“If the nation does not create an image, the future of the nation will be at stake.”
A volatile artistic medium like films can undoubtedly be used to document the menage of events, open it up for discourses and shape history. What comes out of it may be regarded as pure artistic creation by some of them or as a medium to form their own perceptions. Whatever the results are, a few of the questions posit will determine those results and the subsequent response of the audience in accepting or rejecting it.
What are the incidents recurring in the film? Who are the characters? What type of audience is the target? Do the dialogues offer a peaceful message, are they propagandistic? These questions can decide the reception of the film, its statistics and even the psychosocial aspects of the large number of masses who have given bouquets or brickbats. The brilliance of the shots, the tone, grains, screenplay, screening effects are the embellishments that can decide the proper delivery of the incidents, messages or propaganda.
What makes us look at these aspects more painstakingly and vigilantly is because of a film that had caught the chord of the box office with 27 crores in a few days. Vivek Agnihotri’s Kashmir Files which is the centre of debates across the country is not just a focal point, but something that travels to the past, to the absence of people, to the lives lived, living and forgotten. In fact, the film has not only pushed the discourses in question but has also persuaded us to look back at many of the voids left in history.
ART AND DISTORTION
Many of the factual errors which have been hereby cross-checked to be faulty from the official records, the distortion of events of a gruesome incident vividly shows how the pain of some people can be sold, used to create hatred and cause a rift between those living next door.
Even if the director took full liberty to shoot something biased, distorted or formed a retelling that he churned down for the sake of an authoritative regime, the wide rampage it has caused by now reveals the unattended claims, unanswered pain of the incident of the 1990s in Kashmir, where Kashmiris including both the Pandits and Muslims suffered, saved and went helpless.
Dealing with a highly sensitive history of a nation that is most likely to open up the unhealed wounds once again, the art of filmmaking has blatantly failed to address the riots in the right manner. The film, a medium of propagating any message should ideally be valuable for standing with peace and side with the oppressed. Here, when the 1990s painful images in Kashmir are considered as an exodus and Kashmiri pandits as the only victims, all the backstories are channeled, created and distorted to bring out such an image. This takes place as part of clear propaganda to erase the voids left in history and to replace them with the ideologies of the ‘Big Boss Phenomenon’ and Nationalism which by then is not art or facts at all.
The difference in the official records and Vivek’s calling the genocide as India’s Holocaust done by Kashmiri Muslims do not only incite hatred among each other but also equate the latter to Nazi’s atrocities which in no way can be associated with what had happened. This can no longer serve the demands of any artistic innovations when the propaganda outweighs art.
FILM POLICIES AND DIALOGUE FORUMS
The open forums at the recent International Film Festival of Kerala, where eminent filmmakers all over the country including Anurag Kashyap have gathered are remarkable to be noted as a space where, ‘Kashmir Files’, was considered as a part of Hindutva ideology and called for the fight to produce good independent films. While commenting that democracy is not the autocracy of the majority, prominent film director Adoor Gopalakrishnan also said that the policies never catered to producing good films but only to dismantle them.
The censorship and the double standardness of the central government in suppressing independent movies, and promoting propagandist movies should also be challenged by the film societies and film enthusiasts to ensure that the future of a nation should not fall into hatred and genocides by the impetus of a distorted and unfaithful narration of history.
