Film Studies: Cinema as a medium of communication

Cinema as a medium of communication and mass communication

Cinema is one of the most popular media of communication. Through cinema, the director communicates with the audience. Audience is equally important in this process of communication. The action on the screen does not take place between actors of a film; rather the action takes place among the actors and the audience. Cinema is an audio-visual medium and uses images, sound and editing to communicate. It is a combination of several arts like, literature, (story, poetry) painting, music, architecture, sculpture, photography, dance etc. Merging of several arts makes cinema more complex as well as an effective medium of communication. Even illiterate people can understand what is happening on the screen. Cinema does not tell, it shows. Cinema has a magnetic hold on the mind of the audience. Cinema is also a medium of non-verbal communication. In other words, cinema speaks through silence, facial expression, body language etc. Cinema shows the anger on the face without the use of verbal language. For example, Gulzar’s Koshish is about a deaf and dumb couple. They live in society like normal human beings. They communicate through hand movements, facial expression, gesture etc. Facial expressions make cinema more effective. Cinema is a very powerful medium of mass communication. Through this medium, different people like producer, director, story or scriptwriter, songwriter etc. want to communicate with the masses. It is a collaborative medium. It has the potential to reach the heterogeneous audience. Filmmakers produce films for masses not for individuals. In a single cinema hall, hundreds of people can enjoy a film. Cinema is truly a mass medium. Language is not a barrier as far as cinema is concerned. Cinema has its own grammar. However, the visual grammar of cinema is not a barrier for the audience. To understand any other language, one has to learn the grammar of the concerned language. That is not the case with cinema. In other words, the nature of cinema makes it more powerful mass medium. The literacy rate in India is still low. Therefore, cinema as a medium of mass communication is very important in a country like India. To communicate and entertain illiterate masses, cinema as compared to other media of mass communication, is the best.

Cinema as an art form

Cinema, the fusion of several arts including painting, dance, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, photography, editing etc, is a unique art. What makes cinema unique is its life like quality. People on the screen can be seen walking, talking, laughing, weeping, dancing, singing, sleeping, driving etc. as it happens in real life. Although the actions of a cinema do not take place in real time or in real life, yet it is believable. What distinguishes cinema from other arts is its ‘movement.’ The ‘movement’ makes cinema life like. Cinema does not look artificial. Through frontal shot, a director can make a character to ‘talk’ to the audience. No doubt, it is one-way communication. However, the audience becomes the part of the action that takes place on the screen. A house cannot move. Painting cannot move. The tree on a canvas cannot move. The photograph cannot move. Each image or frame is static. When twenty-four frames/photos per second are projected on a screen at a particular speed, the images appear to be moving. There is no physical movement on the screen; it is an ‘illusion of movement.’ What gives movement to cinema is the concept of ‘persistence of vision.’ Life consists in movement. A dead body cannot move. Any person in deep sleep also has movement. When any person breathes, s/he moves. Therefore, it is the motion of events, which gives the cinema a unique identity of being life like. The nature of cinema to record the undirected objects also distinguishes it from other arts. For example, sun cannot be directed to set or rise in a particular way. The director cannot direct a falling leaf in a particular desired way. Some undirected objects are also recorded when the director shoots a film. When the action is being recorded and a leaf falls, the camera records the natural movement of the leaf. Rudolf Arnheim says that film, “…reproduces motion and events as accurately as it does the shape of things…the arts are greatly concerned from the beginning with things in action: hunting scenes, war, triumphal processions and funerals, dances and feasts.”1 As compared to other arts, films have high commercial value. Today cinema has become an industry. An industry can be set up only where a large number of people consume the ‘product.’ Cinema has become a multicrore industry. It is an economic activity. Today it is impossible to imagine a world without cinema. In this connection, Satyajit Ray says, “Somebody - I do not remember who - has defined the Cinema as the highest form of commercial art. After ten years in this profession, I have no quarrel with that definition.”

Cinema makes people laugh and cry, sad and happy etc. Today good quality literature is being translated into cinematic narratives. The director taken for the current study, Gulzar bases 3 most of his films on literary stories. For example, he bases his film Khushboo on a story by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay.