Cinema of the soul

[1]

Muzaffar Ali [1]

Cinema has become a part of our lives and we watch everything that is heavily publicised — good, bad and the ugly. In the larger interest of humanity cinema has to be taken to its highest end. There must be a burning desire and a commitment to share a particular passion with the world. Good is a loosely used word, its potential limited to just an acceptable level of goodness.

Very few films have been worth living with, mainly because the maker didn’t live with the idea long enough or the idea is not part of the soul’s journey!
We need to feel deep within how and why simple things happen. How to take the audience along with you. For instance, Guy Ritchie has a complex structure for a simple plot to compensate for high-end production values. He has fierce, loud, exaggerated characters in high-voltage moments. Cinema becomes an extension of their madness. Colours and textures are monochromatic and bizarre. The cause and effect come together in the second half of the film, nearer the resolution, almost seeming as if the end is written before the beginning. But it helps to place the first half effectively so that you live more with that than the climax! You leave with a sense of victory of your intelligence, that you discovered it all.
So start with that prophetic style of writing in which a complex and bewildering set-up is intelligently unravelled by a pro-active audience. There is a simple narrative and an intelligent device for telling the same story. In cinema, the possibilities are unlimited. The screenplay is a game that you play with the intelligence of the audience. You don’t say it all, you keep planting clues all along which get resolved in the end. The structure is the innovation and arriving at the end is the miracle. There is an electrifying and startling relationship between the story and how you tell the story. While you keep it lean, you surprise the audience with the device. Your opening is the way you will unfold your journey. The modern mind is distracted and shallow. It has always been served with a loud, larger-than-life, exaggerated sense of reality, which is unreal not only in history but equally far from an authentic and aesthetic interpretation of the period or the mood of the theme. The imagination runs amuck on every level, thus never finding a cinematic interpretation to pages from the past.
Writing cinema is art within art with the powerful evolution and interplay of the idea, the story, the unfolding and the writing of sound and movement. The thirsty world needs an inspiring idea. It needs a simple thought visualised and dramatised beyond the realm of imagination. It needs a continuous conflict; a clash of reality and dreams; of ideas bashing at the gates of imagination; the struggle of the good and the bad. Thus, film writing becoming larger than life. A dream within a dream. Entering into the subconscious. If you die in your dreams you age beyond time.
Today people are living in a virtual reality, therefore, cinema can take that quantum leap in the imagination, which is refreshing and exciting and becomes an edge-of-the-seat experience. Esoteric ideas can be woven into it or it can be based on an esoteric idea. Idea as a devise is a new way of structuring a film to excite the participation of the human mind. From magic to virtual imagination challenging the laws of nature, the human mind has taken an enormous leap into a realm that confronts science with psychology and psychology with science using simple emotional devices as a peg to hold human relationships and values. The whole ethos of drama has changed, going beyond fear to enter the extended experience of excitement and realisation beyond time. On the other extreme the whole way of looking at the world is threatening and prepares one for the worst holocaust.
Cinematic writing evolves a new vocabulary in the language of moving images, gives new meaning to the dictionary of cinema, new glossary to dialogue, a new dimension to action and imparts psychology to body language and sensibility to movement.
Nothing happens without a reason. Reason is the biggest cause. It is even beyond the power of humans. When we cannot be humans how can we even ever imagine to be superhuman? Yet, there is a faint reflection of the Almighty in all of us to make us all understand what being human can be all about.
This is the outer end of all positive art, which makes art a prayer.

— Muzaffar Ali is a filmmaker and painter.
He is the executive director and secretary of the Rumi Foundation.He can be contacted at www.rumifoundation.in [2]