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Film Appreciation
Changing social values in cinema
K S Sivakumaran
There is a crisis among civilizations all over the world at present.
What is ‘culture’, is a recurring question among many youngsters. What
we hold as sacred values have turned upside down. The electronic media,
the print media and the general globalization springing mainly in the
west, have had an impact even in our remote social setup. Films, digital
camera, web cams, mobile phones and numerous other devices are used in
damaging our pristine culture.
In this context, I read an interesting article by T M P Nedungodi on
the subject focusing on Indian cinema. For the benefit of our readers
some excerpts with our comments appear below:
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Mobile
phone film-making |
Technical developments, both inside and outside the cinema, change
the social value system. Each technical innovation has to be
internalized by the filmmakers if they are to make any significant
statement with the addition of new technique. Next to technical
innovation it is the composition of the audience and their social
groupings that are responsible for the reflection of he apparent changes
in the social values of films.
The audience, by the 70s, had lost any ethnic or regional
distinction. It was a mixture of motley rural cultures with the veneer
of an urban culture. These were represented by garish externals and
sophisticated guns or weapons of violence, Sex and violence, factors
which can be perceived by the most commonplace minds, came to be
cinema’s staples.
Today the most frequent complaint about the cinemas in India is that
it is full of sex and violence. The truth is that the sex and violence
have always been an integral part of human tradition.
The cinema in many ways is the dominant art of our time. The function
of cinematic art is not only to give us knowledge of the world in which
we live, but also to create the values by which we live.
Having given pertinent observations the writer quotes his article
with a poser from Aldous Huxley:
“We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like: and if the
art we like is bad, then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if
the thinking and telling of most of the individuals composing a society
is bad is not the society in danger?”
This question of changing values cannot be described adequately
because there are visible and invisible changes taking place. However we
cannot arrest mass hysteria of new values based on our cherished values.
Everything is subject to change and either we have to change to survive
or perish without any adaptation. The fittest survives.
Rooted we are in our own cultures and values we have also got to shed
away the irrelevant traits in culture or social values for dynamic
progress.
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