Just Because It Entertained, It’s Not Art?

Somewhere along the way, we started deciding which kind of cinema deserves respect, and which one just deserves revenue. We began applauding silence as sophistication and mocking sound as noise. A film that makes you sit still, reflect, cry, feel heavy and heart-wrenched is automatically called art. But a film that makes you laugh, cheer, scream, or whistle? That’s dismissed as loud and forgettable.

The problem is not with either kind of cinema. The problem is in how we’ve been taught to see. One is hailed as meaningful. The other? A guilty pleasure. One goes to film festivals. The other goes to theatres. But the truth is: both deserve the red carpet. Both deserve celebration.

Because let’s be honest cinema is not one thing. It’s not just a silent close-up of pain or a handheld shot of a man smoking in existential dread. It’s also a wide shot of a crowd roaring when their hero arrives. It’s a perfectly timed cut that makes a punch land harder. It’s the scream that breaks silence. It’s the music cue that makes an entire theatre cry in sync. The commercial filmmaker isn’t less of an artist just because his canvas is brighter and louder.

It takes a different kind of intelligence to be massy. Knowing how to read the mood of an entire region, how to pull people to a theatre after a hard day’s work, how to write scenes that ripple across generations not one or two critics. That’s not an accident. That’s mastery.

And still, somehow, the ones who make the masses move are excluded from conversations about art. Or worse, they are tolerated only when they make a “serious” film.

Let’s rewind to Spielberg. The man who redefined storytelling, childhood, wonder, and emotion. He gave the world Jaws, E.T., Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones. He changed the very fabric of popular cinema but for years, he wasn’t taken seriously. The so-called “highbrow” critics looked at him as someone who just made crowd-pleasers. It took Schindler’s List, a historical, black-and-white, emotionally devastating film for the industry to finally let him in.

So what was he before that? A magician? A cash machine? Or just invisible because he was too “successful” to be considered an artist?

This isn’t just an international problem. Here too, we’ve built the same gate. We praise our “auteur” directors only when they make small, serious films that no one interrupts with applause. But when someone makes a high-voltage scene that gets 500 people to react the same way at the same second? That’s seen as cheap.

And yet, when those very same emotional moments are re-enacted in an indie film, with minimal lighting and a realistic tone, we suddenly see it as “brilliant.” The content didn’t change only the packaging did. So are we really celebrating craft? Or are we just addicted to looking “cultured”?

The worst part? We point fingers at our mainstream directors while praising similar storytelling when it comes from Hollywood. We say, “Wow, that’s Spielberg-level storytelling” when it’s done abroad but laugh when it’s done here. We want our masala moments only if they’re subtitled. We call it cinema when it’s foreign, and cringe when it’s local.

But cinema is cinema. Whether it’s a tear falling in silence or a theatre erupting in cheers. Whether it’s a Rs. 5 crore indie or a Rs. 500 crore entertainer. One makes the cinema live. The other makes the industry live. Both are necessary. One without the other is a dying art form or a dying business. Neither should exist in isolation. And neither should exist in shame.

It’s time we start honoring the creators who bring money, pulse, jobs, and joy into the system. The ones who understand how to make the producer survive. The ones who understand what a family in the last row of the cheapest seat came looking for. It’s not easy to make a thousand people feel the same emotion in a moment. It’s not easy to make a screen feel like a festival.

So why is there no award for that? Why is there no recognition for the filmmaker who saves a studio, revives an actor, or pulls cinema back into culture?

Let’s stop pretending that just because something is popular, it must be dumb. Let’s stop putting art into caste systems. Let’s look at how stories are told, not just how quietly they’re told. Let’s be bold enough to say: this was mass, and it was also masterful. This was fun, and it was also art.

Because the biggest truth is this, if we don’t celebrate the creator, eventually, we’ll have nothing left to critique. Just empty halls. And broken reels.

- Pearl May Art