Views on 'Cinema'

I along with my wife have been visiting the Asian Film Festival since past few days and we treated ourselves with some amazingly sensitive movies.

The medium of cinema always fascinates me.

To talk about cinema, let me take a dig at the psychology of it as it seems to me. I feel that movies allow us to experience characters in reel life which we either may want to live, may not want to lead (like villains), would want to connect emotionally, physically relate to etc etc. When someone imitates an actor's dress, hairstyle, conversation style etc in effect they want to connect to him/her physically. The reason a movie like Rock On! catches onto youngsters is because somewhere they sense a hope in chasing their dreams. In this case, the personalities in the movie and also their mission is what the audience connects with.

Similarly we have a lot of people enjoying the character of the emerging revolutionary in Motorcycle Diaries or the role of Forrest Gump. We love these characters probably because they are special and we somewhere want to be like them deep within our subconscious level but rarely do we gather the courage to become like them. At times there are certain elements in certain characters that appeal to us and not the total self (which is very often the case i must say) and also we have to understand that in our limited lifetime, we can't lead multiple lives. But still to what extent we can stretch ourselves, is completely our personal call. I feel a lot of movies like Rang De Basanti, A Wednesday appeal to us simply because we somewhere try to identify our inner vaccums with what the character tries to portray over here. The loving character of Rajesh Khanna in the movie Anand where he constantly smiles despite knowing that his life is going to come to an end. I have not met a single person who was not touched by the character.

At other times it might just be a brilliant performance, script and direction that mesmerizes us.

This ability to connect to the audience in a way such that the audience finds himself/herself emotionally connected to a character can be one of the tests or challenge which the director might like to take up.

I guess this power of cinema to allow people to lead multiple lives (albeit in an imaginary mode) provides the logic of why it is such a popular genre of entertainment.