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Making of Pride and Prejudice

Mar. 13, 2002

  • Organisation is the backbone of all existences as well as all activities of production.
  • The successful functioning of an organisation is dependent upon the right strategies big and small.
  • If organisation is likened to a car, these strategies can be likened to the fuel and lubricants.
  • Only in the manufacturing factories do we think of any organisation, though organisation pervades all activities as well as existences.
  • In a fixed atmosphere like that of a factory, it is possible to create an organisation and implement the strategies.
  • There are life situations where things are not so fixed as the factory that is stationary. War is the best example.
  • Explorations, expeditions, activities that involve constant movement outdoor, create fluid conditions of space that render organisation precarious. They need an organisation that will retain its liveliness in constantly changing conditions. It takes the concept of organisation to a higher dimension and demands an organisational intelligence that would keep its equilibrium in movement.
  • Strategies are fixed links between two rigid parts like a nut and bolt. Strategies break when the organisation moves.
  • Should strategies work in such flexible conditions, they must be self-shaping with changing space.
  • There are changes observed when an age-old organisation begins to mature into an institution.
  • What is required here is not external rule, but an inner discipline based on values, a self-creative, self-existence that has a greater reference to the inside that is unseen than the visible outside.
  • Filmmaking belongs entirely to this region.
  • Filmmaking and the organisation it needs, is my topic, but I would like to mention the other social virtues of filmmaking.

- It is entirely an art, a creative art, creative in many or most respects of it.

- It belongs to the creativity of imagination.

- Filmmaking, by its exigencies, and its demands that are uncompromising of the most efficient organisation, extends the domain of poetry to the practical arts. Filmmaking is, among other things, organisationally creative technology.

- It can be the immortal poetry of the inexorable laws of mind flowering in Matter.

- All films, all successful films, fully qualify to be so.

- By rising to the demands of the shooting hour, it transcends Time and Space or makes Time and Space creative in the higher organisation.

- When an organisation is required to extend itself to one new dimension, it does not rise but breaks. It can rise to the occasion if it can recast all its existing dimensions into the new form. Thus, filmmaking is creative of creativity, demanding perfect perfection, almost forecasting the supramental organisation of consciousness in the existing rigid mental organisation. Some aspects of it are:

Period movies require the actors to go back in Time and emotionally live there.

Elizabeth finds the language of the story a new language and learns to speak it as she would a new language. She has to rise to emotional intensities there. One who is in a foreign country tries to speak the language of the locality and makes himself a laughing stock. To speak it perfectly is not possible after living there for several generations. This is the experience. Actors rise almost to not only linguistic creativity but to emotional realism. This extends acting to one more dimension.

  • Dressed in unusual costume, one feels inhibited. Actors have to be not normal in that strange physical sensation but be normal characters of that period.
  • Their locations are constantly changing. The filming is not in any particular sequence, but in a sequence necessitated by the needs of shooting.
  • Enumerating all the unnatural conditions created by outdoor shooting, it is not easy to be normal in those conditions. But one has to be creative and be original as a character of bygone times.
  • The organisers are practical artists. With food, settings, weather, they are trying to create natural conditions by artificial methods. Conceive of the practical organisation of social emotions that is in demand. After five months of camping in Longbourn, when the crew moved out, two comments are offered by the book.

1. Those five months were months of cheerful existence.

2. The owner of Longbourn cried at their departure.

Cheerfulness is success. The owner's emotions are indicative of saturated success of maturity in organising the emotions of work.

  • The audience is fastidious and would frown on anything that is not up to the mark according to their ignorance.
  • Audience, thus, represents Life in its exacting nature.
  • It is impossible to reproduce conditions of long ago.
  • Even if it is possible, the truth is today's audience will not appreciate a performance of 1813. The further dimension is filming a story of 1813 is to cast it in an emotional atmosphere of appreciative suitability.
  • The crew may not be aware of it, but they are able to recast the figure of the story into the figure of present expansiveness as they are of the present and work towards their satisfaction.
  • In the film makers we witness an energy that works for 15 hours a day, an ever flexible organisation that is alive in frequently changing locations, an imagination that captures the existence of 1813, rises to the demands of the life-style of the various members of the crew, keeping the schedule of time and the projected budget.
  • Each of the above conditions is impossible to fulfill.
  • To meet the requirements of all this and more simultaneously is yoga of life.
  • This is a field where failure itself is success, as failure means one has commenced and traveled to the end where commencement is an adventure itself.
  • The casting, the contracts with the cast, the investment, keeping the filming within the budget are the lower and more significant ends of filming, as the cast capturing the flavour of the writing.
  • The prime need of investment shows that the future can be built up only on the essence of the past that appreciates the future and submits not only to its practical needs but its imaginative needs too.



story | by Dr. Radut