Sumati Mehrishi
Earlier this year, Manish Mundra, an Indian producer, made posts on Twitter on “Kaamyaab”, a film featuring veteran actor Sanjay Mishra. The film is about an actor who puts everything in him together, at 63, to play the 500th role — so that he rounds off his long career with a memorable and substantial one — unlike the forgettable 499 previous.
I watched this powerful film, keeping aside several worries and uncertainties related to the spread of Covid around us. In parts, Mishra’s work makes one nostalgic for theatre actors in commercial films.
The film is what positivity looks on screen, in cutting through despair, anguish, and in the tireless willingness to do and live.
In September, in a series of positive, independent films, I watched a short film, which shows children using a lesson from the Ramayana to protect a friend’s mother from a sexual predator. Humour and heroism in storytelling meet on a common ground of a serious subject. Positive.
The year 2020 is about to end. Its fortuitous child Covid emerged as a divisive figure, making us realise more than ever that the wall separating the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ is of a sense of relief.
In the context of Covid, ‘negative’ brings people a sense of relief, naturally, just as in the case of anything dreadful that’s not welcome in the body system and is fought back and kept out.
‘Negative’ should be fought back. Negative should become a constant source of contention only when it gives the positive some sprouting space or breeding ground.
In 2020, the year of the pandemic, “positive” and “positivity” should have held their ground in films.
2020: The Year Of Desired ‘Clean Up’
Largely, the year 2020 has come up as the year of desired ‘clean up’ in films and entertainment. This, naturally has kept the focus on negative and negativity. Clean up requires delving in the negative.
And that has required collecting heaping evidence of negativity.
The collecting of evidence of the negative has a strong disadvantage. Toss out anything positive or meaningfully beautiful, and it mostly gets tossed into the endless drain of negative. Brief slab life.
A distant expression of 2020 and what it has demanded from us, can be found in parts in the nameless protagonist in the film ‘A Wednesday’.
He sits on the top terrace of an under-construction skyscraper with a paraphernalia of cellular phones and sim cards. He compels the city police and state machinery to go for a clean up over a series of intriguing phone calls. He does this so the people of the city, who are living in the fear of terror, can begin to live (free of fear). At last, there is a sense of relief. He returns home with his bag of vegetables.
Positive emerges from the intense negative in the film. In entertainment, the negative carries immense attraction.
The Negative, myopic, and judgemental
Among other eyeball gaining trends is that regions are being represented by cuss words. Sexist and regressive cuss words. Old stylesheet.
The web has given films and series in ample shades of the negative this year. Mostly stuff that will keep you blank, or awake, not help you sleep baggage-less.
The discerning lot has noticed it.
Last month, Danji Thotapalli, Chief Curator at Indica Pictures, told this author how celebrating positivity is important to carve out the genre of Indic films.
He says, “Unfortunately the streaming platforms are dominated by mediocre content that is negative, myopic, and judgmental. Most content comes from an ecosystem that is very agenda-driven.”
Agenda — the only resort of the agenda-driven to win the audience. How does (giving) too much attention to negativity impact the positive narrative on positivity? Thotapalli says:
“Negativity generates fear. While capturing hard realities of the world is important, not providing a positive ending to the story, only ends up tormenting the viewer. It drains a person’s emotional well-being. Gritty and dark doesn’t mean negative!”
The Indic Film Utsav, put together by Thotapalli and the team, had close to 20k registrations and 13k viewers. “All this was accomplished in a very short runway of 13 weeks. We are probably one of those handful of film festivals worldwide that were built with an online backbone from concept to completion.”
Positive works its way through challenges. The films and the festival were “beaming into the living rooms of people”. This made them realise that they needed to stay with family-orientated content.
He adds, “The film that won the Best Feature Film at our festival — Gamak Ghar, is a great example of a simple but compelling film that does not judge. Happy to say that we now have a new genre of films called the Indic genre.”
Where to look for positive and positivity?
“We don’t need to search far and wide for films with positivity. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films are a great example of positive films. So are films made by K. Vishwanath (Sankarabharanam). We just need filmmakers with the ability to make simple but compelling films. There is no need to stick to a social message all the time,” he adds.
New and newer work is going unnoticed.
When was the last time you checked social media for what indian film maker, screenwriter and director Bharatbala is creating in his mission to explore India through short films?
The collecting of evidence of negative
Positivity or positive emerging from the negative is complex and simple. It emanates from characters that break the shackles of ink, pen, script, to become characters — Inspector Sadhu Agashe — in flesh and blood, once in 20 years.
This year, people in the audience are doing something different with the negative in entertainment. They are rightly grabbing it by its tail, calling out content for negatives or negativity.
Negative is negative when the negative in it does not inspire a creative rebellion or reaction to leave anything positive on the surface or behind.
It doesn’t celebrate people or regions, if it does, it ridicules the other, others the other. It grins at indigenous values, Indic history, icons, beliefs, culture.
It churns fear to instil fear. At times, it is revolting. The negative in the negative is designed to propel and sell the socially, or civilisational negative. It finds you constantly reacting — in anger, anxiety, mirth, and in ‘this hurts more than the previous’.
Negative: It is not experimental in using negativity as a tool. It is not interested in telling a story. It sabotages a story. Context is not its premise. Agenda is. Telling or retelling is not its purpose. Recollection is not its intention or countenance.
At times, it is posed and propped as disruptive creations. Negative mutates.
Toss Up The Gold
We need to first deal with, defeat and crush the fallacy that quality work that involves the arts doesn’t attract the masses who feel for dharm, the dharmic, nation, Indic values, civilisation and allied concerns.
Good quality work, when involving art, collaboration and a multidisciplinary approach in good and original content needs to be encouraged and discussed and appreciated by the ‘cultural Right’ in a detached manner.
Just as negativity, collecting evidence of negativity, too, has a limited purpose of “discovering”, “exposing”, and venting. This, if it doesn’t lead to, or is used for countering the negative heap with positivity.
Positivity, producing work that is positive, requires pride in people and the civilisation, regions, people stories and culture. It is the only answer to negativity and evidence of negativity.
Positivity is not a low hanging fruit. This makes it more valuable,
more vulnerable, and far less attractive for many.
It demands more effort to think and deliver a composition that stays in people’s collective memory. Demand it. Support it.
Let’s stop visualising bath tubs as oceans. The only cure, need, method for countering negative and negativity, is not erecting an edifice for negativity in the process of collecting its evidence, alone. It is to create and propel positive and positivity.
An edited version of the article is here: https://swarajyamag.com/culture/films-and-web-series-how-to-find-and-demand-positivity-in-a-field-of-propaganda-in-a-year-of-pandemic
— Sumati Mehrishi is a senior editor at Swarajya.
