A film of its time

Like that exhibition, the film Parzania also challenges the parameters of art.

We treat classical art as the product of a simpler civilisation, when things were settled and people believed in a common philosophy of life. But the historians dismay you by pointing out several contradictory movements in directions opposite to the general trends. The truth is that the human mind sometimes oversimplifies and conveniently assumes that any one age presents a homogeneous pattern.

More than others, ours is the age of transition. It displays a bewilderingly stratified picture. The sudden influx of information technologies and the explosion of electronic media in a developing society that still holds on to medieval beliefs and is overlaid by 18th century rationalism, causes upheavals. Volcanic eruptions of pre-historic fanaticism are one of the ugliest features of the age we live in.

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.

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