If I’m honest, I’ll admit that there’s quite a bit I don’t know about Pakistani cinema. I’m used to learning about film through reading books and listening to lectures. Without articles to look up in a database on its history, I become increasingly aware that I need to develop my own curriculum to address this curiosity. Creating such a syllabus requires a framework. Any framework that’s applied to understanding “foreign” cinema as I would have learned in school could be applicable. This usually means looking up how the industry was introduced to the showcasing of cinema. Then it goes onto the technicals; how film as a medium was engineered and produced on the soil. This would highlight a few key films, their makers who might be known or unknown, but their work requires recognition after some passage of film and crossing of borders because of the impact such films made on society; even if it caused a small stir in the local area, but didn’t make it particularly newsworthy. If such was the case, then I would expect to learn about how there was enough traction from these small wins which led to the first major international success. If there wasn’t a payoff, then there might be mention of a lull until some catalyst–an actor, a producer, an anthropologist with gifts, or sheer competition–riled up general interest and production capacity. Some cinematic events might have happened along the way alongside a country’s economic and social history. Those would be things I expected to learn about.

But any of the few film industries I have learned about have been in countries which stayed the same to the time its industry began to the time I was introduced to them. (Godard’s France was still geographically the same as the Auguste and Louis Lumière’s.) Such would be a controversial statement about Pakistani cinema. It simply isn’t right to say that Pakistani cinema began just when Pakistan was created, but it also seems ethically ambiguous to say filmmakers like Satyajit Ray were Pakistani filmmakers when their productions state their origins as “Hindustani” and the modern ethnicity of them is not regional to current day Pakistan. The pursuit in understanding Pakistani cinema history also means acknowledging Pakistani history. This is likely a broader question that thinkers all over the world consider during a country’s succession, about how to think about the history of a nationality when it has been recently constructed. Considering it is a construct, I would prefer to approach the history through a construct that regards Pakistani cinema as that involving major infrastructural backing or involvement within the region that is considered Pakistan today, in March of 2024. It is worth acknowledging how the industry in surrounding regions impacted Pakistani cinema. However, specific connections between events and films should be made, even if they are made speculatively. As long as the pursuit is honest and is aware of the history that the government has been affected and affecting others to the point where it is formed by its involvement, it should stand to be defined as what makes the field of Pakistani film history. Perhaps it is speculative, but it may be that had Satyajit Ray lived and worked in a time where the area he was working in was called East Pakistan, he would not consider his works Pakistani, but Bangladeshi. If all the backing and operations of the films and/or a substantial influence on Ray’s filmmaking journey were not tied to what could ever be considered the overall (West) Pakistani area, a connection between Ray and Pakistani film history would have to relate to inspiration of one film to another made and supported in the area of what is considered Pakistan or with the support of people who identified as Pakistanis. 

A similar process would apply to modern day India. The way the relationship between the two countries have affected Pakistan’s access to Indian cinema seems fitting to be considered part of Pakistani film history–even if the films are not produced in the same country after a split and no impact between the two countries occurred in the production. Even if the box office in Pakistan was modest compared to an Indian film’s impact on other territories, a film’s impact on society seems worth noting as part of its society’s history. This might relate to the way I view my relationship with Indian cinema as compared to those in my parents’ generation. Having access to Indian cinema my entire life, I always considered it as a consistent part of my heritage knowledge base. Those of my parents’ ages may think the same way after living abroad most of their adulthood. But some may have thought specific films which were not released during their childhood are not part of their history, because they literally weren’t and couldn’t be part of their upbringing. These films, by their absence, seem to be noteworthy within reason of their mention as part of Pakistani film history, even if had no other relationship to Pakistan, other than the fact that they were specifically or collectively not to be shown in Pakistan at a certain time. Unless Atif Aslam’s involvement in a Bollywood film is known to generate a feeling of connection to the film from Pakistanis, resulting in economic or social relevance, it seems difficult to consider his work as part of Pakistan’s film history. 

Looking into Pakistani film history means examining the interplay of film and societal history of a region. A film’s lack of entry into a country or a people’s lack of access is telling of its impact on society. These situations matter in the case of geoblocking or how a local independent filmmaker’s anonymity sustains despite their talent and democratization of technology. While I never learned about the Lumière Brothers’ impact on France’s economy or society as a whole as part of my cinematic education, learning about these factors in Pakistan does affect the nature of aesthetics and topics explored in its film industry.

Danial Gondal