Shyam Benegal has been making highly-acclaimed films since the early seventies. In those days he had to struggle to find a footing since his themes were completely different from those of Bollywood. Over the years, he has continued to make movies with serious themes but found wide acceptance too. In an interaction with Express staff, moderated by Consulting Editor Shailaja Bajpai, Benegal spoke about recent trends in film making, film makers he admires, and how the village, the theme of many of his early films, has fallen off the map.

Shailaja Bajpai: I would request Mr Benegal to comment on his personal grouse about the period where he changed really his approach to cinema

Shyam Benegal: Well, when I started making films i.e. fiction films in the early 1970s, it took me a very long time really because most young people today make their very first feature films by the time they are in their mid 20s or early 30s. But when I made my first feature film in my late 30s, it had taken me 13 years of taking my script around to various producers, hoping that they would pick up the subjects on which I could make a film. Now that was a long journey and difficult simply because I was wanting to make films that were different from what was the prevailing form of films. And the prevailing form is what I now called as the traditional Indian cinema and I was very impatient with that kind of cinema at that time. I had to qualify because my views have changed somewhat because if something like entertainment, which the people of the entire country seem to enjoy most. When you are young, you can take a very strong position and say that you disagree with this kind of form, but there must be some reason why people enjoy certain films, which if you look at them at their face value you might say they are naive but they are not as naive as they seem. And all that you discover much later. But at that time it was important for me to say that I was not going to make films of that nature and I had to make a film that would clearly be my own expression in the cinema and also creatively speaking. I used to think that the traditional form of the Indian cinema was in many ways was simply a pedestrian paint. And anything you had, say you had a number of ideas but once you made a film, it exactly looked like the one made before. Everything came from the same kind of sausage machine, so you get identical sausages at the end of the day. Now that is a position I don’t agree with and later changed my stand also because I believe that there were tremendous possibilities in the traditional format of filmmaking. But of course, when I started making films, I had a different perception. I felt it was very important to make films that were socially engaged, your concern should be the concern of the environment and the community in which you live and it should reflect in the ideas you decide to deal with. Now those ideas have not really changed for me since then because I continue to believe that films have a role and have to be in many ways forms of expressions, which have some social engagement. Now that is not to say that films must essentially have a message to carry but be in some ways a kind of response to the world around, that is an important aspect of cinema. Whatever kind of films you make, be it a documentary or a fiction film, you ought to have to have a connection of that kind. In the last couple of years I have discovered that the cinema has become particularly interesting sort of space in which people have all kinds of political views can come in and use that as platform for making themselves seen and heard. Films like Jodha Akbar, what happened to that or one other film where you had the fact that somebody used a traditional idiom suddenly becomes a bone of contention in a song and the film gets banned. So when you say there has to be some engagement, you have to be apparently very careful because we are such a diverse community and one part of the country may not necessarily find some kind of sympathetic response whereas the same expression might have different meanings. But you don’t worry about these things when you start making a film, because if you worry about them from the beginning then you are really engaging yourself in self-censorship. And self-censorship is the worst kind of thing to start off with when it comes to any kind of creative functioning.

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