Gautaman Bhaskaran | Photo: Ashima Shenoy
Manipal: Gautaman Bhaskaran is a film critic who has worked for the Statesman and has been working with the Hindu for around 25 years. He has been attending the Cannes film festival for the past 15 years and was among the 20 people who received a medal of recognition from them.
Q: What made you become a film critic?
A: I grew up in Calcutta, and lived next to a film theatre for 25 years. I grew up watching many different films, including those by Satyajit Ray. I was exposed to meaningful theatre. I started of with Statesman as a journalist and wrote on many different topics including cinema. I then shifted to Hindu where I wrote about social issues, art and features on cinema. There my editor encouraged me to write film reviews. I was then sent to many international film festivals and I have been a film critic since then.
Q: What according to you makes a good film?
A: A good film should be meaningful cinema. It should deal with real issues, real people and things you can identify with. It should go beyond entertainment. It should generate debates, controversies maybe. It should have an element of believability. Today a lot of cinema, in India, is make believe. They are neither here nor there and it’s disturbing.
Q: What do you have to say about Indian cinema these days?
A: I just want to say that Indian cinema is not Bollywood. We make a 1000 films a year of which only 200 are from Bollywood. The rest are from the different film industries such as the Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Punjabi film industries, to name a few.
Q: Have you tried making films? If not, would you want to make films in the future?
A: No I haven’t made any. Everyone can’t do everything. I love watching cinema. As of now I have no plans.
Q: Do you think that being a critic, you could make better films?
A: May be or may be not. There are people like Francois Truffaut, who was a critic who later made great movies like Day for Night and others like an Indian film critic who did not succeed. If a critic became a film maker then he/ she would tend to look at cinema more keenly and would be more critical of one’s own work.
Q: We have heard that you were a member of an international critics jury, what all film festivals have you served as a jury for?
A: I served on the international critics jury at the Melbourne International Film Festival and Deauville Asian Film Festivals and on the main international jury of the International Film Festival of India in New Delhi and the Pune International Film Festival. I have also been on the jury for the National and State movie awards in India.
Q: Which publications do you write for? Have you written a book?
A: I write for the Hindu and also a variety of publications. I am the India Film Critic for The Hollywood Reporter in LA and I write reviews on Indian films for it. I also write for The Dawn in Pakistan, The Lumiere Reader in New Zealand, The Seoul Times in South Korea, The Japan Times in Tokyo, and The First Post in Britain. I am also writing a book on the biography of Adoor Gopalakrishnan funded by Ford Foundation. It will be published by Penguin International sometime in autumn, this year.
Q: Which is your favourite film and why?
A: There are many. I like many of the early films like Roman holiday, Sound of music, Casablanca, Beyond the Clouds. I even like Jab We Met and Taare Zameen Par.
Q: According to you who is a good critic?
A: A good critic is one who analyses a picture on all parts, analyses it in compartments. For example a film can have a good script but may not be properly directed or vice versa. They should not get personal.
Q: What do you think of Indian films today?
A: Technically it’s very good. It is better to live in hope. We (Indians) need great commitment and passion. We feel that anything goes and we fall behind the rest of the world, look at hockey. We need an eye for precision and strive to be perfect. Most of us fall way behind. Each of us should do our job well.
Sub-edited by Nina Chengappa |
