After many arguments about the depiction of tobacco products on screen, the recent directives which demand that smoking scenes in old movies be blurred, has drawn criticism from the industry. Filmmakers argue that it will take away the core character from classics. The industry feels it’s “unfair” to tamper with age-old flicks.
Director Abhishek Kapoor calls such tampering “ridiculous”. “Movies have, and will always project whatever is happening in the society. How can you just turn a blind eye to it and blur scenes from an old movie? Those shots define a character or a reality from those days. You can’t merely cut it out and think people will stop smoking. Ban the sale of cigarettes instead or shut down those companies. Take a stringent step instead of creating a mess in the movies,” he says.
Documentary filmmaker Ajay Kanchan, who is known for his work Poison On The Platter, asserts that there’s no correlation between the subject smoking on screen and health problems. “They shouldn’t play around with classics like that. What the government should understand is that a director doesn’t show an actor smoking on screen just for it to look ‘cool’. There’s a meaning to the shot. If you fiddle with the shot, you take away the creativity. Most youngsters start smoking even before they watch any of these movies. Why don’t they come up with a stringent ban on smoking altogether rather than snatching a director’s creative freedom?” he adds.
Actor and screen writer Raj Singh Chaudhary, who was much appreciated for his role in Gulaal, feels that such a move would hurt sentiments of many. “If you blur out scenes of Zeenat Aman smoking in Hare Rama Hare Krishna, what are you going to show in the movie? It’s a classic and those shots are portraying a character in the film. Those typical poses of Dev sahab smoking in some of the films are timeless. Those shots came with a meaning. How can you just blur them in the name of health concerns?” says Raj.