New Delhi: The battle is not just against arbitrary censorship anymore. After smoking and animal safety, filmmakers in India may now have to deal with disclaimers on the action and road sequences that play out in their films and television programmes to drive home the point that these are not to be tried without expert guidance or supervision.

Last month, the Indian Film and TV Producers’ Council issued a circular to recommend that producers exercise caution in depicting scenes “of rash, negligence and dangerous driving" and insert appropriate disclaimers to promote road safety.

“Film is a business of creating illusions. Here, you’re saying you don’t trust the people watching the film enough to know it’s an illusion, and that it’s not supposed to be repeated. The cigarette packet says smoking is injurious to health, why should a film repeat the same thing?" asked filmmaker Atul Sabharwal, writer-director of Arjun Kapoor-starrer Aurangzeb, who posted the circular on his Twitter profile.

Though the council only recommends the disclaimer to be inserted at the beginning of the movie, the bigger controversy today surrounds disclaimers that are super-imposed on various scenes in a film. Sabharwal recalls attending a show of period drama Bajirao Mastani at a theatre in Mumbai, where during a crucial confrontation scene between Ranveer Singh and character actor Raza Murad, there is a tiger chained near Murad, and the words, “The tiger has been shot abroad," are immediately flashed across the screen, disrupting the sequence.

“It’s a full cinema hall and suddenly the words appear at the bottom of the screen," Sabharwal said. “When something suddenly flashes on the screen, your attention goes there and the whole theatre starts reading it," he added.

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap had waged a battle with the censor board for over a year when they required his psychological thriller Ugly to carry a no-smoking disclaimer at the lower end of the screen each time a character lit up a cigarette. Director Madhur Bhandarkar, who incidentally is also joint secretary at the producers’ council, took the matter to court when the CBFC asked for a similar ticker for his Kareena Kapoor-starrer Heroine.

“A film is a work of fiction. And the world has changed today; everyone, including young kids, is online. They all know the kind of duplicates and the technology that is used in films. Nobody has to be spoon-fed," Bhandarkar said.

He added that he wasn’t aware of the latest recommendation by the council on promoting road safety. However, veteran producer and vice-president of the council Ramesh Taurani mentioned how several films and television programmes already incorporate such disclaimers to promote road safety.

“I don’t think it affects the narrative at all," Taurani said.

To be sure, the primary argument to support such public interest disclaimers lies in the impact films and other media have on society and young impressionable minds. Indeed as statistics from a World Health Organisation global report on trends in prevalence of tobacco smoking, for instance, show, India’s smoking population has reduced to 101.3 million in 2015 from 111.8 million in 2010.

But for filmmakers, disclaimers continue to be an un-aesthetic distraction that take away from their plot. Especially when, unlike a formal advertisement, the film is not meant to promote a particular brand.

“It’s a lame excuse," Sabharwal said. “If films do affect society and people want to recreate in real life what they see in a film, then I believe cities like New York and Washington would have been blown apart many times."

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