Chapter 5: Cinema
Long before a multiplex stood in every district town, cinema in India travelled by truck. A touring cinema carried a projector, a generator, film reels in metal cans, a few hundred metres of canvas and a long piece of white cloth. The crew reached a small town or a fairground, raised the tent in an afternoon, strung the cloth between two poles and sold tickets for a few coins. People sat on the ground. When the generator started and the light struck the cloth, a beam of dust-filled air crossed the tent, and a village square, a palace or a moving train appeared where a moment earlier there had been nothing. Fig. 5.0-1 shows how such a tent was arranged.
Diagram
Fig. 5.0-1 – cross-section of a touring tent cinema; projector raised on a stand at the rear, cone of light widening across the tent to a white cloth screen strung between two poles at the front, generic seated audience on the ground between them, generator placed outside the tent wall; label the projector, the beam of light, the screen, the seating area and the generator
The same reel then moved on to the next town, and the next. One print could be watched by tens of thousands of people who lived nowhere near a cinema hall, in a language they spoke, sitting shoulder to shoulder with their neighbours. A few touring cinemas still work today.
This is what makes cinema unlike most other arts. It is made with machines, sold like a commodity and watched in company. It needs a technology, an audience and a story at the same time, and its history is largely the story of people learning to fit those three things together.
This chapter will answer each of these five questions.
5.1 The History of Cinema
Cinema did not arrive as a finished invention. It was assembled, over about twenty years at the end of the nineteenth century, out of photography, clockwork mechanics and a great deal of trial and error. Several people in Europe and America were working on the same problem at the same time, which is why almost every claim about who was “first” comes with an argument attached.
The problem they were all trying to solve was simple to state and hard to build. A photograph holds one instant. Life does not stop. Could a machine take many photographs in quick succession, and then give them back to the eye fast enough to look like movement again?
How a Moving Picture Works
A film is a strip of separate still photographs. Each one is a frame. When the frames pass in front of a light at a steady speed, and each is held still for a fraction of a second before the next replaces it, the eye and brain read the series as continuous motion rather than as a stack of pictures. Fig. 5.1-1 shows the sequence.
Diagram
Fig. 5.1-1 – how frames become movement; a strip of six film frames showing a generic figure with one arm progressively raised, feeding downward past a lamp and lens, with an arrow to a screen showing a single moving figure; label the individual frame, the light source, the shutter that holds each frame briefly still, and the screen
This effect was traditionally explained by persistence of vision, the idea that the eye holds an image briefly after it disappears. Psychologists today explain apparent motion differently, as the brain actively filling in movement between similar images shown in quick succession. The older name has survived, but the mechanism is more the mind’s work than the eye’s.
Getting frames to move steadily was the mechanical half of the problem. The other half was not mechanical at all. A machine can capture movement; deciding what movement is worth capturing, and for whom, is a question of judgement. The four experimenters below each answered that second question differently, and between them they opened most of the paths cinema has taken since.
5.1.1 The Lumière Brothers
Auguste and Louis Lumière were French manufacturers of photographic plates. In 1895 they patented the Cinématographe, a hand-cranked wooden box that was, unusually, three machines in one: it photographed a scene, printed the film and projected it. It was light enough for one person to carry and needed no electricity.
That last detail decided a great deal. Earlier viewing devices such as the Kinetoscope, developed by Thomas Edison’s company, worked by peephole: a customer looked down into a cabinet and watched alone. The Cinématographe threw the image outward onto a wall, so a room full of people saw the same thing at the same moment. Fig. 5.1-2 sets the two arrangements side by side.
Diagram
Fig. 5.1-2 – peephole viewing versus projection; on the left, one generic figure bending over a tall cabinet to look into an eyepiece, image enclosed inside the box; on the right, a projector casting a widening beam onto a wall screen with a seated group of generic figures watching together; label the eyepiece, the enclosed image, the beam and the shared screen, and mark the number of viewers each arrangement serves
On 28 December 1895, in a room beneath a café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, the brothers held what is generally recorded as the first paid public screening of projected films. The programme was made of very short pieces of ordinary life: workers coming out through the gates of the Lumière factory in Lyon, a baby being fed, a boat leaving a harbour. Each ran under a minute and consisted of a single unbroken shot.
Filming the World as It Was
The Lumières called their short films vues, or views. The word used in film history for this kind of unstaged record of a real place or event is actuality. Nothing is acted, nothing is arranged for the camera, and the shot simply runs until the film in the camera is finished.
Because the Cinématographe was portable, the brothers trained operators and sent them abroad — across Europe, to North Africa, to Asia — to film local scenes and to show the programme wherever they went. Within a year of the Paris screening, Lumière programmes were being shown in Bombay. Audiences in one country were therefore seeing filmed images of another country’s streets, harbours and festivals for the first time in history.
Below is an original single-shot actuality, written out in the shot description form this book will use throughout. A shot description names the shot size first, then the camera angle, then the subject, then any movement. Here, a long shot shows the whole figure together with its surroundings, and eye level means the camera stands at about the height of a standing person’s eyes.
Read the sample again and notice what the film-maker actually controls. Almost the only decisions available are where to stand, how wide to frame, and when to start cranking. Everything else belongs to the jetty. This is the whole method: choose the position, then let the world walk through it.
That limitation is also the source of the form’s power. Because nothing is arranged, the viewer trusts what is on the screen, and because the shot is unbroken, nothing can be hidden between cuts. Every later documentary tradition, and every argument about how much a documentary may arrange, begins from this starting point.
5.1.2 John Grierson
John Grierson (1898–1972) was a Scottish film-maker, producer and theorist. He came to cinema not from the arts but from the study of society and public opinion, and he was interested in a question the Lumières never raised: what is film for?
His answer was that film could do civic work. It could show citizens how their own society functioned — how coal was cut, how mail was sorted, how houses were built and how people lived in them — and could therefore be an instrument of public education rather than only of entertainment.
Grierson is credited with first using the word documentary in English for this kind of film, in a review he wrote in 1926 of a film by Robert Flaherty. His definition of it has lasted: a documentary is the creative treatment of actuality. Each of those three words carries weight. The material is actual, meaning drawn from the real world; the treatment is creative, meaning shaped, selected and arranged; and the result is therefore neither raw record nor invention.
Documentary as Public Work
In the late 1920s and the 1930s, Grierson built something the medium had not had before: a permanent, publicly funded documentary unit. He directed Drifters (1929), a film about herring fishermen, and then largely stopped directing to become a producer, organiser and teacher of others.
Working first for the Empire Marketing Board and then for the film unit of the British General Post Office, he gathered film-makers such as Basil Wright and Humphrey Jennings and set them to work on subjects of national life. Night Mail (1936), made by that unit about the overnight postal train, is the best-known result. Grierson produced it; he did not direct it.
In 1939 he founded the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), a state body for documentary production, which became the model other countries copied. The idea of a government-supported film unit making public-information and social documentaries spread widely from there, and shaped state documentary production in many countries, including India.
Two things are worth noticing about this arrangement. First, it solved the problem of money: documentary rarely pays for itself at the box office, and a public unit removes that pressure. Second, it created a permanent question, because a film unit funded by a government is making films about the society that government runs.
5.1.3 Robert Flaherty
Robert Flaherty (1884–1951) was an American who worked as a prospector and surveyor in the Canadian north before he worked in film. He spent years in Arctic regions, living among the people he later filmed, and he came to cinema with a traveller’s eye rather than a studio’s.
His landmark film is Nanook of the North (1922), which follows an Inuit hunter and his family through a season of life in the Arctic. Flaherty shot it on location, over a long period, with the family’s active participation, and built the film around one person the audience could come to know. It is widely treated as the first feature-length documentary, though the claim depends on how the term is defined and is not settled.
What Flaherty added to the Lumière method was narrative. An actuality shows an event; Nanook of the North gives its subject a name, a family, a landscape and a sequence of struggles, so that the audience follows a person rather than watching a place. That is why the film held audiences who had no interest whatever in the Arctic.
The Problem of Staging
Flaherty also arranged a great deal of what appears on screen. Hunting methods that had already been replaced by rifles were performed for the camera in older ways; a shelter was built with one side open so that there would be enough light to film inside. These are reconstructions: real activities, performed again, for the camera.
The close reading is the whole lesson of this subsection. Version A is harder to follow: the potter’s hands are half hidden, the light is poor, and the viewer may never see the moment the pot takes shape. Version B teaches the craft clearly, because it was arranged so that it could be seen.
Nothing false has been introduced in Version B. The potter is a potter and the pot is a pot. But the film-maker has now become a participant in the event, and the audience cannot tell from the screen how much was arranged. The honest response is not to refuse all arrangement, which would make most documentary impossible, but to be open about the method — which is precisely the argument that has run through documentary practice ever since Flaherty.
The table sets out a difference that still divides documentary today. Flaherty’s line leads towards observation, intimacy and the single life closely watched; Grierson’s leads towards explanation, argument and the public issue. Most documentaries you will see mix the two, and the mixture is usually where their strength and their weakness both lie.
5.1.4 Dada Saheb Phalke
Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, known as Dada Saheb Phalke (1870–1944), came to cinema from photography, printing and stage craft. He had worked with cameras, with printing presses producing coloured pictures, and with theatrical illusion, and each of those trades turned out to be part of the job he invented for himself.
Around 1910, in Bombay, he watched an imported film on the life of Christ. The account he gave afterwards is the one every history repeats: while the figures moved on the screen in front of him, he began to picture Indian gods and Indian stories in their place. The question he took away was not whether cinema could be made in India, but whether Indian subjects could be made to work on film.
Raja Harishchandra and the First Indian Feature
Phalke went to London to learn equipment and processing, came back with a camera and raw film, and set up production in his own home. In 1913 he completed Raja Harishchandra, a silent feature film — that is, a film long enough to fill a programme on its own — drawn from a mythological story of a king who keeps his word at ruinous cost.
He did nearly everything himself: writing, set building, photography, developing, editing and the effects. There were no trained technicians in the country to hire, and no women willing at that time to appear on screen, so the female roles were played by men.
Trick Photography and the Making of Effects
Mythological subjects demanded transformations, apparitions and impossible scale, none of which a camera can simply photograph. Phalke solved them with trick photography — effects produced in the camera at the time of shooting rather than added afterwards — including stop motion, in which the camera is stopped, the scene is altered, and shooting resumes so that the change appears instantaneous on screen. Fig. 5.1-3 shows the principle.
Diagram
Fig. 5.1-3 – stop motion / substitution effect; three panels — panel 1, camera running, generic seated figure in frame; panel 2, camera stopped, figure steps out of frame while the camera and set stay exactly in place; panel 3, camera restarted on the now-empty set; below, a strip of consecutive frames showing the figure present then absent; label the fixed camera position, the pause in shooting and the resulting instant disappearance on screen
He went on to make Mohini Bhasmasur (1913), Satyavan Savitri (1914), Lanka Dahan (1917) and Kaliya Mardan (1919), and to train the first generation of Indian film technicians and performers. Establishing a supply of trained people mattered as much as any single film, because an industry cannot exist without one.
The Four Experimenters at a Glance
Table 5.2 gathers the four together. Read down the last column rather than across the rows, and a pattern appears: each one solved a different problem, and none of them could have done the others’ work.
Fig. 5.1-4 places the same four in order of time, which makes one further point clear: the whole of this founding period fits inside a single human lifetime.
Diagram
Fig. 5.1-4 – horizontal timeline of the early experiments, 1890 to 1940, with marked points in order: 1895 Cinématographe patented and first paid public screening; 1913 Raja Harishchandra completed; 1922 Nanook of the North released; 1926 the word documentary first used in English; 1929 Drifters; 1939 National Film Board of Canada founded; label each point with the person responsible
5.2 Cinema Genres
5.2.1 Genre Theory
You already sort films without being taught to. Before a ticket is bought, before the title appears, you have decided roughly what sort of thing you are about to watch — and if the film turns out to be something else entirely, you feel misled rather than surprised. That sorting habit is what genre study examines.
Genre is simply the French word for kind or type. In cinema it means a group of films that share recognisable elements: the kind of story told, the kind of characters in it, the settings, the look, the sound, and the emotional experience the audience is being offered.
The repeated elements themselves are called conventions. The recognisable objects, costumes, landscapes and settings that belong to a genre — the courtroom, the spacecraft, the desert town, the rehearsal hall — are its iconography. Together, conventions and iconography are how a film tells you what it is before it tells you anything else.
How a Film Signals Its Genre
Genre is communicated fast, and mostly without dialogue. The setting and its light, the costumes and objects in the frame, the pace of cutting and above all the sound tell the audience what kind of attention to bring. Fig. 5.2-1 sets out the main channels.
Diagram
Fig. 5.2-1 – the channels through which a film signals its genre in its opening moments; central box labelled “audience expectation” with five arrows feeding into it from boxes labelled setting and location, lighting and colour, costume and objects, pace of editing, and music and sound; label each arrow with one example cue
Everything arranged in front of the camera — setting, lighting, costume, props and the placing and movement of actors — is called the mise-en-scène, a French term meaning, literally, putting into the scene. It is the single largest carrier of genre information, because the audience reads it instantly and continuously.
Sound does the rest. Diegetic sound comes from inside the world of the story and the characters can hear it: footsteps, traffic, a radio playing in the room. Non-diegetic sound comes from outside that world and only the audience hears it: background score, narration. A genre is often established by the score before a single event has occurred.
Version A is a comedy. The light is bright, the frame is full of people, the accident is harmless, and the music arrives to tell you that falling over is funny rather than serious. Nothing has been explained, and nothing needs to be.
Version B is a drama. The absence of music is the strongest signal in it: with no score to tell the audience how to feel, attention shifts to the boy’s own behaviour, and the shot held on an empty frame after he leaves says that this film intends to take its time.
Version C is fantasy. The low angle makes the gate tower over him, the mist withholds information, and a gate that opens by itself breaks the rules of the ordinary world. The push in promises that we are going through it.
Why Genres Change
Genres are not permanent categories. A pattern is established, repeated until audiences know it thoroughly, then questioned by film-makers who assume that knowledge — and finally recycled, mixed or gently mocked. Fig. 5.2-2 shows the cycle.
Diagram
Fig. 5.2-2 – flow: a new pattern is established in a few successful films → conventions harden through repetition → audiences learn the conventions completely → film-makers revise, invert or parody them → revised conventions become the new pattern; draw as a closed loop returning to the first stage
A subgenre is a branch within a genre that keeps its main conventions but narrows the subject or tone — the heist film within crime, the superhero film within action. Hybridisation is the mixing of two genres in one film, which is now more common than a pure example of anything.
5.2.2 Action
The action genre is built on physical conflict and movement. Its central promise is that a problem will be resolved through what a body can do — running, climbing, fighting, escaping, arriving in time — and its central pleasure is the controlled experience of danger from a position of complete safety.
Its story shape is escalation. Each obstacle is harder than the last, the stakes rise, and the film moves towards a final confrontation that has been prepared for from the opening. Characters are drawn functionally: a capable protagonist, an opponent with a clear goal, allies, and someone whose safety makes the mission necessary.
The craft of the genre lies in clarity as much as excitement. During a chase or a fight the audience must always know who is where, moving in which direction, and what will happen if they fail. Wide shots establish the space, tighter shots carry the impact, and cutting must be quick enough to feel urgent and clear enough to be followed.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg) is a useful example because its set pieces are constructed around simple, legible physical goals — reach the object, get out of the room — so that complicated action remains easy to read. Sound completes the effect: the score keeps pace, and a sudden silence before an impact makes the impact land harder.
Action carries an obvious risk, which the better films in the genre handle openly. Where violence is presented purely as spectacle, with no cost to anyone, the genre trains an audience to enjoy harm as sensation. Where consequence is shown, the same excitement becomes something the audience is asked to think about.
5.2.3 Westerns
The Western is set in the nineteenth-century American frontier, and its recurring subject is the arrival of law in a place that has been living without it. Its conflicts are therefore moral before they are physical: freedom against order, revenge against justice, the individual against the community that needs him and does not quite want him.
Its iconography is among the most fixed in cinema — open plains, a single street of wooden buildings, horses, hats, the long approach of a rider seen from far off. Landscape does argumentative work here. Vast empty framing makes human settlement look fragile and human decisions look small and permanent at once.
Stagecoach (1939, John Ford) is the standard example: a group of strangers with conflicting interests, confined together on a journey through open country, forced into a shared crisis that exposes each of them. The pattern travelled far beyond America. Sholay (1975, Ramesh Sippy) uses the frontier structure — an outlying settlement, hired outsiders, a community unable to defend itself — in an Indian setting, and is often discussed as an example of how firmly genre conventions can be transplanted.
The genre’s later history is itself an argument about that problem. Revisionist Westerns from the 1960s onward deliberately reversed the older pattern, questioning the heroism of the settler figure and the treatment of Indigenous peoples in earlier films. A genre, in other words, can be used to criticise its own past.
5.2.4 Comedy
Comedy exists to produce laughter, and it does so by arranging a gap: between what a character intends and what happens, between what one person knows and what another assumes, between the dignity people claim and the situation they are actually in. Almost every comic device is a version of that gap.
Its story shape runs from order into confusion and back into order. A misunderstanding is set up, allowed to multiply beyond anyone’s control, and finally resolved — usually by the truth coming out at the least convenient moment. Because the audience is generally given more information than the characters, the pleasure lies in waiting for a collision you can see coming.
Timing is the whole craft. A joke depends on the exact length of a pause, the moment a cut lands, and how long a reaction is held. The same performance edited half a second differently is not funny. Comedy also relies on contrast between characters — the excitable one and the calm one, the deceiver and the person being deceived.
Chupke Chupke (1975, Hrishikesh Mukherjee) is a clean example of construction rather than gag-writing: one man’s disguise obliges everyone else to keep adjusting their behaviour, and the film’s humour comes from the effort of maintaining a lie rather than from jokes. Modern Times (1936, Charles Chaplin) shows the older physical tradition, in which the body’s struggle with machinery carries both the comedy and the social criticism.
Comedy also does something no other genre does as easily. Because laughter lowers hostility, comedy can raise subjects an audience would resist in a serious film. That is its value, and also where its responsibility lies: humour that works by inviting an audience to laugh at a community rather than at a situation is doing the opposite of what the genre is capable of.
5.2.5 Crime
The crime genre takes as its subject an act that breaks the law, and it is interested less in the act than in what surrounds it — the motive, the investigation, the consequences and the question of what a society counts as guilt. Its structure is usually a withheld piece of information and a gradual approach to it.
Its recurring roles are the offender, the investigator, the witness and the victim, and its interest lies in the fact that these positions are rarely as separate as they look. Visually the genre favours restricted light, shadow, enclosed interiors and night exteriors, because concealment is its subject and the frame can be made to conceal.
Knives Out (2019, Rian Johnson) demonstrates the detective structure at its most transparent: a closed group of suspects, information released in a controlled order, and a solution that reorganises everything already seen. Jewel Thief (1967, Vijay Anand) shows the heist and mistaken-identity strand of the genre, where the audience’s uncertainty about who someone is becomes the engine of the plot.
Crime and action are frequently confused, because both contain pursuit and physical danger. The difference is where the film puts its weight.
Read the table downward and a single distinction organises all six rows: action asks the audience to keep up, crime asks the audience to work things out. A film that contains chases but keeps returning to motive is a crime film with action in it, not the reverse.
5.2.6 Drama
Drama is the genre of ordinary life taken seriously. It deals with people in believable circumstances facing choices that have no comfortable answer, and it locates its conflict inside characters and between them rather than in external threats.
Because it offers no spectacle, drama depends entirely on credibility. Performances are restrained, dialogue sounds like speech rather than statement, and lighting is usually natural or made to look natural. The camera stays close to faces, since in this genre the important events are decisions, and decisions register as expressions.
12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet) confines itself to a single room and a group of jurors deciding a verdict, and generates its entire tension from argument, prejudice and doubt. Taare Zameen Par (2007, Aamir Khan) follows a child whose difficulty with reading is mistaken for laziness, and builds its effect by letting the audience see the same behaviour first as a failure and then as a condition.
Drama’s characteristic movement is a change in understanding rather than a change in circumstance. Something is revealed, someone finally sees what was in front of them, and although little may have altered outwardly, the meaning of everything shown earlier has shifted.
5.2.7 Fantasy and Science Fiction
These two genres are grouped because both do the same fundamental thing: they change one rule of reality and follow the consequences honestly. The difference is where the change comes from. Fantasy draws on magic, myth and the supernatural; science fiction draws on technology, science and the future.
Both depend on world building — the construction of a setting with its own consistent rules, history, geography and limits. The rules matter more than the invention. An audience will accept almost any premise, and will refuse a story that breaks its own premise halfway through.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001, Peter Jackson) works through mythic structure: a long journey, an object of enormous power, and a moral test that falls on the least powerful character. Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve) works the science fiction way, taking a single technical premise — the difficulty of communicating with a species whose language is nothing like ours — and using it to raise questions about time, choice and grief.
The genre’s real subject is usually the present. A story about an invented society is a way of examining our own with the details changed, which is why science fiction so often concerns anxieties about technology, control and what is done with knowledge once it exists.
5.2.8 Historical
The historical genre sets its story in a documented past and reconstructs that past through research, design and performance. It is not the same as history: it is an interpretation of history built for an audience, and it works by turning recorded events into individual experience.
Its craft is largely in the mise-en-scène. Costume, architecture, objects, speech and manners must be consistent enough that the audience stops noticing them, since a single wrong detail breaks the illusion for anyone who knows the period. The genre also has to solve a structural problem: the audience often knows how events ended, so tension must come from how and at what cost.
Gandhi (1982, Richard Attenborough) organises a long public life into a sequence of decisions and consequences, using crowds and scale to place one figure inside a mass movement. Lagaan (2001, Ashutosh Gowariker) takes a fictional story set in a real colonial situation, and uses the invented contest at its centre to dramatise a real relationship of power.
This genre carries a distinctive ethical weight, because most people learn most of their history from films rather than from historians. Compression, invented characters and merged events are ordinary and necessary techniques; the line lies in whether the film’s shaping serves understanding of the period or replaces it with a flattering or convenient story.
5.2.9 Animation
Animation creates the illusion of movement from images made one at a time — drawn, painted, modelled, sculpted or generated digitally — rather than photographed as continuous motion. Nothing in the frame exists before the film-maker makes it, which means every element on screen is a deliberate choice.
That total control is the medium’s defining property. Scale, physics, colour and time can all be altered at will; a character’s inner state can be shown directly, as changing shape or shifting colour; and subjects impossible or unsafe to film can be shown plainly. Design carries the meaning that lighting and location carry elsewhere.
Spirited Away (2001, Hayao Miyazaki) uses that freedom to build an entire spirit world with its own economy and rules, seen through a child who has to learn them. Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter) works from a premise that could not be filmed at all and uses it to tell a straightforward story about being replaced.
It is worth noting a genuine disagreement here. Many scholars argue that animation is not a genre at all but a production technique — a way of making films that can carry any genre, since there are animated comedies, science fiction films, historical films and dramas. The counter-argument is that audiences and industries have long treated it as a category with its own expectations, which is what a genre is. Both positions are defensible, and knowing that the category is disputed is more useful than settling it.
5.2.10 Romance
Romance takes the formation of an intimate relationship as its central subject, and it works by placing obstacles between two people whom the audience wants to see together. The obstacles are what the genre is actually about: family expectation, class, distance, duty, timing, or the characters’ own misunderstanding of themselves.
Its structure is well known — meeting, attraction, complication, separation, resolution — and its familiarity is not a weakness. The audience knows the shape and watches to see how this particular pair will move through it, and whether the ending will be reunion, renunciation or loss.
Visually the genre works in close framing, warm light and shared spaces, and it depends heavily on what is not said. A held look, a gesture withdrawn, a distance maintained across a wide shot: romance is a genre of small physical signals, and the camera exists to catch them.
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995, Aditya Chopra) is an instructive Indian example because its obstacle is not the couple’s feelings but family consent, and the film’s entire second half is organised around winning it rather than escaping it. Roman Holiday (1953, William Wyler) takes the opposite route, using duty as the obstacle and refusing the reunion the audience wants.
Romance is also the genre most closely tied to changing social attitudes, since it dramatises who is permitted to choose whom. What counts as an obstacle in a love story is a fairly accurate record of what a society at that moment considers a barrier.
5.2.11 Musical
In a musical, song and dance are not decoration but the means by which the story advances. A character sings at the point where speech is no longer adequate, and the number changes the situation: a decision is taken, a feeling is admitted, a relationship shifts. If the songs could be removed without loss, the film is not a musical.
The genre requires the audience to accept a large convention — that people in this world express themselves in song, and that everyone present knows the choreography. Once accepted, it allows emotional directness that realistic drama cannot reach.
Its craft lies in the joining. The transition into a number must be prepared so that it feels inevitable rather than abrupt, and camera and editing must follow the music: cutting on the beat, holding wide shots long enough for movement to read, using close shots at the emotional turn. Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen) is the standard demonstration, partly because it is a musical about the arrival of sound in cinema.
A distinction matters here for Indian viewers. Mainstream Indian cinema across languages has used songs continuously for almost a century, but most such films are not musicals in the genre sense, because the songs sit alongside the narrative — as mood, spectacle or interlude — rather than carrying it. The test is not whether a film contains songs, but whether the story would still make sense without them.
The Ten Genres at a Glance
Table 5.4 sets out the ten genres together. Read across the second and third columns and one point becomes clear: what distinguishes a genre is not its subject matter but the kind of question it asks, and the kind of attention it wants from you.
5.4 Summary
The History of Cinema
- A film is a strip of separate still photographs called frames. Shown in quick succession, they are read as continuous motion — traditionally explained as persistence of vision, though the effect is now understood as the brain supplying movement between similar images.
- Building a machine that captured and returned movement was only half the problem. Deciding what movement was worth capturing, and for whom, was the other half, and the four early experimenters answered it differently.
- The Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis, patented the Cinématographe in 1895 — a single hand-cranked device that photographed, printed and projected — and held the first paid public screening of projected films in Paris on 28 December 1895. Projection, not the mechanism, was the decisive step: it turned film from a peephole novelty watched alone into a shared, ticketed, public experience.
- Their short single-shot films of ordinary life are called actualities: unstaged records of a real place or event, running in one continuous take. Operators sent abroad carried both the films and the machine worldwide, and Lumière programmes reached Bombay within a year.
- John Grierson first used the word documentary in English in 1926 and defined it as the creative treatment of actuality: real material, deliberately selected and shaped. A recording captures; a documentary interprets.
- Grierson directed Drifters (1929) and then worked chiefly as producer and organiser, building publicly funded documentary units in Britain and founding the National Film Board of Canada in 1939. He established documentary as organised public work — which solved its funding problem and created a permanent question about independence from the funder.
- Robert Flaherty made Nanook of the North (1922) after long residence in the Arctic, giving non-fiction a feature-length narrative built around one named person. It is commonly called the first feature-length documentary, though the claim is contested.
- Flaherty also reconstructed scenes for the camera. Reconstruction is real activity performed again to be filmed; it is not invention, but the audience cannot detect it from the screen, which is why openness about method — not the refusal of all arrangement — is the working standard.
- Dada Saheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra (1913), generally regarded as India’s first full-length feature film, drawn from mythology because a silent film could rely on a story its audience already knew. He developed trick photography and stop motion for mythological subjects and trained the country’s first film technicians and performers.
Cinema Genres
- A genre is a category of films linked by shared story patterns, character types, settings, visual and sound conventions, and by the expectations an audience brings. Repeated elements are conventions; the recognisable objects and settings are iconography.
- Genre theory holds that meaning in cinema comes partly from how a film uses, varies or breaks the conventions of its category. Its limitation is that genres are shifting agreements rather than fixed boxes, and most films belong to more than one.
- Genre is signalled fast and largely without dialogue, through the mise-en-scène — setting, lighting, costume, props and the placing of actors — and through sound. Diegetic sound comes from inside the story world; non-diegetic sound, including score and narration, is heard only by the audience.
- Genres change in a cycle: a pattern is established, hardens through repetition, is learned completely by audiences, and is then revised, inverted or parodied. A subgenre narrows a genre; hybridisation mixes two, and works only because the audience knows both sets of rules.
- Action turns on physical obstacle against physical capability, and depends on legible space so that danger can be followed.
- Westerns set freedom against law on a frontier, use landscape as moral argument, and have since been used to criticise their own earlier treatment of the communities they portrayed.
- Comedy works from the gap between intention and outcome, moving from order into confusion and back, and depends entirely on timing.
- Crime examines motive, guilt and justice through withheld information; unlike action, it asks the audience to work things out rather than to keep up.
- Drama takes ordinary life seriously, locating conflict inside people and between them, and its characteristic movement is a change in understanding rather than in circumstance.
- Fantasy and science fiction each alter one rule of reality and follow it consistently — fantasy through myth and magic, science fiction through technology — and both depend on world building whose rules the film must keep.
- Historical films reconstruct a documented past through research and mise-en-scène, and carry particular responsibility because most people learn most of their history from films.
- Animation builds movement from images made one at a time, giving complete control over everything in the frame; whether it is a genre or a production technique is genuinely disputed.
- Romance is organised by the obstacle between two people, and what a period treats as an obstacle is an accurate record of what that society considers a barrier.
- Musical uses song and dance to advance the story rather than accompany it; a film containing songs is not a musical unless the story would fail without them.
5.5 Key Terms
- Actuality — a short, unstaged film that records a real place, event or activity as it happens, in a single continuous shot.
- Convention — an element repeated so often within a genre that audiences expect it and recognise the genre by it.
- Crowdfunding — financing a film through a large number of small contributions from ordinary people, rather than through a producer, studio or lender.
- Diegetic sound — sound that comes from inside the world of the story and can be heard by the characters, such as speech, footsteps or a radio in the room.
- Documentary — a film built from real material which the film-maker selects, arranges and shapes in order to interpret it; Grierson’s phrase for this is the creative treatment of actuality.
- Feature film — a film long enough to fill a cinema programme on its own.
- FFC — Film Finance Corporation; the Government of India body set up in the 1960s to lend to film-makers whose projects had no commercial backing, later reorganised as the NFDC.
- Frame — a single still photograph on a strip of film; frames shown in rapid succession are read as continuous movement.
- Genre — a category of films connected by shared story patterns, character types, settings, visual and sound conventions, and by the expectations an audience brings to them.
- Hybridisation — the mixing of two or more genres in a single film, which works only because the audience already knows both sets of conventions.
- Iconography — the recognisable objects, costumes, landscapes and settings that belong to a particular genre.
- Long shot — a shot that shows the whole figure together with its surroundings.
- Long take — a shot allowed to run for an unusually long time without cutting, so that a situation develops in front of the viewer in real time.
- Mise-en-scène — French, literally putting into the scene; everything arranged in front of the camera, including setting, lighting, costume, props and the placing and movement of actors.
- NFB — National Film Board of Canada; the state documentary production body founded by John Grierson in 1939, which became the model for public film units elsewhere.
- NFDC — National Film Development Corporation; the body that succeeded the FFC and continued financing independent and socially serious Indian film-making on a larger scale.
- Non-diegetic sound — sound that comes from outside the world of the story and is heard only by the audience, such as background score or narration.
- Non-professional actor — a performer cast from the place or community being filmed rather than from the profession, used for authenticity of speech, bearing and manner.
- Parallel Cinema — a movement in Indian cinema from the late 1950s onward whose films used realist methods and modest budgets to examine Indian social conditions, in place of the spectacle, star system and formula of mainstream commercial production; also called art cinema or New Indian Cinema.
- Persistence of vision — the traditional name for the effect by which rapidly shown still frames appear to move; the effect is now understood to depend on the brain supplying movement between similar images rather than on the eye retaining them.
- Reconstruction — a real activity performed again for the camera in a non-fiction film; not invention, but arrangement that the audience cannot detect from the screen.
- Stop motion — an effect in which the camera is stopped, the scene is altered and shooting resumes, so that the change appears instantaneous on screen.
- Subgenre — a branch within a genre that keeps its main conventions while narrowing the subject or tone, such as the heist film within crime.
- Trick photography — visual effects produced in the camera at the time of shooting rather than added afterwards.
- World building — the construction of an invented setting with its own consistent rules, history, geography and limits, on which fantasy and science fiction depend.
5.6 Points to Ponder
Flaherty rebuilt scenes so that they could be filmed at all. If an arrangement makes visible a truth the camera would otherwise have missed, has the film become less truthful, or more?
The earliest films were single unbroken shots because that was all the machine allowed. When a limitation of the equipment later becomes a deliberate style, is it still a limitation?
Phalke chose a story his audience already knew by heart. Does a familiar story make a new medium easier to accept, or does it delay the moment when the medium starts doing something only it can do?
A genre works because the audience knows roughly what is coming. What is a film-maker actually offering when the pattern is broken — surprise, or a comment on the pattern itself?
Many Parallel Cinema films were about rural audiences who had little chance of ever seeing them. Can a film be said to speak for a community that it never reaches?
In Manthan, the people who paid for the film, the people it portrayed and its first audience were the same group. Does that make it a more honest film, or simply one with a different interest behind it?
5.7 Objective Questions
The Cinématographe changed the nature of film chiefly because it:
- recorded images at a higher speed than earlier cameras
- projected images so that an audience could watch together
- allowed films to be edited into several shots
- added recorded sound to the moving image [1 mark]
An actuality is best described as:
- a short unstaged film recording a real event in one continuous shot
- a documentary made with narration and a musical score
- a fiction film shot in a real location
- a reconstruction of a past event performed by actors [1 mark]
A film is correctly called a musical only when:
- it contains a large number of songs
- its songs are performed by trained singers
- the story would not hold together without the songs
- it uses a continuous background score [1 mark]
Which of the following is a convention of the crime genre rather than of the action genre?
- escalating physical set pieces
- wide shots establishing the geography of a chase
- information withheld from the audience until late in the film
- a driving score that maintains pace [1 mark]
Assertion (A): Dada Saheb Phalke drew Raja Harishchandra from mythology. Reason (R): A silent film had to be followed from its images alone, and a familiar story could be understood without dialogue.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true, but R is false
- A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
Assertion (A): A low budget protected the independence of Parallel Cinema film-makers. Reason (R): A film that need not recover a large investment need not be shaped to please a mass audience.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true, but R is false
- A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
Match the film-maker in Column A with the contribution in Column B. | Column A | Column B | |—|—| | a. The Lumière Brothers | i. founded the National Film Board of Canada | | b. John Grierson | ii. developed trick photography for mythological subjects | | c. Robert Flaherty | iii. held the first paid public screening of projected films | | d. Dada Saheb Phalke | iv. built a feature-length non-fiction film around one named person | [1 mark]
Match the genre in Column A with its central conflict in Column B. | Column A | Column B | |—|—| | a. Westerns | i. the consequences of one changed rule of reality | | b. Drama | ii. freedom against law on a frontier | | c. Fantasy and science fiction | iii. feeling against obstacle | | d. Romance | iv. competing obligations inside ordinary life | [1 mark]
Fill in the blanks.
- A single still photograph on a strip of film is called a ______.
- Sound that comes from outside the story world and is heard only by the audience is called ______ sound.
- Everything arranged in front of the camera — setting, lighting, costume, props and the placing of actors — is called the ______.
- A shot allowed to run for an unusually long time without cutting is called a ______. [4 marks]
State whether each statement is true or false.
- Grierson defined documentary as the creative treatment of actuality.
- Reconstruction in a documentary means inventing an event that never took place.
- Hybridisation refers to the mixing of two or more genres in a single film.
- Parallel Cinema films were financed mainly by private studios and star-driven investment. [4 marks]
Write the full forms of: (i) FFC (ii) NFDC (iii) NFB. [3 marks]
5.8 Check Your Concepts
Define an actuality, and state one feature of the Cinématographe that made such films possible. [2 marks]
State Grierson’s definition of a documentary and explain what the word “creative” is doing in it. [2 marks]
Name any two conventions of the Western genre and state what each contributes to the story. [2 marks]
Differentiate between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, with one example of each. [3 marks]
Differentiate between the action genre and the crime genre with reference to the source of tension in each, and give one example film for either genre. [3 marks]
Give reasons why India’s first full-length feature film took its story from mythology rather than from contemporary life. [3 marks]
Explain what reconstruction means in documentary film-making, using one example, and state the ethical difficulty it creates for the audience. [4 marks]
Explain any two production decisions that reduce the cost of making a feature film, and describe the effect each has on what the audience experiences. [4 marks]
Compare Robert Flaherty’s and John Grierson’s ideas of what documentary is for. Refer to the working method of each, and state one weakness of each approach. [6 marks]
Describe the Parallel Cinema movement in India: how it began, the issues its films depicted, and the low-budget production process it used. Support your answer with examples, and include one honest criticism of the movement. [6 marks]
Evaluate the claim that genre restricts a film-maker’s creativity. Use at least two genres studied in this chapter in your answer. [6 marks]
5.9 Analyse the Media Text
- Read the two openings below. Both describe the first shot of a film about the same situation.
VERSION A – MEDIUM SHOT – EYE LEVEL – a girl of about seventeen stands at a bus stop in heavy rain, her bag held over her head; a bus passes without stopping – CAMERA STATIC – NO MUSIC; RAIN AND TRAFFIC ONLY
VERSION B – LOW ANGLE LONG SHOT – the same bus stop, the rain lit from behind so that each drop is visible; the girl is small at the bottom of the frame, the sky enormous above her – SLOW PUSH IN – MUSIC: low, sustained, rising
a. Name the genre each version signals, and identify the specific cues that signal it.
b. Explain the effect of the low angle in Version B on the viewer's sense of the character.
c. State what Version A gains by having no music at all.[6 marks]
- A student film-maker plans one scene — a shopkeeper closing his shop for the last time — in two ways.
PLAN 1 – five set-ups: a wide shot of the street, a medium shot of the shutter, a close shot of the shopkeeper’s hands, a close shot of his face, a high-angle wide shot of the empty street; background score throughout.
PLAN 2 – one set-up: a wide shot, camera static, available evening light, held from before he begins until after he has walked out of frame; no score.
a. Identify the technique used in Plan 2 and explain how it changes the viewer's role.
b. Explain why Plan 2 costs considerably less to shoot than Plan 1.
c. State one thing Plan 1 can achieve that Plan 2 cannot.[6 marks]
A team making a documentary about handloom weaving finds that the weaver’s loom stands in a dark corner where nothing can be filmed clearly. They ask him to move the loom into the doorway, to begin a fresh length of cloth while the camera runs, and to start when they signal. The finished film carries no mention of any of this.
- Name what the team has done, and state whether the film is still a documentary.
- Explain what the audience is unable to judge from the screen.
- Suggest one change to the film that would resolve the difficulty without abandoning the scene. [6 marks]
A film is set in a documented historical period. Its makers compress three years of events into one, merge four real officials into a single invented character, and design every costume and building from photographic research.
- Identify which of these decisions belong to ordinary craft and which raise a question of responsibility.
- Explain why the historical genre carries a particular responsibility that the fantasy genre does not. [4 marks]
5.10 Craft Practice
Write one original single-shot actuality in the shot description form used in this chapter: shot size, angle, subject, movement. Choose a public place you can observe safely and with a teacher’s or parent’s knowledge; if any person is recognisable in your description, obtain their permission first, and describe no one you cannot ask. The shot must run about 50 seconds with the camera static. Submit the shot description and a note of 100 words explaining why you chose that camera position. [6 marks]
Situation: a family waits at a bus stop with luggage on a hot afternoon. Write three opening shot descriptions of this same situation, one each in the comedy, drama and historical genres. Each description must specify shot size, angle, subject, movement and sound. Submit the three descriptions with one line under each naming the cue that carries the genre. [6 marks]
Plan the scene below twice, once by the studio method and once by the low-budget realist method: a school peon locks the gate at the end of the last working day of term. Plan 1 must use five or six set-ups; Plan 2 must use one. State lighting and sound for each. Submit both plans on one page with a three-line comparison of what each costs and what each achieves. [6 marks]
Draw a four-frame storyboard for the opening of a science fiction short film set in a school. Under each frame, write the shot size, the angle and one line of sound. The four frames together must establish the setting, the changed rule of that world, and the character who first notices it. Submit the storyboard with a title and a one-sentence premise. [6 marks]