Film artists free to voice opinions
Freedom of expression is what has been given and granted to us by our founding fathers and they wanted us to have a voice that could be heard without the policing by a state. A voice that could be creative and a voice that could express itself in an artistic way
but with that freedom comes responsibility. We cannot ask for freedom of expression and be careless about it. Ours is a medium that affects thousands of impressionable minds and we must be very careful about the impression we make.
To make certain that the artiste is not carried away in his vision, the state created a board of censorship that would regulate the madness of the creative mind and sometimes, the greed of the producers behind that creative mind. Needless to say, that with power comes corruption and there was a time when a censor screening was the worst nightmare for a film producer or director, but that was in the past. Film censorship has come of age and I can say with confidence that the film will pass censor with minimum difficulty if made with a certain amount of responsibility.
There is now a new nightmare that a producer has to live with and that is the nightmare of films being disrupted in the theatres by hooligans who want to target the films as a means of politicising an issue. The first time I saw it was when the Amitabh Bachchan starrer Shahenshah was being released. The Bofors gun scandal was at its peak and the political parties had a field day trying to disrupt the film. They did not really manage, but surely grabbed the headlines.
Since then there have been scores of films that have gone down that route. Fire, Fanaa and now My Name is Khan as a recent example. This is not about censorship but political parties using these means as a way to make their point and scare the Star into submission.
Let me put it in the ‘Rule of the Jungle’ way. If you have something to protect, then you are weaker than the person who attacks you and who, more importantly has nothing to protect, and by that it means that the weak will be bullied by the more powerful. Simple law of the jungle but the rules of society were made to protect people from the laws of the jungle. The weaker will be protected from the more powerful and the law and order machinery was made to serve that purpose. In India that has failed. Time and again.
A film person can never really have an opinion on anything except for films. I have been appalled to read political parties giving statements asking sports and film persons to refrain from making any political statements. My country gives me the right to make uninformed statements, then why would I refrain from making informed ones.
The theatre owner will be scared for damages to his theatre and won’t screen my film. The Star of my film would refuse to retract from his social position and I will lose loads of money.This is not blackmail, this is not the rule of the jungle and this is not about politics, but this is the failure of a democratic promise. Violence is anti-social and what is anti-society is anti-the nation.
By Vikram Bhatt
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