Protecting creative freedom: It is the duty of the arts to speak 'truth' even if it causes offence
Sometimes it is easy to forget how important films are. For a long time when working, it is a solo endeavour or at best involves one other person.
In these moments one is led to believe that a movie truly belongs to you. In the privacy of a room or a conversation, the story is recounted in minutiae, sometimes in embarrassment and at other times in triumph.
Always in whispers, in case word gets out; being all too aware that your only copyright protection (with the way the laws are) is yourself. It's a favoured part of the process, this innocent intimacy with words before they manifest.
When the situation is "formalised" - contracts come along. Standard film contracts require signatories to refrain from engaging in any political activity or comment, or any public speak or behaviour that would put the film "at risk" (I am paraphrasing the legal speak).
When I received one such contract, I delayed its signing by a few days. But industry insiders will tell you it's a necessary precaution and isn't as "personal" as it may seem on paper.
There have been far too many instances when films have been targeted for causing offence, however small or large, justified or unjustified, conscious or unconscious. But is taking offence at a work of fiction justified?
Should we take exception to another person's imagination? On the other hand it is not entirely unreasonable to take into consideration a minority community's discomfiture or hyper cautiousness at being reduced to a particular stereotype.
This stereotyping in a popular medium like films is acceptable, though offensive when it is pegged on a scale of buffoonery or eccentricity. But when it comes to a throbbing subject like terror, should we all be a little more sensitive with the narratives we choose to tell?
I have encountered manipulations in creative decisions when it comes to giving names and religious identities to characters.
This is done in order to present a more inclusive narrative of the "Indian" experience, even a more populist one. Is this then an honest exercising of creative power? Should it be just as deeply disturbing as choosing to stereotype? Don't the arts have an obligation to represent the truth, whoever's truth it may be, in some measure? Even if it's an unpopular truth?
With experience, every such decision reveals the work environment and the political correctness that is incumbent on being a creative artist in this country. Social media and liberal chatter is awash with derision for public figures i.e. actors and their apolitical stances.
Members of Muslim community protest against the release of Kamal Haasan's movie Vishwaroopam in Madurai
In the United States, Clint Eastwood can come out and speak to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention, be lampooned, hailed and criticised and yet be allowed to continue as an actor and director, when the invisible guy wins. In India our celebrities cling to the sanctuary of silence.
A Satyamev Jayate, is thought to be an exercise in self promotion and emotional grandstanding and its intentions are heatedly debated.
A Shahrukh Khan is denied his personal truth because it does not fit into the discourse of success and acceptability as perceived from the outside.
Words, opinion, art must live up to the standards of popular sentiment and endemic judgment. Creativity is held hostage to individual or group opinion and its ability to amplify its concerns.
Our narratives of war must be jingoistic, we must not speak of state brutality on film, a woman must be represented in a particular light; if she must gain empathy from an audience, she is not permitted to be a multi-dimensional character; her deification on celluloid is essential, else she must be a vamp. Maybe with a heart of gold, if one insists on complexity.
Then there are the commercial considerations, which are too numerous to mention. The walls are closing in on the creative space.
Creative people that I have spoken with, increasingly revel in and offer advice to a new entrant on the merits of the private creative conversation, where nothing is off bounds.
And of these being the only conversations worth having; the rest must emerge in expression. Indeed the most prolific ones have no public imprint at all.
Disappearing behind walls, agents and handlers. It is a subtle but deeply disturbing withdrawal, one not highlighted in the frenetic televised debates and public rancour, against vs for, for vs against. On and on it goes, the noise - FIRs, legal notices, opinion, facts, bans, debates etc etc.
Haasan I suspect it is not greed but creative control that propels an actor of Kamal Haasan's stature to take the immense personal risks he has to make Vishwaroopam.
This need for ownership is often denied even to the most successful practitioner of the arts. It takes years to get to that point and is a seduction that may find little empathy, if one does not understand that a creative journey however successful is set on the bedrock of compromises and the desire to break free is the biggest triumph.
It is why the artist Prince moved away from big record labels and attempted to erase an identity that he didn't own, to his own detriment. It doesn't make sense - the motivations, intentions.
The stories, why people tell them and the ones they choose to tell. It makes even less sense when an icon like Kamal Haasan struggles for his right to creative freedom. It makes no sense. Only depresses.