Art and Middle Cinema

Art cinema (also known as “New Cinema”, “Parallel Cinema” and “New Wave”) on the other hand, often shot in black and white, posited gender, caste, religion, rural land relations, urban and rural poverty, and political unrest far more centrally as problems, in approaches ranging from slow-paced realism (long takes, wide shots, shooting on location) to more modernist and jagged visual forms of cinematic experimentation (hand held cameras, jump cuts, montage, incorporation of documentary and animation footage). Storylines individuated these broadly social themes, at times framing the quest for a different social order in terms of a personal existential search, as this page from the brochure for the Malayalam-language art film Uttarayanam (Throne of Capricorn, 1975) makes clear.

More to the point, art films rejected the song-dance and masala format, and this became the most readily identifiable mark of an alternative film practice.

 As the name indicates, "middle cinema" hewed a path in-between art and commerce: not as melodramatic and sprawling as commercial films, and attending to ordinary, less spectacular, and less melodramatic aspects of urban middle-class life, while retaining the convention of songs that were a staple of commercial films. In this collection, brochures for Hindi-language films like Grihapravesh (House Warming, 1979) and Choti Si Baat (A Small Matter, 1976) belong to this category.

Grihapravesh tells the story of marital infidelity and ultimately reinforces norms of idealized domesticity for its female characters. The wife wins the husband back because she spruces up her household and her own appearance in ways her husband’s lover cannot compete (see frames).

But the movie also introduces new character types, costuming, traits, and settings in combinations meant to represent the urban working woman’s independent life.

Gender relations are free from the tacit and ever-present strictures imposed by the extended family in the world of commercial films, and the couple must negotiate their middle-class marriage on their own. Almost always resolutely urban middle-class in the audiences it sought, middle cinema wagered on the recognizability of its situations and settings while rejecting the mantle of an engaged (or worse, angry or polemical) social document that presented itself as an option in art cinema discourse and practice in the 1970s.