Should our films have a 'social message'?

'Sangam', starring Raj Kapoor and Rajendra Kumar, conveyed the message of loyalty to friends. 

A 2022 edition of the Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFes) has just been confirmed but alongside has been an official statement from the chief minister that the festival should deliver ‘social messages’ — which I take to mean that the films chosen will be those with ‘social relevance.’ The notion of good films needing to have ‘social messages’ has been one that has particularly plagued Indian cinema.

Like all art and literature, the purpose of great cinema is not really ascertainable. In fact, the whole field of literary/art/film theory exists in order to speculate about the function of the art object. If we consider the earliest cave paintings — of animals and hunts — going back tens of thousands of years, was there a chief minister in office in time stipulating that cave paintings should be ‘socially meaningful’?

Cave paintings were, it is supposed, a kind of magical means of gaining control over malevolent nature, and the magical element continues in contemporary cinema as well. We are intrigued by great films because many of them leave us mystified and we are drawn to interpreting them. If we say that art, literature, and cinema are ‘mimetic’ — i.e.: they imitate the world in being complex, ambiguous, and ultimately only the object of speculation — great cinema does not reveal its purpose immediately.

Cinephiles are still wondering about David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’. Cinema cannot be like legislation and official decisions, which must be transparent about their purpose. Expression is possible in cinema because we do not know what the world really is and the artist tries to say something that makes sense to a select audience. There are no restrictions placed upon experience and there cannot be on cinema.

Indian cinema, right from the beginning, has not followed this above characteristic, which is why it relies on its ‘message’ — i.e.: it is already interpreted. DG Phalke said that his mythological films were ‘realistic,’ i.e.: that they were giving physical manifestation to ‘truths’ and not simply replicating the evidence of the senses. Even when Indian cinema moved out of the mythological mode, ‘socials’ went on relaying ‘universal truths’ using stereotypical action and characters, the way fables tell stories, always with a purpose. If a fox in a fable has to be cunning for the message to be delivered or a monkey mischievous, a spectacled person in a popular film must be studious and a young man or woman deeply romantic.

Even art cinema is not different and the Marxist cinema of Mrinal Sen deals with supposed ‘truths’ like the solidarity of the working class. One could say that it was belief in the truths of a pre-existent text — whether the ‘Bhagwad Gita’ or ‘Das Capital’ — which made Indian cinema relay ‘relevant messages’ as universal truths. But if we study Indian cinema, these truths have not been constant and have changed constantly.

If loyalty to friends (‘Sangam’) or being selfless and honest (‘Satyakam’) were held up as virtues in the 1960s and 1970s, Bunty and Babli (who are tricksters in ‘Bunty Aur Babli’) are eulogised after 2000 for fulfilling their personal dreams by fair means or foul. In the public space too, it is the billionaire with a morally suspect business model rather than an Einstein who is admired. The fact that the ‘truths’ of Indian cinema contradict each other over time means that they are not ‘truths’ at all. Social messages, in effect, are reduced to irrelevance eventually — the way governmental policies keep overriding each other. If we recognise cinema as artistic ‘expression’ we will not claim for it the sanctity of ‘truth’.

International film festivals are intended to expose Indians to the best in world cinema and with the exposure that Indian cinephiles have thus received to world cinema, they should have moved out of the ‘social message’ format. My own sense of why the ‘message’ is so important is that it is part of our belief that everything about the world is already expressed in sacred texts and we cannot add more to it.

Where scientific and socio-political texts do not remain relevant forever, sacred texts are considered ‘permanent’ in value because they are the sources of ultimate wisdom. But does not the esoteric nature of the religious text itself throw doubt upon its ‘permanent value’? If there are so many commentaries on it, it is not as ‘unknowable’ as the world itself? One wonders here if this sense of the permanent value of the revealed truth of the religious text has not also made its way to the administration of film festivals.

(The author is a well-known film critic).