Mirroring the Perceptions: Escapism in Imtiaz Ali’s Cinema
Journal Title: Journal of Advanced Research in Journalism & Mass Communication - Year 2017, Vol 4, Issue 3
Abstract
Indian commercial cinema over the ages has been infamous for taking the escapist route. For the dream sequences, larger than life characters, happy endings et al. For its justification, it portrays the dreams, aspirations and ambitions of the masses on the screen. But the song and drama and the dance sequences depict life as it should be, atleast in retrospective, and not as it is. On the other hand, reality also finds a depiction in a niche, limited to the fringes of the mainstream cinema, referred to popularly as the art-house or parallel cinema. But the mainstream industry still sells the highly plastered format. Glossed and gleamed over. Enter a new generation of film makers, trying to build bridges between the parallel and mainstream. One of the new breed, Imtiaz Ali, a film maker of the same generation, trys to take the varnish off the films, like many along with him. He picks up characters with flaws, imperfections and vices. His protagonist is not almighty and neither is his heroine the prettiest swan in the lake, thus mirroring the youth in the looking glass of his films. Soon he is credited to be one of the popular hindi film makers who can touch the raw and throbbing nerve of the younger generation. He is touted to be balancing both the arms of cinema, parallel and commercial, by many. This paper proposes to find out if Ali is redefining the escapism infamous with hindi cinema or is he actually escaping from it? Does his narrative style transgress into Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Medium is the Message’ or does he restructure the aspirations according to the present generation? His films have been picked up as case studies and studied under a quantified tabular format to reach a conclusion.
Authors and Affiliations
Sonali Srivastav
Keywords
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