3 - New Forms, New Stories: Zoya Akhtar's Short Films

Summary

There is something fitting about how Zoya Akhtar's entry into short films starts with her work in Bombay Talkies (Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar and Anurag Kashyap 2013). As a point of commemoration, the film was a curious creation that was tied to the industry but was not wholly part of it. Commissioned as an anthology production to celebrate a hundred years of Indian Cinema (marked by the release of the ‘first’ Indian film, Raja Harishchandra [Dadasaheb Phalke], in 1913) and named after the Indian production house Bombay Talkies, the film was anything but the typical cinema hall fanfare. Instead, it offered a mixed point of reflection from distinct perspectives that looked forward as much as it looked back. Its directors ranged from industrial kingpins like Karan Johar to those quickly establishing themselves as the next generation like Akhtar to the more popular ‘indie’ filmmakers Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap. Its form, while representing some of the sensibilities of these directors’ styles, overall leaned more towards the ‘indie’ than commercial and the film was notable for a lack of song-and-dance sequences; though there was a tie back to Bollywood's present with a closing song containing many of the industry's biggest stars. The stories ranged in themes from the dreams that the cinema creates to the acceptance of the realities we live far from these dreams and even broached taboo topics not often seen in the blockbusters such as suppressed homosexuality and breaking societal gender roles. Thus, like Akhtar's other works, this film was hard to categorise. Instead, it represented something new being created as the industry was trying to re-envision itself for a new millennium.

As such, the film left questions of not only what type of commemoration it was, but if it was a true commemoration of the past it purported to be celebrating. In a special dossier reflecting on the meaning of this particular commemoration, Meheli Sen perhaps best describes this ‘hatke (different)’ film and the questions it raises:

I would like to ask whether Bombay Talkies, as a film as well as a celebratory event, forces us to reckon with this new milieu of the Bombay industry – the new ecology, wherein the mobilization of a seamless mediascape seems to be of paramount interest as well as maximum profitability?