Cinema: From Showing Actual Events to Telling Fictive Stories
How cinema that could have only been a medium of visual-documentation diversified to be a prime source of story-telling.
Camera Obscura (1953) by N R FarbmanLIFE Photo Collection
Cinema, as it evolved from photography, is primarily considered a visual-medium.
Camera-Obscura seen here is the predecessor of all photography-related inventions in history.
Toofan aur bijli by Homi WadiaUltra Media & Entertainment
In effect, cinema was seen as a medium to capture moving-images of various actualities.
At the time of its inception, cinema was being considered as a unique medium of visual documentation of events or of spectacular phenomena.
This is the first moving-image recording of a train. It was recorded by Lumiere Brothers, who're considered as inventors of cinema. When it was screened, the audience, who were seeing cinema first time, ran out from the venue to save themselves from the train.
Alibaba Aur 40 Chor (Mahipal) by Homi WadiaUltra Media & Entertainment
It is in a way surprising that cinema went on to chart another trajectory for itself-that of telling stories.
The term, 'story-telling', suggests that such an act is associated with aural narration, referring to a particular kind of oratory form.
This is the image of a poster of a Hindi film that adapted the popular story Alibaba and Forty Theives from the Thousand and One Nights corpus.
Various folk-tales, songs, myths, legends, epics etc. that have been passed on from thousands of preceding generations have all been oratures that constituted story-telling.
Paigam by Gemini PicturesUltra Media & Entertainment
Sometimes these narrations would take the shape of play-acting, but the spectacle of such plays would always be a mere supplement to the larger verbal delivery that narrators/actors do for the audience.
Hence, it is peculiar, that cinema despite being primarily considered a medium to show could also tell stories successfully.
ZimboUltra Media & Entertainment
In fact, it could say these stories so successfully, that today, it has become the primary medium of story-telling all over the world, across various cultures, regions, to people from urban as well as rural background.
Baghdad ka jadu by Homi WadiaUltra Media & Entertainment
Its success in being able to narrate stories has been so impeccable that traditional performers, community storytellers, storytelling by family elders have considerably declined and got replaced by watching of film narratives.
By Ralph CraneLIFE Photo Collection
The surprise only accentuates with the fact that cinema didn't wait to get audio-means, it was telling stories even when it was silent. Chaplin's comic classics or Dadasaheb Phalke's rendition of mythological Raja Harishchandra were all at a time when cinema didn't yet speak.
A scene from Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra.
Yun Hota Toh Kya HOTA..WHAT IfUltra Media & Entertainment
Furthermore, even with sound, cinema didn't rely on a narrator who would summarize the situation.
Viewers could make sense of the fragments of alternating shots, overlaid dialogues, songs, diegetic sounds, background music, etc. and could derive from these the situations of an unknown fictional story.
Dhoomketu by Homi WadiaUltra Media & Entertainment
To understand how we manage to grasp a narrative from a discrete set of images, we have to take the cue from the faculty that we use in our everyday lives to grasp moods, circumstances and people around us.
MahanandaUltra Media & Entertainment
We sense the situations we are in by apprehending the visual information that we perceive.
After all, we don't need a narrator to tell us when we are in trouble with the boss, when someone who we care for is upset or when someone catches our lie.
Baghdad ka jadu by Homi WadiaUltra Media & Entertainment
Psychoanalysis proposes that the narratives are already there in the sub-consciousness of the viewer. The emotions, motivations and action of the characters are our own, as they are hidden in our psyche.
Hence, the projection of cinematic recording activates our sub-conscious motivations and the viewer gets identified to the characters visible on-screen.
TilottamaUltra Media & Entertainment
The identification is so strongly intertwined with our own sub-conscious processes, that we not only understand the situation on-screen but we also find it very difficult to leave the film incomplete.
This allure of cinema is verified the fact that viewers finds it difficult to leave a film midway even if something else demands their attention in that particular moment.
AliBaba aur 40 chor Sanjeev Kumar by Homi WadiaUltra Media & Entertainment
This hints that rather than getting surprised by the fact that cinema could devise means of story-telling, one should recognize that cinema was primarily meant to be a medium for telling-stories instead of merely being a medium for visual documentation.
Ma dikri by Homi WadiaUltra Media & Entertainment
This is because cinema-images, more than making us think of the event that was recorded, allow us to identify and empathise with the character we see in those images.
So, instead of thinking when and where did this event happen, we as viewer start feeling what happens to this character next. As we see ourselves as that character.
The narrative abilities of cinema are proven by fact that narrative techniques like flashbacks, cutaways, montage, close-ups, parallel action etc. were evolved with cinema and today we borrow them even if we are orally describing an event that we lived to someone else.
Uljhan by Vijayashree PicturesUltra Media & Entertainment
'A picture is worth a thousand words', is indeed demonstrated and proven right by over a hundred years of cinema-stories that have ensnared and engaged viewers all around the globe.
Story and curation: Abhishek Kukreja
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