Since the year 2020 peoplehave incorporated new rules in their life calling them ‘new normal’. But thetruth is nothing is actually normal for one year. When life comes back tonormal, hopefully soon, there might be a chance that cinema gets a slight change.Well, the audience would definitely not want to get reminded of the old not sonormal days, they would not want their celebs to wear masks and narrate thewhole horror story of the pandemic again. What face cinema will have and to whichextent it is expected to change or whether it will or not, all this is a matterof assumptions and wait for now. In aspecial story conducted by The Times Of India, many dignitaries from the filmfraternity have shared their views on the topic.
Amrit Gangar, a filmhistorian said that how particular content is shown matters more. He said, “ifyou consider the great depression of the 1930s as a devastating pandemic whenthe majority of American masses was in a grim misery which was man-made. WalterGifford head of president Hoover’s organization on unemployment relief fund isthe US pleaded with the president that movie tickets be distributed free to thepoor. But there were others like Henry Warner Brothers in Hollywood who saidthat people somehow always had the money for the price of a ticket and addedthat they would go hungry or stay diseased or ill-clothed but would go to themovie”. Amrit also pointed out the fact that last year during the completelockdown in India Doordarshan started telecasting ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’again. According to him, not just the production of the film but how a capitalistic societyuses films to silence the majority of people needs to be studied.
CEO of Dharma ProductionsApoorva Mehta feels that there might be a change in the storytelling ways infuture, “given the constraints of shooting in large numbers or safety issueswith global pandemic waves, there will be a tilt in telling stories that arehappier or lighter and provide escapism, in this currently, extremely chaoticworld. Such stories will have the power to bring back audiences to the theatresfaster as the world slowly emerges from the pandemic”.
With India facing a huge pandemic the face of the film industry will most probably change once life will turn back to ‘normal’in actual sense. The broadcast pattern from a theatrical release to an OTT releaseand the storytelling way might see a drastic change. While these are onlypredictions what will be the face of Bollywood can only be known in the distantfuture.