An Art

“Art” isn’t just a word. An art can be defined as a deception that conceives human thoughts to give his physical existence a whole new meaning. Yes, it is a deception. By rule of thumb, no art can be real. There are no real movies, there are no real paintings, there are no real novels, there are no real dancers/singers and there are no real actors. I repeat, nothing in art is ever real. It is like magic. So, what makes the intellectual human species to divulge and dwell in the art isn’t its charm but the deception that disguises to be “true” to humans.

So, considering a movie an art, the aim of any film is to make you believe that something is really happening out there, when it had not, will not and cannot. This boils down to one basic fact that a movie’s appeal has a lot to do with how well informed the viewer is. For example, a movie based in Afghanistan does not have to be an exact replica of what is happening there. Rather an intellectual drama with skilful imagination can deceive most of this planet’s population to believe that it could be real for no one is ever going to check out. To throw light on viewer’s perception, let me give you another example. Take the case of a commercial south Indian movie. A hero beats up fifteen 15 thugs single handedly without getting a scratch himself. The audience claps their hands. At least, 10% of those who clapped would have believed that the hero is so strong. Yes, they aren’t informed and they are the target audience. The rest 90% fall in two categories. The first who wants to forget the reality around them and enter into the dream world that the movie makers aspire to create and the second, who find the dream world more fun than reality. Well, those who didn’t clap, the movie didn’t work for them.

There was a time when people clapped for anything shown on screen. When humans started progressing, the class of people who did not clap started increasing. An artist is satisfied only when he can please every single being with his art. So, the film makers started thinking. They made films that appealed to the mind. They made it look real and they started getting a new breed of fan following. When Titanic drowned, nobody knows how many lovers met death. Nobody knows what could have happened in those last moments. So, a movie based on Titanic was going to be imaginative. But then, the audience would rubbish the movie, if it is to portray that Titanic got drowned by an alien attack. This is where the established facts come in. So a film maker would first look for established or commonly accepted facts. In our previous example it would be that Titanic drowned after hitting an iceberg. Now, James Cameroon cannot alter this. He would have collected all such facts and then scripted his story within these accepted facts or barriers or corner stones. At the end of the day, the deception turns out to be successful, and the creator is happy that his art is accepted. Note here that Titanic could have still been drowned by an alien attack but the iceberg story is the widely accepted reality.

However, an art has no such boundaries. It has no rules. Any rule or commonly accepted fact is a hurdle to creativity. So, how would a film look like without those barriers? I would say, it would look like an Avatar or Matrix or Star War or Indiana Jones. But to break the shackles or barriers and to make a movie and to still convince the intellectual audience, requires not just skillful imagination but rather a powerful one that gratifies the human intellectuality. It is that imagination and the power behind it that makes an art, an art. So what is the difference between making a movie bounded by widely accepted reality and a movie that dwells in an imaginary world? Both are art, so, none, but still there is a thin line which, in software terms, I would say that the earlier is like giving you a standard tool and work with it (your creativity bounded by the tool or you are comfortable only with a tool) and the latter is like writing your own programming language to get what you want(depends on how good your programming language is and the conveniences you take while creating it). However, at the end of the day, for any artist, all that matters is what the moviegoer wants to see and believe... Fantasy or “real”ised fantasy... Ajay R