The film is an influential medium that has a wider reach. It can transform into the real, and this medium has its own procedure and own way of making it worthwhile.
Cinema is the business and art of making films. It is also referred to as the theater where films are shown for public entertainment. Holding the attention and interest of an audience is the major function of cinema. What comes under the preview of entertainment can never be clearly stated or defined. The human endeavors and the journey of finding over the centuries have been expressions in art and literature. The symbols, languages, art forms, traditions, customs, historical contexts, ethnic contexts, trade, economic, geopolitics and social factors all have been falling under the function of cinema. Cinema is a powerful platform for depicting the reality of life. It presents the articulations of reality and comprises the elements happening in society.
Cinema is a motion picture, millions of people watch cinema in daily life all over the world, not only for entertainment but also to escape from the monotony, boredom, anxiety and troubles of life. Similarly, it is a source of consolation for people around the world and is a popular medium for cultural transmission. Films resemble painting, literature, music and dance. It is a medium used to generate artistic results. There can be portrayed any real-life character or historical occurrence in the best way. So there is some kind of cognitive connection between the world of film and the world of spectator. The film is a medium of historical and conflicted expression, to construct new occurrences or to reshuffle the primary data or raw material, to re-manipulate or re-idealize them using various stages of filmmaking. The film is an influential medium that has a wider reach. It can transform into the real, and this medium has its own procedure and own way of making it worthwhile.
In the arts, realism, also known as naturalism, is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality, while avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. Realism has been popular in the arts for many centuries, and it is largely a matter of technique and training, as well as the avoidance of stylization. From around 1840 to the late nineteenth century, the Realist movement in French art developed, with the goal of conveying a genuine and objective image of contemporary life. Realism was founded on direct observation of the modern world, rejecting academic art’s idealized classicism and Romanticism’s exotic themes. The notion that ‘realism’ may serve as a common denominator for a wide range of productions termed ‘world cinema’ is widely held and appears to be uncontroversial. The cinema appears to be on the verge of abandoning its role as a “medium” for the representation of reality in order to become a “life form” and hence a reality in itself. Nothing is represented in films. Instead, they construct things; they build realities, possibilities, situations, and occurrences that have never existed before; they create objects and topics with filmic reality. The mediated ‘real’ is never truly real; it is only a representation of it. Despite its importance in film theory, realism is not a coherent notion that relates to many features of cinema in various critical and theoretical settings. Simply said, while there is no realism, there are dashes of realism.
The Indian film industry is considered the biggest film industry as it produces 1800 movies every year in different regional languages. It has a wider reach of audience, not only in India but also in the rest of the world, as of 2013 India ranked first in terms of annual output. Indian cinema produces multiple genres of films every year. Kashmir which has remained the setting for many films in so many decades in the past continues to get portrayed in social-historic frames for reasons well known to the world. Indian cinema has been as in seen in many films such as Roja, Mission Kashmir, LOC, Fanna, Tahaan, Haider, Notebook, Shikara, Uri and Kashmir Files.
The attractive scenic valleys and beautiful pasture-laden mountains of Kashmir have always been an attraction for Indian filmmakers. Owing to its natural beauty and magnificence, Kashmir has earned the title “The Paradise on Earth” and “The Switzerland of the East”. A large segment of the pre-89 Hindi cinema movies shot in Kashmir about the valley, rarely aciculate to any constituent of Kashmiri character, be it culture, music, dress, cooking, dialect, etc. However, the post-1989 films completely changed the narrative of Kashmir in Hindi cinema. Potential sightseers, media houses and the common man started looking towards Kashmir with the changed perception as was shown in the post-89 films. Indian cinema has been ignoring the derivations of Kashmir beauty by emphasizing more conflict of Kashmir in its films and projecting the “bravery” of Indian soldiers gratuitously. Pre-insurgency, Kashmir was used as a location of romance and escapism, the perfect setting for the Bollywood hero to romance his love. Films in the 1960s and 1970s including Kashmir Ki Kali (The Bud of Kashmir, 1964), Jab Jab Phool Khile (Whenever The Flowers Bloomed, 1965), and Noorie (1979) focused on the romantic, serene, and escapist nature of Kashmir. From the 1990s, Kashmir moved from a scenic backdrop to the spotlight of the story. The generalized nature of the gentle Kashmiri was redrawn as a potential terrorist and a threat to India’s security, and the beauty of the landscape was tempered by danger. Representation of Kashmiris has thus oscillated from overly passive and generalized to overly aggressive.
After the repeal of Article 370, numerous filmmakers and celebrities, including Sanjay Dutt, Vivek Oberoi, Shahrukh Khan, and many others, visited Kashmir. They admired Kashmir’s beauty, friendliness, and culture, but when Kashmir appears on screen, the storyline is frequently changed and less of what they truly saw in Kashmir is depicted. However, the filmmakers serve as the tourism industry’s brand ambassadors everywhere in the world. Subsequently, Indian filmmakers ought to display the real gesture of Kashmir and Kashmiriyat on the big screen to the extent that it has the potential to develop Kashmir’s tourism business, and there is no more powerful platform than Bollywood to publicize the beauty of Kashmir.
The author is a research scholar of Journalism and Mass Communication, a political consultant and a poll campaigner. He can be reached at jo************@***il.com