THE RECENT TREND OF TOLLYWOOD

Browsing through the pages of the dailies' cinema section and the film magazines, the word that is coming up about the recent urban films of tollywood is NEW AGE CINEMA. A section of our critics is of the opinion that young directors are coming up with a new language of films that basically deals with city life and the youth. They have labelled films like AUTOGRAPH,22SE SRABON,JANI DEKHA HOBE,UROCHITHI and some others as the pioneers of this new trend. It seems on a first glimpse, that things are changing, bengali cinema is on the verge of a revolution and in that light it makes film lovers like us to think of the great neo realism of the west where people like Truffaut, Godard, Fellini were trying to bring about a radical change both in the form as well as the response of the spectators toward cinema and eventually we were introduced to auteur films. However in spite of the hype that some of these new age cinema of today has created among the people,it is near to impossibility for a true film lover to appreciate this new trend.Calling spade a spade, this is not a trend at all and i feel that tollywood has only developed in its outward polish and has overcome to some extent the typical hack melodrama that we have seen in the films of the 90s but so far as real experimentation in form is concerned, it is still suffering from mediocrity. To make things worse, films of today are mostly big budget ones and that is all the more disappointing as so much money is being wasted only for some cheap gimmicks of ludicrous editing and songs. Songs have become the ultimate usp for a film. In most cases they are not well tuned to the sequential need but people are asking for them only because of the way they are being promoted. Now we have got the concept of music videos where one hears a film song well before the première and often the videos are separately made, they are not the music cuts of the original movie. This concept of separate music videos of a film is itself nonsense but unfortunately they have become commercially successful and in most cases indispensable for making a movie a box office hit. As a result of these changes in the promotional pattern, we are slowly forgetting the structure and appeal of real cinema. I hope there comes a real change in tollywood and that change can only come if the youth of bengal feels it is necessary. After all, revolution comes only through the young hands....