It is only natural that artistic expressions in such an age are extremely varied and highly individualistic. The well defined borders between art and propaganda are blown away. Street theatre, fictionalised documentary films, direct slogans with art images are only a few examples of this phenomenon.
Parzania does a by-now familiar reversal. Instead of simply creating a feature film that condemns and castigates the perpetrators of communal atrocities through an imaginary story, it takes a very real family tragedy and presents it through authentic-looking locations and professional actors.
Undoubtedly, the dramatisation of real life people can have its own problems. The actor’s craft and his grace layer the real with several dimensions which may not be present in the real event. Films like Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and Russell Crowe’s representation of John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician in A Beautiful Mind, undoubtedly cater to the popular. Commercial pressures bend recent historical characters and events and play up the emotional ingredient to make profits. The process of dramatisation while making the work more acceptable to the public, restructures the story to make it a neat and attractive package for viewers. At the same time, the actor, by the very nature of his profession, lifts the real-life event into the realm of fiction. Such a process involves a great deal of selecting, rejecting, down-playing, emphasising and editing of huge amounts of information available in the actual material. The process of re-making qualitatively changes the very material from which it is made.
The characters in Parzania are relatively under-played in comparison to Russell Crowe’s portrayal of John Nash, where the emotional is rather heavily overlaid on the real. If we assume a 1 to 10 scale of dramatisation where the minimum will be represented by 1 and the maximum by 10; then Parzania will stay close to 3 or 4 while films like Gandhi and A Beautiful Mind will hover around 7, 8, or even 9 where histrionics take over so completely that ultimately the film, ignoring the real, turns into an emotional love story of a certain kind.
In sharp contrast to classical periods in history, today the genuine artist is passionately, even painfully seeking a new relationship between art and life. The work that shows that struggle, even while depicting other major themes is totally honest. To my mind, Parzania, despite its pitfalls, fares well in this regard. Obviously it is an activist film. It seeks to highlight the barbaric killings of Muslims in Gujarat on a massive scale with state support. The shocking irrationality and insensitivity of the situation has moved the filmmakers and they have turned a documentary subject into a feature film. Their motives are transparent and clear.
The documentary film movement in our country is too weak, almost non-existent, to have access to large sections of viewers. The feature film has effectively replaced all other medium of entertainment, except TV soaps. The fact that the makers of Parzania thought it fit to take recourse to a dramatisation of real-life events through a few star actors, does not surprise me. I have no problem with it.
The writer is an actor, director and playwright. He is former director of the National School of Drama
Mohan Maharishi
