Cinema Marte Dum Tak: Vasan Bala says pulp filmmakers didn't initially trust they'd get dignified depiction | Exclusive

The new Prime Video docu series Cinema Marte Dum Tak has been garnering praise from all corners. The show, which has filmmaker Vasan Bala as its creative head, talks about the history and economics of pulp Hindi cinema. These films, which saw their boom in the 90s, were low-budget semi-erotic, horror films that found popularity among smaller cities in north India. The series shows how the industry started and how it ended due to censorship and greed and brings back four iconic filmmakers from the genre and gets them to direct one more film.

In an exclusive chat with DNA, Vasan Bala chats about Cinema Marte Dum Tak, why it did not want to pass judgement on these filmmakers’ work, and how difficult it was to get them on board. Excerpts:

The show is being praised for bringing a non-mainstream perspective to pulp cinema. What’s your take on that adulation?

What has been really heartwarming is that people have connected with the emotion, seen them as people and not a grade of human beings but human beings who wanted to tell stories and live their lives in a certain way.

How did you decide the tone of the series, the one where you don’t mock or pass judgement on these filmmakers and don’t look down upon their work?

That was the first thought itself. We didn’t arrive at it. Even though the proposition can sound funny, spoofy, but that is not the route we are ever going to take. The documentary is not about us or what I think of them but who they are in their voice. The idea was to force neither our judgements, nor our analyses. None of that should taint our documentary. That was of prime importance. We also followed through that in our edit because there is enough scope for manipulation there. I am glad that has been picked up and people have connected with the show probably because of that.

Given that the pulp cinema industry in India died in the early 2000s, these filmmakers were away from the limelight for two decades. How difficult was it to convince them to do this?

It took a while. There was no easy conversation or fast conversation. They have been under the radar for such a long time that even they were a little surprised or stumped about us contacting them. Obviously, they would not be trusting of us to talk about them in a dignified way. All credit to the directors and the producers of the show, who all kept at it and kept convincing them of how we are looking at the show. That relentlessness has shaped the show.

Before you made this series, what was your familiarity with this genre, the pulp Hindi cinema that is often described as B-grade or C-grade cinema?

I was never a connoisseur of that cinema but I am aware of it. When you go into the VHS circuit, you look for Purana Mandir and Veerana, you wouldn’t get them because those were very busy titles. So you’d be given some other VHS. Then you end up watching something by Hari Ram Singh where you stumble upon these titles and find something different in them. Earliest discovery was bout Joginder’s films and then I came to know about Kanti Shah because Goonda became such a big hit. Vinod Talwar’s Raat Ke Andhere Mein was a popular tile. Slowly, you discover all of them.

While these films were not drawing room conversations, they were still mainsteam to an extent…

Yes, the ambition was to be mainstream.

Yes, because a sizable number of the population was going to watch them. But yet, as the docu series mentions, they were caught in that class divide and there was no effort to regularise them and bring them under the certification fold.

When Mr Vijay Anand was in the CBFC, he suggested that these films have a AA, AAA rating above the A we have. But that never went through, unfortunately. We never considered them legitimate which is why they had to jump the system and sneak in bits illegally. There was a huge audience that wanted to be gratified. Those were interesting times with a highly unorganised market.

With streaming services, there are a lot of shows that are of the semi-erotic nature. Do you think there is a market to revive these pulp films on those platforms in a similar manner?

Yeah, but they are already being made on certain apps in their own way. The only thing missing there is horror. Now it’s straightforward soft porn. Earlier, the fun was it was mixed with a couple of genres. You had to justify the erotica with another genre. But today they straightaway go for it. It was a like a cloak and dagger play, which was fun.

You make an interesting point about horror, because that is the genre most popular with these films, be it by the Ramsay brothers or Kanti Shah. Would you credit them for making the genre popular among the masses so when so-called mainstream Bollywood filmmakers came, the public had a taste for horror?

Mainstream Bollywood had made horror in films like Naagin and Jaani Dushman. But they were far in between. They weren’t being regularly made. It was only the Ramsays who made it a regular affair. So I agree to an extent. The advantage of the genre is you don’t need stars, which is why it works as it can be made on a lower budget and the return on investment is huge. That is why the popularity of the genre is there everywhere be it Hollywood, Latin America, or French cinema.