Is Movie Art or Business ?

When the common man enters a theater, the grand hall which has just the right temperature to keep him from falling asleep and the surround sound system that adds dimensions to the lifeless acoustic waves, and then the lights are switched off and the big screen starts to magnify both beauty and ugliness; when the movie begins, it also starts a dream. Movie is the business of dreams. And all its cast and crew, merchants of this "dream business".

I must begin by the definition of "business", for which, I will paraphrase Jordan Belfort, the infamous salesman of Wall Street. 

"Business is monetizing the delivery of some value".

When a person goes to the theater, he is looking for some respite from his reality. A movie warps the time (shot of a running boy's feet and by the time the camera refocuses to his face, he is a grown up young man), exaggerates human ability (the protagonist jumping off sky-scrappers without getting hurt), distorts dimensions (the picture perfect damsel) and many, many more to transport a person to a momentary disbelief of his own self. It frightens him, makes him cry, laugh, makes him angry or gives him hope through a platter of scenes and variety of genres for the sole purpose to entertain. 

Steven Spielberg said "A movie must always entertain the conscious mind and educate the subconscious mind." 

Such efforts need collaboration which is the very hallmark of a business. It is for this reason we also call businesses a "company". These need full time effort, which means, collaborators need to be paid. Hence, the money that the producer spends to make a movie needs to be recovered to fund future such efforts to guarantee future income for the collaborators. 

Unfortunately there is no single definition of art which makes answering this question so difficult. To ease the effort, let us look at something we consider art - the painting "Death of Socrates" by Jacques David. (recommend the reader to pause and see the painting) The person sitting at the feet of Socrates is his famous disciple Plato. When the former died, the later was young. Isn't this also warping of time ? The most famous works of art are all distortion of reality. And they are also valued in billions. Academically (who don't have a skin in the game) movie is a multi-disciplinary art that delivers a value - a shock or surprise or solace without damaging his reality. In fact, the movies those are labelled as "art films", at least the ones those are sincerely done, are experiments by mainstream movie producers which is a smaller risk to test a concept or style. Unless there is a profit in the mainstream, these would not have been possible. This makes its nature just like any another business. 

Businesses produces more business. 

I will elicit this point by the example of the movie Terminator 2. It was a path breaking movie that had visual effects ahead of its time. It was produced at an era when microprocessors were less powerful and more costly. This movie (and Jurassic Park) triggered the Hollywood race for visual effect domination. The Knoll brothers working at Industrial Light and Magic (VFX) company who worked on this movie later created the software Photoshop using computer algorithms used in this movie. This software took Adobe (company) to dizzying heights of success and spawned an entire industry around it.

Trivia: The bad robot in T2 could take forms of other people - once a security guard and then the boy's mother. This is not VFX but shot using twins ! Even people with large amounts of money optimize. In fact, they always optimize. 

However, it is true that money magnifies the personality of a person. It will make a stupid look more stupid. More money does not guarantee success in movies, but it is also true that an unimaginative person with the best computers cannot make a dog wag its tail, let alone dinosaurs fighting the human army. As Steve Jobs said "Computer is the bicycle of the mind". It can only take you to places that you can imagine.

It is undeniable that one of the finest minds like Andrei Tarkovsky has redefined movies, but hasn't he also distorted reality ? Similarly, it is equally difficult to create a movie like Hum Apke Hai Kaun**, (a Bollywood movie) that seemed more like a wedding video yet it had something for every last Indian. It did find a new way of storytelling - tell an ordinary one but in a grand fashion. 

Money is not a yardstick of success but an essential one for any creative effort. Movies do not need to consistently make money but the objective of never making any will surely kill an exciting art form permanently. It may be re-imagined, it may employ newer art forms.

But it will always remain a business of dreams.


**My lack of the understanding of the language limits watching Tamil and Malayalam movies, but undoubtedly those are way up the mark compared to Bengal and Bombay.