Bengali cinema has emerged strongly after hitting a low in the 1990s and the early 2000s. It's now bold, audacious and willing to take risk. So, is this a new golden era for TollywoodIJ

In recent times Bengali cinema has emerged strongly after hitting a low for more than two decades in the 1980s, 1990s and the early 2000s. Issues related to this recent emergence arouse serious interest, hype and critical engagements in various sectors. On the one hand, press columns and other media discourses are showing serious interest in the richness of theme and variety of subjects that Bengali films are dealing with. On the other hand, a new Bengali film cult has formed firstly with ‘path-breaking’ Gandu and then some of Q’s later films. These films and film-related activities evoked a large fan-following at some college and university campuses of Kolkata and also generated regular discussions and debates at Facebook fan pages and other virtual community forums. Scholarly works questions the applause which Bengali cinema has gained in Bengali media and engages with questions like the media-cinema nexus that forms such celebratory narrative of contemporary Bengali cinema. In this context I am interested to focus on something else, which is at the heart of this phase of transformation, but not discussed: How Bengali cinema in recent years also brings an idea of a film audience and taste discourse which are relatively new, and how these changes have caused an interruption in the imagination of the binary of the popular and the parallel. 

The Bengali film industry in the 1980s experienced a new group of filmmakers and producers and their imagination of a ‘new’ target audience with films like Shatru (Anjan Chowdhury, 1984) or Gurudakshina (Anjan Chowdhury, 1987). The narrative frameworks designed by directors like Anjan Chowdhury in the early 1980s were followed by filmmakers like Swapan Saha and Haranath Chakraborty in the late 1980s and 1990s. While being extremely popular, these films earned widespread criticism from a section of urban Bengali intelligentsia for their ‘vulgarity’ and the ‘crudity’ of their narrative model. And in the mid-1990s in a direct oppositional stance towards the mainstream, some films like Unishe April (Rituparno Ghosh, 1996), Asukh (Rituparno Ghosh, 1999), Paromitar Ekdin (Aparna Sen, 2000), Ek Je Achhe Kanya (Subrata Sen, 2001), Shanjhbatir Roopkathara (Anjan Das, 2002 ), etc, emerged and constructed the paradigm of the post-liberalisation Bengali ‘parallel’ cinema, not only in terms of their use of particular aesthetic devices or their cinematic appeal but also their imagination of an audience, their marketing structure, their production patterns and the logic of their publicity. Popular press columns appreciated these films for regenerating a ‘lost’ pleasure and reclaiming the lost educated middle class audience of Bengali cinema. This binary of popular/parallel sustained for more than a decade and this very notion of quality/good taste in the post-1990s Bengali ‘parallel’ cinema successfully worked through cultural frameworks and networks of urban intelligentsia within which its ‘difference’ from mainstream is maintained. But in the last six-seven years with a wide variety of Bengali film texts and their logic of form and apparatus, that very idea of homogeneity and coherence is disturbed. And film texts within the ‘parallel’ category started opposing some of the features of this category and offering a critique of the middle class values and notion of good taste.

Herbert, both the film (2006) by Suman Mukhopadhyay and the original Nabarun Bhattacharya novel on which it is based, in its very approach subverts the urban middle class belief system regarding the questions of cultural superiority, taste,  education, middle class sensibility and other charismatic self-perceptions of this class. Herbert’s engagement with ‘calling up ghosts’, mumbo jumbo, the ‘fraud business’ of the ‘conversation with the dead’ have a different register of past from the nostalgia narrative of the 1990s Bengali ‘parallel’ cinema. This film touches upon the memory, past, child hood of Herbert and relies on the flashback mode a lot, but in its use it never romanticises the idea of the past where the protagonist can take refuge. Instead of that pleasure of refuge in the past, the idea of past here bursts out in explosion when Herbert's dead body explodes as a dead human bomb. As the novel says (and the film uses that as a dialogue from the police inspector), “The Government, the state or police will never exactly know from where and whom the explosion is coming.”

Another film, Ekti Tarar Khnoje (In Search of a Star, Avik Mukhopadhyay, 2010), in a different way problematises the nostalgia narrative of contemporary Bengali ‘parallel’ cinema when it traces back the history of an urban, educated middle class family in heinous crime circles and thugs. The film narrates the story of Abhishek who has come to Kolkata  for a career in film. He has got accommodation at a middle class home where a girl, Rani, stays with her aunt and uncle. Abhishek has bagged the second lead in a Bengali film, and at the same time unwillingly has become involved with the underworld. At last we come to know that the landlord uncle is the underworld don under whom he unknowingly works. And Rani traces back their family history in thugee crime circles.

If Herbert and Ekti Tarar Khnoje try to reach a possible critique of the construct of the post-1990s Bengali ‘parallel’ cinema, Suman Mukhopadhyay’s latest flick, Kangal Malshat (War Cry of Beggars, 2013), descends into a text of anarchy that completely subverts that construct. In this film Choktars (dark magic practitioners) and Fyatarus (flying humans) join together and engage themselves against everything considered to be decent, polite, sober and gentle in the middle class perception. And finally redesigning and reframing a Tagore text Q’s Tasher Desh (The land of Cards, 2013)  literally and cinematically declared a war against the class value system.

Along with film texts, the growing importance of media and formation of a neo-public sphere centring on the media discourse have an important role in this transformation. Especially after the launching of Sangeet Bangla and film-based infotainment programmes on TV with shows like Film Star on Star Ananda and others, television has become a crucial medium to circulate what we call ‘filmi khabar’ these days. Newer publicity mediums like film websites, Orkut communities or Facebook pages are not exclusive to ‘market’ the parallel-ness of a parallel film any more. The question of the new media public is important here. For instance, when I asked Bengali popular filmmaker Haranath Chakraborty what he thought about the media’s changed approach towards Bengali popular cinema, that they did not even recognise him as a film director 15 years ago, and now the media was so concerned about his films, he pointed to the “truthful” quality of electronic media of the contemporary that was missing earlier for the attitude of the press was faulty with a partial vision.

He said that now the press cannot fool an audience if they have the awareness. However, here the question I think is not so much about ‘truth’ or of the audience being fooled, but what we believe to be appropriate for the audience and how we think of the nature of the audience that brought this serious change media perception.

In the case of Bengali cinema, a major change came in last five-six years when the middle class taste, discourse and literariness of Bengali cinema started functioning differently with new directors. A film like Madly Bangali (2009) by Anjan Dutta that narrates the nostalgia story of a Bengali band and its dissolution,  adopts a style that does not quite follow the logic of the established notion of post-1990s Bengali ‘parallel’ cinema, and refers to a present moment in youth culture in multiple registers. For instances, it appropriates the euphoria of Bengali band culture in its promos, publicity posters and used a quasi-English Bengali language. Another film like Autograph (2010) starts narrating the story of a director who wants to remake Satyajit Ray’s Nayak and ends up as a story of a film star Arun Chatterjee (Prasenjit Chatterjee, almost playing himself in it).  Autograph, in a way, starts with thematic and visual references to nostalgia icons of Bengali cinema  like Satyajit Ray and Uttam Kumar, and appropriates the star actor Prasenjit who was criticised and denounced earlier as a star for ‘lower class’ Bengali film in a discourse of urban sensation and youth culture.

With an increase in the average budget for a Bengali film and rise in the number of Bengali flicks released per year in recent years, the media focuses on the growing market possibilities of Bengali cinema that include regular slots given to Bengali films at multiplexes outside Bengal, or the formation of Databazar Media Venture  which facilitates the global circulation of Bengali films. The interventions of new technology, corporate house investments and digital film making practices have a role in the changing scenario of Bengali cinema, accompanied by a change in film discourses in the contemporary moment. Other significant changes that have come into the market since 2007-08 is that the rural belt has lost its importance remarkably as the major basis of the Bengali film market. The same rural belt and its mass audience imagined as habituated to folk entertainment that caused the ‘rupture’ in imagining the target audience during the industrial crisis in the late 1970s and 1980s has become less important in film promotions, publicity and advertisements in the contemporary moment. That’s why a popular filmmaker of the 1990s Swapan Saha asserts that his ‘kind of films’ cannot cope with the present market and the big budget approach of the contemporary. In an interaction with this writer, he admits that his era is almost over and that he has not had much work in the last five-six years.

The other end of the story is that production houses like Venkatesh Films, popularly known for their Bengali commercial films in the 1990s, have increasingly engaged with the niche film market and the alternative film makers. Post-Chokher Bali (Rituparno Ghosh, 2003) they have taken interest in the ‘parallel’ stream and produced films like Shrijit Mukherjee’s Autograph (2010), Sanjay Nag’s Memories in March (2011) or the very recent Aparna Sen films Iti Mrinalini (Yours Mrinalini, 2011) or Gaynar Bakso  (Jewelry Box, 2012) designed for the urban audiencee of Bngali films. A filmmaker like Haranath Chakraborty has made a film Chalo Paltai (let’s transform, 2011) with a narrative style and a publicity logic that goes against his image of the successful commercial Bengali filmmaker of the earlier period. That does not mean that the mainstream song and dance formula film has taken a backseat at the box office; nor that ‘parallel’ middle class relationship stories are no more treated as something of high quality in the public sphere. The thing is that the idea of the parallel and the binary that it formed with the mainstream does not work in a similar fashion anymore. How these changes are restructuring the overall scenario of Bengali cinema in the present situation is an issue that deserves serious critical engagement.

 Bengali filmmaker Q (Quashiq Mukherjee) said in an interview that he made his film as a form of protest against a certain form of art that’s recognised in Kolkata. Q said, “This city (Kolkata) has always produced cutting edge commentary on society and the world. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have stopped in our tracks. We have stagnated, bound by our past, and a distinctly class value system.” Surely it would be a difficult task to demonstrate a simple correlation between the emergence of new media and a new media public in the last six-seven years in the Bengali cultural sphere and this emerging need for a cinema that criticises or simply ignores the reality of the existence of a ‘parallel’ stream. Perhaps it can yet be said that their complex intermingling has resulted in a new film culture that revisits and rewrites both the 1990s run-of-the-mill commercial releases and the nostalgia map of the middle class dramas of relationship.

The writer is a PhD scholar in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi