Musicality of Narrative Film: Creating emotionally impactful cinema

A film should be more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings.

The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. – Stanley Kubrick

Chamomile-scented incense. The spreading carpet in the living room. Candle flames, casting their

giant shadows upon walls. The tinted-glass paintings. Meditation mantras playing softly in the

background.

Flashes. Just flashes of reminiscences…some still alive, most long forgotten. Memories of a time and

space that once existed, but ones that I yearn to revisit. This, through the films I make.

I see movie-making as a very personal selfish act – an emotional satisfaction that every filmmaker is

trying to give himself, by reliving past experiences through the artifice of a constructed world.

Filmmaking is making a connection with your inner life, finding a rhythm and expressing passions

with utmost honesty – a less cerebral, more musical process. Be it in the scripting phase, the pre-

production, shoot, editing, or even the digital intermediate, music provides an instinctive vision to the

makers to not just wrap their heads around, but break into and connect with intimately. Good films

don’t come from great concepts, but from the emotional honesty through which ideas are

communicated. In fact, a director’s emotional disconnect with a scene does come across to the

audience, and the effort and focus, therefore, should lie in making our films more convincing and

expressive – nailing the ability to authentically translate what the creators feel onto screen. This

emotional authenticity can only be achieved when filmmakers connect more deeply with their

subjects, or gain a stronger sense of musicality. If the film isn’t told with heartfelt emotional honesty,

even a great concept cannot save it.

Making Cinema Tactile

In my opinion, the pursuit of every filmmaker should lie in trying to understanding himself better, and

in making a closer connection with his inner life. The truer the director is to his own emotions, the

more relatable his film is likely to be. This connection can be further strengthened by a certain sense

of musicality, and by making music central to the cinematic experience – that is, truly giving ‘audio’

precedence over ‘visual’ in this so-called audio-visual medium. Of course, this would also mean a

radical re-assessing of our existing methods and procedural norms of making films, as, in our current

methods, the script and performances are central to the process. In re-looking at music as the highest

order in movie making, I do see more convincing and heart-warming films being produced…films

that reduce the distance between the audience and the filmmakers, making cinema more tactile. It was

in fact literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of novelization that conveyed the idea of reducing

the distance between the narrative and the readers, by breaking the age-old canonical constructs of

epic or lyric poetry literature – that is, writing literature that were less panegyric or romanticized, and

more relatable and honest. While this was an idea that was proposed in 1941, I feel that there still

exists a very strong distance between Bollywood cinema and its audiences, which is seen in the fact

that our ‘tinsel town’ (super)heroes are highly valorised, and are perceived as lofty, completed

individuals who are far beyond the tactile reach of the audience. Unfortunately, this ‘town’ is a

‘walled’ one i.e., it builds boundaries that block it off from the present. Thus, there exists an

impending need to create more novelized cinema, that audiences can intimately speak to and not just

romanticize from a distance, but make love to.

Cinema then, for filmmakers, becomes simply an art of connection…first with yourself, then

automatically the audience. Movie making is about finding a rhythm and expressing a strong sense of

individualism. The deeper intimacy you share with your art, the closer the audience connects with it.

Bound by the common human emotions such as hope, desire, anxiety, etc., our emotions are

universally relatable, however rarely expressed with complete honesty. This is either due to the fact

that we’re systemically designed to veil our true emotions, or we just haven’t connected well enough

with our inner lives. Either way, I do truly believe that filmmakers, in India especially, collectively do

need to relook at the way they perceive cinema – do we see it as art, or as craft?

Looking at Cinema as Art (and not Craft)

Cinema is a spontaneous and intuitive play of emotions, stemming from musical responses. However,

there are several films today which visibly lack an emotional honesty and sincerity on the part

filmmakers to genuinely feel for the characters they’re weaving into their films. For these films, the

pretentiousness and the disconnection of the makers with the film is evident to the audiences. A

filmmaker may set himself the task of arousing or manipulating a certain emotional response in an

audience. In this respect, it is an honourable and skilful craftsmanship, requiring great technical skill,

but the lack of emotional honesty does come through. Maximum emotional impact (on the audience)

is created when the intent of the filmmakers isn’t pre-meditated, but is a spontaneous, heart-felt and

intuitive piece of emotional exploration – films that are made by simply “living on the inside.” This

wholehearted emotional journey that the filmmaker goes through while making a film, separates a

piece of art from merely a piece of craftsmanship.

In my opinion, the job of a filmmaker isn’t to manipulate the emotions of the audience, but to go

through an emotional exploration of his own during the entire process. Perhaps, his job is also to

stand in the same relationship to the outcome as his audience – trying to understand, clarify and find

out just as much about his own work, as if he’s seeing it for the first time. Films made with artistic

integrity are the ones in which the filmmaker doesn’t take up the role of a stage magician or a

conjurer, manipulating the emotions of his audience, but has actually gone through an emotional and

expressive journey of his own to create an honest piece of art, rather than a pre-conceived work of

craftsmanship. Films like these are made more out of love for cinema than from a lust to meet box-

office targets. These filmmakers just purely follow their heart and flow with their own musicality.

Here, it’s interesting to observe that unlike popular perception, it’s not just actors that follow a

method, but filmmakers as well. The method that I speak about, of course, is closer to the

Stanislavsky Method than the Meisner Technique of acting. Stanislavsky sought to encourage sincere

and emotionally expressive performances, rather than pre-planned and rehearsed acting. These ‘art-

house’ filmmakers did the same – most creation happened on the basis of what they felt and

experienced intuitively during filming.

Engaging the Crew

In my opinion, a large part of filmmaking is simply about bringing your crew in a common emotional

zone, making them seamlessly connect with the musicality of the film and your vision for it. Every

single crew member, in this grand miracle of collaboration called cinema, must understand not just

what is being shot, but also the mood, tone, rhythm, performance key and emotion behind it. This is

critical – the director’s job isn’t just to set the mood in front of the camera, but also behind it. The

authenticity and honesty of emotion can only translate onto screen if the entire crew, and not just the

director and actors, are in tune with the mood of the scene. The best way to set the tone for a scene is

to brief the crew with reference music tracks that best suit the emotional progression in the scene.

In my past experiences, I’ve noticed that just creating the mood for a scene through lighting or

performances makes no difference if the rest of the crew doesn’t know what is being shot, or don’t

feel for it as deeply and tenderly as the director and performers. A crew that is not in line with what is

being filmed, can be a distraction and non-conducive to sustaining that mood on set till the shot has

been taken. It just takes one small interruption for the actors, the cinematographer and the recordist to

break from the flow.

An added advantage of having a crew with a creative vision, and understanding the musicality of the

film, is that the process gets far more collaborative. Filmmaking then becomes a healthy confluence of

minds, almost dissolving Bazin’s Auteur theory. Passions automatically rise, and energy levels

increase. A truly powerful piece of art is one in which the emotional discovery is a collective

pursuit…with over two hundred people in a film unit channelizing their spiritual and creative energies

to collectively create something that lasts and resonates universally.

Editing with Emotional Honesty

Identifying and connecting with the musicality of a film is extremely critical for an editor. Whether

the beats are in the scene or in the dialogues, every film has a rhythm to it which must be latched on

to. Accomplished editors often use metronomes to edit silent/non-dialogue scenes, to bring out a

certain pattern and musicality in the edit. In my own films, I’ve always edited scenes to a music piece

that best defined the pace and rhythm of that scene. Film direction, for me, has always been about

living the film while it’s being shot – connecting with your soul and intuition, and communicating

emotions with honesty. In my opinion, the moment you’re making a film with an external objective,

(of awards, rewards, or other) it ceases to be a deeply intimate emotional exploration of the

filmmaker. It then becomes a work of pre-meditated craftsmanship, but the art is missing…the focus

of the filmmaker shifts to manipulating the emotions of the audience than living and communicating

his own with honesty. The best films are the ones that filmmakers have made for themselves. The

moment you’re keeping the emotions of your audience in mind while making a film, you’re

disconnected from your own. The effort for me has always been to ensure that not only are my films

designed and inspired by music, but are like music itself. Cinema is finding musical harmony in

collaboration.

Here’s a link to my short film ism (2016). A short film that I had made when I was 17, the entire

concept, visualization, rhythm, editing and music, was inspired from a 1995 film called Repete (or

rather the soundtrack of it). So far, my films have always been conceptualized, scripted and visualized

around music.

ism (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ds-9CNyXo

Repete (1995): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaUyaLZSoTc