A SITE on the internet offers quite a detailed account of the career path taken by Ali Sufyan Afaqi, a famous Pakistani film man who passed away in Lahore on Tuesday. It maps Afaqi Sahib’s start as a journalist, his crossover to cinema originally as a writer and his eventual return to the newspaper.

Journalist. Film journalist. Filmmaker. That’s a familiar route and nor has Afaqi Sahib been the only one to make the switch for political reasons. It is about how you want to tell the story. The biographical sketch says ASA found himself too constrained by the limits placed on journalism by the advent of Ayub Khan’s martial law in 1958. He decided that film was the medium which offered him greater freedom to express.

One inherent message here is that he thought, and rightly so, that film audiences were likely to yield to or were more prepared to be treated to subtle, nuanced storytelling.

The curtain has long fallen on the phase when the timid would be overwhelmed by the directness of the message-oriented theatre.

Without this assumption the free hand, even if in relative terms, he thought he had in conveying his message across would have amounted to little. That set the film a little apart from the stark realities of everyday journalism.

Afaqi Sahib made many films between the two martial laws of 1958 and 1977 — the second military rule perhaps making him realise that cinema, too, did not now offer him too much space to interact with people.

He was associated with many leading film directors and for a brief period in the early 1970s, he was himself considered to be a very successful director. That was when Aas, released in 1972 and his directorial debut, ran to packed houses in the country.

A couple of years later came Aabroo. The film didn’t quite live up to his promise but was good enough to be part of the earliest film memories of a young boy from amongst the family audience ASA was aiming at.

The intended message of the film is hard to recall. Given one’s preoccupation with the comic relief delivered in the form of timely nuggets it is doubtful if anything that could be called ‘of substance’ according to the prevalent standards was ever registered.

What happened was that, through the relief scenes that Afaqi Sahib had employed to lead his audience towards his solution to the conflict — the ending, according to memory, necessitated the death of many of his characters — a personal premise to experience films was formed. For whatever sundry objectives that defined its making, it was assumed that to be entertaining was not exactly a bad quality for a film to have.

In time, one learnt that this was not a unique formula. So many others in the audience craved similar, if not always the same, kind of experience and one needed to be a little more imaginative in one’s interpretation of a story to claim to have grasped some of the fine layers in a story, the picturised and the written versions both. Maybe you wouldn’t want to talks about it as frankly as you do now but you would find some substance, or simply some fleeting moments of your own to remember in every story told.

A so-called ‘commercial’ film would not be a topic of high discussion, until  recently when the filmmaker — mainly the Indian ones since Indian films have been such an integral part of our lives —  would themselves remove this divide between the ‘mainstream and the ‘parallel’. Today the fashionable thing to say is that there is no distinction between films as art film and commercial films.

Today, there are films which are good and films that are not so good.

That is so unless you want to have a second look at some of the recent stuff churned out in cinema studios and create a distinction on the basis of the directness and bluntness of the message. The freedom and the subtlety a young A.S. Afaqi aspired to when he switched over to films all these years back is perhaps considered unsuitable for times as debilitating as these. 

The curtain has long fallen on the phase when the timid would be overwhelmed and terrified by the directness of the parallel, meaningful, message-oriented theatre in Pakistan. Now a layman’s account of a play by someone as talented as Anwar Maqsood holding forth through narrations by characters from national history gathered on one stage is enough to keep you away.

There is Waar, there are a couple of films by Shoaib Mansoor, that have been hailed for their message and for meeting a demand, albeit with no great emphasis on periodic relief during the story narration, with no nuances to think about. In fact with no stress on storytelling.

If Pakistan has its great leaders from history to invite on lecturing tours every now and then, across the border, Rajkumar Hirani, too, is compelled to resurrect Gandhi after trying out Munna Bhai as the delivery boy with reasonable success. He then makes an attempt to rediscover his old frequency and is able to delightfully mock the establishment courtesy of the Three Idiots, only to next fall for PK. It required plenty of courage. Did it require any great storytelling skills that so many in the audiences thought Hirani possesses?

Is the message — or the subject backed by technology available for picturisation — enough and do the filmmakers have to be so blunt, so matter-of-fact in their portrayal of the realities that the ‘feature’ sometimes appears to be encroaching on the ordinary documentary?

There are some members in the audience who find these portrayals of the present so real that they cannot help but consistently turn their faces away for relief. So great is the force in the message relentlessly hurled their way that it leaves them with little breathing space.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2015

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