How relevant is the film society movement in India?

It was the Calcutta Film Society (CFS), established by Satyajit Ray and friends on October 5, 1947, which actually precipitated a movement of urban English educated youngsters of India, looking for an “Indian idiom” in films. The movement received a huge boost after the unprecedented recognition for Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’

Arguably, it is not very often you would find a book on the world of films that has an introduction by Adoor Gopalakrishnan and a note by Shyam Benegal. That both are extraordinary filmmakers is an understatement.

It goes to the credit of journalist-author V.K. Cherian to get the thoughts of Gopalakrishnan and Benegal for his recently published ‘Celluloid to Digital: India’s Film Society Movement’.

So what is a film society? Well, like any other society, this is also a membership-based club. People can watch screenings of films which would otherwise not be shown in mainstream cinemas. In Spain, Ireland and Italy, they are known as ‘cineclubs’ and in Germany as ‘film clubs’. The endeavour is to introduce new audiences to different audiovisual works through an organized and prepared program of screenings.

Cherian has rendered a yeoman service by documenting perhaps the first comprehensive account of the seven-decade journey of the Film Society Movement (FSM) in India and how it helped Indian cinema come into its own as an envious global entity. Till the 1950s, 80% of the films screened in India were from abroad and the country was not on the map of the global film world. Today, the country has a place in all International film festivals, competing against Hollywood.

The massive transformation is credited to policies, film institutions and the Film Society movement.

One needs to ponder whether such policies and movements have a future in the digital era?

Celluloid to Digital: India’s Film Society Movement delves into this question in the OTT age. When and how did the film society movement begin in India? What was it all about? Cherian answers all these in great detail. Honestly, not many books have been written on this subject.

The world of cinema and theatre is very close to the heart of Cherian, even though he is a career journalist who had a tryst with theatre in his college days back in Kerala.

He states that the first official film society in India was the Bombay Film Society, which was established in 1940. This was meant to expose budding Indian documentary film makers to the best of world standards, especially the works of Grierson, Wright, Jennings and others so that they could be engaged to make effective films for the Raj.

However, it was the Calcutta Film Society (CFS), established by Satyajit Ray and friends on October 5, 1947, which actually precipitated a movement of urban English educated youngsters of India, looking for an “Indian idiom” in films. The movement received a huge boost after the unprecedented national and International recognition which “Pather Panchali” directed by the film society pioneer Ray bagged.

If Ray was the pioneer of the film society movement in India, then one must not forget that Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak also played a key role in giving impetus to the movement. The movement’s nerve-centre Calcutta produced outstanding filmmakers like Buddhadev Das Gupta, Goutam Ghose, Sandip Ray, Aparna Sen and Dibyendu Chakraborty.

K/A/ Abbas was also a film society veteran and his Film Forum in Bombay saw the emergence of Benegal, Govind Nihalani, A.K. Kaul, Basu Bhattacharya, Basu Chatterjee, Khalid Mohammed and Shoojit Sircar. In Bangalore the lineup is equally impressive with Pattabhirama Reddy, Girish Karnad, B.V. Karantha, Prema Karanth, Kavitha Lankesh and Girish Kasaravalli, while in Maharashtra, Jabbar Patel, Vijaya Mehta and Vijay Tendulkar were exemplary. In Kerala, the movement was led by Gopalakrishnan. G. Aravindan, T.V. Chandran, P.A. Becker, K.G. George and John Abraham, all of whom were inspired by the FSM.

Cherian writes, “Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spotted the potential of the Film Society Movement as early as in 1950s, by organizing the first international film festival of Asia in India in 1952.”

Till the 1970s, film societies were the only window to world cinema for thousands across India. But with modern technology — VHS tapes, CDs, Blue Rays and now the ubiquitous pen drives and internet — many classics are now available to the public for free.

As Gopalakrishnan writes in the book’s foreward, “Film society lost the unique position of being the one and only window to world cinema.”

However, as the world has changed with the passage of time, film societies are no longer the exclusive window on the best of films, but they are still the connoisseurs’ delight, especially the budding ones.

On the Delhi Film Society (DFS), Cherian writes, “DFS was the most privileged of the film societies across India. The membership and the leadership were the who’s who of the national capital in the 1960s and 1970s. Diplomatic missions vied with each other to patronise the DFS by offering their films and bringing in film makers from their respective countries to meet Delhi’s film buffs.”

It may be recall that the Film Club of India International Centre is one of the oldest functioning film societies in Delhi. Open to all members of the IIC, the focus of the Film Club is to screen films of merit and excellence that are not normally available in the commercial circuit, experimental works and art house cinema. Four to six films are screened every month and festivals and retrospectives organised focusing on the work of well-known directors, actors, genre or country.

In this highly readable book, Cherian deals with a series of pertinent questions like: Do film societies have a future in the Digital Era and the debate on box-office vs. meaningful films.

If you love cinema from your heart, then ‘Celluloid to Digital: India’s Film Society Movement’, published by Atlantic, is the one for you and your ilk.

(The author is Delhi-based senior journalist and writer. He is author of Gandhi's Delhi which has brought to the forth many hidden facts about Mahatma Gandhi)