enough was embarrassing.
However, progress is hindered by a factor that is rarely mentioned when talking about the history of Indian cinema: the representation of light and colors of India. Our best filmmakers have created images that emphasize the lyrical character of a vibrant country that sticks to the skin of India.
But in their desire to embellish everything, they are reluctant to show the harsh light and disorder that are also part of our visual reality. I find it unfortunate that the American film The Bourne Supremacy [The Bourne Supremacy, 2004] and the British film Slumdog Millionaire [2008] are able to interpret the light, color, architecture and Indian artifacts in a much more fruitful than indigenous productions.
The black and white differs intrinsically from our natural vision, which removes the details without giving a false impression. The color, however, requires more real on camera. It is instructive that many of the best photographers in India, like Ram Rahman, Dayanita Singh and Ketaki Sheth, have retained a predilection for black and white.
It is also noteworthy that, among the best Indian filmmakers who started with black and white, very few people who have delivered movies in color matching the quality of their early works. The Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaj [The rustle of beautiful anklets, 1955] Screaming and saturated color of V.
Shantaram [1901-1990] offers a striking contrast with the Do Aankhen Barah award winning Haath [Two Eyes Twelve Hands], filmed a year later in black and white, not to mention his masterpieces of the 1930s. This is not entirely a coincidence that we stopped making good movies at about the time we left the black and white.
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