The Lead: Film criticism and Indian cinema

In this episode of The Lead from DH Radio, national award-winning film critic Baradwaj Rangan talks about many aspects of film criticism and changes in Indian cinema today.

Here are some excerpts:

Vivek M V: Hello sir, welcome to the show

Baradwaj Rangan: Thank you Vivek, thank you so much.

Vivek: I want to start off with a quote. Steven Speilberg once said that "whenever I go to a movie, it's magic! No matter what the movie is about". So for someone who is experienced in the field of writing on movies, what does cinema mean to you?

Rangan: It basically means transport; it means something that takes you from where you are into another world. That would be the physical definition of the world you know, something strange that you don't know. For me. it's going and spending two- two-and-a-half hours with some other people, in some other place, in some other homes. That's what it means to me.

Vivek: Alright. Nice. Given the situation that we are in now. A lot of media outlets have been explored and even discovered a lot of OTT platforms, so content is coming through them. Another thing is that the way we look at content is also changed, maybe because we want to compensate for the films that are not releasing in theatres. Also, we have the luxury of sitting at home and thinking about a lot of ideas. Do you think, too much is too bad or is it the best phase of film journalism?

Rangan: See, as far as one of the things this has given me is job security. In a strange way, there is so much to write about. But as far as viewing goes, I think we are heading towards or maybe we are already in that phase, where we are terribly fragmented. That happened in the music market sometime back and now it's happening in the film market. We are all gonna be watching very good films. It's not going to be one monolithic film that releases in the theatres that we all rush to watch and enjoy. We all are going to be watching different things that appeal to us. It could be a movie, it could be 3 hours of Tik-Tok or whatever app that catches people's fancy at that point in time because I already know a lot of people who have been saying things like that they can watch 5-10 minutes of YouTube videos, beyond that they don't have the attention span. People's brains are being rewired as we speak. I do think that it's the golden age in terms of... yes, there are a lot of different kinds of content available. You don't need to have that one size fits all type of movie anymore, you can completely make a movie that you want without worrying about whether somebody sitting in some small town is going to identify with this that you have created or not...

Listen to the podcast to know more about the conversation.

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