New Delhi: How do you define a film?
Is it something captured on camera or is this something that deserves to be captured on camera?
What is 'The Godfather'?
A film, an epic, a story, a subtle story, a life portrayed on celluloid, a story so subtle that it achieved the status of an epic, or it is just 'The Godfather'?
The film has completed 40 years but does it look like a 40 year old film?
Well, the dark photography can still confuse the audience in judging the exact date of the film.
I thought that Francis Ford Coppola could have taken a year to shoot the film but the entire shooting didn't take more than 77 days. This fact indicates how clear the storyteller in his mind was.
When Vito Corleone makes an offer we all are already prepared to accept it. The singer Johnny Fontane asks for a help and he is being given the assistance just because he is a family loyalist. Just fifteen minutes into the film and you are already confused about the traditional sense of morality and ethics.
Vito speaks with a stuffed mouth which is capable enough of stuffing silence into your mouth. Orson Welles's 'Touch of Evil' seemed nothing in front of 'The Godfather' due to a very simple reason. The terror was not in the actors' eyes or mannerism; it was in the air.
A scenario where ambiguity of character became the real strength. No clear motives, no hidden agendas, but the family has to be on the top.
Tattaglias' son Bruno gets killed and Michael emerges as the man behind the crime. Did you feel bad about the rise of a gangster?
I guess not.
You wouldn't have felt bad even if you would have been on Tattaglia's side but can you deny the fact that a murder is being 'performed'?
Film schools take 'The Godfather' as a text without realising that the film can kill the student's creativity. It's very natural though. Who wouldn't doubt his own skills of recreating a world after watching 'The Godfather'?
What does the law do?
It provides the logics and arguments to complicate an otherwise simple process of seeking justice; 'The Godfather' does exactly the same.
But he is not the 'authentic' law.
One doesn't get scared by the Corelone family but it gets complicated when the neutral spectator finds the hint of a Corleone inside him.
I doubt if there could be another 'The Godfather' even after next 4o years.
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