Cinema as a Career

This is part of a four article series that will deal with the excitement and problems of cinema as a career. The recent craze for filmmaking amongst the youth is indeed an exciting and positive phenomenon for the film as an art form. New found business and career opportunities also have facilitated parental approval which was almost negligible 30 years ago. It seems as if gone are those days when a young person trying to make a career in films had to run away from home and struggle in the streets of Mumbai for years. Our very own Bollywood's past is laden with many examples of Ashok Kuamr, Dev Anand, Javed Akhtar, Sunil Dutt, Madhubala and many more. But is it actually so? Has creativity at last found its due respect in the monetary terms? Is creative talent today has created a structured career growth pattern as we see prevalent in other career such as IT, ITess, Marketing, sales, finance and management. To understand this we may look at the historical advent of Arts in general and its sustainability.

Creative expression is a unique talent of human beings as compared to any other in the animal world. The primitive paintings in the caves such as Bhimbhetka in Madhya Pradesh, Khiching in Orissa and Alta Mira Caves are the early examples such creative expressions. Arts remained within the realm of community participation and sustained by utilizing available materials and means of daily life. It can be seen in what we call today as tribal arts. Mud paintings of Warli's, murals on the village walls in deserts of Rajasthan, bronze artifacts of Bastar, wooden combs of Santhals in Bengal are testimonies of such artistic expression which have functional values in day to day living and at times have values of worship of Gods and past lives. Then for over millennia arts and artists sustained by patronage of the emperors, kings and royalty. Music, literature, drama, painting, buildings are the testimony of that era which we can call classical arts. Then comes the mercantile or the trading economy of Europe that affected almost the whole world. Art found its utility to promote business and trade. Art started combining traditions and styles from around the world and travelled to far places for entertainment of people and document times of struggles and celebration. Interestingly artistic expression found another area of avenue called Advertising. Arts started promoting trade, sales and consumption. The technological innovation in the 1800's gave rise to new forms of arts such as photography and cinema. The uniqueness of such medium was that it can be replicated in making many prints of one creative form. This arts' reach became massive. Multiple copies of a picture or film could be made a showcased in many venues many times cutting across geographical barriers, thus the reach of these forms arts became global. But these arts needed very high investment as they need expensive technical equipments to produce. Additionally the entertaining and aesthetic value of these media created mass markets of audience who were ready to pay to see. Simultaneously advertising also started using these medium because of their immense impact of persuasion. Thus arts also became a commercial proposition attracting business men to invest in these expensive medium. This facilitated people to fully dedicate their lives to work on these mediums and make a living. Thus cinema and photography came to become a viable career opportunity.

The career concern of the great Indian middle class has seen an interesting curve in the last 60 years in the post independence era. Since 1950's till 1980's engineering and medicine seemed the most sought after and respected career option. Then came 1991 and the government decided liberalise the economy. This attracted many multinationals to set up their bases here. This created new job opportunities to manage the huge growing Indian market and so to say professionalise business production units. Professionally trained management professionals became the call of the day. The new products in the market needed to be popularized. Around this time, the Indian sky also opened up and many private TV channels came up. Thus in the recent times, there seems to be an excitement about the growing career prospects in media and media arts. India sees humongous amount of TV commercials, News and Television programmes such as serials and reality game shows. If one knows the basic grammar and production of audio-visual language then one can venture into any of these areas of business. Latest technological innovations in cinema reduced the cost of production drastically enabling more people to try their hand in film medium. Thus is we see the term "Mass Communication" becoming highly fashionable career options. Proof of this can be seen in more than 1,000 Mass Communication Institutes in India.

By learning how to make films one can get in to TV channels, advertising production houses, NGO's for whom Audio-visual medium is an important tool to spread their desired message. These enterprises pay a lot because the volumes of produced material needed is ever growing and key to high profit. And the profit lies in streamlining an assembly line production and reducing cost to the minimum possible. Most effort is given to churn out average audiovisual software resembling culture of a factory. The jobs in these industries are repetitive and more managerial to oversee cost reduction within prescribed weekly or daily intervals. And for that, high salaries are doled out to give enough incentive for a creative person to stay on, a phenomena that can be seen in ITess industry. But Cinema is still seen as an artistic medium even today. Audience expects cinema to give an experience that is different that News, TV commercial and other kinds of TV serials and game shows. Audience expects it to be more reflective (i.e. interpretative) entertaining and more emotional in content. Things have to be told as a story no matter whichever style but that can engage them and evoke awe.

But if we look carefully to the cinema industry even today, it has stayed fairly a freelancer's territory. This means one has to work at an individual capacity earning money solely on individual creative talent. As per payments, sky today is the limit as long as one is good in his or her individual contribution to the film. It can be done either by joining film industries of Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, etc. or become and independent filmmaker who make films on low budget (either feature or documentary) anywhere else. Of course there is no dearth of money in this industry today but the struggle still remains as it was say 30 years ago. So we can say the classical nostalgic idea of struggler in the streets of Mumbai has spread out to streets of other cities and villages of India.

So one can safely assume that though the prize of being recognized for creativity may have increased in form of money one can demand but the struggle has stayed the way it was earlier. In a way the struggle has become relatively acute in the face of high cost of living of the cities. Moreover one has to overcome the lure of the commercial enterprises such as TV, AD production houses who provide high salary.

So before thinking about Film or Cinema as a career one must pause and explore within. What is the calling from within? Are you ready to take the risk to follow a career of freelancer where money doesn't get transferred to your bank account on the mid night on the 1st day of the each month? Is creative independence is of prime importance for you? Can you work in a culture where work timings are as erratic as train schedules of Indian railway? Can you work in a group where everyone else is as independent thinking as you are and is equally crazy about cinema? In this article I have tried to elucidate on what is the attitude required to make a film career within the maze of ever burgeoning audiovisual software business in contemporary India. In my next article I will discuss various career options in film making or film production such as Film Direction, Cinematography, Film Editing, Sound Recording and Audio Technology, acting, Art Directions, Production Designing, etc.

Source: Shiksha Team

Date: 9th June, 2010

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