The old in the new

By subverting popular idioms, a new wave of filmmakers are redefining Hindi cinema

Once again, we have arrived at a moment in our cinema when the seemingly distinct categories of ‘arthouse’ and ‘commercial cinema’ are collapsing. In the ’80s, when the chasm between these two categories was at its zenith, socially meaningful cinema flourished. Yet apart from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, a scathing satire on the embedded web of corruption, it is hard to recall a film from that period that has survived into mainstream consciousness today. This was after an extraordinary spell in the ’70s, when fuelled by the masterly screenplays of Salim-Javed, films like Deewaar made such categories redundant.

Over the last year, a number of films have challenged those notions, rejecting the ghettoisation of ‘arthouse’ cinema in order to effect change from within the mainstream. Films such as Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and, now, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey have unlocked the potential within popular idioms of Hindi cinema. Contemporary interpretation of the proverbial tale of twin brothers or the story of Devdas for these filmmakers allows easy translatability, giving them a mainstream platform while leaving room for avant-garde expression. Thus, subversion of popular idioms becomes the conduit to weave tales of modern India.

One of the ways in which this subversion is achieved is by privileging disjunctions over continuity. In the original Devdas, for example, his death serves the purpose of preservation of the patriarchal order. However, the subaltern narrative of society’s suppression of women in Devdas is given agency in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. Kashyap’s target is the hypocrisy of patriarchal structures that finds itself in crisis when faced with a more assertive female sexuality. Thus, the lead protagonist played by Abhay Deol encourages sexual liberalism in Paro, but is unable to respond adequately when it threatens to outgrow patriarchal consent. Chanda’s father, on the other hand, commits suicide when shown a mirror to his participation in society’s collective lust which invokes morality while it receives gratification.

In an iconic film such as Ram aur Shyam, the twin brothers are united in pursuit of a common goal— the return to rightful inheritance and restoration of a slightly readjusted feudal order. In Kaminey, for the most part, they engage in a clash of competing self-interests — it seems inevitable that one’s happiness must come at the cost of the other. In earlier versions, the filial bond was sacrosanct, yet Kaminey repeatedly violates this maxim to portray a society getting rapidly atomised. Fittingly, Bhardwaj sets his tale in the brutally competitive world of Dharavi.

Another common thread in these films is the dark, dystopian urban vision, revolving around themes of alienation. The city does not exist as a singular entity — it inhabits diverse worlds, the distance between those is immeasurably vast. This is only too evident in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, a film almost entirely set in the capital that steers clear of Delhi’s dominant representation in cinema. Instead, Banerjee focuses his lens on the claustrophobia of growing up in a west Delhi ghetto, the narrative of people excluded from centres of power. Similarly, the ubiquitous pictures of Marine Drive and Bandra that populate films set in Mumbai are largely absent from Kaminey.

The decade-long reign of the banners of Yash Chopra and Karan Johar, beginning with DDLJ in 1995, came at a moment when the middle classes were grappling with identity — the new wealth could not make them overcome a lingering unease with modernity. Their films celebrated this fraught coexistence, by effortlessly merging regressive values with consumer culture. In Oye Lucky, the protagonist is a victim of both — he seeks to firmly abandon the former, while wanting to conquer the latter. Oye Lucky replicates some aspects of the loud, baroque film with Punjabi characters, only for it to serve as a form of critique. Lucky is the antithesis of the archetype Punjabi lead in, for example, Karan Johar’s films. He never completely belongs in a consumerist milieu while the ‘native culture’ so beloved of their films is, for him, a prison that he must escape.

Another remarkable aspect is the astute skill with which these filmmakers have incorporated contemporary events, without appearing contrived or cynical. From the right-wing politics of Raj Thackeray’s MNS to the DPS MMS scandal, their interpretation has taken the form of progressive interventions.

Vishal Bhardwaj, Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap are at the forefront of a new wave of filmmakers reshaping popular Hindi cinema, merging tribute with critique. Their films have served as expressions of dissent in a cinematic culture veering towards lazy self-congratulation. Contributing to constructive change from within mainstream cinema, they have taken up old chestnuts and infused them with radical energy, opening up new horizons in which we can re-imagine the popular Hindi film.

This piece appeared in the op-ed pages of The Indian Express on August 20.

Through an astute lens

For almost three decades, cinema has been a perceptive mirror to the forces shaping modern Iran

Mania Akbari in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten

As the crisis in Iran escalates, the pictures of protests and unrest would not have surprised those who follow Iranian cinema closely. Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian cinema has developed a subtle language of dissent, circumnavigating the dreaded censors of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture and holding a mirror to the country’s fissures. Film critic Godfrey Cheshire wrote in Newsweek, “Iranian films show us a society struggling with itself, trying to reconcile cultural traditions with political choices, vaunted ideals with thorny realities.”

The most visible struggle, for those of us who view Iran from the outside, is the issue of women’s rights. Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple, a film about the forced confinement of two women, and Jafar Panahi’s Offside, which trained its lens on the exclusion of women from football stadiums, are among several such acclaimed films.

But to understand how Iranian cinema articulates its political protest, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten is particularly revealing. In the film, a dashboard cam eavesdrops on a divorcee’s impromptu conversations with fellow passengers in car journeys across Tehran which bring Iran’s sexual and social policies into sharp focus. In one scene, a camera focusses on a character as she scratches wildly around her hijab in the summer heat. In another, the veil drops in a moment of catharsis but is quickly put back on — Kiarostami has made his point by showing us the exhilaration of the unlocked genie. In an environment where dialogue can swiftly be clamped down upon, Iranian cinema has mastered the art of subversive suggestion, without leaving any footprints.

The picture of Tehran that has emerged in recent days has been that of a city divided — the pro-Moussavi supporters who have crowded the elite, affluent neighbourhoods in the capital’s north distinctly separate from the poorer neighbourhoods in the city’s south where support for incumbent president Ahmadinejad is strong.

In a country where one-fifth of the population accounts for 45 per cent of the household income, the class divisions point to irreconcilable narratives. Iran’s cinema has observed the chasms that separate the westernised elite and the middle classes, who long for greater freedoms and a secular state, and their poorer fellow citizens, who support religion’s primal defining role.

Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold is the tale of an overweight pizza delivery boy who, in encounters with Tehran’s wealthy classes, realises his inability to transcend his social class. Majid Majidi’s The Song of Sparrows takes this even further — portraying the working classes as powerless and inconsequential, he shows the primal role of religion as a form of social glue that gives them a sense of community and belonging.

What gives Iranian cinema its significant political weight is how often its films blur the distinctions between fiction and documentary. Solely relying on dialogue and minimal use of supporting narrative devices like background music, Iranian cinema regularly comes up with genre-defying films —Ten and The Apple being two examples — impossible to determine whether their realm is fiction or non-fiction.

At other times, they can be remarkably prescient. In 1997, Kiarostami’s most celebrated film, Taste of Cherry, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in the same week that an assertive electorate chose reformist intellectual Mohammad Khatami as president. Taste of Cherry, the tale of a nihilist who drives on the outskirts of Tehran looking for an accomplice to complete a task after he commits suicide, was distinctly at odds with the euphoric mood in Iran at the time. However, reformist hopes withered away as hardliners prevailed, leading to an environment of frustration and failure similar to the predicament of the protagonist.

But its role as an instrument against authoritarianism retains primacy. In his book, Close Up Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future, Hamid Dabashi has written, “In the cinema, we were re-born as global citizens in defiance of the tyranny of the time and the isolation of the space that sought to confine us. In cinema, everything was possible, and in that possibility we defied our paralysing limitations. The cinema revealed our hidden hopes as nation.”

Armed with the radical fervour of artists under siege, Iran’s filmmakers have created a searing chronicle of a fascinating and complex society — its tenuous social fabric, the weight of history, the arduous battle between tradition and modernity — as it charts its way forward in the modern world.

This piece appeared in the op-ed pages of The Indian Express on June 20.

The indefinite deferral of closure

Naseem’s continuing narrative can be defined by all that has happened since 1992

Watching Naseem with the advantage of the retrospective context of the last 14 years, one can only admire Saeed Mirza’s prescience. Released in 1995, Naseem was created with the clay of those tumultuous times, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Through the relationship between the young girl Naseem and her grandfather, it portrays the escalating communal atmosphere of that period.

Yet Naseem is not a secular film, not at least in the way secularism is conventionally defined. Naseem’s grandfather, who represents the epitome of religious tolerance, frequently delves into the nostalgia of his days in Agra, spent with his mates Tripathi and Niyaz. In recounting memories of his youthful days, he never emphasizes even once on Tripathi’s Hindu religion. Mirza is drawing our attention to the matter-of-fact nature of such inter-religious social relationships. The grandfather’s Agra of pre-Independence is not just an idyll of religious tolerance, but united by language and regional culture. Mirza is interested not in the nature of erstwhile secular ethos, but in the inextricable syncretism of the two religions that held society like glue.

Therefore, the deteriorating health and inevitable death of the grandfather (on December 6, 1992) with his love of poetry and ethos of religious tolerance is seen as the irreversible decline of shared values. The death of a Hindu shopkeeper’s wife, with whom Naseem shared a friendship, is a metaphor for the severing of communication links and inter-religious interaction in the increasingly fractured social climate. What may be seen as an ‘ending’ in Naseem could also be interpreted as an indefinite deferral of closure. The continuation of the film’s narrative can be defined and described in all that has happened since, including the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

As a nation dies slowly

Two decades on, Amma Ariyan has lost none of its evocative power and political relevance

CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE: Released in 1986, Amma Ariyan remains a masterpiece

Early in Amma Ariyan, Purushan enters a hospital in Calicut where he has come to identify a dead body. As he walks in the hospital compound looking for the mortuary, we can hear the seething cries of a newly born child. It is not coincidence, for this death of a former acquaintance would midwife the birth of a new movement.

It becomes clear in Amma Ariyan, or Report to Mother, that the mother is a metaphor for something much larger, the nation itself. Purushan has set out to Delhi to pursue his research, promising to write to his mother from wherever he is. After finding the dead body of a person he faintly recognises, which is later revealed to be that of Hari, he decides to go to Hari’s house to inform his mother about her son’s death. The film takes the form of a letter written by Purushan to his mother.

Amma Ariyan therefore becomes the account of those who have been left outside the system and the narrative of the nation that promised to embrace all its citizens. On the way, Purushan meets some of Hari’s friends and they join the journey. Director John Abraham traverses the memory of this group to unravel the character of Hari, and this is closely interwoven with the turbulent political history of Kerala in the 1970’s. Brilliantly shot in black-and-white, the film weaves fact and fiction (Abraham filmed actual protests) to create a powerful narrative of political unrest faced with an increasingly corrupt and oppressive state.

Towards the end, the group finally reaches Hari’s mother to give her the news. Soon we find that the group has metamorphosed into a crowd, which Abraham uses to suggest that the journey begun by Purushan will not end here. The ending of the film could be seen as the people finally uniting to question those in power, but critics have often wondered if Abraham prophetically was satirising the de-ideologised tamasha of political activity which never endeavours to investigate and demolish root causes of oppression.

In one memorable scene, the travelling group reads from Guatemalan revolutionary Otto Rene Castillo’s poem Apolitical Intellectuals – “One day the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the simplest of our people. They will be asked what they did when their nation died out slowly, like a sweet fire small and alone.” This is of immense resonance in an age such as ours when civil society begins to speak the language of power instead of representing the concerns of the subaltern.

Amma Ariyan was released in 1986 as the first film of the Odessa Collective, which obtained the funds by collecting money from the ordinary people of Kerala. An example of effective cooperative filmmaking, the film also serves as a reminder of the social and political possibilities of cinema once it is let loose from the hegemony of business and power interests.

This review was published in Mise en Scene, the journal of the 2nd Women’s Film Festival in Chennai.

Occupying an imaginative space

Even the most dedicated cineastes often struggle to name 10 women filmmakers in response to an impromptu ambush. This is because filmmaking has almost entirely been seen as a masculine enterprise. The intention here is not to disregard the enormous achievements of women in all fields of the filmmaking craft. All evidence suggests, especially in the last decade or so, that women are increasingly occupying spaces that were previously considered exclusively domains of men.

Therefore, it is surprising that despite their pedigree and excellence and increasingly substantial contribution to the craft of filmmaking, they have occupied very little imaginative space in the psyche of the film viewer. Even today, it is far easier to spark furious debate and discussion on the films of Jean-Luc Godard than on the work of women filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Sally Potter .

This failure to occupy the imaginative space is a peculiar predicament. On the one hand, we have more women filmmakers than ever before yet they are only a footnote in the dominant canonical history of film. No woman has ever won the Oscar for Best Director in the 81 years since the conception of the Academy Awards. It is not to say that the Oscars are the pinnacle of cinematic achievement or confer a greater legitimacy to any body of work. But it is only evidence of how hard it has been for woman filmmakers to find equal representation in mainstream cinema.

Thus, anybody who is dismissive of the idea of a women’s film festival must put into perspective the lack of proportion between achievement and recognition. The battle has not been won. The purpose is not only to positively discriminate in favour of filmmakers of a particular gender. The idea is also to challenge the hegemony of mass culture that has effortlessly seamed into the status quo of society reproducing ideas not only of patriarchy, but of class and power.

In its breathtaking range of films, the 2^nd women’s film festival has the possibility of not only broadening the horizons of those who love film, but also posing as a site of contestation of the dominant narratives that today pervade our lives.

This piece was published in Mise en Scene, the journal of the 2nd Women’s Film Festival in Chennai.

Cinema Today

We live in an age in which the culture of cinema has been substantially impoverished by the hegemonic banality of Hollywood. It continues to be the case. The best films are reduced to the ghettos of film festivals, while tasteless dubbed versions of ordinary American films are everywhere to be found.

The review format, in its current form, with the vulgar system of star ratings has only worsened its current plight. Cinema today, is in danger of being annihilated as an art form, and its future existence may solely be in the form of a consumer good.

Hence, the importance of criticism. We have a battle at hand.

All of us, who have spent hours and hours in the company of the great masters, who have loved this mechanical art with the passion of an only love – we have an obligation to rescue it.

In 1967, Jean Renoir wrote about Andre Bazin, “For that king of our time, the cinema, has likewise its poet. That king on whose brow he has placed a crown of glory is all the greater for having been stripped by him of the falsely glittering robes that hampered its progress. It is, thanks to him, a royal personage rendered healthy, cleansed of its parasites, fined down – a king of quality – that our grandchildren will come to delight upon.”

The critic today is faced with a monumental challenge. He must rid film criticism of its slumber, and reinvigorate it with ideas. Every thriving art form has a healthy, impassioned sphere of criticism.

Cinema has lost its way – we have exchanged eclectic cuisine with junk food. We, as critics, must speak of the health hazards of this junk. We must call a spade a spade – we have to restore cinema to the idealistic vision of its greatest innovators, return it to madness and passion. Through criticism, we shall reclaim our endangered art.

It was Fellini who said that “a different language is a different vision of life.” It is what we need to save our king, the cinema, who still sits on the throne, but is beset with grave illness.

This piece appeared on the FIPRESCI website and for the International Film Festival of Kerala.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat

Somewhere in the middle of Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier), Bruno Forestier runs away from the French secret agents that have ordered him to kill an Algerian sympathiser. As he drives away, he thinks – ‘I don’t know whether it felt happy to be free, or free to feel happy.’

In many ways, it is this existential conflict that is central to Godard’s early films. As we have seen in Breathless, Contempt and Bande a part, among many others, the protagonists loath the security of a normal existence, but are unable to find agency or direction in the tumult of a frenetic, absurd existence they chose. Often, we see faint glimpses of nostalgia, although for Godard characters, the idea of a return is beyond consideration.

In Le Petit Soldat, his follow up to Breathless, we see this intellectual confusion and lack of purpose find admission in the structure and form of the film itself. The Algerian struggle was a flashpoint of physical and ideological warfare, but it left a large chunk floating in indecision about which side of the fence they stood. Or even, whether they were fence sitters at all.

Godard, in the midst of a similar predicament, chose to explore it through his film. For long stretches, the film reflects this lack of stable vantage-points, as it meanders mostly purposelessly, from one argument to another while endorsing none. Bruno is captured by the Arabs and undergoes torture, not for any conviction or purpose, but in a manner of prolonged idiosyncrasy. He falls in love with Veronica, played by Anna Karina in her cinematic debut, who is working for the other side.

The film’s plot is opaque and absurd at times, and I guess, this is the effect Godard wanted to achieve. Bruno and Veronica are unlike revolutionaries in every way – not patriotic, lacking ideological moorings and grand ambition. They are characters whose actions are propelled by forces outside their control, and even when they are in the thick of action, they are somehow outside of it.

Le Petit Soldat is a technically more stable film than Breathless. Raoul Coutard’s cinematography stands out, and he even gets a cheeky reference by the narrator during the film. This small reference to his cinematographer in a way defines the maverick Godard touch. In a larger sense, this is how he sees cinema – as a toy – open to manipulation and improvisation while remaining at all times a medium, not a recorder of truth or reality, but a multiplicity of interpretations and illusions.

Ingmar Bergman on intellect

I can’t say anything that hasn’t already been said about Ingmar Bergman.

Found this brilliant quote though while digging through the newspapers today -

I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.

The genius filmmaker who explored the existentialist crisis in a Godless universe with films such as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander left an indelible mark on the cinematic world.
Woody Allen called him ‘the greatest artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.’

The Tramp’s Travails

Recently watched Charlie Chaplin’s masterly 1931 film City Lights and got interested in the life of the man who at one time represented the most famous image on earth.

His political frankness, as opposed to correctness, fascinated me. He addressed an Arts for Russia Dinner in honour of the Russian soldiers incurring the wrath of the paranoid, Cold War administration in the United States. A man who believed that patriotism was the greatest insanity ever suffered by man, Chaplin never became an American citizen despite living there for thirty years.

In 1952, after he sailed to England for the premiere of Limelight (his only film with Buster Keaton), the US administration revoked his re-entry.

The genius adroitly replied:

I have no further use for America. I wouldn’t go
back if Jesus Christ was President.

Another astonishing fact I came across – In 1972, after Chaplin was given the Lifetime Oscar (for the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century), he received the longest standing ovation in the history of the Academy Awards, lasting a full five minutes.

Journalism as Art in Tokyo Olympiad

In the beginning of Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, we are shown images of destruction and demolition. A few moments later, Tokyo’s strikingly new Olympic stadium is abuzz with fervent emotion at the Opening Ceremony. In a few magnificent shots on widescreen canvas, Ichikawa is not just showing us the splendor and magnificence of the Games, or the optimism they arouse every four years, but also the rebirth of a war-ravaged Japan.

In Tokyo Olympiad, Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, creating a catalog of extraordinary observations that range from the expansive to the intimate. It could be classified as a documentary, but very often it transcends those boundaries of reportage into the realm of art and becomes a meditative journey on the beauty of the human body and the strength of the human spirit.

It unfolds with the slow, firm pace of an epic, chronologically chronicling the event. Each constituent of the Games is shot with affection, and technical mastery. Ichikawa revealed that he shot with telefocus cameras, because he was not interested as much in the activity of the sport itself, as he was in the emotion before and afterwards. Throughout the film, this is evident, the camera is almost obstinately trying to unravel the mind of the athlete beneath the tense posterior. We see the demands placed on the body and mind by each sport and the different attributes required to succeed in each one. The film, though, does not excessively glorify the winner. Winning and losing are secondary, it is taking part that is important.

Throughout the film, the sun comes across as an important motif. It is used in the beginning of the film with images of the sun shining brightly at dawn. To think of it as an easy metaphor for Japan as The Land of the Rising Sun would be missing the point. What Ichikawa is trying to do is to represent the sun as an entity to be compared with equality and oneness, his logic being that ‘the sun shines equally on everyone.’ And sure enough, the sun descends from sunset to night as the Closing Ceremony comes about.

The Olympic Games are held up as that bright spark, that dream, when all ethnicities and races merge together in one human embrace. In one of the most emotional sequences, the joyous, disorderly Closing Ceremony is commented upon – This is what world peace would look like. Another dazzlingly shot part is the marathon, held up as the ultimate example of human resilience – the ability to constantly push boundaries, endure adversity, all in order to succeed, and a desire to excel.

Its digressions, detail and meditative resonance took me back to the magical Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire. However at two hours and fifty minutes, Tokyo Olympiad is a bit too long, and I felt some of it could have been chopped off at the editor’s desk. But one can sense that Ichikawa’s ambition is to sketch an all-encompassing portrait of the biggest sporting extravaganza on the planet.

And for the most part, Tokyo Olympiad is a mesmerising and enjoyable film. It intimately captures a cataclysmic event in the renaissance of a nation, while making us keenly aware of the sense of equality that sport instills – a universal dream we all must aspire to.