There is an axiom of literary criticism, expounded by the American scholar Yvor Winters, that should be posted at every film school in the world. Winters insisted that all poetry should make sense in terms of the living experience; even a poem written by T.S. Eliot or Gerald Manley Hopkins, he declared.

Since the serious Indian film-maker always aspires to create ‘poetry on celluloid’, it is imperative that Yvor Winter’s advice be brought into reckoning in all Indian film production companies and film schools aspiring to take cinema beyond the boundaries of story-telling and into the realm of poetry.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s essential interpretation of Sarat Chandra’s ‘Devdas’ emanates from his obvious desire to transform the novel into a cinematic narrative-poem. Yet, as so often happens in Indian cinema when the director aims to create ‘a poem on celluloid’, the basic premises of aesthetic communication become blurred.

Understandably, Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’ also has several precedents within the commercial cinema itself. The most notable and famous of these being Guru Dutt’s ‘Kaaghaz Ke Phool’. Waheeda Rehman was to say, in the course of an interview in the mid-eighties, that Guru Dutt and his team knew, before the film’s theatrical release, that ‘Kaaghaz Ke Phool’ was not going to do well at the box office because it had become “over-technical”.

Nobody can deny a director as gifted as Sanjay Leela Bhansali the right to interpret, or re-interpret, a novel. The best film and theatre productions on great novels and plays are the ones that offer their own interpretation of the writer’s work. Just as Shakespeare’s plays have been re-interpreted by stage and film directors down the ages, great novels too tend to gain from the creativity of film directors who have the courage to appropriately adapt the novel for the film medium. One has to only compare the engaging Hollywood production on Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, starring Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer, with the ponderous, unendurable Sovexportfilm production on the same novel, to immediately concede the right of interpretation to a director.

What Bhansali attempts in ‘Devdas’ is not an interpretation of Sarat Chandra’s novel, but a transcreation of the novel into a ‘pure film’, which Indian film intellectuals believe is something that is closer to poetry than to story-telling. However, Indian notions about what constitutes poetry, inclusive of ‘poetry on celluloid’, are wholly misplaced and misdirected. Most of our film directors and actors believe that poetry is mood, ambiguity and an extremity of emotion. They are unaware that since the mid-twentieth century, poetry is being defined by such precepts as Ezra Pound’s declaration that “poetry is written with brains” not emotions; and T.S. Eliot’s exposition of ‘the idea as a sensation’. Nor are they aware of Albert Camus’ recommendation to the modern artist, that it is a requirement of the times that the artist articulate the most complex of ideas in the simplest of ways.

What almost invariably happens when an Indian film director wants to create ‘poetry on celluloid’ is that he wishes to make every single moment in his film a great moment - of high emotion, grand gestures, extraordinary feelings. Hoping to convey thereby that every single strand of life in the film is nothing short of the exceptional and the incomparable. This level of intensity creates its own one-dimensionality; a monotony that, within half an hour of the film’s opening, destroys the dramatic rhythm that is so essential to the creation of a sense of dramatic surprise in both literature and the performing arts.

The desire to make every split-second in a film to be a great moment in itself tends to become something that is as bland and non-dramatic as the eulogies in praise of great persons that we hear at public functions commemorating them, on winning an award or on their seventy-fifth birthday anniversary.

One has to go back again to the counsel of the world’s most influential poet-critic of the last hundred years, T.S. Eliot, to define the secret of what creativity is all about. Poetry, said Eliot, “transcends from the ridiculous to the sublime”. That is, from the commonplace it rises up to the sublime thanks to the imagination of the poet.

The great films, even the popular classics, instinctively follow the Eliotese recommendation. In its essence the cinema is a medium that incorporates the simplicity of everyday life within the cinematic masterpiece - the way a person walks and sits, moves his hands about, nods his head, shrugs his shoulder, speaks and laughs, turns sad, listens to another, etc. It is against the backdrop of the simple, mundane existence of human behaviour that a great film sets its dramatic surprises, narrative twists and its heart-wrenching moments.

This controlled pendulum-like swing of moods between the ordinary and the extraordinary are what give a film it’s dramatic rhythm and imbues a three-dimensional depth to its emotional content. But if a film-maker ignores this juxtaposition of the commonplace and the exceptional and focuses at every second of the edited film on only the grandiose and the extraordinary, then there is a very great risk that he might violate the first rule of film-making - Thou Shall Not Be Boring!

Unfortunately, contemporary Indian film directors are so obsessed with the belief that art can be created within a feature film only if the film is closer to poetry than to story-telling, that they are constantly trying to deny the basic truth of the feature film that it must be structured and made as ‘a story’, if it is to have even half a chance of coming close to ‘poetry’!

In the case of Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’, which is a product of the commercial cinema circuit, what the film industry has begun to ask is why Bhansali had to make such an exorbitantly expensive film?

The economics of mainstream cinema is such that, at the time of a film’s release, it involves a financial chain of investments stretching from the film financier and the producer to the film’s distributor and the various theatres that are booked for the film’s screening. If a big budget film fails to deliver, it cuts into the pockets of several people along this financial chain.

The moment a big, big budget film is produced, it raises the financial risks of all those who invest in its production or release. Its colossal budget needs, ipso facto, that the film should run long enough to make a profit for each investor. These days there is a school of thought at Mumbai that is becoming more and more influential within the film industry, that it is safer to make an average budget film and go in for smaller returns than make a Titanic of a film which could sink half the industry. Therefore, it is for its own sake that the film industry is praying these days that Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’ runs long enough all over the country to recover costs and price.