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EDITORIAL “THE CINEPHILE IS AN ORPHAN WHO CHOOSES TO BE KIDNAPPED BY A RATHER SPECIAL PASSER-BY WHO LAUNCHES HIM, BUT NOT JUST ANY OLD WAY, ON HIS APPRENTICESHIP IN THE WORLD”

SERGE DANEY My father was one of the lucky few in his college years who had a bicycle, and he fondly remembers picking two of his best friends, and riding his way to the movies. For the trio it was a ritual to watch a film everyday, even if that meant seeing the same film thrice. Cinema for them was glimpse into an art-form that could provide these small town boys a chance to witness a world that existed beyond the boundaries of their own lives. Yet, at the same time, it gave them a chance to mould themselves like the characters they admired. It taught them how to dress, speak and interact. In short, for them, cinema was life and life was cinema. The two were so inextricably linked that they only bought clothes from only those tailors who could stitch trousers and shirts like those worn by the stars they admired.

But it was not just the persona of stars that was shaping their attitude. Music played an important role in the lives of these cinephiles. The songs from the Golden Age of Indian cinema and till the late 70s formed a foundation for them to dive into understanding Urdu, as many lyricists who were working then in the industry were Urdu poets themselves. So the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz was spoken in the same breath as a film by Basu

NITESH ROHIT

Chatterjee. This at the same time also made them get into the dramatics. But all their new found interest was done on their foundation for the love of films. They could talk about directors, musicians, actors and the overall film. And this cinephile growth was occurring without any knowledge regarding the presence of world cinema or the realization of any cinematic conventions. A film celebrating a Golden Jubilee or a Silver Jubilee was the talk of the town and Filmfare Awards were seriously taken and discussed. Just like the trailer of every new film that was shown before each film that played in the theater. If there was one common wish they all wanted to fulfill before dying - it was to watch a film shoot.

It’s only in the early 80s that the trio disbanded, my father’s best friend decided to go to Mumbai to become a film director, his second lieutenant entered the world of politics. While my father’s love affair with cinema continued. He went on to open one of the first video libraries in the early 80s in Patna, Bihar. So the decade brought in new possibilities: color television, regular TV shows, VCRs, VCP and soon the world of movies became bigger. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly became a household name, and Clint Eastwood was as much in vogue as Amitabh Bachchan. But the ever mutating face of cinephilia proved too costly for the cinephiles of my father’s generation. As Indian cinema slowly becoming an ugly Godzilla like creature called Bollywood.

The love for movies was slowly disappearing from the landscape.

When cinephilia entered the 90s my father had lost his interest in movies completely; he never went back

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AUTEUR JOHN CASSAVETES IN ONE OF HIS HAPPIER MOODS

to the theater he so much loved, except for the fact that he reminisced about the films of Guru Dutt, Vijay Anand, Basu Chatterjee and more. The baton of the cinephile dream was passed on to me. And it’s this transition that the cinephile in India needs to construct as he(she) has an important role to play in finding the missing images(histories) that are completely lost between cinephilia that existed in the 20th century and cinephilia that exists now. So that a genealogy of Indian cinema can be created that would help in understanding the relation of cinema and its role in shaping the cultural milieu of our society today.

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AUTEUR

THE LEGEND OF HERR ZOLKA 09

THE SPACE RACE

ANUJ MALHOTRA

DIGEST

AU REVOIR FESTIVAL! SUPRIYA SURI

COVER STORY

GAUTAM VALLURI

INTERVIEW

24

PARADISE LOST

30

CINEPHILIA IN INDIA

34

REVIEWS

CROSSING THE BRIDGE

76

DEEP IN THE VALLEY

77

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

79

ANIMAL TOWN

81

GAUTAM VALLURI

KSHITIZ ANAND

ANUJ MALHOTRA

42 PROGRAMMING FILM SACHIN GANDHI FESTIVALS SEEING IS BELIEVING

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CINEPHILE, ADJECTIF.

53

WINDS FROM THE EAST

56

GAUTAM VALLURI

SUPRIYA SURI

SUPRIYA SURI

FROM THE VAULT

ANAMARIA DOBINCUIC

SAGORIKA SINGHA

66

ADRIAN MARTIN

NITESH ROHIT

26

THE INDIAN DOCUMENTARY 82 B.D.GARGA

60 MULTIPLEXES, MILLIONS ANUJ MALHOTRA & WOOD

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6 editor writers

legal advisor

NITESH ROHIT SATYAM BARERA SRIKANTH SRINIVASAN ANUJ MALHOTRA GAUTAM VALLURI SUPRIYA SURI EBRAHIM KABIR DEBOJIT GHATAK KSHITIZ ANAND SAGORIKA SINGHA KISHORE KUNAL SASHI MATTHEWS

contributors

SACHIN GANDHI HARRYTUTTLE

designer

ANUJ MALHOTRA

cover design

GAUTAM VALLURI

publishers

NSMedia Film

marketing head

SUPRIYA SURI

marketing team YUSRAH OPRITI EBRAHIM KABIR DEBOJIT GHATAK

online supervisor DEBARATA NATH

contact W-104, GK-I , NEW DELHI, 110011 editor@indianauteur.com advertisement@indianauteur.com Indian Auteur is published monthly.

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7 7 As James Hadlee Chase would have said to the cinephiles...

HAVE THIS ONE ON ME...

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And yet, within us, the phantom lives on forever. Cinema is as much camera as it is the projector and the screen. The maverick behind the camera is often the subject of our attention; but the self-effacing zealot with a projector tucked up under one arm and the screen rolled under another is a legend unto himself.

The phantom of Henri Langlois lives within us forever. For Langlois is not a footnote in the annals of history, but a notion. The notion of cinephilia. IA repays a portion of its portion of debt to Henri Langlois.

THE LEGEND OF HERR ZOLKA

by Anuj Malhotra

“The rediscovery of Feuillade had a double effect: on the one hand, it rewrote cinema history, for Feuillade was a forgotten figure in France and was unknown in Great Britain and America. The other effect was Feuillade’s influence on directors like Resnais, Franju, and Rivette, whose original thirteen–hour version of Out One especially seems to show that influence. Up to 1944, it had often been said that the French cinema had two traditions—Méliès and Lumière, fantasy and reality, or what you will. But Feuillade became, as Francis Lacassin put it, the Third Man, and filmmakers were struck by the mixture of realism and surrealism in his work.”

- From Richard Roud’s 1983 biography of Henri Langlois, aptly titled, ‘A Passion for Films’.

The following narrative seeks to trace the rise from the ashes of oblivion of Peter M.Zolka, the great German filmmaker. The narrative seeks to present its reader with an exhaustive amount of accumulated and assorted material from various different sources: film magazines, personal journals, lifestyle magazines, hitherto confidential files from the cultural ministry, letters from a friend to another etc. One may find the unusual construction of the narrative, much like an ambitious graphic novel, a tad too disjointed to follow, but I seek to assure you that a straightforward narrative may not serve the purpose of being able to clearly elaborate on Zolka’s ressurection in the popular realm, and instead of presenting the sheer joy of discovery that the following first-person accounts reek with; will only be lost in my discovery of their discoveries. It is thus, a montage of newsreel footages, and not a documentary. It is material whose origin is spread over a period of 75 years that begin with a solemn admission of regret and end with a solemn admission of respect.

While one may argue that the narrative is fictional, the events it details are not.

A FILMMAKER’S REGRET. AN ARCHIVIST’S DELIGHT. A CINEHILE’S DISCOVERY. A NATION’S PRIDE.

A FILMMAKER’S GRATITUDE.

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PART I : A FILMMAKER’S REGRET Following is a letter written by the filmmaker, Herr. Peter M. Zolka himself, at the onsurge of the Nazi search for the superman, written in a Berlin apartment; meant to be sent to a friend called ‘Max’ in America. (Reports have suggested that the Max in question is infact, his friend, Max Goering, the famous actor).

April 29th, 1938 My dear Max; It is with a rather tired pair of hands that I write this letter to you. Exhausted by their unending contribution to the service of a life that has demanded resilience, perseverance and patience; but has never paid proportional dividends. It is with a trembling pair of hands that I write this letter to you. For they remain apprehensive of the nature of each event that precedes a knock on the door of their house, or footsteps that do not correspond to the usual rhythm of the passer-bys on the cobblestone street outside. For who knows when my religious identity becomes someone else’s obstruction in his path to attainment of a superman race. Finally, it is with the same pair of hands that I write to you; that enjoined at the tip of their respective thumbs twenty three years ago on a film set, to discover the prospective beauty of a frame in which an actor’s face is enclosed within a more suffocated space.

Griffith called it the close-up. They called him its discoverer. I, on the other hand, dwell in oblivion.

However, I have made films. I am the director of cinema. I have spent an entire life allowing silver nitrate particles on a plastic base to respond to light falling on them. I have spent an entire life cutting film negatives in dark spectral rooms at midnight and splicing them together so as to attain the satisfaction of creating a beautiful fraud – the schwindel they call cinema. I have seen Marlene Dietrich perform in A Blue Angel and Sternberg direct her.

And yet, am I content? Is my life but a series of sporadic bursts of such experiences, such revelations, and opportunities to watch Metropolis play out on the screen; or is it merely a collection of all the regret for the missed opportunities, envy for those who didn’t miss them, and remorse for a talent I never felt appreciated (or consummated), that punctuated these occasions?

Max, as I write this to you, I can see the Müggelberge span out from the tiny window in my wall. (How lovely was it to shoot Die Forst Fahrt there in 1925? We attempted to shoot the sun directly, the film burnt). It looks so pretty at night, as the fog surrounds its periphery, like ancient Mayans worshipping their lord. I am reminded of my days as a gaffer on Wegener’s The Golem, which was shot on a soundstage near the Müggelberge. Gigi and I would escape from the shoot everyday to it to make love. Its presence is overwhelming, and I confess I have often felt like a film actor in front of it; the mountain being the camera. It merely stands there, sturdy and firm, witness to each second that takes place in front of it, assuring eternality to the object of its witness, and lending immortality to those lucky enough to acquire a contact with it (Like the ravines of Müggelberge still echo Gigi and my hushed whispers). Do you remember why we left the Das Kafeehaus theatre group

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to join cinema industry? It was because we remained assured of our permanence; of the allocation of an apartment on history’s boulevard that no one but we would occupy.

And yet, am I permanent? Is Peter M. Zolka permanent? Would anyone a hundred years from now watch Die Forst Farht like they would watch City Lights or M? Would they applaud the ingenuity of my close-up as they celebrate Gish’s beauty in The Birth of a Nation?

Would they mimic the slur in my voice as they do with Lang’s monocle?

And again, as is often, the Müggelberge helps dawn the realisation of my true stature on me. Who am I, but a forgotten ageing Jewish filmmaker whose relevance has been dwarfed

by Reifenstahl’s achievements, a middle-aged lover of cinema who is ignored by friends at taverns, too ashamed to even share a beer with him, or the unfortunate residue of a film movement that shone bright before its greatest exponents rushed westwards? What permanence do I talk about, when I remain unsure about even the very existence of my films, as they decompose in UFA’s storage houses?

If they do locate my apartment on the boulevard of history somehow, years from now, they will find it completely abandoned, I remain certain; and move on to one where the light in the dining hall still shines. And the name plate on the front door of that apartment would certainly read Fritz Lang, or Sergei Eisenstein, or D.W.Griffith.

Lastly, I wish to congratulate you on your recent successes with Laemmle. Remind him of the promise he made to me lest he gets occupied in the revelry of his universal glory. Times are sad here, and I foresee oblivion for myself and millions like me. In hindsight, my adamancy in regard to choosing Berlin over Sunset Boulevard was a huge mistake.

Always a well-wisher, and your favourite director in the world(unless your preferences have changed and I stand to lose my sole fan in the world)

The celluloid is the refuge of spectral apparitions and ethereal phantoms; for it violates the first basic fundamental of the very human condition it seeks to record. Through its property of being able to captivate particles of light to draw patterns on itself, in the process enabling itself to create a document of what exists

in the direction in which the camera points, the celluloid manages to transcend the confinement of age. It is the house of ghosts, for it allows Louis Le Prince to still ‘exist’, 121 years after Roundhay Garden Scene. And yet, is the photographed image of Le Prince, Le Prince himself? Is his filmic representation a substitute for the person himself? Is it not that

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Yours sincerely, Peter M. Zolka

when we watch The Philadelphia Story, it is only a depiction of the appearance of Cary Grant we see, and not Cary Grant himself?

The recorded image is essential because it contains within itself the ability to not merely record a point in the history, but through the choice of the subject it chooses to record, it also renders the viewer powerful enough to ac-

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THE TWO ENGLANDS : BLOWUP(left) & TRAFFIC CROSSING LEEDS BRIDGE(right)

cess another history – that of the subject – and that is true of atleast the documentary film. For instance, the old woman who passes by the camera in the 1895 Lumiere brothers film, L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, is old enough to have witnessed the Crimean War. Is it that the film captures only her countenance but not also simultaneously provoke the viewer to contemplate the passing of time (and the events during it), that led the features of her body to form into that countenance? In that, the film is not merely a photographic document of a subject’s existence, but also a portal into it.

And yet, as American avant-garde auteur Scott Cummings points out in an opinion that lies in conjunction with the ingenious cinematographer of some of his films, Siska Yunic, “Film is worth shooting on because it resembles the human cycle of life. It is born in a factorthe ingenious cinematographer of some of his films, Siska Yunic, “Film is worth shooting on because it resembles the human cycle of life. It is born in a factory somewhere, is in a situation of prime usability, is used,

begins decomposing, fades, scratches, and then, ultimately, dies.” That is true, but it is also in the completely opposite function of film – that of its capability of permanence, as detailed in the modern Japanese masterpiece Deep in the Valley, that the exclusivity of the filmic image lies.

And even then, isn’t the filmic image different from the vehicle that carries it? The filmic image is an abstract idea, whereas the celluloid is a tangible object that the abstract idea resides on.

Therefore, if I were to try defining film preservation (or restoration), it is the reconciliation of the tangible object and the abstract idea – the effort to preserve the tangible object so as to safeguard the original intention of the abstract idea it carries. The abstract idea could thus be, in the form of a series of images, a cultural artifact (The Battle of Algiers, Pather Panchali), a political climate (Woodstock, Triumph of the Will), a topography (The Man with a Movie Camera, Koyaanisqatsi).

And due to the virtue of the cinematic medium also being an art form, the preservation of an old

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film is essentially the act of the measurement of evolution – both of the subject it captures and of the medium itself - through the opportunities it provides of comparision. Unless a film is a period film, and seeks to depict the era in which it is produced, by the very act of shooting the landscape of the city it is set in, it provides a chance to place the film besides a film placed in the same city a hundred years ago, and trace an evolution; which is a point that only seeks to strengthen the aforementioned claim that cinema does not merely record the subject at a given moment in time, but also the passing of time that preceded that moment. Consider the England of BlowUp and the one of Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge. And yet, the opportunity of comparison allows the ardent viewer to trace the aesthetic evolution of the medium itself – the film stocks, the reducing ASL, the aspect ratios, and the saturated colours, being cases in point.

Much of this opportunity to compare, today, can thus be owed to the greatest cinephile to have lived, Henri Langlois.

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PART II : AN ARCHIVIST’S DELIGHT – TWO PERSONAL JOURNAL ENTRIES FROM THE JOURNAL OF ROGER TACCHELLA The following exhibit(s) in the narrative are two entries made in his personal journal, by the legendary film archivist and founder of La Ville Du Cinema, Roger Tacchella, made in 1942, at the height of the German occupation of France. The diary was retrieved from the bottom of a beer barrel in a tavern where the absent-minded Tacchella had hidden it in 1947, and then, like everything else except films, forgotten to retrieve it. It remained in the possession of the tavern owner until this reporter sought it (read: bought it).

1.

23rd Mai 1942 The tiny window in my wall affords me a glance at a portion of the Champs-Élysées, visible only through the small separation between the almost enjoined walls of two apartments. It looks beautiful, as usual. And yet, it does not seem mine. I do not own it as I own the chair I sit to write on, or the table my diary is placed on; or how I owned its sight till that fateful day in 1940. Why? Because my beloved Elysees is only in the deep focus background of the glance my window affords me, like the butlers in La Regle De Jeu. In the foreground, concealing most of the cobblestones, each witness to a different phase of my life, is a Nazi Sturmmann who uses a cigarette to let his smoke mix with the Paris fog and let a part of him submerge into the Parisienne atmosphere forever.

We’ve had to live in fear since Schutzstaffel officer Kluge (I remain uncertain of his rank) sought residence in our apartment complex. Goebbels’ Third Reich has consistently sought to admonish the films by American, British and French masters; only seeking to promote the cinematically gifted (how she freezes the frame in Triumph of the Will, and yet the frozen frame shows Hitler), yet ideologically stilted films of Fraulein Reifenstahl. It means that we have to stifle the sound of The Night Mail or It Happened One Night; and only stare in silent admiration, that of a projectionist in the safety of his chamber, able to only watch the visuals and not hear a sound; lest Monsier Kluge may want to interrupt our evening revelry with sounds distinctly reminiscent of Hawks’ Scarface.

Even then, Vincent and I had only a narrow escape today. Since the day the siege has begun, all cinephiles in Paris have taken an oath to converge upon Section 42 of the catacombs whenever a danger is posed to the safety of our collective l’amour – notre cinema. As luck would have it, as Monsier Kluge passed our room by last night, he happened to notice a distinct flicker of blue underneath our door and as is the case these days with the Germans, his response was not to knock gently on our door like a civil neighbor and inquire as to the nature of this spectral light, but arrange a party of SS soldiers to raid our apartment and check for ‘any piece of culture that threatens to challenge or supersede (or encourages to); the Aryan authority’. Perhaps that is why Monsieur Hitler is so in love with a seemingly harmless Mickey Mouse. In any case, as the news of the troopers’ raid reached our grief-stricken and deprived (of Leigh’s murmurs) ears, we packed our 35mm film stocks in a potato sack and threw it downstairs to Georges, who has forever been friendly in helping out with our endeavor; much like Limpy is to Harold in Safety Last!.

As Vincent and I crawled down the apartment building wall clinging on to the sewage pipe, we collected the potato sack from Georges on the first floor and made our way to Section 42 in the catacombs. As is the case often, we met the shabbily dressed, arrogant and yet pleasing Henri there. He had his own collection of films to ‘dump’ there. He has the most films from amongst us. We were

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informed of how one of our beloved friends, mon ami Richard had crossed over into Switzerland.

Thus, he had left his ‘collection’ at Section 42 behind him, never to be attended to, lost in certain oblivion in the underground moisture of the catacombs. Henri and I decided to divide the films amongst ourselves. As it turned out, there were only three films, two of which there are ample copies of – Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera and Mizoguchi’s Naniwa Elegy (how it resembles the films of Murnau). The third, however, is a stranger at the saloon bar – the one no one knows but everyone is curious about. The film stock case informs us it is called Die Forst Farht or The Forest Adventure.

Never heard of it. Will play it once Monsier Kluge has satisfied his appetite for sadism.

2.

20th Jun 1942 The diary entry will be short for the want of time needed to make a hasty escape. And yet, it will be made nonetheless to ensure documentation of our travails. George has disappeared. One was always suspicious of his links to the Resistance.

Things are getting tougher here, they are. Why? Because the German presence in Paris has taken upon itself to erase all proof of the existence of Capra, Flaherty, Vadim, Paradjnov, and even Bunuel. Do they realize how futile their efforts are? For how do they propose to erase cinema? Can they render their Müggelberge extinct even if all their National Socialist tendencies conspire? Lumiere would record their desperation, and Méliès would mock them with his sardonic farce. As long as there is a screen and a projector, on any planet in any century, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush will remain immortal.

But other things sadden me as well. And perplex me. For example, where is Monsieur Zolka now?

The magician who made Die Forst Fraht. Oh, the glory of that film. Can the Parabellum of the German SS ever defeat the joy of Fraulein Brigit Von Hammersmarck as she swings from one tree to another? The answer is no.

Dare I commit the confession to the pages of this diary that if given a chance to save merely three films from my collection if Monsieur Kluge were to break down the door at this very instant, I would save Nanook of the North for cinema as a bystander, Sunrise for cinema as a intruder, and Die Forst Fraht for cinema.

In 1936, Henri Langlois, alongwith his friends Jean Mitry and Georges Franju founded the cinema museum now famous as Cinematheque La Francaise.

The exercise of foundation was similar to the declaration of love, a marriage proposal or a discovery of faith; for the institution could acknowledge better than any other filmmaker in

those days, or in the present; the original conception of the idea of cinema – that of a community.

As time passes, and cinema becomes reduced to a status symbol or an exotic umbrella sourced from a foreign land the ownership of which grants the owner a position superior to his envious neighbour, it was Langlois who truly understood the only quality

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that remains truly intrinsic to cinema, that of enabling its audience to share a common experience.

While Beethoven’s ‘Historia De Amor’ is a magnificent piece of music, I can only vaguely pass on the idea of its excellence to a friend, and I can only attempt a description of the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile to a fellow enthusiast; but cinema does not

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permit such discrepancy between experiences, for we are all witnesses to the same event – the screen – like witnessing a murder would cause all of us disgust, an act of injustice would provoke rage, and the sight of an old woman evoke nostalgia.

Langlois was thus, the first, to understood that cinema’s future lay, not in the great films, its great exponents; for those were but a part of the grander schema – but through the sheer force of collective discovery.

“Whenever I visit a theatre, I only hope to occupy the middle seat of the last row, for that allows me to take a light nap, and smile, as I hear the audience laugh together, or cry together at a scene” Jean-Luc Godard Langlois’s love manifested itself not in the extension of the cinematic tradition, but in its celebration. His undying love for the medium did not cause him to pick up a camera himself and begin shooting in all direc-

tions with the lunacy and desperation of a soldier in the war who has just lost his closest friend, but in the meticulous distribution of bullets among all the other soldiers of the unit, so that the eventual war could be won. In that, Langlois was similar to a young child who finds it hard to curb his enthusiasm upon the discovery of an old secret, and rushes to share it with his friend. He was a cinephile not because he loved films, for cinema finds itself at such an inextractible position today in the modern life, that each one of our neighbours is a fan of some type of film; but because his effort lay in the direction of dispersing the joy of his discovery to others. To achieve that, he would maniacally collect all the films he could, like Joseph Brodsky would accumulate pieces of literature from the trash to read.

And much like Brodsky, Langlois’s status as an artist of the form was not subservient or even reliant on his own contribution to it, but to his commemoration of others’ contributions. Like Brodsky loved Akhmatova, Langlois loved Feuillade. And yet, a case could strongly be made for Langlois’s stature as a cinema maker himself, for isn’t the expression of such vehement love that forces one to introspect their own stance towards the object of that love, an act of ‘creation’ in itself?

“One can serious lay the claim down that Henri Langlois is one of the greatest cinema geniuses, for he instituted a new way of seeing movies”

Jean-Luc Godard

A STILL FROM LOUIS FEUILADE’S ‘LES VAMPIRES’

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THE PRESERVED MAN : LOUIS FEUILLADE

THE POSTER OF LES VAMPIRES

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PART III : A CINEPHILE’S DISCOVERY – AN ARGUMENT ACROSS THE ENGLISH CHANNEL The following pieces of film writing, taken from the esteemed journals Vingt Quatre, and Penthesilia, French and British respectively, seek to detail the discovery of Zolka’s films by two cinephiles in their respective nations, and thus, their naturally opposing stands on it. And the opposition derived not out of a disagreement on the quality of Zolka’s films, but on its inherent meaning.

1.

Following is an Excerpt from the film article entitled Les plus belles escroqueries du monde (The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers), by then young film critic Pierre Pastor (now a Golden Bear winning senile old man) which seeks to discuss the construction of the fraud in cinema.

Juliet 1958, Vol XII, Issue 7, Vingt Quatre ...And yet, cinema stands on the brink of a glance over the edge of the cliff. For long, it has safely secured a post on the plateau of the cliff, assured in the refuge it’s sheer magnanimity offers it.

It has met each demand for an aesthetical upheaval in recent years with an expansion of scale.

In that, its response to each voice calling out for an introspection for its nature has not been correspondence, but suppression. Not attendance, but oppression. The businessmen who remain ever so keen to exercise their hegemonic authority over cinema have adopted a fascist autocratic stance in dealing with the most major problem that faces the beautiful medium today – a stale objective.

Cinema, for long, has excused itself from any discussion that seeks to locate its objective, its inherent properties, its nature, its possibilities and limitations by stating its novelty as an artform – and explaining how it still dwells in infancy when the artforms it is compared to – painting, literature or vaudeville – have been allowed periods of a century or two to discover the aforementioned. And yet, this excuse doesn’t stand true anymore – for cinema is not completely, and in its original conception, completely an artist’s medium. It is not in eternal servitude to the whims of an individual, whether a painter, an author or a theatre director; or the respective art critic – and is in fact, a blotting paper that soaks the ink that is a yield of the entire world that surrounds the sound stage – the cultural upheavals, the political transformations, the shifts in audience shifts, wars, famines, genocides, migrations, and most importantly, technological innovations. Yes, it might seem unfair, but cinema remains eternally obliged to be subservient to these factors that might influence its production – and while a painter might seek to paint like Raphael did 400 years ago, a cinema director has to change. Thus, subsequently, the medium has to as well, correspondingly. Cinema, thus, cannot afford itself the luxury of a century or two to discover its intrinsic properties, and has to dwell in a constant state of introspection. As the great British-American director Alfred Hitchcock said, “Cinema is loved by the masses. That is both the gift to the medium, and its curse.” And that is true, for cinema is like a prodigal talent to the parents that are its audience. It has to perform. Now, or the parents would completely lose hope.

And yet, there is hope. Through the consistent work of Vingt Quatre, Cahiers Du Cinema and Positif in France; we now see a possibility of a time when cinema does not respond to each challenge by expanding the width of its screens. Or introducing a new lens that can shoot a wider territory. Through our work, we remain assured that cinema will reciprocate through contemplation and not argument. And in this, we must not rely on Hollywood, for that remains the refuge of the blissfully ignorant; where agents run the show, and lawyers decide the films that are made. I hear also that cinema in India is slowly moving to adopt the model of Hollywood. I wonder about Ray, whose cinema is to India what Night and Fog is to the concentration camp – its mirror. At the end, Hollywood claims one thing and we claim another . Who is right? Of course, us.

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The Wild Animal – Zolka The Rue De Biellot grounds stay abuzz with speculation about (Francois) Truffaut’s arrival. He is the rancorous, arrogant, precarious young critic from our contemporary Cahiers and the proponent of the politique des auteurs, and one of Paris’s most hated men. And yet, I cannot wait to join him in the front row of La Ville Du Cinema, the film collection initiated by Vincent De Mille and Roger Tacchella in 1937.

The film they will screen is one we have watched a hundred times already – their exclusive set-piece, the one they reveal when the competition becomes biting, and the threat of emptiness looms over the seating facilities – German director Peter M. Zolka’s Die Forst Farht or The Forest Adventure, purported to have been produced sometimes in the early 1920’s, the same time F.W.Murnau and Fritz Lang were onto their own legends. And yet, as is often the case on a film set, the placement of a lamp decides what objects would be concealed within the dark shadows and which ones would be illuminated for our perusal (Harry Lime comes to mind). As Dr.Caligari and Mabuse gained popularity, Zolka’s legendary warrior princess Delga (Hammersmarck, perfect), was lost in the dark shadows. And now, we have the honour of witnessing the film from the front row of a packed hall at La Ville Du Cinema. Delga’s legend in Parisienne circles is imminent now. Her tragedy is Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, her earnestness is Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, her rebellion is Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, her self-discovery is Kurosawa’s Ikiru, and her identity is Zolka’s Die Forst Farht. At Vingt Quatre, we wonder how it escaped the attention of esteemed film historians that while Griffith’s close-up was only a caress, Zolka’s close-up was devastation.

2.

Excerpt from the British magazine ‘Penthesilia’, from the article ‘The Defeat of The Vertical in The Forest Adventure’ by known feminist, Laconian, and psychoanalyst Barbara Moravia.

Aug 1967, Vol 23 Issue 8 It is only during one of my recent visits to Paris, a city that I am prone to finding mundane, and being completely at loss to comprehend everyone else’s fascination for; that I finally made a discovery so enchanting and exhilarating that it more than compensates for the lack of any serious ingenuity that city has had to offer during my earlier visits. I finally took some time from being bombarded by the persuasive infant Jean-Luc and being treated to romanticised visions of a faux pas reality by that charmer Francois; and went to La Ville Du Cinema to catch the screening of a film I have read a lot about in the recent past but have not personally had a chance to encounter personally. I am glad the old is there to compensate for the brashness for all the new waves that rise around the world. I am glad Roger Tacchella and Vincent De Mille found a copy of The Forest Adventure.

It is a 1924 masterpiece by German director Peter M.Zolka, other works in whose filmography are a matter of great curiosity by now I can safely assume. As I skimmed through the French journal entries about the film (particularly Vingt Quatre), I was not at all startled to read how the French had merely soaked the film in dollops of their conniving romance and even gone so far so as to disguise their incomprehensibility at being faced with a masterpiece of such overwhelming stature with their fantastical analogies and ridiculous comparisons. For instance, this excerpt from one of Vingt Quatre’s write-ups about the film, “…Her tragedy is Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, her earnestness is Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, her rebellion is Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, her self-discovery is Kurosawa’s Ikiru, and her identity is Zolka’s Die Forst Farht.”

Sure, Mr.Louis L’Amour, but do we even realise what Zolka was trying to achieve except evoking comparisons with films that hadn’t even been made then? Do we also realise that cinema is about human relations and not spatial ones?

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The Forest Adventure is the masterpiece that it is because it is a brilliantly subversive manifestation of the popular notion of the conventional female role in cinema - for Delga is not prone to holding onto bed-posts like Lillian Gish is in Griffith’s films, or Paulette Goddard is in Chaplin’s, but also because she not only just holds onto the phallic symbols (the trees, the tree-stumps, her own spear), and does not exist in a position wherein she relies on them; but has a naughty tendency to literally, as well as figuratively, use them to propel herself forward – and leave them behind; the way she hangs from one vertical symbol to another.

Zolka’s photography only seeks to confirm this – he never shoots directly up at Delga (or into the sun), thus never framing her in a low-angle shot; instead always allowing her to start a shot below the position of the camera(in a high-angle or overhead shot), and then swinging to a position above it; thus not only escaping the confines of the frame, but also leaving it behind. Is it an irony then that the film had an all-male crew?

If Paris is special thus, it is not because they can claim the exclusive ownership of the Eiffel, or the Arc De Triomphe, or of Jean-Luc Godard; but of the singular copy of Die Forst Fraht. What is the world waiting for?

And creation it was. It has become famous now how the greatest movement in the history of cinema met in the front row of the Cinematheque. The Cinematheque became a center of discovery, union, and irreverent ambition.

The steady stream of American films that the young turks watched at Cinematheque, provided them with reference points, in the films of Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Preston Surges, Rock Hudson and George Tashlin, that they consistently compared their own cinema to, resulting in a dissastisfaction that led them to take up cudgels against their own cinema and demand one that replaced the factory with the individual, and manipulation with sincerity. In the Cinematheque, lay the birth of Cahiers.

And yet, the Cinematheque was not merely a center of revolution; for it was not borne out of a need for propaganda, but transmission.

It did not seek to convert, but cajole. The rage at a cinema in bad condition was the result of unconditional love for the American, and in that, the Cinematheque was not the propagator of hate; but the

perpetrator of love. It provoked an outcry, but the outcry was not the scream of a suppressed rebel, but the joyous shriek of a child at the rediscovery of a toy he’d thought was lost. Langlois’s stand as a cinephile was vindicated, for his proposition of growth through sharing resulted in a generation by a number of Henri Langloises; the children of the cinematheque, l’enfants du cinematheque; youngsters in hopeless love with Marilyn Monroe and Lillian Gish. His stand was vindicated for Cinematheque became not the center of merely ‘showing’ a film, but sharing it, thus making cinema itself its own distributor. “...Not exist Henri Langlois, exists only Cinematheque...”

Henri Langlois Love bred arrogance, however.

For Langlois, like any lover, invited no interference between him and the object of his love.

And yet, there was Andre Malraux, who proceeded to remove Langlois from his position as the director of the Cinematheque, largely because of his preference

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for individualism when trying to run the show. History reveals to us that the state cannot tolerate the emergence of the artist, and that he is mostly like a mad dog, who, when left uninhibited, challenges authority first, and that holder of authority second. The state feels threatened and vulnerable to a mind that possesses the ability to convince a large audience. In that circumstance, it usually responds with an execution so rash and unthoughtful, that it causes people to take up subversion in a manner which the artist can only hope for, in the process becoming the consummation of its own insecurity.

Malraux made the same mistake.

His move to remove Langlois was met with wide spread student protests and rioting in May 68. The event prompted a society already on the verge of

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disillusionment with the status quo to explode. The Festival at Cannes was stalled, and cultural icons like Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard joined the protest to reinstate Langlois to his position.

Remarkably, Langlois remained quite throughout the proceedings, perhaps embarassed by the realisation, that his reputation remained capable of overwhelming that of the Cinematheque itself.

The protestors won when Langlois was reinstated, although with reduced state funding. Politics had its imminent communion with art, finally.

WHY MR. MINISTER? : ANDRE MALRAUX

PART IV : A NATION’S PRIDE The political climate had changed in the ensuing two decades after the World War, and the atmosphere of conflict had given way to an atmosphere of reconciliation. Zolka’s esteemed film had become a source of power, and each country that could, did claim its ownership of the artifact.

1.

Following is the letter of from the German Cultural Commune in Berlin to the French Cultural Ministry, emphasising on the importance of the transfer of Zolka’s film as a way in which to strengthen diplomatic ties.

To Monsieur Andre Malraux, French Cultural Minister

23rd January, 1967

It remains within the scope of our duties to inform you of the success of the establishment of the identity of filmmaker Peter M. Zolka. Through detailed processes of investigation and inquiry, elaboration on which remains outside the scope of this letter, we have managed to confirm his identity as a German citizen during the era of the Third Reich.

Details of his death have not yet been fully established. However, one may dare to attribute the cause of his death to natural causes, by the way of a coronary problem.

As per the agreement between our respective diplomats during the London Convention, it was decided that the French Cinema Archive La Ville Du Cinema, which comes under the direct control of the French cultural ministry and is in fact, state subsidized majorly,

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will help the concerned German authorities acquire a copy of Herr Zolka’s film Die Forst Fahrt. It goes without saying that a film of its stature holds relevance that transcends the meager impositions of national boundaries and is meant for ownership by the entire world.

We wish to assure you that this move will help both the nations bury memories of a dark past, and also help in strengthening both cultural and diplomatic ties in the times to come; permitting thus, in its wake, a freer cultural and social exchange between the two great nations.

Upon the receiving from our side of the confirmation of the transfer from your side, we will make the necessary arrangements to ensure safe transport of the duplicate film stock, and also wish to express the desire to pay for the duplication process.

Waiting Eagerly, Roy Friedmann, Berlin Cultural Commune

2.

Following is a Berlin Film Festival Report, filed in British Film Magazine, “Spool”, on July 14th 1968.

BERLIN: Even as the recent memory in the world of cinema remains tainted by the violent clash between the interests of the politician and the interests of the artist, the Berlin Film Festival, which happened just in the wake of Cannes, has not only managed to emerge from the older cousin’s shadow, but also managed to claim complete independence from it. The festival jury, which comprised of eminent film personalities like Luis García Berlanga, Peter Schamoni and Georges de Beauregard, arrived at the final consensus to award Swedish film ‘Ole dole doff’ by Mr.Jan Troell, the honor of being the best film at the festival. Among the various films in competition with this eventual winner were films by French master Jean-Luc Godard (Week End), Jean-Marie Straub (Chronik der Ana Magdalena Bach), American great Orson Welles (The Immortal Story), and Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda (Gates To Paradise). However, the longest standing ovation, ironically, at a time when the entire cinematic world fights for the restoration of a legendary film lover to his position; was reserved for a film whose very existence has been made possible only due to similar film love, and the accordance of the value of some sort of treasure to that film by the owners of that love. The film being The Forest Adventure by German master Peter M. Zolka.

Henri Langlois was called ‘The Phantom of the Cinematheque’ by the title of a 2003 documentary of which he was the eponymous subject. To say that it might be the most accurate description of the man’s contribution to cinema would be an understatement, for the entitlement not only allows him to

successfully secede into the shadows of the Cinematheque, thus allowing the institution itself to exist as an entity, as he so wished; but also in being able to describe the man as someone whose very name might not be used in the annals of cinematic history to refer to a specific person who existed, but to a notion, a vague idea, an

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essence, a spirit, and a symbol of all things cinephile. He is the Phantom for the idea of his existence transcends the limitations of a physical existence, and enters into another other-worldly realm, where he is but an epitomisation of cinephilia. The title is so important, as well, because it seeks to finally separate the man from

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the institution. Yes, as the Phantom of the Cinematheque, his spirit lives on in the projection room of the great cinema theatre; but as was his idea, eventually, we are meant to identify the Cinematheque as an institution greater than any individual.

A strong case might indeed be made for Langlois’ position as the most important figure in the history of cinema’s tradition; simply because, he created that tradition himself. And even as the man would himself disallow any attempt to let him supercede the medium itself; it remains beyond debate that cinema is essentially the result of the work of individuals.

Like the other great artforms, especially music and painting, it cannot boast of an intrinsic existence within nature; and like literature, needs (and has needed) human be-

ings to both invent it, and then constantly reinvent it. Where would cinema be, after all, without Muybridge, Dickson, Lumiere, Melies, Griffith and Godard? Where would, however, all of them be without Langlois?

Yes, in its innate nature, the recorded image of cinema is permanent; but it still needs Henri Langlois to lend it its permanence. And that is precisely where Langlois’s role lies, as a creator of cinema. And I daresay, of the early 20th century history?

“Griffith

Welles nourished it.

Godard killed it.”

Peter Greenaway invented

cinema.

Langlois created it. For without him, where would Griffith, Welles or Godard be? Film needs tending, or it falls CLOCKWISE FROM TOP : W.L. DICKSON, victim to its own tendency of fallGEORGES MELIES & EADWARD MUYBRIDGE ing into oblivion. It needs a rescue.

PART V : ABOUT TIME Around early 1970s, Zolka’s film had begun receiving renewed serious critical interest. It culminates in, and is epitomised in this foreword of the seminal classic of cinematic literature, “Cinema, The Primal” by renowned Boston-based film critic Robert McKenzie.

‘Cinema is a paradox’.

‘Great cinema does not come from the head. It comes from hands and thighs.’

In order to even begin to fathom the scale of the epic that James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is, a reader would first have to verse himself with the basic tenets upon which literature seeks to base itself upon.

In order to comprehend, similarly, how ingenuous is Pablo Picasso’s introduction of multiple perspective in a two dimensional frame, a viewer would have to learn about the limitations that the canvas was supposed to be a representation of in painting, before Picasso came along. Similarly, unless one seeks to enhance his awareness to a level where the acknowledgement of Mozart’s genius becomes possible, Mozart is but another name; or a character in an Oscar-winning film, that means no more to the casual listener than details of the solar system do to Sherlock Holmes. To be a connoisseur to the works of, or even be a casual audience to the genius of the aforementioned greats, one would have to educate himself; and I daresay, the true genius presented within these works only seeks to address the educated, informed, erudite, adroit and aware realm of the human conscious – most certainly not its primal and primordial one. It is only cinema, thus, which as a medium, holds within itself the capability of possessing examples which are also simultaneously deemed its supreme achievements, that tap into the most basic of human reciprocation capabilities to elicit its responses, instead of relying on an accentuated level of awareness.

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It is only cinema, thus, that can claim a Seven Samurai, which does not demand a superior level of education to be appreciated, and yet, remains one of the most fascinating examples of accomplished filmmaking.

It is only cinema, wherein Martin Scorsese can gain access to the most fundamental of human responses – that of fear – just by adding guttural animal sounds to the soundtrack overlaid on his boxing sequences.

For masters of the cinematic medium understand and acknowledge the fact that cinema is a medium that was originally conceived as one meant to be savored in a communal unison – and not in the private spaces of our homes as seems to the emerging trend these days. Through the virtue of its existence as a medium that sought to unite people and not segregate them into niches and schools like other media (or art forms do), cinema sought to address only that what was shared by each member in the theatre – his/her humanity, and the consequent results of that possession. Essentially, cinema is the only medium that the pre-historic man would not have been confounded by, because even he was in possession of the most stripped down form of humanity – one that the films of Werner Herzog firmly challenge, Jean-Luc Godard’s consistently frustrate, and Sergio Leone’s excite. And each great filmmaker seeks to address only a portion of the entire gamut of human emotion – not all of it, for that would be too much of a vulgar display of power. De Sica accesses human empathy like no one else does, Fellini raids nostalgia and Guru Dutt forays into cynicism.

In this book, through which I seek to celebrate these masters of primitive, you will find extended essays on the films of Werner Herzog, Ritwik Ghatak, Kenneth Anger, Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujiro Ozu. You will also find a long dissection on what makes The Forest Adventure by Peter M. Zolka, the most singular cinematic experience of all time.

- Robert McKenzie, 1982

Even then, the greatest tribute to Langlois as a cinephile would be that he opted against making the film watching experience he provided the denizens of the cinematheque didactic. For him, the effort remained not about the expression of a personal preference, a personal choice, of selection; or of picking one film over another.

He was clear that the creation of Cinematheque was not an exercise in judgement, but merely of consumption. One loves a woman in whole; and not just her feet, or her hands. To Henri Langlois, cinema was the only love of his life – and the Cinematheque his love letter to it. As a conclusion, Cinematheque is not cinephilia’s cradle. Cinematheque is cinephilia.

THE PHANTOM OF THE CINEMATHEQUE : HENRI LANGLOIS

“I have never said this movie is good, this movie is bad; they discover by themselves. I have not helped, I have not talked. I have put food on the table and they have taken the food and eaten, and then gone on to eat more and more food. All I give them is food, food, food, food. This is my work, to show films; to save and to show films, nothing more. Henri Langlois does not exist; only exists the Cinémathèque Française….Not exist Henri Langlois, only exists the Cinémathèque Française.” –

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PART V I: A FILMMAKER’S GRATITUDE INT. WAREHOUSE – NIGHT Excerpt from the screenplay of 1990 Golden Palm winning film Tagalog by Filipino director Kento Tioseco. It is said to be the scene which won actress Nika Gonsalves her Best Actor trophy at Cannes.

INT. WAREHOUSE – NIGHT As Delga walks adjacent to the row of huge cartons of matchsticks, we can only see her from a distance. She is determined, yet hesitant. She is purposeful, yet apprehensive. From a distance, in the LS, she looks like a picture of poise – the model for vendetta. But as we cut to a CU of her face, we discover for the first time that she’s been crying all this while. The discovery that the matchsticks used to burn her home were manufactured in Alexo’s factory has confused her Tears stream down her face like torrents. We cut back and forth between being very close to her and being observant from a distance. From being a witness to being the perpetrator.

As she reaches one end of the row of cartons, she suddenly back and looks at the audience. We slowly DOLLY IN, as she blurts out a voiceover,

DELGA(v.o): He asked me whether love is bitter. I replied, “No, love is sweet.” When I kill him tonight, he will look into my eyes, writhing in uncontrollable pain and say, “But you said love’s sweet.” I will say, “Yes. It is bitter sweet.”

As we reach the end of the DOLLY, we can see her face from up close. She is not crying anymore. She has a smirk on her face instead. That’s when we realise, she is not called Delga anymore. She IS Delga.

She throws up a long piece of cloth which entangles itself with a beam in the ceiling. Suddenly, she leaps out of the frame through its edge, much like how Delga does in The Forest Adventure. We cover her swinging from one carton to another in LATERAL TRACKING from a distance, and as she reaches the last carton, she lands...

CU: On her feet. As we TILT up to her, she smirks again, and like Delga from TFA screams a gibberish wolf-howl.

As she exits the frame and begins walking out of the frame, we PAN to reveal how she a fire has started burning all the cartons down. While swinging from one to another, Delga’s set them on fire.

She has the last laugh. We hear laughing loudly in the offscreen as the cartons, and Alexo’s factory burns.

FADE TO: BLACK.

CREDITS ROLL.

THE END.

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SUPRIYA SURI

AU REVOIR FESTIVAL!

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xposure to moving images to our Indian audiences has been quite conventional in terms of what prevails in the main stream cinema. Therefore an offbeat festival exposing the city people to the Pan Asian Cinema is quite rare and a challenge for the festival to survive with huge participation. A city where an audience outside any multiplex or cinema hall is difficult to hold on to, Osian’s always provided an option for alternate viewing with remarkable enthusiastic cinephile attendance.

In a country where a cinephile has to search for good cinema to get in touch with, has to search for any critical write up to learn on cinema, where one cant event trace its own cinematic history, where hence it becomes difficult for one to understand the difference between good and bad in that aspect Osian has always narrowed the gap by providing the best networking, seminars, talent campus, selection of films etc for a viewer. Unfortunately all this ended with 2008 festival.

OSIAN: THE FESTIVAL OF ASIAN AND ARAB CINEMA filled the void of giving the Asian independent directors as well as viewers a platform to cherish and gather such a lovely celebration of cinema. This bridge that for years filled such gaps seems to be broken this year. To experience a new and the rare opportunity for such contemporary international as well as old films was a miss this year.

The yearly awaited enthusiasm; first for July and then with the rescheduled dates in October was not worthy.

Osians’s started off with 20 films and

build over to 220 films till last year. However this year they had around 100 films out of which 13 were in competition, 56 feature films and the rest were all short films. The focus of programming lied in showing the New Stream Indian Directors who apparently have dared to break away the conventions of the mainstream and the New Wave of Romanian Cinema. The irony was, the time when Osian thought of going popular by attaching itself with the popular cinema, it no longer was popular among the cinephiles and it drastically marked a decline in their presence as well. And with the focus of the festival on the New Stream Indian Cinema, the Bombay juggernaut extended the In-dialogue (Non Competiitself to the prestigious Osian. tion section) and Competition section. All the films under this The strategy to position these so category were contemporary cincalled New stream Directors at ema made in 2008-2009. Since the same plate with other good a festival like this has always directors (for attaching a value been an institute by itself where for these clichéd mainstream, one gets to learn only through a conventional cinema) at a com- good programming at the festimon platform took an opposite val showed a decline this year. direction that killed the value For instance for years the proof Osian build over 10 years in- gramming has maintained a balstead, leaving the cinephiles in ance to show old as well as new town disappointed. The New films. A place where one could stream programming of films learn about the history and see a that already had a popular theat- growth in cinema to present day rical release nation-wide was a films. It was a place where we de-motivating (also a complaint) had master directors at one end for a cinephile to re-view these and upcoming directors on the films at a rare view festival. other. In other words Osian was However other films were still a place where perfect programa reason to explore films with ming of present day cinema hapIA/NOVEMBER 2009

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In short, the learning experience through watching a number of film was absent at the festival or maybe one can now only hope to learn cinema with such a way through the upcoming OLE in January 2010 and no longer rely on the festival for this platform.

OLE: The Osian Learning Experience is the educational dimension by the Osian to be launched in January, 2010 providing a learning platform for all art lovers through its short term courses. This festival was an announcement for upcoming OLE through a section accompanying the festival called AT A LOSS FOR WORDS : MANI OLE. Like mentioned earlier, KAUL (left) & NEVILLE TULLI (right) the festival has always focused in providing a learning experience to the cinephile that usualpened along with curating films ly lacked access to such things. from the archive. Such placement of films was definitely nonexistent This was usually done with in the 2009 programming schedule. IBM seminars like the Origins Apart from that having a retrospect of Asian Cinema, why festiat any festival is way to let the cine- vals, interpretations of films phile explore an oeuvre through an etc. This was the joy moment auteur and understand his aesthet- when the cinephiles experiics by retrospecting his work. It is a enced an intensive discussion section where one seeks to master at with great critics, film makers, least a director through his films at cinematographers and other a festival. For unknown reasons this great cinephiles. These secsection was skipped at the festival. tions were a place where the However the most exciting films upcoming artists were prowere played in the small televi- voked to think about their art sion showing masters like Bresson, and to be concerned with their Antonioni at the corner of the film medium. Also these additional festival in mute. This was the place sections were a place where one where some often stood by glancing understood the problems that and cherishing the joy of such im- independent film makers exages. But unfortunately it was only perience while getting funds or the isolated corner for good cinema. making their films that helped IA/NOVEMBER 2009

13 25 us to compare our own situations how things could shape within our own country. These IBM seminars were overtaken by OLE this year.

OLE sessions included panel discussions with the New stream Directors and discussions with other film makers sharing their experience with their work. Such discussion excluded the intensive cinema discussion that the cinephiles one cherished. These discussions took place all throughout the six days of the festival. As the programming itself lacked the tracing of history of cinema and the retrospective section, even the discussing section lacked such dialogues.

These dialogues were restricted with the films screened and discussing them only. But when films were itself nothing to watch out for, the discussions itself lacked any motivation for cinephiles to be a part of.

Even the opportunities through seminars to know the co production model with Indian film makers and abroad were a miss. The opportunity to discuss scripts with writers and the platform to learn about the shoot of the film through cinematographers were a miss.

In short even the sections accompanying the programming that made festival a learning experience once upon a time was a complete miss this year.

Or maybe one can now only hope to learn cinema with such intense film viewings and discussions through the upcoming OLE in January 2010 and no longer rely on the festival for this platform.

BONJOUR OLE! AU REVOIR FESTIVAL!

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WORLD CINEMA Cinema is mostly the statement. It is also politics. Sometimes, it becomes a political statement.

Gautam Valluri contemplates how two of the greatest directors ever made space travel epics which became synonymous with their respective national statements on exploration of space.

C

“The Earth Is blue. How wonderful.... amazing!”

- yuri gagarin, first man in space

inephiles all around the world will agree that two of the best science fiction films to have ever been made are 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972). Released during the infamous reign of the Cold War and the unofficial AmericaSoviet “Space Race”, these two films have risen to the ranks of the most celebrated films from their respective countries and provide important viewpoints of both sides regarding the said affair.

In 1957, the United States government announced the launch of its first satellite into outer space by the spring of 1958. This undertaking termed Project Vanguard was to be the moment that America declares itself the first country to reach space but the Russians had other plans. A mere two days after America’s announcement, the USSR announced the launch of their satellite Sputnik 1 by the fall of 1957 and went onto fulfill their promise in October of that year, making USSR the first country in space and thus beginning the Space race with America.

Project Vanguard failed to launch at Cape Canaveral to much public embarrassment but they did eventually make it four months later with Explorer 1, making USA the second space power. In the following months both sides tried to outdo the other and what ensued can only be described as scientific madness with the launch of Dogs, Chimpanzees and other animals in space to test the plausibility

of a human cosmonaut to enter the realm of the gods. In April of 1961, the Soviets won this stage of the race as well when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in outer-space. The Americans saw themselves slowly falling behind and the support from the general public towards space programs reduced to disappointment.

President Kennedy re-kindled the cosmonautic flame in Americans when he promised that America will send a man to the moon and return him safely back to earth “before the decade is out”. Kennedy’s bold statement promised to capture the imagination of the Americans and for the first time since Vanguard’s announcement almost 4 years ago, they truly believed they can beat the Soviets to it.

On 29th January, 1964, a 36-year old Stanley Kubrick released what would be considered one of the greatest Black Comedies in the

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history of cinema. Dr. Strangelove or How I learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was a great commentary on the ongoing Cold War between America and the Soviet Union and the possibility of a Nuclear Holocaust that the world will suffer as a result. It was only apt that he took on a project of making an epic science-fiction film next with a rise in interest from the public and the surfacing of the “New Wave” of sci-fi literature. Kubrick chose to collaborate with the already well-known science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke to write the story of the film. They had also decided to write a novel parallel to the writing of the screenplay and have both the book and the film come out at the same time.

On April 2nd, 1968 the world was finally allowed to see for the first time, Kubrick’s magnum opus that has been in the making for

WORLD CINEMA

nearly four years. The breathtaking cinematography and the cutting-edge visual effects and the fact that the story was more of an abstract concept gave rise to either extreme enchantment

the one thing that man could not yet reach in the years that have passed between the film’s release and its prophecy is the fact of space travel being common practice. Kubrick’s film went onto be a

A CORRIDOR BETWEEN THEM : 2001 (left) & SOLYARIS(right)

with the film or complete disdain towards it and its maker.

In his film, Kubrick explores the themes of divine uncertainty in the form of an abstract, extra-terrestrial monolith that keeps appearing throughout the film. This monolith becomes somewhat of an incomprehensible being that keeps reminding the viewer that perhaps we do not understand space or the legions of stars that lay beyond our atmosphere just like we don’t understand the monolith. The very fact that the actors seem to appear so miniscule in front of the monolith each time it makes an appearance is perhaps Kubrick and Clarke’s way of telling us that we are exactly that miniscule in front of the field of space exploration.

40 years on, one can easily see the prophetic elements in the film- the use of video conferencing, flat screen display units and other scientific advancements but

hit among the very few who truly enjoyed it and the ones who didn’t but spent their money anyway just to see what the fuss was all about.

14 and-a-half months after the film, Americans- Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk the surface of the moon. Kennedy’s promise was fulfilled just 6 months before its expiration date and America finally outran the Soviets. If the USSR were the rulers of the domain of space, the Americans were the rulers of the domain of the moon. Armstrong became a global hero and some erroneously or intentionally even called him the first man in space but Gagarin never had to deal with knowing another man went further away from the blue planet than him. He had passed away in March 1968, much before Apollo 11 and much before 2001.

1971 saw the soviets come up with

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13 27 another innovation in their new found realm. They had launched the first space station, Salyut 1.

This would form the basis for Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel “Solaris”. The film adaptation of the novel was directed by critically-acclaimed Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky and unlike 2001; Solaris was already a well-known published novel when the film was first proposed in 1968. Kubrick and Tarkovsky may seem like they are world’s apart (and indeed they were -the socialist eastern and the capitalist western) but their respect for the larger unknown and eye towards creating an epic image of it on the screen was similar in more ways than one.

Tarkovsky’s take on Solaris is a long, meandering meditative drama on the themes of loss and grief. Set aboard the eponymous space station, the film chronicles the journey of a psychologist recovering from the recent loss of his wife and his trip to the said station where mysterious events have been happening. Though taking the initial premise of an investigative film, it quickly switches over to a slow-moving and sparsely populated fantasy of personal levels. It was as wonderfully complex at an emotional level as 2001 was at a conceptual level. Tarkovsky’s film was a poem stretched over 165 minutes- grueling for most and awe-inspiring for the others.

At 40% of the budget of 2001, Solaris was an uncommonly expensive film for Tarkovsky’s meditative realist style and a worthy reply from the USSR to the west’s great science fiction film.

Solaris was released in the USSR in 1973 after a grand showing at the Cannes the year prior and

28 the film winning the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury. The film, much like 2001 sparked debate and unanimous acclaim alike. People would sit around dinner tables discussing the true meaning and the metaphors the film depicted and though considered a classic, the film never really got the attention that critics and cinephiles say it deserved. Lem was unhappy with Tarkovsky’s take on his novel and Tarkvosky retaliated saying that all Lem ever wanted was a page-to-page adaptation of his novel. He pointed out that Lem didn’t acknowledge film as a different medium.

At a global level, the interest in space was greatly reduced with various other world events taking place. The sci-fi new wave had settled down and was being commercially exploited into its other mutated variants such as Space-Noir, Space-Westerns and Space Operas circa Star Wars Trilogy. With innovations in cinema special effects and the rise in character-driven mythologies, people were just not that into watching films about unknowns exploring the inner complexities that are exposed quite nakedly in outer space.

The inner-outer irony was simply not good enough anymore.

July 17th, 1975 saw the conclusion of the 18 year-long Space race when the two super powers decided to join hands in the Apollo-Soyuz rendez vous program in outer space when USSR’s Soyuz 19 met and docked with USA’s Apollo for the first very first time. This great international collaboration allowed astronauts from both space crafts to visit the other and

WORLD CINEMA

conduct combined experimentations, paving the way for peace, friendship and collaboration in outer space. This marked the official end of the unofficial Space Race between the two countries.

The themes explored by Kubrick and Tarkovsky mirror the plight of their respective countries at only a very superficial level. In any other filmmaker’s hands perhaps both films might find themselves slipping into typical propaganda and limit themselves

to a cultural cliché but it was only in the safe hands of these two cinematic masters have they gone on to become two of the greatest films of all time. Kubrick’s film dared to show man’s fearless exploration into the unknown and Tarkovsky’s film provided insights into man’s inner self through unknown occurrences. Both have realized that someday man will go beyond just the moon and that someday he will conquer the solar system or perhaps he is just giving himself too much ambition but one thing is certain- no matter how far away from the earth he will go, he will never be too far away from himself and that is the limit he will always be bound by.

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ISHMAEL CINEPHILE

Cinema is ‘the whale’ the cinephiles seek and might never attain. But on the warpath, they do accumulate encounters, experiences and enlightenment; which then become anecdotal accounts later. A few cinephiles share their own, alongwith a few dissections of the present that will be an anecdote tomorrow.

CHAPLIN & GODDARD WALK OFF INTO THE SUNSET : MODERN TIMES

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PARADISE LOST NOSTALGHIA & REMINISCENCE There was a time of ticket queues, thin pink paper tickets, cheap popcorn, cheaper seats, the blackier outside the theatre and the balcony. Kshitiz Anand recalls.

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I

miss the movie halls of yesteryear. Yes I do. No, I am not talking about the multiplexes. A desire for a movie comes in often. And that comes too often on a rainy day.

It is during one of these rainy days here in Bangalore, I decided to see the latest Bollywood release. Bangalore in rains is bad.

It is depressing at times. And what is a better way to cheer you up than watch a movie. There are numerous things that one sees when deciding to watch a movie. Highly influenced by the cast, the director and the genre of the movies, we fail to go beyond this. However there is one other thing that is a deciding factor.

In my case, the place where I see a movie has a huge impact on the entire temporal experience that is built during the movie watching exercise.

My oldest memories of going to a watch a movie has been with friends in Darjeeling in the small video parlors. As time went by, the venues have ranged from small video parlors to large multiplexes. Needless to say that there is a certain experiential factor that is associated with each place.

Showing movies in these small halls barely the size of a standard drawing room had a certain charm. The seating area was just a bench and the rows of benches were arranged in an increasing height order. There we were, boarding school boys, out in the town for a day’s outing, eager to catch the movie on show. Having eaten our hearts out with the Chaat and the Chhole Bhature

of the near by snack shop Benis cafe, we would sit in the small parlors. The movies would play in a print that made the characters beyond recognizable face value.

Sometimes the audio acted as the guide for the video and sometimes vice versa. I fail to recall when I stopped watching movies in these small parlors. I guess it was by when we had supposedly grown up and decided it was time to try out the other larger halls.

Following these small video parlors came the lager halls that were the Capital Theater, and the Rink Cinema. For students of a boarding school these theaters was our Cinema Paradiso, and our Gulabi talkies. It was meeting point for us, and often used as a reference in our directions.

I am sure there would be many more like me who felt sad when the Capital Theater stopped functioning for a while, and the Rink Cinema was brought down to make way for a multiplex.

Time passed on, and I came to a metropolitan city for my work.

Movie watching never stopped.

However, in the present day context, movie watching is restricted only to the multiplexes.

So coming back to where we were, I asked the auto driver to take me to the theater on one of the popular roads here in Bangalore.

I was dying to get a feel of the yesteryears, and was deliberately avoiding going to another of the multiplex. Little did I know that I was in for some shock that day.

The old theater was now converted to a Multiplex. Disappointed at this change, I was almost about to go away when someone IA/NOVEMBER 2009

suggested me to check out the renovated halls. I am thankful that I stayed back and enjoyed the experience of the movie.

The structure of the new theater was the same, but the overall experience seemed different.

The name itself felt out of place.

Somehow, I felt that the experiences of the olden days were lost.

A class apart The one thing I miss most in the theaters in the multiplex is the different categories of seating. The thing that baffles me always is why should I have to pay the same amount for sitting in the front row, as compared to the person in the top most rows.

So I miss the balcony, and the dress circle, and the exclusive box seats. The feeling of superiority that was provided by this class differentiation often resulted in an enhanced experience. At the outset, this differentiation opened up the cinema hall to audience of all kind of all classes and sections of a society.

Have the money, take the higher-class seats. Just want to see the movie, take the lower class seats. It was as simple as that.

WHICH POSTER? As a kid, and in the times where the Internet was absent, the very first point of reference to know whether a new movie was in town was the movie posters and the advertisements that would be stuck on the walls of the town. This visual signifier gave information about the movie, the show timings, the main artists in the movie, and the theater in which the

32 movie was playing. Come what may that did not change and the posters on the walls, was our notices and the walls the information hub. The joy of witnessing the poster, the hand made ones especially. One of the things that really had me awed was the presence of these huge hand painted hoardings that announced the arrival of the movie with all its pride. With the coming of the digital age, and no size being too small to get a high quality print, with a longer durability, people opt to go for the digital one.

VALUE FOR MONEY Ok so let me ask you this? When was the last time you bought a ticket in black and saw a movie?

In present day when advance booking of movie tickets is the order of the day, the role of the blackier is not felt in the multiplexes. I remember this one instance when we got 10 tickets at a time for the movie Titanic’s first day first show. The blackier went back a very happy man.

There was a certain charm that was associated with this too.

If you are from a middle class family like I am, you will realize that the price of the ticket plays a huge role in the theater that you see the movie. Therefore paying a lower price for a ticket, would still result in the same experience, or not was not something that mattered.

What mattered was how cheap I could get the ticket for. Some theaters deliberately had different price of tickets for the different timings of the shows. When I spend Rs 250 on a movie ticket,

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I often wonder what is it different that I am gaining out of this experience. What are the things that are new to this experience?

Talking of the different show timings. One thing more that I miss is the show timings being called depending on the time. Like we have the morning shows, the matinee, the evening, the late night show. With the ever-increasing multiplex culture, the show timings have shifted randomly and the same names for the shows do not apply anymore. So now a 10 o’clock, and the 10:20 and the 10:45 are all the morning show and so is the 11 am show.

The experience build up Needless to say the movie is definitely the most important factor in the build up of the experience.

The story is important, the cast is crucial and the execution is prima essential. In the whole it is all about the aesthetic experience that the medium of the film is creating. This experience has been studied by researchers widely.

John Dewey, who spent a lot of his research in analyzing art experiences mentions that any experience of an art form can be analyzed as a rhythmic dance of the aesthetic expression that it is made up of. This dance is primarily composed of 4 parts, namely a) the Cumulation, b) the conservation, c) the tension and d) the anticipation. These four are present in a temporal framework, and if one was to analyze the films in this framework one gets a better idea.

Cumulation is the build up of the IA/NOVEMBER 2009

experience in the absence of a priori information about the experience. This is a build up over time before actually confronting the medium of the expression.

The human capacity of deriving meanings over things increases in a temporal flow. Cumulation is a thing of the past, leading to the present. Without such a build-up there is no fulfillment and without fulfillment there is no aesthetic experience. Cumulation is that part of the experience that is essential in the audience making the decision of whether to watch the movie or not. I feel that it is primarily in this part that the choice of the theater plays a huge role.

Conservation is the tendency to hold onto the some of what one has gone through before, in-order to make sense and a better experience of what is in present.

Conservation is in the present.

This takes cues from the past and is creating the experience along the present. An example in this case is that when you are in the movie theater premises.

The experience has already begun.

How do you hold on to that experience? The genre of the movie, the storyline, the seats in the theater, the acoustics of the hall, play an important role in this part of the experience.

Tension is where the fun lies mostly! This is where moviemakers make most of their money! Music invariably plays an important role in the tension.

Tension refers to both the opposition of energies within the ex-

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perience and between the people involved in the experience. Any resistance prevents immediate discharge and accumulates tension that renders energy intense. So the quality of the theater in which one is watching the movie enhances the experience. Thus tension appears from this compressed energy that is seeking release. And when they try to do it, another form tries to block it. This struggle is the cause of tension. Analyze it this way, say in a movie, you are in a state of conservation; enjoying the experience of the plot, and suddenly there is a gunshot. For a moment, you freeze.

It may be instantaneous, that time may be in milliseconds, but for that instant the hard pounds an extra beat. This creates that struggle within the energies that were already there with the experience you were having.

Finally comes the anticipation. As one would guess, this

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is for This thus occurs in two temporal phases. The first one occurs before the aesthetic experience is taken pace, and the other during the aesthetic experience taking place. Thus there is an expectation build up in this. When that expectation is met, the past is conserved as if the anticipation is molded into the experience itself. When it is not met, the conservation is breached. Often this would also lead to tension and then further lead back to conservation.

the future with the knowledge of the present and the past.

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IN CONCLUSION This short reflection is more about the experiences that have been lost, and is not accessible to me anymore. There is always the option of going back to the smaller towns and checking out the movies in those halls to regain those lost experiences.

It is this conversion of the traditional movie theaters into multiplexes that I sigh upon.

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CINEPHiLIA by Nitesh Rohit

‘The Cinephile is the one who keeps his eyes wide open in vain but will not tell anybody that he could not see any thing.

He is the one preparing for a life as a professional ‘watcher’ as a way to make up for being late, as slowly as possible’

in INDIA

Main Entry: cine•phile Function: Noun Etymology: French cinéphile, from ciné + -phile Date: 1968

‘Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia -- the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born out of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.’

- Serge Daney

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- Susan Sontag,

‘The Decay of Cinema’

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O

n Christmas week 1910, India saw the birth of its first cinephile who while watching ‘The Life of Christ’ had visions, and he wrote:

“While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualizing the Gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. I was gripped by a strange spell. Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?”

Dada Saheb Phalke saw every film he could get his hands on from that moment. His love for the medium drove him to London to further understand the techniques and refine his senses as a filmmaker. On his return, Dada Saheb Phalke relived his dream to make films. Dada Saheb Phalke had seen the film like many others but the passion he bore, the love he showed, and the way he pioneered the exhibition and production of the medium made him the first cineaste we had in India. However, similar to Alfred Nobel, his great discovery of the medium did not move in the way it should have been. Dada Saheb Phalke did not inspire or increase cinephilia in India, but set the base for film production. However, there are no clear indications of development in mise-en-scene from then on. And he unknowingly laid the foundation of Bollywood which we haven’t been able to shakeoff - our love for the epic form.

He also laid the roots for ‘Idol-

worship’ in Indian cinema that has continued to be an important aspect of identification for the Indian audience with cinema. When audiences watched their beloved mythology came alive on screen, the first seeds of ‘fascination’ and ‘love’ without a critical space became etched in our genes. Ever since, the admiration has grown by leaps and bounds. It’s only during the late 40s that this form of love was further enlarged and cinephilia as such developed.

Further, with the growth of the bourgeois in India their mannerism formed another form of love for the medium. This love was built on the foundation of forming a knowledge and displaying it, or watching films to become a part of a social class or acceptance. It’s this form of love for cinema that has flourished and is booming currently in India. Typical of the nature of such cine-goers: hypocrisy, lies, and pseudointellectualism is rampant. The love of cinema in India can be seen in three basic categories:

makers; especially in Calcutta, and the audience had an access to watch movies and meet like minded people unlike ever before. Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Das Gupta and Bansi Chandragupta sowed the first seeds of ‘Cinephilia’ in India, that eventually lead to the growth of these three men to writing and making films in times to come: Ray as a filmmaker, Das Gupta as a critic and Bansi Chandragupta as an Art Director.

1) Idol worship 2) The Bourgeois Gaze 2) Cinephilia

Similarly, Adoor Gopalakrishan a graduate of FTII Pune, established the first society in Kerala - the society also aimed at production, distribution and helping to formulate a passage for good cinema in state of Kerala. Interestingly, the enthusiasm and passion of the ‘period’ is the main source of strength along with the support of the government agencies (FFC now NFDC) that led to the emergence of auteur and good cinema for a considerable period of time. The death of film societies rather the death of enthusiasm, passion and lack of support was a major blow to the ‘Cinema of India’ and ‘Cinephilia in general’.

The inception of the ‘Calcutta Film Society’ is a landmark event in the history of Indian cinema and the advent of ‘Cinephilia in India’. The film society spearheaded a growth in the way people looked at films and viewed cinema in the country.

This rise of film societies in India inspired a legion of film-

There seems to be a vacuuma black hole- somewhere between the transitions of cinema in India from 70s to 80s, because it’s exactly in this short period everything seems to have declined. The right reasons are hard to pin down. Except for the notable cinephile turned

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filmmakers, critics, and historians of 60s and 70s, post 80s onwards ‘Cinephilia in India’ and ‘Cinema in India’ suffered from the same fate. And it’s during this era of decline that film festivals in India and cinephilia in general shifted from love of cinema into snobbism, lies and hypocrisy. It’s not that it did not exist during the era bygone, it did, but it materialized and become a dominant presence that can be felt even today. It has more to do with the bourgeois framework that we come from than our own individual thinking. Where to see, collect, and intellectualize is an important sign of knowledge and collective approval from the crowd and society. Either one has too much money to exhibit those attribute or highlight them using the tools of knowledge.

Interestingly, ‘Idol-worship’ continues to be an important part of the culture: socially and politically, where the ‘matinee’ idol embodied an important place in the minds and heart of film lovers. This spirit has continued to grow and today in the age of satellite boom the media has populated the images into a state of fetish (Like offering prayers when their superstar is sick, and the media reports it as breaking news). While a win by a film director, at an important film festival, in the competitive section of the festival goes unreported. This type of fetish is seen across India. Here, Bollywood is a form of escapism; a place where people go to dream, relax,

enjoy and laugh and this assembly reminds us of the fascination our audiences had with other form of popular recreation most notably the circus. However, unlike the circus, the ‘dreams’ and the ‘life’ portrayed on screen are ‘larger’ than what most middleclass Indian population could have aspiration(s) of, the loves here exist as fetish, where any form of critical breakdown is never accepted. Though their lies a similarity of ‘ fetish’ in a cinephile’s love for cinema and the fetish found in ‘idol-worship’, however, as Christian Metz points out that the ‘fetish’ in the case of a cinephile transpose into a different altitude altogether:

On the other hand, the love of the cinephile has the ‘space’ for a critical breakdown and s (he) is ready to provide evidence, reasons, and is equipped regarding the understanding of the medium. Cinephile is ‘The Love of Cinema’ as Christian Metz defined the term for ‘Cinephile’ in his book; ‘The Imaginary Signifier’. However, the love of cinema for a cinephile also has similarities in the intensity with which the basic three divisions of film lovers are in India, but the difference lies in their degree and range of love for the medium. This degree and range display different aspects that is

“The fetish is the cinema in its physical state,” says Metz, adding that when the love for the cinema is extended from a fascination with technique to a critical study of its codes and processes of signification, the disavowal attached to the fetish becomes a form of knowledge (ibid., p.

75). Cinephilia,

in other words, enables the semiotician to love the cinema while gaining a critical distance from its lure”

CHRISTIAN METZ

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related to the history, tradition, culture of the medium per se, but it also attributes qualities that are purely related to our own being as an existence. Here the love is just not an attraction: physical or mental, but the love is also about exploring the properties and stylistic traits of the medium. This is an important trait of ‘watching’ and ‘learning’ for the cinephile, but for ‘idol-worshippers’ it does not matter, everything is acceptable, provided their favorite stars are present. Hence, ‘Cinephile’ or ‘Cinephilia’ should not be confused with such form of love and imagery worship.

So then the question arises, does ‘Cinephilia exist in India’? The answer is that its exponents have always existed even in the darkest periods, but in such small numbers that it’s hard to point them out. However, post 90s globalization in India, due to the opening of Indian economy for various FDI which eventually lead to the growth in various sectors. This has also contributed to the way film viewing experience has changed through: Multiplexes, Satellite channels and availability of cheap CDs and DVDs. This also lead to the rise of Internet and mobile culture. All these aspects have lead to the growth and ‘Appreciation of Cinema’ in the country, where people are getting aware about watching good films and not just sticking to watching routine Bollywood fare. These groups of people mainly belong to the

urban class. The urban class of film lover notably refers to people leaving in the metros in India (but the aforementioned form of bourgeois gaze is just not restricted to metros) they have the facilities and the accessibilities to watch foreign films in theatres, film festivals, and in their own homes. And it’s exactly here we find second group of film lovers and these group should not be confused with cinephilia or even to an extent adhering to the definition of a cinephile.

Here the ‘ urban class’ of film lovers have taken up the task of appreciating foreign films, and among this social class some typical traits of bourgeoisie narrow-mindness and hypocrisy can be seen. And is evident through all forms of cinema exhibition in the country whether at a film festivals or film screening. This appreciation of films could be referred to as the ‘Bourgeois Gaze’. There is a distinction between people who fall under such platter of film lovers from yesteryears and today. The older lot has slightly become more reconciled in their own cocoons and could be seen more with their own types at film festivals or film screenings and their discussion or the sharing never moves beyond such a social group. On the contrary, the younger lot of the same stature actually looks forward to engage, display, or even interact usually in awe to display their love or sudden knowledge of the field. Yet, both

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forms do not have the space cultivated for a critical discourse.

This is because the love itself is not a pure manifestation, but come towards the field with other invisible source of pretence that carries a disavowal of some form of hidden materialistic desires and acceptance.

This form of façade is very different from the ‘desires’ exhibited by a cinephile towards their relationship of cinema. All three forms of cine-love is justified and accepted at their own limitations and boundaries, however, what causes the distinction of film love is in the personal desires exhibited in the relationship of subject towards the medium. Each desire again could be debated within the framework of an individual vision and goals of life, but when such ‘desires’ are placed on the broader outlook of the medium forms, the social responsibility, the political scenario and scope that the medium itself provides, the clear limitation and redundancy of vision over personal materialistic quests makes the love critically flawed unlike that of a cinephile.

A cinephile may be materialistic but he does not become blind in believing that there is no world beyond the limits of his own skin.

Today foreign films are released in theatres and Film titles are available in the market, and there are 24hrs satellite TV showing not just Bollywood or Holly-

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wood but World Movies. I’m not even counting the amount of films downloaded over the Internet that forms an important growth of watching films, sharing films along with music in colleges in India. Students across India; consciously or unconsciously watch tons of films from all over the world. And these are just not people who are studying cinema or mass communication, the field is varied. However, then the question arises, does this make them into ‘ cinephile’ or signal the boom of ‘ cinephilia’ in the country, because it’s this very lot today that is directing more films than the people who are actually passing out of film schools?

They have seen their fare share of European/ Art films and have love for Bollywood and Hollywood. But this trend of filmmakers and the ‘fresh’ cinema of our country that is directly linked to such group of men/ women, who come from this diverse field, (some of them go on to study ‘Cinema’ or simply join the bandwagon to make films) cannot be linked to the same rise of ‘Cinephile and ‘Cinephilia’ of 60s and 70s that gave rise to great filmmakers and cinema.

Because, irrespective of the growth, and appreciation of good films or the change in the way films are being made in mainstream cinema, the core, and the stylistic trait or the advancement of mise-en-scene is completely non-existent. Most mainstream fare, if not all, resemble each other and technical competence is not the sign

could be called individualistic.

THE OWNER OF THE FACTORY : DADASAHEB PHALKE

of an individuality that is the core to any form of art that could separate it from lets say a massmanufactured good which is severely formed out of alimentation; irrespective of the presence and hard work. So having a new Jimmy-Jib, new Panavision, an avid system or latest DI advancement is not improving the quality of our films. These batches of film lovers are very similar to the ‘Idol-worshiper’ in the forms of their neglect and alienation from the history and tradition of film culture, and almost no understanding and co-relation of the medium either Indian or Foreign. When the zeal of understanding our own traditions and culture does not exist, how can one ‘honestly’ express about others or go on to make films in taking a ‘leap’ in defining their own visual language that IA/NOVEMBER 2009

This is another core reason why there are no film critics, historian or people severely interested in writing on the medium. Because when they are not equipped, how one can provide evidence when questioned, reasons when pointed or admit their flaws. It’s predominately in-between this group of people that a severe habit of snobism and lying exist.

India, maybe, the only country in the world where people from all walk of life and different agegroups lie about movies- to appear intellectual or make things so arcane that it becomes difficult to understand and leaves the other confused. This rise should not be confused with any form of cinephilia. I won’t deny that exception exists in all forms, but exceptions don’t make the rules. The last great batches of cinephiles went on to makes movies in both mainstream and regional cinema in India. However, everything is not lost, irrespective of the fact, that we come from a very rigid social framework yet there seems to be a ray of hope. There are three important reasons for the same: 1) We have a thriving film industry.

2) A generation aware of world cinema is emerging.

3) The slow but important rise of cinephile and converts.

Cinephilia or Cinephile is no special term or institution that requires a person to join or be part of, it’s a conscious or sub-

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conscious linkage of people who are preparing a long arduous journey of being an eternal student. Who enjoys all forms of movies, who is ready to be informed and be informed, and who slowly builds his own course of aesthetics through writing, watching, programming, or making films. Here direct influence without understanding has no values: aesthetically or technically. Similarly there can be no space for dishonesty.

Cinephilia is slowly emerging from across India. Some of them are converts; people who have shifted their loyalty from the first two brands of film lovers.

Here the shift does not mean that one stops appreciating main-

stream fare and lets an unquestioning awe of art cinema take over. It simply means shading of “lies”, “hypocrisy”, “pseudo- intellectual” that so badly engulf the urban class. I myself had to work tremendously hard to bring in a change from the ‘The Bourgeois Gaze’ towards actually ‘loving cinema’, and its then I realized that the world of films I was living and dreaming was fake and unreal. People who I meet at film festivals, read online, or anywhere are not what they pretend to be. It’s then only this gradual shift to actually ‘loving cinema’ arouse. I could see the different blend of film lovers and differentiate people who call them cinephile or label the tag of film lovers to be some form of ‘rise of cinephil-

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ia’. Beside, it’s very few who have been purely in love from the beginning with pure honesty and reflect the same. These people are the hardest to find here.

However, there has been a considerable growth in the last couple of years in the rise of cinephiles. People who enjoy the diversity that it provides and they are slowly picking up its tradition: reflecting and relearning. Of late, the cinephile have access to all sources of film-watching much like the other group and they are using the Internet to take advantage of the cross-cultural values and understanding of the medium through blogs, magazines and discussion. If this group of people are able to ‘inform’ and help,

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especially the second group of film lovers in the country to understand the medium better and help them overcome few boundaries than their could be a vital and a strong pool of people who would be talking, writing, and hoping to making changes in the medium. Wherein one could witness the emergence of New Wave of films, writing, and a ‘choice’ for the audience.

It’s is through this very ‘few’ that a new cinema of the country or a new way of looking at our own cinema and beyond could come through. Because it’s through them that one could help overcome the illiteracy about the medium people have; to help them see the difference between good camerawork and bad camerawork; a bad shot or good shot; between the existent of a director and non-existent. The Internet is the first tool in the struggle to break into the large pool of reaching people, because in the last decade or so, films and film writing has become separated into two large pool ‘ academia’ or ‘mainstream’ and its this gap or a ‘ middle-path’ the cinephile must find and reflect.

It’s exactly here the Internet is providing the possibility of an alternate from the clutches of editors and censorship.

most cinephile can’t afford a film magazine, it’s learning off the Internet that becomes vital.

I won’t deny that a number of critical writing on directors or any form of write-up by cinephile lack critical ingenuity, but we can’t overlook the idea of growth and the prospect of establishing a critical school of thought that could be called our own, and not directly influenced by someone else. Yet always be open to learn and improve is vital. Because in the end, it should not be about you and me, but more of, towards the improvement of the relationship one has with the medium. So the more I work toward my relationship the better I get to understand the forms of its existence.

At the same time it’s providing an important source of learning. In a country where there is no infrastructure for a critical discourse and hence the Internet becomes an ocean of learning. India being a place where

Cinephilia would help India get back into the days it once had or to even wave a march forward into representing the true face of the nation: through form and content. It is the growth, sustainability and constant self-as-

THE MAN OF CIINEMA : CAHIERS FOUNDER & EDITOR, ANDRE BAZIN

IA/NOVEMBER 2009

surance and motivation of cinephiles across the nation that is important; especially for the survival of the medium aesthetically. Else film love and idol worship will continue to exist here in India. Cinema will continue to flourish, but cinephile and critics will finally disappear from the face of the country and cinephilia will remain buried as just another romanticized fantasy.

REFERENCES/CITATIONS:- THE TRACKING SHOT IN KAPO, SERGE DANEY, SENSES OF CINEMA - THE CINEMA OF EXPERIMENTATION- AMRIT GANGER, WINDS FROM THE EAST. - THE DECAY OF CINEMA:

COVER STORY CONTINUES. NEXT PAGE. IA/NOVEMBER 2009

I

programming

film festivals

In the first of our two-part series on film programming, Sachin Gandhi, elaborates on his experiences as a film programmer for prestigious film festivals all over the world.

DEAD AS SNOW : STILL FROM THE NORWEGIAN FILM, ‘DEAD SNOW’

IA/NOVEMBER 2009

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E

very week there is a film festival playing in some part of the world.

Film festivals come in various flavours - international, genrebased (horror, sci-fi, western, etc), regional (Latin, Arab, Asian) or festivals which only program independent films.

While festivals differ in size, almost all festivals share the same programming difficulties with regards to monetary and political decisions that can sometimes prevent access to certain films.

When money and politics are not an issue, a festival has to address the problem of striking a balance between popular vs artistic cinema in its selection. My programming experiences with the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF, since 2004) and the smaller Calgary Pan-Asian Film Festival (CPAFF, from 2006-2007) have offered plenty of sobering anecdotes with regards to dealing with numerous obstacles in trying to secure the best cinema.

If a film festival has sufficient funds there is a good chance they can land most of the marquee films, provided the festival’s dates do not clash with a bigger film festival. Getting these funds is another matter altogether! This is where a festival’s sponsors come into play as a healthy list of sponsors can address most of the financial burden. The ideal situation for a festival is to find sponsors who can freely support the festival with no strings attached. This ensures a festival has complete

artistic freedom to book any movie it wants. On the other hand, if a festival can only find limited sponsors, it becomes harder to maintain the festival’s integrity. Getting government grants is another avenue to bring money into the festival. Even the two biggest film festivals in Canada, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), depend on these government funds for their operations. In fact, in 2009 TIFF received 3 million Canadian dollars in government grants.

The sponsorship issue makes for an interesting challenge when one starts a film festival from scratch. In 2006, I was in charge of programming films for CPAFF, a startup film festival which was designed to showcase works from Pan-Asian countries (ranging from Iran to Japan and including South East Asia) and to specifically promote works of North American filmmakers of Pan-Asian descent. CPAFF had big dreams and chased films which played at Sundance, Berlin and Rotterdam. We also pursued works of emerging filmmakers across North America.

The irony was that CPAFF had no initial budget for these films but our wish list continued to grow nevertheless. Being a startup film festival, we received help from filmmakers and producers who were willing to offer their films at a discounted rate. The festival amassed money in tiny spurts ($100 here, $500 there) on IA/NOVEMBER 2009

a weekly basis and this enabled us to book our initial films. With some impressive film titles to our name, the festival was able to bait further generous sponsors. One of the biggest sponsors for CPAFF was the local Vietnamese community. The community was supportive of the festival but had one small request - they would not support the festival in any form (no money or marketing) if we booked a film made in Vietnam as the community was not in favor of the current Vietnamese government. On the other hand, they had no problem in supporting American-Vietnamese films. This restriction presented a problem because this would mean loss of sponsorship money from the Vietnamese community if we went ahead with our choice of the Vietnamese film Buffalo Boy. We had already short-listed two American-Vietnamese films, Kieu by Vú T. Thu Há and Simply Fobulous by Richard Cranor. We were definitely going to book Kieu but the dilemma arose with Simply Fobulous. While Simply Fobulous had a good story, it suffered from substandard acting and average technical aspects (editing, cinematography etc). The film did not make our original cut but the Vietnamese community promised to buy at least 200 advance tickets. After much deliberation, we booked Simply Fobulous. The film drew a huge crowd and most of

44 COVER STORY

the audience loved the film as it portrayed issues that they could relate to as Vietnamese growing up in North America. At the end of the day, we learnt much about the ethics of choosing a technically inferior film in return for keeping our sponsors happy.

CPAFF incurred a minor loss when it went against the advice of one of our major sponsors (the Chinese Consulate) in booking Micha X. Peled’s insightful documentary China Blue (about jean making sweat shops in China).

The Chinese Consulate promised assistance in terms of marketing as well as acquiring Chinese films. However, upon hearing of our decision to show China Blue, the consulate refused support.

It was a baffling decision as the documentary does not put China in a bad light but instead shows Western corporations as villains that force Chinese companies to lower the cost of manufacturing while demanding mass production in deplorable conditions.

In the end, the festival director made a bold decision to show the film. We presume the film received negative advertising as only 5 people came to see the film and we were left to speculate.

Sometimes having the money to get a film is not enough, there can be other strings attached when booking films. In 2005, CIFF wanted to show Deepa Mehta’s Water alongside her two earlier films Fire and Earth.

However, the Canadian distributors enforced the condition that Water had to be the opening gala film. While this was never CIFF’s intent, the festival had

to comply otherwise they would not have been able to show the film. A more common demand while booking films is from directors and producers who expect to be flown-in for the screening. For the bigger festivals, for example the Venice Film Festival which flies in the director, producer, principle actors and some technical crew for every feature, this is not a problem. However smaller-budget festivals such as CIFF can only fly-in a few film makers.

Booked films are not guaranteed to be part of the final festival line-up. Sometimes, filmmakers or producers withdraw their movie from a festival even after the film has been officially selected. Two common reasons for such late withdrawals are distribution deals or a film’s premier status. There are only a handful of festivals around the world (Sundance, Cannes, Rotterdam, TIFF) which offer a distribution market for films. For a majority of independent films, the goal of a film festival is to find a distributor for their film.

Some filmmakers will only target their films for the select few festivals and allow their works to go to other festivals while waiting for distribution. In 2009 at CIFF, Jeff Kopas withdrew his film An Insignificant Harvey from the festival after he received a distribution deal.

All the festival catalogues and media releases included his movie but a few days before the film’s screening, the film had to IA/NOVEMBER 2009

be withdrawn. At CPAFF, we had two films that were pulled out after they were selected. In both cases, the producers decided that they did not want to risk showing their movies at a small film festival lest their chances be ruined for the bigger TIFF. Since TIFF prefers to have exclusive premiers for its movies (either World or North American), it was a reasonable assumption that Toronto might have passed on them had these films been shown at CPAFF. The filmmakers situation was perfectly understandable because CPAFF offered no distribution potential for their films and in both cases, the filmmakers apologized and one of them even said that he would have loved to show his film at our festival but he had to play “the political game” and hold onto the festival’s premier status.

Interestingly, even TIFF is not immune to losing a film to another festival. In 2008, TIFF was scheduled to play The Class but had to withdraw the film after the film’s North American premier status went to the New York Film Festival instead. There is a clear hierarchy of film festivals with the smaller festivals being the most vulnerable to losing out on films if a bigger festival comes calling. Of course, the international festival hierarchy starts with the Cannes festival which is at the top. It is impossible to imagine any filmmaker or producer dare withdraw their film from the festival if it has been selected to play at Cannes.

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Another challenging aspect for festivals is finding a balance between showing popular vs art films. If a festival goes too far in either direction, it will suffer either in terms of critical judgment or financial revenue. If the festival books too many popular films, the festival will benefit financially but will take a beating from cinephiles. On the other hand, a festival that has many artistic films will suffer financially because most of the audience will stay away. However, every film festival, including Cannes and TIFF, has found a few spots for some form of popular cinema. Hollywood’s presence at Cannes may have dipped slightly in the last two years but over the course of the last decade, plenty of big summer blockbuster Hollywood films have played out of competition at Cannes.

Over the last few years, TIFF has also found spots for Bollywood films such as Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, Kabul Express and Singh Is Kinng while still serving as the unofficial fall lineup for Hollywood movies and continuing to program the best in foreign and avant-garde cinema.

In our case, the Simply Fobulous example at CPAFF illustrates this divide between popular and art films. Simply Fobulous was a popular choice with the audience and the screening generated enough money so that the festival could cover the costs of bringing in quality features such as the wonderful Chinese film Electric Shadows and the vibrant

documentary Bombay Calling (about Indian call centers). At CIFF, it has been the popular films that have always drawn the most crowds while art films have struggled to find audience.

The definition of popular films at CIFF has evolved over the years and is no longer limited to Hollywood or Canadian Cinema which are still the top draws.

Popular cinema at CIFF now includes any American Independent, French language, Pedro Almodóvar or gore/shock horror midnight films. Of course, there are exceptions - if a film wins the top prize at Cannes or Sundance, it will draw crowds regardless of which country the film is from. It goes without saying that CIFF cannot think of leaving out new films by Canadian directors David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan or Deepa Mehta. Thankfully, these filmmakers do not make bad movies but even if they did, CIFF would still have no choice but to book these filmmakers work.

At CIFF French films usually sell out even if they are by an unknown director. The main reason for this is that the city has a good number of French speaking people (after all French is Canada’s second official language) but also the Anglophiles in the city still consider French cinema to be the best in the world. There is no disputing the number of French masterpieces that have come out over the past decades but some of the best current cinema is coming out of Romania, Malaysia, PhilipIA/NOVEMBER 2009

THE POSTER OF THE FILM ‘CHINA BLUE’

THE POSTER OF THE FILM ‘SIMPLY FOBULOUS’

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pines, China and Mexico. Yet, the festival-goers easily ignore these new works and continue to choose the safer alternatives in French cinema. Likewise, some festival-goers never venture away from English language films because reading subtitles is “not their thing”. An interesting test to observe and validate the audience trend at CIFF came in the newly created Maverick Competition category where 10 new and challenging works were chosen from either first time or second time directors

THE 10 FILMS • Be Calm and Count to Seven (Iran, Ramtin Lavafipour) • Be Good (France, Juliette Garcias) • Everyone Else (Germany, Maren Ade) • Fish Eyes (China, Zheng Wei) • Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (USA, Damien Chazelle) • Juntos (Canada/Mexico, Nicolas Perada) • Karaoke (Malaysia, Chris Chong Chan Fui) • My Suicide (USA, David Lee Miller) • Unmade Beds (UK, Alexis Dos Santos) • Wrong Rosary (Turkey, Mahmut Coskun)

Since all the directors were relatively unknown, it was an interesting test to see if some common expectations of past audience records would still hold. Going by the list, the programmers expected that Be

Good and My Suicide would be the crowd-attractors solely because of their country of origin.

Sure enough, the French film Be Good was the only sell-out in the category while My Suicide came very close to selling out. Guy and Madeline was also a US film and was well attended but the mention of Jazz and John Cassavetes might have put some people off. The film which won the Maverick Competition prize, Karaoke, was one of the least attended movies in the category, yet the programmers agree that it was one of the top films from the group of 10 along with Be Calm and Count to Seven and Everyone Else.

Another sure thing at CIFF is that any film with an overdose of blood and mayhem finds a willing audience. The Norwegian Nazi-zombie movie Dead Snow was a stellar hit in terms of audience numbers despite playing at 11:15 pm on a Wednesday night. The number of people who saw Dead Snow was greater the combined total of people who saw the excellent films Karaoke, Birdsong, Daytime Drinking and Call If You Need Me. The common characteristic of the latter four films was that they all had a leisurely pace with no violence. The wonderful Malaysian film Call If You Need Me was an example of an artful gangster film without any blood or guns while Karaoke evoked the beautiful poetic cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Unfortunately, most of the people who attended Karaoke were not fond of the movie

IA/NOVEMBER 2009

with their main complaints being that the film was “too slow” and “not much happened.”

These words have been used to describe the cinema of many stellar filmmakers in the past.

Local audiences at CIFF are still not used to slower paced films and fail to appreciate the beauty that comes from soaking up the atmosphere in a film that does not rush its shots. If a film manages to engage the audience it is a treat to watch, regardless of its pace. Yet every year it seems people are most vocal when they complain about a film’s slower pace yet no one seems offended if a film has too many quick cuts and overloads the senses with needless noise, explosions and blood. In fact, audiences at CIFF are more forgiving towards the mistakes of popular cinema than they are towards an art film.

Even after successfully acquiring films after many hours of

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val had no choice but to play the non-subtitled version of the film as well as refunding the audience their money.

A STILL FROM ‘KARAOKE’

negotiations and programming, festivals can face further problems due to prints not arriving on time or technical problems with the projector. In 2007, the print for Francisco J. Lombardi’s engaging political film Black Butterfly arrived by plane less than 2 hours before the film’s scheduled screening. It took a coordinated effort to ensure that the print successfully made it to the screening on time but there were some nervous moments until the film made it to the theater. However, problems can still arise even after the print has made it to the theatre. At CIFF, a sold out show of the Japanese film Cyborg She had to be rescheduled (originally slotted on a Wednesday night) because the print did not arrive on time. When the print did arrive, the only feasible slot was at 10:45 am on a Saturday morning. Regardless, the wrong print had been received since the distributers sent a print without any subtitles. The festi-

With organization and keen planning, a festival should be able to properly budget for the subsequent year’s festival.

The festival makes money not only from sponsorships but also from ticket sales. This additional revenue enables each programmer at the festival to select as many films for their category (example World, Documentary, Midnight etc) as long as they operate within budget. Smaller film festivals do not have the financial capability to acquire big banner films such as bigger festivals like TIFF and VIFF. In a way, smaller festivals have a better chance of unearthing undiscovered gems because they have to find the best films at reasonable rates. Of course, even if the financial aspects are taken care of, a film can still be out of a festival’s reach because of political interference. This

A STILL FROM ‘BE CALM AND COUNT TO SEVEN’

IA/NOVEMBER 2009

political interference can take the form of demands made by sponsors or filmmakers themselves. While these interventions may be orchestrated by personnel outside of the festival, they can still directly or indirectly influence the programming of a festival. Audience have the ultimate say in a film’s fortunes.

Some attend film festivals for the gala premiers to mingle with local celebrities and big name movie stars while others stick to safer choices (Hollywood films or works by well known directors) and then there are those who try to watch as many different things as they possibly can.

A film festival has to cater to all these diverse cinematic palettes.

If a festival is too heavy with a specific brand of film, the festival will either suffer financially or in terms of film criticism. A festival has to find the perfect blend of popular, genre and artistic cinema. Even if a festival does manage to keep its sponsors happy, stay within budget and book a diverse range of films, there is no guarantee that audience will like the festival because when it comes to film, everyone is a critic, unofficially that is!

(Sachin Gandhi is a cinephile and film programmer for the Calgary International Film Festival since 2004. He also helped start up and run the Calgary Pan-Asian Film Festival. His articles on film have appeared in The Hindustan Times, Cinema in India (an NFDC publication), Rediff, India Abroad and the Pune International Film Festival. Sachin’s film blog can be found at likhna.blogspot.com.)

II

SEEING IS

BELIEVING

In the second part of IA’s two-part coverage of film programming, Supriya Suri begins to reveal the grossly misunderstood job of a film programmer in the nation and solve the general incomprensebility around it.

IA/NOVEMBER 2009

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“Cinema is a paradox, being a mass art; it is interpreted by cinema literates.�(1) India being the highest producer of films has assured that cinema has reached every nook and corner of the nation.

As far as the literates; film programmers, film critics, film scholars, film teachers, etc. are concerned, not only do we not have the infrastructure to support them but in India such literates are almost nonexistent.

Any communication begins with a sender at one end and receiver at the other, where the message transmission is disrupted through noise. Cinema being a tool of communication, with director sending out the message to the audience has often been the victim of noise due to the lack of such cinema literates. Under such a circumstance our cinema has been affected in many ways; for film schools, students do not have the right guide to help them explore cinematic possibilities; for an audience, they lack an understanding of good and bad due to the limited viewing habits; for directors and other films making professional, there is a lack to look at their work objectively; and most importantly, a space for good cinema is automatically killed due to the lack of programming possibilities that should try to create an alternate space for good cinema. In such a scenario, when the gap between the film maker and

the audience is huge, it has given an advantage to the film maker to be a capitalist who has mastered the art of selling his films to maximize his profits through his venture/films and reach out to masses with limited choices making audience his puppets.

Due to the lack of programmers, critics, scholars bringing to attention to the audience what is good and bad, the maker himself becomes the programmer, distributer and critic to the audience. This has been the biggest reason for cinema always being a cul de sac for audience as well.

Looking at the developments in cinema in the recent years, there has been a rise in film festival, sudden distribution of foreign films DVDs, and shift in T.V. programming of films and emerging film clubs in various cities. All this although seems a positive factor for the growth of cinema but they lack one common aspect: a good programmer to take good films to masses.

All these positions have been rather acquired by corporates, who possess money but lack cinephiles. Hence they face trouble in understanding what should be the best film that is worth acquiring the rights of, the films that should be shown on TV, films to be selected for film festivals, films to be screened at various culture centers. And it is for these reasons why a film programmer is so necessary.

On the other hand looking at bodies promoting cinema under the government like National

IA/NOVEMBER 2009

Development Of Film Corporation, Directorate of Film festivals India are headed by government officials and not cinephiles themselves. So when an international film festival demands Indian films, films being sent out are more based on personal choices and networks of these officials than representing the best of Indian cinema to foreign film festival. A programmer must assist these departments to liaison in sending the best of Indian films to international festivals and in turn getting the best of foreign films for our audience. It is out of these gaps that a need for film programmer or curator emerges.

A need for programmer in Indian has usually been felt only for such big international festivals in India and have ended with them. However to be a film programmer has certain requisites and in a country like India, where art itself is still gaining importance; being a film programmer has to search its own path, facing more challenges and carry more responsibilities.

To understand what is film programmar in simplest manner; a film programmer is anyone who screens films and curator is someone who looks into the archives and screens for museums, galleries. And in the emerging scenario for film screenings, film clubs, local festivals, work of a programmer is unheard of.

Those organizing such screenings are not cinephiles as such but more involved in social causes, or art in general, or the foreign culture centers in In-

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dia promoting their own country. All these have one thing in common they are promoting their own cause but trying to create a space for good cinema.

Looking at the history of the film society movement in India during the 60’s when cinema saw a new course in India, it happened only when cinephiles: Chidananda Das Gupta and Satyajit Ray in Kolkata hit it off and then Adoor Gopalakrishnan in Kerala.

The reason why such a movement sustained only once in the history was because it was started by cinephiles themselves.

With a clear objective to provide the audience to witness international cinema, since in the commercial film circle no other films found its way. (2) Few decades gone, the scenario today in India is the same; there are still no exhibitors for films beyond the commercial films circle.

The importance for paving the way for international cinema among the masses was realized with an International film festival back then and today even though international films have been introduced to the market this has been done without any realization for the importance of cinema, since it started with the corporate interests and not serving the cinephiles. Today how audience experiences cinema might have changed but what they watch is still dominated and guided by the capitalist. Therefore, a film programmer, who has an understanding of cinema, has an insight to the history and con-

temporary developments of cinema, in other words a true cinephile must exist. And this is a pre requisite for a film programmer, to be a cinephile, it only then that he can contribute in building a cinematic culture in his town. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.�

Ludwig Wittgenstein He then must understand the traditions of viewing habits of the audience what they have been watching, what needs to be added, how he can break away from the conventions. This is the most challenging part for the programmer since the viewing habits of the kind of films they watch have been constant since decades. Audiences are not only not used to world cinema but

their own regional cinema as well, and have been dominated by the commercial productions.

Hence the major problems that the clubs, and screenings today face is getting audience.

To break away from something that audience has been watching since decades is the most difficult crisis that a programmer must learn to overcome.

The viewing habits in terms how the audience sees a film has definitely changed but what they see has remained constant.

Reflecting back at the past, the pattern of any development of images, say image of a God (through rock art, sculpture, paintings, clay idols etc) have carried forward a similar imaginations in different forms that has led to traditions and firm

THE BIOGRAPHER AND THE BIOGRAPHED : RAY with SETON

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believers or devotee of that creation. To break away from the image of that God, to a new one is an impossible task to achieve that has been carried forward since decades, even if the evidence shows it. For e.g. if today a painter starts painting a blue face of an elephant with a pot of butter claiming it as Lord Krishna, there will be a conflict between the traditions of image and the new way of expressing the image presentation of Lord Krishna. Hence, in a way to see Lord Krishna in every image representation has become a tradition, myth and also a superstition. And the most difficult tasks lies in breaking away from it especially in the metros of India.

The growth of images in cinema has also formed a certain sort of beliefs and traditions among the viewing habits of the audience.

The challenge for a programmer lies in understanding these traditions of watching films and then introducing a space for alternate cinema beyond the mainstream, so that cinema gains is importance other than being a culde-sac medium. To introduce a new tradition of viewing image in cinema, the programmer will witness similar challenge as an artist will in expressing the mythology in new ways. Therefore challenging the viewing habits cannot be implemented until understood. Hence a programmer/curator is required for film clubs, local festivals and screening, for which most of the organizers refuse the demand of.

While the watching habits in terms of how and what definitely differs from metros, to small towns to rural village. In T.V. with new satellite channels showing foreign films are becoming more and more status symbol, for film clubs and festival a certain intellect always want to be a part of the crowd, and for theatres it is all about commercial releases giving luxurious, multiplex experience and as for internet savvy, the new streaming and downloadable movie options are gaining popularity.

Even though the accessibility to watch any film might have increased yet the quality remains a big question. The balance to be able to watch good films along with bad does not exist. In such a circumstance the challenges for a programmer still lies in breaking away from these conventions and im-

IA/NOVEMBER 2009

ages as also mentioned earlier.

Similarly as far as rural viewing habits are concerned, a programmer will have to deal with different problems altogether. Although today there exists no option at these places apart from commercial cinema this was not always the case.

Going back to the history again, the film movement was gaining momentum in the metros during the 60’s and this movement entered the rural areas only when Marie Seton, who first realized the potential to educate people in these areas through film. She was perhaps the first programmer to understand what importance cinema can hold in such places and push cinema to rural places.

And the gradual decline in the movement, for decades and now has resulted in no option at these places to watch any other film than commercial fantasies. And in such a scenario where only the commercial fantasies exist, cinema for them is no less than a dream. These rural places have given space for such dreams like idols (actors/superstars) a place next to another dream like/ powerful idol and that is the idol of his Lord. So when a festival of lord is to be celebrated, it is given equal emotional response to that of such dream idols from cinema. (No wonder today the political parties need them). This is where a challenge for a programmer lies in dealing with the rural areas, to be able to get them out from the dreamy and fantasy world and build a better learn-

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THE TRADITIONAL REPRESEN TATIONS OF LORD KRISHNA

ing experience through cinema.

A programmer will also face challenges to decide what films to show, since most of the films do not have subtitles in Hindi or their respective language.

Even if there are not many know how to read them. So the challenge lies both in breaking away from the dream as well as in selecting from the limited films that can be watched.

These breaking away from the traditions can only be done by a programmer who constantly dedicates time in understanding what kind of films should be shown. However programming alone cannot bring about a change and lead them to think consciously about how to look at films. He needs to be provide a platform for intensive discussions, where a programmer is a

mentor to moderate them, and involved the audience as much as possible without being preachy.

This is an added responsibility for a programmer that he must carry, the act of communicating through cinema accompanying the act of communication with the audience about cinema.

It is only when this takes place could there be a revival not only in cinephilia in India, but towards building a positive growth in cinema in future, building better directors through this platform. And he must be able to provide this platform to challenge their viewing habits in a way that is balanced for the audience to have a reason to come back again, to be motivated to watch good and bad, to be able to see all kinds of films. And it is only then that the audience IA/NOVEMBER 2009

will be able to decide what is good and bad for themselves.

Because; “The

limits of my language

mean the limits of my world.�

Ludwig Wittgenstein (2) It is only when a programmer understands these directions could he also create an importance of a programmer itself in the country.

Notes:1.

Alain Badiou : http:// www.monthlyreview.org/ mrzine/badiou050609.html 2. http://www.cscsarchive. org:8081/MediaArchive/art.nsf/ 94ff8a4a35a9b8876525698d00264 2a9/d148feec545f0ccf652572d60 033134e/$FILE/A0190108.pdf

CINEPHILE, adjectiv.

A European nation with 35 theatres witnesses a cinematic splurge in a new breed of filmmakers changing the face of cinema in their nation and unwilling to back down from their demand of complete independence. Anamaria Dobincuic contemplates the wave and her own cinephilia.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS & 2 DAYS

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CRISTI PUIU(left) & CORNELIU PORMBOIOU(right).

THE POSTER OF POLITIST, ADJECTIV.(inset)

F

rom 432 movie theaters in 1997 to 75 in 2008 – one might think these are the darkest times for Romanian cinephiles. With no substantial help from the state and with more and more multiplex theaters, independent movie theaters are, indeed, on the verge of extinction.

Despite all this, I choose to adopt the glass half-full perspective. With each year, more and more film festivals are being organized, and more or less obscure films are being screened in unusual places.

As a cinephile, I feel that I owe a lot to one particular film festival: Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF). TIFF is the first international film festival from Romania, and definitely the most important; since its first edition in 2002, it has grown incredibly much. TIFF

basically means ten days of films from all over the world, films brought directly from Cannes (Von Trier’s Antichrist, for example), movie theaters packed with viewers, around 200 volunteers, international guests (Julie Delpy, Vanessa Redgrave, Catherine Deneuve – just to name a few). Most importantly, TIFF has proven to be a great framework for the promotion of new Romanian cinema. It’s this festival that has introduced me to the work of Cristian Mungiu and to that of Corneliu Porumboiu.

Other important film festivals are Anonimul International Independent Film Festival (6 editions), Bucharest International Film Festival (5 editions), Anim’est International Animated Film Festival (4 editions), and Next International Short & Medium Length Film Festival (3 editions). Moreover, this

IA/NOVEMBER 2009

year alone has welcomed four new international film festivals: KINOdiseea International Film Festival for Children, Iaşi International Film Festival (IIFF), Romanian International Film Festival (Ro-IFF) and Comedy Cluj International Film Festival.

Needless to say, film festivals are a cinephile’s playground.

There’s something exhilarating about being in a movie theater full of people during a film festival. At the same time, after such a festival is over, I enjoy the familiarity and the almost intimate feeling of being in a movie theater with only five to ten people, as often is the case. Personally, I’m not a stickler for the classic definition of cinephilia, i.e. “avid moviegoing”. Although nothing compares to watching a film in dark theater, I mostly watch films at home. I like being alone with a film, away from

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ma at the previously mentioned French médiathèque. Plus, there are always the online editions of international film magazines for well written reviews, and IMDB.com for news as well as for complete filmography lists.

any type of distractions (popcorn bags, impatient moviegoers – “Is it over yet?” etc.); and I certainly enjoy the possibility of replaying certain scenes that caught my attention. Besides, most of the films I watch are in a digital format (received from friends or borrowed from the French médiathèque, or even downloaded – because it’s the Wild West out there, right?).

I strongly believe that cinephilia supposes a lot of individual research. While recommendations from friends play an important role, I’ll have to say that the Internet is the best tool for discovering great films, no matter how alienating that might sound. As for magazines, I stopped relying on them for information about cinema a long time ago. Film magazines in Romania have come and gone. The only magazine that has been a constant in the Romanian print market is Cinemagia, which has also managed to build a strong online community around it. And, of course, there used to be Republik, my favorite music / film magazine. Unfortunately, the major editorial changes at Republik resulted in less space for film reviews, and also in poor writing. I find it more efficient to follow the reviews of a number of well-known film critics (Alex Leo Şerban, Iulia Blaga, Andrei Gorzo, Lucian Maier etc.), that they write for different cultural publications than to read a film magazine. Luckily, I can always count on finding the latest issue of Cahiers du Ciné-

I’m lucky to live in the town that hosts TIFF, and I’m also lucky to be surrounded by people who share my love for films.

Nevertheless, there are those rare occasions on which someone will tell me they don’t care about cinema, which is when I like to remind myself the quote that opens Godard’s Le Mépris: “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires.” It’s why I love cinema, it’s why I need cinema.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: THE POSTER OF THE PALM D’ OR WINNER, CRISTIAN MUNGiU & RADO JUDE(below)

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THE UPHOLDER : JAHNU BARUA

Winds from the East by Sagorika Singha

Bollywood either swallows each pocket of actual cinema in the nation or absorbs it within itself. Ultimately, as the American imperialism spreads across the world, the Mumbai imperialism all over the nation. Small industries and their ardent zealots strive to survive. This issue, its Assam.

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ven to try to give an overview on the state of cinephilia in this part of India is a hard task in itself. The diversified, varied diaspora of this region makes things difficult. The myriad mixture of color, culture, language and tradition imbibed in the cluster of seven states get reflected even in the kind of cinema that comes out of it as well. Add to it the constant unrest, communal clashes, and identity issues among other concerns that have been taking so much of attention (making the region infamous) that it almost overshadows the other persona of the region, for example the art and culture scene including the bludgeoning love for cinema. Cinema has mostly been used both as a tool for entertainment or as the medium for showcasing the state of things at hand, in other words presenting the reel side of the real picture. Things have been going awry in this regard here, otherwise. The utter negligent of the erstwhile flourishing, rich cinema culture of the east is mightily felt by the small existing community who have been trying so hard to safeguard it. It is sad to think that the region which has raised filmmakers like Jahnu Barua, Aribam Shyam Singh and Bhabendranath Saikia, to name a few, has been going through such a downfall. One of the major constraints behind the declining numbers of people coming up from the re-

gion is, perhaps, the inability of the state machinery in nurturing and keeping in the few enthusiasts who do crop up. Even after trailing on all the bad records, I don’t know if it is a healthy trend to find the popular films proliferating. There is a distinct presence of a number of small time filmmakers who usually end up making cheaper rip offs of the Bollywood ‘biggies’ (excluding the few exceptions who try to bring in some freshness) but they are few and far between. It is being debated and discussed in the film circles in the region that the film industry in Assam and its neighboring states (moreso) have been repeatedly ignored by the cultural scions of the country. It is actually a pity to find the already ravished paradise turning to be a dead ground and now to see it creeping to the arts scene here is pathetic if not worse.

BANE OR BOON We constantly complain of the mediocrity of “Bollywood” or commercial cinema at large, how they have been so successfully able to maintain their hegemonic stance. At the same time, it is amazing to access the large reach that Bollywood has all over the country. The northeast is no exception either. It is amazing to note that the region, which is ever complaining of the step-motherly attitude meted out to it, finds a common ground when it comes to accepting the Hindi film industry and its by-products. It is ironical that IA/NOVEMBER 2009

Hindi films were banned in Manipur by the terrorist groups, on the ground that it was a threat to the cultural scene in the region, but for the ones who wanted autonomy, may be it was the power of unison that Hindi as a language holds, possessing the supreme ability to bypass trivial boundaries that people erect between themselves. But the basic thing is that cinema has always been a route, a medium through which one just wanted to give shape to his/her creative vision, like an artist’s painting or the sculptor’s sculpture. It is not difficult to understand that Bollywood has its impact here, but that is definitely just one side of the coin. There is, of course, a group of cinema enthusiasts who want the art to be taken seriously and hence work for its growth. But it is easier said than done, particularly in the context of the region to fight so many of the evils (necessary and otherwise) haunting the place and subsequently, in its art scene.

IS CINEMA ALL-IMPORTANT? Violence kills and everyone else are left to suffer. Everywhere, the voice least heard, or the ones’ trying to fight the established norms find a way to do so. There are the coming of age and the many other little known/ obscure documentary film makers whose pure passion for the art sees them through the whirlwind, to find their group and even with their limited means, to come up with their own vision-

58 ary appeal, some of them manage to float somewhere between but in some way or the other there is definite wish fulfillment, as in finally seeing their work of art in real. The question of its reach follows soon though.

The brightest thing is that of all the terrorism issues, community clashes, unrest that the region goes through, the cinema, or the moving images can, will and has been acting as a platform for reaching out to the public, to the nation, the media, to vent their angst or simply to tell the tale of the various other after affects of it to all and sundry. And thus cinema grows. It is unfortunate that for the majority though, it is not so easy to appreciate the art as it should be, it’s only one dimensional side of cinema that is generally accessed by the people at large. And it is not their fault exactly; to work for flourishment has never been that easy.

Even recognising those individual and then helping them to grow in their endeavors is difficult and something that has not been given enough attention too.

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culture, the setting up of multiplexes and the chain. But for every multiplex being installed, there is double the number of local theaters being shut down, an imbalance on such fronts kind of helps in furthering the tendency of ruin. In Assam, mostly the capital city, Guwahati, film clubs such as Assam Cine Art Society, Guwahati; and Cine Art Society, Asom (CineASA), are still working back and forth, arranging film fests, seminars and workshops along with the regulars.

But these are established old clubs which have managed to stand tall after battling many ordeals. The urgency is the growth of newer ones, but there are none. Naturally such a constricted, suffocating space, leaves no scope/low scope

BHABENDRA NATH SAIKIA SHOOTING HIS FILM

It is the lack of education and exposure to cinema as an art that is partly responsible for the current state of things. Besides, in an already troubled state, the fledging and depleting infrastructure only reaffirms that cinema or its revival in the proper way is not the first thought on everybody’s mind. But things are still pretty perky for the growing cities or the capitals. In places like Guwahati and Shillong one can see the invasion of the consumerist

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for the growth and proliferation of the small band of cinephiles who do manage to exist somehow. I remember my university, and our “Movie Club” and the bare unnecessaries that had followed through. It never worked out because of the sheer convoluted sense of cinema but then again I’m no authority on it.

For others might be of the opinion that for a region which is already mired with more than required mount of problems what to do with cinema, but the magic of cinema is such that still a handful comes out with documentaries and films, and a rare number of film clubs and it is high time that something came about in the way of nurturing the existing few.

The solution, if you want to consider it as one, is to build an atmosphere that tries to revive the cinema culture. Setting up a podium where the enthusiasts are exposed to good cinema, cinema which is more of an art and less of the consumerist delight. Though things are bleak but we can always hope for brighter beginnings. Education, knowledge, the internet era has its strong points one of them being the fact that now-a-days dissemination is easier. Film studies courses, festivals, workshops must increase but primarily it should be looked into that people are made much more educated in reading and studying cinema. It is important because understanding cinema is entirely dependent on the individual, the society and the kind of cin-

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ema one has been exposed too.

Cinema has been spinning its magic; it will be continuing to do so. The best thing to happen would be when those obscure filmmakers come to fore, and could help in garnering a group that also helps in spreading the knowledge about what more cinema means. How it is a form of art, to make the connoisseur of cinema delve a little deeper and to make them accessible to cinema at large.

In the other states of northeast there is spurt in the production of local cheap music videos made on digital videos, hand held cameras. The ultimate aim behind the making of these popular music videos is profit and entertainment. This is a welcome trend but then again analyzing it qualitatively, cinema is not much benefited- the obstacles, the tendency of catering to so-called popular tastes prevails. It is high time that there is an environment that is allowed to grasp cinema in entirety. For cinephiles, the worlds over, the basic aim is to be lost in the realm of cinema, to create an art, to appreciate, to look at all the ordinary stances in the way it was meant to be, giving shape to the vision they have, the stories, and the motions that few have been able to decipher.

But as in the case of the young people, there has been very few conscious upcoming filmmakers coming out of this region. We have one Reema Kagti (of “Hon-

eymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd” fame) but it is basically more mainstream. Small time filmmakers, as mentioned before, are tying to carve a niche but the sorry state is such that they have to come out or most of them do, as is the case. Brighter things are hoped for the souls from the east. The northeast region already known for its varying musical, natural and cultural milieu can surely raise up to this occasion, for the cause of cinema itself, and create a community that share the ideology that cinephiles all over aspire to achieve, even if it takes a long time coming. For the few cinephilia victims, there should be spurt in hope and not the opposite. After all, don’t we all live in constant hope?

gies, the smoky hazy existence, the late hours dedicated to chase that dream, hours of endless film viewing, so much so that the life feels like the whirring projector that runs a never-ending film. They have left the shores of their homeland but that is it,

THE COVER OF THE FILM MAGAZINE, ‘SILHOUETTE”

TO CONTAIN THE MAGIC… Information age has its advantage and it is definitely helping in making the distance and ignorance slowly dissipate. There is an ardent urgency, this should be realized and thus acted upon.

Torrents and the internet revolution can help in decreasing the divide but then again, one has to know what one is looking for. The question again revolves back to education, discovering what exactly the part of cinema in all this is. I know my group of friends then would-be engineer and scientists, fostering their own group of cinephiles, trying to give a vision to their vision through the help of the medium, the elusive art. Their tree houses and political ideolo-

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they are growing it somewhere where the opportunities are broader. Cinephilia thus getting a restricted space spells a shady grey sky but things can get better and it is with this hope that the numbered cinephiles keep on facing every known storm.

But even after all this prolonged monologue, the baseline is that cinephilia is a state of existence in itself. One who has to discover a way through the woods will discover it anyhow, it’s only a matter of time. northeast and its cinephiles will find a way towards the growth, the redressal and ultimately device and create the perfect conditions that would further their cause, for the revival of the art.

MULTI

PLEXES MILLIONS WOOD

Three day competitions, four-week theatre runs, billion dollars, one fifty rupees ticket prices, twenty thousand seats, sixty rupees colas, two good films in one year. A statistical triumph becomes a cinematic ruin. Anuj Malhotra thinks.

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elusion sells easily in Bollywood. The perpetrators of the myth become its most ardent followers, and the propagators of the lie become its most zealous supporters. Kareena Kapoor makes vehement claims as to Bollywood’s existence as an independent entity, separate from the influence of Hollywood, and completely self-sufficient, and then stars in a film which has as its prime promotional material; the flaunting of three out of work Hollywood actors whose services the producers of Ms.Kapoor’s film have proudly managed to procure.

It is not so much the tendency to spread misinformation that renders Bollywood disgraceful; for that is endemic and typical of each center of power in the world – the religious zealots call it God’s own sermon, the politicians call it the manifesto, the corporate giants call it the credo and all the others call it propaganda – but in its tendency to become an innocuous victim, a blind follower and a recipient of that misinformation itself. In that, it displays a strange dual tendency – to first create mythical resonance around itself, and then to attribute it with the credibility of actual existence by being the most staunch believer in it. It is, thus, not only the victim of its own crime; but also self-delusional. If anything, the application of the multiplex model of film distribution in the nation is but a proof of the aforementioned process.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF WALLS WITHIN THE ROOM The multiplex changed the cinema theatre from a Roman Colosseum, where the entire society would gather around the playing arena to witness the spectacle taking place in the middle, to the Wimbledon arena, where different people could let preference reign supreme as they filled the seats for one match and skipped the other. The essential difference between the two aforementioned sport arenas, except the obvious one in terms of their existence in vastly unlike periods of history (to which we can attribute the other differences between them as well); is in the number of spectacles each offers; and the subsequent variety of choices it makes available to the paying public. A multiplex, much like an amusement park, thus, was cinema’s commercial solution to the problem of an audience that refused to have its demands satiated by a common spectacle.

Never before in cinema’s history lay the taste of the audience divided. Democracy and the luxuries it allowed its citizens to exercise had crept in the establishment of cinematic taste as well and audiences rejected the older model of merely being receivers of the new release in town; instead, exercising unprecedented influence through their esteemed position in the market chain – that of the consumer – over not only which/ how the films were made, but

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also how the films were shown.

Even then, despite the multiplex’s original irrefutable nature as primarily a move guided by the fulfilment of financial motives, one similar to the Cinerama or the introduction of sound, it also remained a huge manifestation of the industry’s respect for their audience and its choice.

While it was originally concieved as a profitable venture, it was also a manifestation of the the variety that cinema distributors now sought to offer the medium’s ardent followers; and as a rare occasion in cinematic history, not stifle or manipulate an audience trend, but play alongwith it by serving the increasingly segregated nature of cinematic taste – high brow and low brow, art house and commercial, world cinema and local productions, indie films or studio products – through the gracious feature of accomodation and opportunity, rather than an obstinance or resistance to change.

The multiplex was a positive trend, for it sought to convert the cinematic theatre, or now complex, into a museum from a road side show – for in the latter, the audience’s existence would matter only so far as they preserved their relation with the stage, or the performance area by sitting (or standing) in front of it, thus in a manner, being forced to sit through the performance for the lack of any alternative to it; but in the former, the only common spaces the audience was supposed to share was the box-office queue and the en-

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trance to the multiplex, through which having passed, they could roam around the compound, savoring the various exhibitions inside, the variety of films playing nowithstanding – film posters, information about latest releases, the enormous options in terms of the exhaustive menus offered by the catering services; and the latest trend of the incorporation of a multiplex within a shopping mall (in itself being the updated version of the Baghdad street market, with its promise of an assortment of buying opportunities), thus opening an entire world of peaceful co-existence wherein the enthusiastic audiences of the larger spectacle (the bigger film) would not interfere with the zeal of the audiences of the smaller spectacle (the smaller film); thus promising a prospective trend wherein a small independent film wouldn’t have to seek refuge in art-house festival circuits and leaving the fans of the director of this film to launch extensive searches for bootleg copies of the film years after the release of the film.

THE CASE OF THE BIGGER FISH However, Bollywood’s tendency to delude itself assures itself of the need to place conviction in the very myth that it itself constructed – that of absolute cultural dominance, and of its nature as the greatest cultural export that India can offer to the world.

One may interject : But isn’t that true? Isn’t Bollywood truly India’s greatest cultural export?

And the answer is no. Primarily because, as is often the case, the cause of a myth is served by

other myths – which in this case, is that the world has woken up to the cinema that India seeks to offer, and yet, the truth remains completely the opposite – for even today, the world sees Bollywood as being synonymous with Indian cinema and its cinema as, as film director Dibakar Bannerjee puts it, “A three-legged cow at the fair, a freak that everyone is curious to catch a glance of, and even mock; but no one is inIA/NOVEMBER 2009

terested in beyond these superficial reactions.” The second myth is one that Bollywood seeks to solidify with the assurance provided by a figure, and thus, it often shows its revenue running into billions to explain how such a figure could not have arrived at without the attention of the world being centred upon us; and yet, their statements are only a contradiction to the films they make, wherein each film is

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dulges in it sooner or letter, but its conviction in the myth itself, which leads to its execution of a plan that aims at the elimination and obliteration of all other types of cinema in the nation. A plan that Bollywood takes up to consistently confirm its hegemonic cultural authority as the only possible cultural export of the nation, and taken up by the privileges of that position, the bigger fish seeks to preserve that position, through the employment of whatever mechanism it takes to make that preservation possible.

As such, the multiplex, that prospect of change in how cinema is viewed in this nation of ours, has been converted into a citrus money fruit that is squeezed dry

by Bollywood to explore all opportunities it offers in terms of making money. Therefore, the same multiplex complex that sought to afford the cinema theatre the status of a museum where people are given the authority of roaming around the space and affixing their attention onto a particular exhibit, has now been reduced to a salesman’s minitrunk, which carries umpteen variations of the same product. modelled to satiate the desire of the NRI living in far away lands to establish a reconnect with his homeland, where the most fundamental of human feelings – nostalgia – is exploited cleverly

by Bollywood to fill its coffers.

Yes, even outside the territorial confinements of our nation, it is the Indians who watch our cinema and no one else. To believe otherwise is self-delusion, and yet another myth that Bol-

lywood seeks to propagate through the manipulation of the fourth column – the media – to the gullible audience who sits at home, waiting to lap up information and attuned to gifting the status of anything that features in the news, as being true.

And again, it is not Bollywood’s myth-making that is more harmless, for as aforementioned, each organisation that thrives on a need for constant power inIA/NOVEMBER 2009

In that, each exhibit is similar to the last, and each spectacle burns as bright as the previous one. And the mecca of accomodation that the multiplex could have been through the fulfilment of its promise to allow an independent film made in Maharashtra play in a theatre besides the theatre that plays a Karan Johar film; thus converting it into a video-art installation with screens being placed

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adjacent to each other; has now been transformed into the center of containment for the small film, and of expansion for the large film. Therefore, a model which promised an opportunity for the small filmmaker to let his film occupy one screen while the blockbuster down the corner occupies another screen, has given way to one where the big screen now gets two screens to feature its typical lack of ambition on.

RELENTLESSLY BANGING THE HEAD AGAINST THE WALL And it is no surprise, for the Bollywood model is of bombardment. Of constaint uninterrupted refrain till a response is elicited from its target. It is reflective, completely, of how our society is at large in today’s world – a social structure that emphasises on accumulation and deposit.

And the same two steps repeated again and again till accumula-

tion is no longer possible, which is also when the process of deposition is replaced by that of measurement of the accumulated amount. Thus, the multiplex has become the steady tool for a bad Bollywood film to accumulate as much and as fast as possible, an avenue for it to finally stifle out the small independent film, and extend its earnings beyond just the old box-office, but into the ticket sales, satellite rights, music rights and merchandise.

A lots of film enthusiasts proudly claim the changing modes of film distribution in the nation – of the splurge in television movie channels, DVD distributors, Set Top Box Services that provide the option to watch the latest film, 30-rupee VCD’s, rent-on-demand service websites, and the possibility of a Video-on-demand channel in the near future– but what is there to celebrate if each screen in the film festival is going to play IA/NOVEMBER 2009

the same set of films again and again? The reason behind the initiation of a different trends in film distribution is to expand the channel for more diverse cinema to pass through, and not for a single film to pass through to a diverse audience. The purpose of the multiplex lies grossly misunderstood in the nation as of now; and with its reduction of the revenue-generation period of a latest film from jubilees earlier to a 3-week window, it has only enhanced the factory assembly line production like nature of Bollywood films, wherein with the expanded demand, the supply has to expand proportionally, thus resulting in close to 4.73 films releasing every Friday, and all produced by Bollywood.

And then, we are supposed to be proud that we produce the most films in the world. How much cinema do we produce?

INTER VIEW VIEW IA/NOVEMBER 2009

INDIANAUTEUR TALKS TO ADRIAN MARTIN

66 Dr. Adrian Martin is an Australian film and arts critic from Melbourne. He is a Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies, Monash University (Australia). His work has appeared in many magazines, journals and newspapers around the world, and has been translated into over twenty languages. He has regular columns in the Dutch De Filmkrant and in Cahiers du cinema España.

Martin was one of The Age newspaper's film reviewers for 11 years until early 2006 and has worked as a film reviewer for ABC TV and Radio National. He is currently coeditor of the online international scholarly film journal Rouge.

He plans to launch his own website, containing around 3000 pieces of writing from 1979 to the present, in early 2010.

ADRIAN MARTIN. HIS BOOK, “WHAT IS MODERN CINEMA?”(inset)

ON FILM CRITICISM Why would movie goers need a film criticism that is more than a synopsis run down and summary judgements? To whom does serious film criticism matter ? How could film criticism reach out to the average movie goers?

Film criticism should matter to everyone who has a serious, passionate love for movies. Of course, you cannot force it on anyone! People must come to it themselves, through their own interest and desire.

And there have to be the good critics, teachers, writers and speakers on hand to capture and cultivate that desire in people. That ‘culture’ has to be there for those who want to find it and explore it. But the desire has to involve the compulsion to put together films with ideas, with thinking. Not everyone wants to do this, and I understand and respect that; we all have an ‘economy’ to our lives, different things that we invest in different ways at different levels. I personally do not want to deeply analyse every pop song I hear, or every TV show I watch!

But somebody else will. So, I try to live my own

life in terms of my own desire to explore, enjoy and contemplate cinema; and I make that work public for anyone who might be intrigued by something in it to begin their own lifetime of cinephilia. All serious film fans look for teachers, different sorts of teachers: some in books, some in schools, some on the radio or in newspapers and magazines. No student completely agrees with his or her ‘master’, and that is healthy: each of must define and defend our own special sensibility. I believe in individual taste and exploration on that level: we all invent the cinema for ourselves, within our own personal, social and cultural histories and biographies.

How film critics and their tribune will survive the economic crisis of newspapers? Is it possible to imagine film criticism without film pages in newspapers? Do print media still matter to the 21st century generation of movie goers? How will online film criticism evolve to in the future?

I take a hard line on this: newspapers are yesterday’s news! Literally, the news in newspapers now is always two or three days old when you get it.

And very few newspapers investigate or generate

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anything, anyhow: they are just recirculating and repackaging what they grab off the Internet, on a delay. I ask you: who cares? Newspapers will soon die around the whole world, and I am not sad about this; their day in the media sphere is over. It has been a long time since serious film criticism has had a good berth in newspapers anywhere. And this is for one reason: publicity. Big film companies buy big advertisements, and editorial decisions follow the dictates of that advertising dollar. So, newspaper coverage (and also much media coverage in general) becomes just an adjunct to advertising campaigns: obsessed with promoting the ‘latest releases’, the stars, streaming box-office figures, and so on. None of it has anything to do with true film criticism. I think there may still be some good, genuine film magazines, like Sight and Sound or Film Comment, up against all the consumer-guide garbage that now fills all newsagencies, as the 21st Century proceeds, but they will need quite a bit of institutional backing (and money) to survive – and a mighty international distribution system, which is becoming more and more scarce. Can you buy Cinema Scope, Cineaste, Film International, Positif, Cahiers du cinema Espala in your local newsagency or bookshop? If you can, you’re very lucky, because I can’t! So, in terms of any sensible ‘economy of scale’ in financial matters – and in international distribution – the Internet is the only way to go. Maybe I could produce 500 ‘hard copies’ of Rouge and you could do the same with Indian Auteur: but how could we be sure that we would ever be able to receive, access, read or buy each other’s cultural production? Whereas with the Internet we can reach many thousands of interested people immediately: and in the small world of serious film culture, that is truly a revolution.

Magazines that have only a partial, nervous relation to the Internet (like Cinema Scope, Sight and Sound or Cineaste) are fighting a rearguard action.

Something’s got to give, and it will do so soon.

What is the role of film critics in film culture?

Do they only give hindsight downstream, or can they also influence upstream how movies will look like next? Is film criticism an integral part of cinema or is it just in the po-

sition of a distant observer in the sidelines?

I have always been fascinated by the interaction between criticism and practical filmmaking. It should start in film schools, and it does so already in the best ones. Some countries have (it seems to me) a healthier, more fluid interrelation of these functions: Italy, for example, where filmmakers like Fellini, Argento, Bertolucci, Antonioni or Leone would hire the critics who wrote perceptively about them to help script their next films!

I have worked in various roles on the margins of the film development process (sometimes for government film agencies, sometimes for commercial companies): script editor, ‘script doctor’, project assessor. In these experiences, I always say to filmmakers: it’s better that I give you my criticisms now, before you make the film, rather than afterwards, when I write a negative review!

But the course of the critic-filmmaker relationship doesn’t always run smoothly: there can be mutual suspicion, mistrust, paranoia. Critics and filmmakers don’t always approach the ‘object’ – a film – in the same way, with the same means or the same ends in sight. They never will be the same thing; they are autonomous endeavours on two sometimes overlapping paths. But critics can always learn more about the practical matters of filmmaking (some know almost nothing!), and filmmakers can sometimes get a sense of some aspect of film art, film history or film culture from critics.

Both critics and filmmakers can use each other to get (as I like to say) ‘an edge’, a special bit of insight and knowledge you won’t get if you stay isolated within your own field; the really smart ones (in my opinion) seek this edge out. I certainly do!

What does the Auteur theory mean in film culture today? Is it still relevant to popular film critics and cultural studies scholars? Is the job of film director still at the heart of film creation in big productions? Do contemporary filmmakers even consider themselves as auteurs? What are the new paradigms offered by recent academic studies to move beyond the concept of Auteur?

The status of the auteur and auteurism wavers all

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NEW ZEALAND FILMMAKER JANE CAMPION. STILLS FROM BRIGHT STAR(inset).

the time. Sometimes I think that it’s old-hat, a battle won long ago, an irrelevant and in fact burdensome legacy; at other times, I think it’s one of the few solid principles you can hold onto: the individual poetic voice that speaks, sometimes miraculously, above all the ‘noise’ of industry, money, publicity, culture in the bad sense. The difficulty is that, today (and for quite a while now, at least 20 years), the auteur has become a marketing category, a ‘name brand’: when that happened, everybody (including especially those who didn’t deserve it) became an instant ‘auteur’! It’s the ‘a film by …’ syndrome, set in stone within film industry law: the director is the boss, the star, the celebrity, the person with ‘vision’ and style and personality and (hopefully) good looks … and they know (sometimes painfully) that this is the part they must play within the ‘system’. So, in this sense, the auteur is no longer someone whom critics discover or ‘decipher’ (as Peter Wollen once put it); he or she is already way out there in the public eye, sometimes even before their first feature exists! (Look at the career of Jane Campion for a striking example.) So, the auteur is something different today: he or she exists in a different ‘game space’ of the public cultural industry, and when scholars talk

(rather windily and posily) about post-auteurism or neo-auteurism, that’s what they are gesturing towards: it’s not just a matter of the film text in isolation anymore (if it indeed ever was! – the best auteurism always drew a wide circle around a film) but a whole, complex set of social relations. In terms of auteurism – meaning the kinds of study and analysis we critics, scholars and teachers do – there needs to be constant vigilance about moving away from the reductive trap (even worse in art criticism than in film criticism) of just funneling films first and last and foremost through their directors: there are many contexts, many circuits or networks, many aspects and cross-referencings of films that we need to explore, all the time. Auteurism as a critical approach, alas, is sometimes the easy, lazy way out!

ON FILM EDUCATION & CINEPHILIA As a film teacher, do you believe that film education, either in high school or in film university, can make a difference in opening

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up the taste of the population? How film education, or lack thereof, could change the bad habits of the mainstream audience? Who are the players in film culture responsible for the taste conservatism of the public, the media, the institutions, the executives or the filmmakers?

Well, taste conservatism – let’s call it cultural mediocrity, the ‘common denominator’ or the ‘bottom line’ – is everywhere dominant. We have to start from that ugly reality. Middle-class standards of taste are everywhere triumphant; lazy habits of thinking, speaking and writing proliferate at a terrifying rate every day. Not just in film but in every area of public life, politics, education, journalism, everything! We will always be fighting the ‘uphill battle’, and we will always be flying in the face of what many people regard as ‘common sense’: that films are made just for laughs or thrills, that they are just disposable stories about glamorous people, that they are a weak, vulgar, commercial art, etc, etc. To pitch a tent of serious film education and criticism in the middle of that mortal storm is a divine, reckless folly indeed! But I think the deepest role of film criticism is to be against common sense – and it took me 50 years to figure that out, in all its dramatic simplicity!

What range of knowledge is taught in film schools? (In Melbourne or any other universities you might be familiar with) and what film students educated in these schools are capable to accomplish once they are through?

What jobs do they go to (teaching, research, journalism, and publishing)? How does this film culture acquired by students then spread around to help educate the public opinion, the mainstream taste, to improve the reception of cinema in society?

We have to understand that neither ‘film

criticism’ nor ‘film theory’ ever had a pure place in the division of knowledges taught by most (or all) universities. In tertiary education, they were born – almost accidentally, but kicking and screaming – out of English literature departments (in the 1950s and ‘60s); they co-existed for a long time alongside Media Studies (‘70s); and then, just as they seemed to be achieving a fully visible ‘disciplinary identity’, Cultural Studies (‘80s) came and swooped them up. Ever since then, film has remained a football passed around between these various areas that are themselves being constantly today redefined, absorbed, expanded: Cultural Studies is going down, but both Media Studies (or Communications) and Gender Studies are back on the way up. It is very rare – too rare – to find a ‘pure’ Film Studies department in a university; maybe, thanks to young people like you, India can blaze a new trail in this regard! But it’s hard work, wherever we are, to ‘fix’ this field of study; in my experience, there is no entirely agreed-on curriculum across institutions that offer it (I sometimes wish there was!).

Therefore, it is never easy – but also always thrilling – to know where the diverse students of film ‘come from’, what they are bringing into it, or where they will go to afterwards with what they have (hopefully) learnt. In my experience, film graduates go into many areas – the least of which is teaching Film Studies in their own or other universities! Some go into writing (in its many forms, including publishing), some into the ‘public sector’ of arts bureaucracy (courses are now taught in ‘arts management’ and even ‘cinema culture management’!), and others of course into one of many levels of the filmmaking and television industries. A few go into programming or curating; or film distribution and exhibition. For me, this ‘promiscuity’ is all good. The seeds of cinephilia should be scattered wide in

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this way; it is the only way to create anything like a healthy film culture with open, future possibilities.

Regarding your recent book ¿Que es el cine moderno? [“What is Modern cinema?”] published in Chile, what is the short answer to your question: What is Modern cinema? {Laughs} A great question! So, in short: modern cinema begins for me after World War II. It is defined, in relation to previous classical cinemas, by a radically different approach (or set of approaches) to narrative, to characterisation, and to film style. Modern cinema is a rupture, a break within regimes of cinematic representation. It did not end in the ‘60s; the adventure still goes on today. What is called postmodernism is, for me, only an episode within this adventure.

When I see films by Apichatpong, Ruiz, Guerin or Gomes, I exclaim to myself (and frequently to others): wow, that’s so modern! You can ‘taste that difference’, as they say in advertising!

What happened to this modernity of cinema in the 21st century, with digital images, mixed-media, CGI “acting”, a revival of 3D projections, online streaming and interactive appropriation of mash-ups?

iting and filming technologies via computers.

But access alone changes nothing; we can still be reproducing sheer garbage, bad ideology, on our laptops 24 hours a day! All the challenges – and all the traps – remain. This is as true (I might add) of teaching as it is of cinema: with all the new technology around, every teacher still has to stand on his/her two feet and ‘put an idea across’ into the head of a student! That does not change, either.

What, within Leone’s films, appealed to you in order to prompt you to write on his films?

Well, for me, Sergio Leone is one of the primal cinema experiences – alongside Godard, Boris Barnet, Michael Powell, Lubitsch, Akerman, Lang, Kiarostami, a few others. That’s part of my personal autobiography – the way his films affected me when I was 11 years old, watching them on a huge cinema screen with my Dad – but also part of my (and not just my!) idea of cinema, of what it is and what it can do.

Leone is one of those artists who opens you up to everything that is theatrical, artificial, operatic, performative and cartoonish in cinema (which for me, adds up to one key stream

The modernity of cinema doesn’t go away – just as cinema itself as a medium does not go away. Yes, it disperses, extends, gets redefined in all sorts of new technologies grand and humble. But cinema as audiovisual event – which ultimately lodges and is replayed in your head, not on any objective screen surface, a fact I always insist on – exists whether we are in a grand picture palace, watching a 16mm print in a classroom, sampling YouTube or (and this last one I haven’t myself had the nerve to try yet) downloading into a tiny mobile phone!

All those problems and challenges of modern cinema – telling the story, conjuring a body, affixing an image to a sound – are the same no matter what ‘format’ we are inside (and all formats, to say it again, exist to project this audiovisual event into you, ultimately). We are indeed witnessing a cultural revolution at the level of general access to ed-

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ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST: FRANK’S INTRODUCTION. LEONE(inset)

INTERVIEW

of modernity in cinema) – with a grandeur that Tarantino (for example) cannot even approach. Leone is not an intellectual, but his work is profound: on that level, he is one kind of apotheosis of popular cinema. I find his work so rich, and so enjoyable, that I know it will accompany me all my life, just like the work of those other directors I just listed.

Where do you see cinephilia heading towards in the 21st Century?

It’s heading everywhere, down every nook and cranny! Cinephilia is itself changing, shifting and expanding these days – it’s not so much an elitist cult, and nor is it defined anymore primarily by the figure of the authoritative expert-critic (of which cinema history has had many shining examples). Many forms of cinephilia are emerging into prominence: collecting-cinephilia, programming-cinephilia, collage-cinephilia, DVDproducing-cinephilia, as well as the kind of grass roots, pedagogical cinephilia you are involved in with Indian Auteur’s public activities. What used to be extremely private cinephilias – people who obsessively drew up lists, or translated their favourite critics, to give two examples – now come out into the open, via the ambiguous (public as well as hidden, secretive, playful) avenue of the website or blog. I try to use my monthly column for Filmkrant magazine in Holland, “World Wide Angle”, to reflect on all these mutations. For example, something that people once dreamed of in the ‘70s but only occasionally practiced – writing criticism purely in short fragments, aphorisms or haikus – has become a new genre of expression, and not just in Twitter! These ongoing experiments (even if they are sometimes only passing fads) open experimental possibilities for all of us.

ON INDIAN CINEMA Which is your favourite Indian film and why?

For me, this is an easy one, and the answer will not surprise you: The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) by Ritwik Ghatak, whom I am

THE BREAKDOWN : MEGHE DHAKA TARA

writing on in greater length and depth at the moment for a forthcoming French book. An inexhaustibly rich and extraordinary film; a great melodrama; and a manifesto of cinematic modernism. Ghatak is a complex, mysterious character: to understand him both in himself and as part of social history would be a life’s work, like Sartre’s highly creative ‘projection’ into the mind, life and times of Flaubert! And maybe Ghatak was, like Sartre’s Flaubert, another ‘idiot in the family’ in the context of his national cinema, an irritant, a nuisance, a neurotic enigma. As well as a genius! Like Abel Ferrara, perhaps. But Ghatak also belongs to the wide world, and his films, so specific to the Indian experience at many levels, also speak to everyone. That is especially true of CloudCapped Star. But I have to confess that, so far, my knowledge and experience of Indian cinema (in all its varieties) is still quite superficial. I have sampled both the art cinemas popular cinemas of India; I have some familiarity with this national cinema’s issues and debates, and I follow the work of some great scholars such as Ashish Rajadhyaksha, or Australia-based Vijay Mishra.

I have also written half a dozen pieces recently that were solicited by Indian editors and publishers (one of them is on Marguerite Duras’ India Song!). But my journey into Indian cinema is just beginning. It is a good feeling to know that vast words of cinema still await you! And I would like to acknowledge here an odd debt that goes back

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thirty years: when I saw on TV (our once-magnificent multicultural channel SBS) the wonderful, breakneck Bollywood compilation film Cinema Cinema (1979) by Krishna Shah, which introduced me, with lightning-bolt force, to the miracle named Guru Dutt. I can also recommend the spirited, lowbudget ‘trash comedy’ American Drive-In made six years later by Shah: I once thought the future of cinema belonged in this guy’s capable hands!

Where is he today, I wonder? Time to check IMDb! How could you explain a single recipe, the Bollywood musical, generates so many copycats without boring an ever growing audience? Why is the Bollywood production underevaluated on the international scene, especially in prestigious festivals, and why did this form of cinema seems to appeal to Indians only and some East/Middle-East countries? Why hasn’t it exported this model successfully to the West?

This is a question which has surely been pondered, for many years now, by people both inside and outside of India. I myself wrote some words about it when I worked for a newspaper between 1995 and 2006 – because, in that context, I became aware of a vast ‘parallel circuit’ of Bollywood musical cinema that is enthusiastically supported by the Indian-Australian population (in big cinemas as well as on VHS and DVD), but is completely invisible, almost literally never mentioned, in the daily Anglo film press. It’s a totally bizarre situation! (And the same thing happened with Hong Kong cinema.) And every time I would review a Bollywood musical epic – always favourably, I might add, because I have rarely seen one I didn’t enjoy! – I would get a great response from the Indians in the local community, because they felt their particular cinephilic passion had at last been acknowledged, even if only for a passing newspaper moment. However, the sad truth remains that Anglo culture, in very many of its forms and sensibilities, remains totally resistant to virtually every aspect of the Bollywood template – even more so than to musicals in general. Again, it has to do with the inferior place accorded to artifice, and the

dull triumph, in middle-class cultures everywhere, of naturalistic drama (and its attendant model of character psychology – very un-modern cinema!).

Undoubtedly, there is also a middle-class rejection of Bollywood within Indian culture itself, and others can tell if, or to what extent, that is tied up with the postcolonial remnants of backward British imperial taste in all things high-cultural. The best Bollywood films rock me like Leone’s do: the fusion of image and sound, movement and music, is sublime. Something especially exciting to me – and a challenge to every ‘totalised’, America-centric theorisation of the musical, such as we get in Rick Altman’s work – is the way that Bollywood very naturally fuses a grand mise en scene style (dancers in superb choreographic formation) with very fast (even MTV-style) kinetic cutting: supposedly the great ‘no-no’ or stylistic contradiction which has destroyed the screen musical! And I like the pictures of everyday life (however stylised) we get in Bollywood romances, too (Shaad Ali’s Saathiya [2002] is among my favourites in this regard).

But there will never be either an ‘international popular cinema embrace’ of Bollywood – Baz Luhrmann’s token 30-second gesture in Moulin Rouge notwithstanding – nor a Film Festival, artcinema embrace. Those cultures would really have to change radically in order to open themselves up to what is good in Indian popular cinema. And it is only after, or on the basis of, that appreciation of popular Indian aesthetics that we could move to a deeper cultural understanding of the social role and functions of Bollywood cinema, which I don’t pretend to understand at all at that level.

Is there room in India for regional films and indie filmmakers under the current circumstances? And how could this status quo might change?

I certainly hope there is room for regional films and independent filmmakers! I am not familiar enough with the current Indian cultural situation to know why this is not flourishing as quickly as we all would like. Of course, I am sensitive to that postGhatak generation of directors: Kumar Shahani

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AYESHA DHARKAR IN TERRORIST(left).

SANTOSH SIVAN(below)

(whom I have met, through the Sri Lankan-Australian scholar Laleen Jayamanne, because his films have been preserved by Queensland Art Gallery), Mani Kaul, Adoor Gopalkrishnan (a marvellous retrospective of his early work was screened at the Brisbane Film Festival), Mrinal Sen, and others. I have had to search out these films: on the Australian arthouse circuit, I could only see, over about a ten-year span, that crazy Tamil film The Terrorist (1999), directed by Santosh Sivan and ‘presented’ to Anglo audiences by John Malkovich! (Later, in 2001, I saw his more conventional and epic Asoka, which I liked very much.) I fitfully follow the commentary on regional/independent Indian work by Paul Willemen and other critic-theorists-teachers.

Actually, Australia (as I realise, writing this) is a reasonably good place to keep in contact both with Indian art cinema and Indian popular cinema!

On the general international Film Festival circuit, my sense is that the idea of regional/art cinema from India is somewhat hampered by a reductive view of the Satyajit Ray legacy – a great director, no doubt, but the idea that was imposed around him and since, all over the world, of ‘Indian neorealism’ is hard to break away from: it renders many non-Indian viewers at a total loss when they

encounter, for example, Kahani’s highly formal and allegorical work. And the fact that, for so long, Ghatak was far from the centre of global perception of Indian cinema history, has had devastating effects. Actually, the neo-realism tag – which blankets the cinema from most countries that have ever had any relation to economic underdevelopment – makes it pretty impossible to even appreciate what Ray was doing, for example, with his richly expressive and lyrical relations between music and image, sound and narrative. Everybody needs their eyes and ears opened anew – at all times.

ON HOLLYWOOD What keeps the Hollywood hegemony intact decades after decades? Is it a financial/marketing leverage/lobbying? Is it because of its uncontested superiority in the mainstream entertainment territory? or is it purely due to its cultural universality that transcends all language and cultural barriers in every country on Earth? Does the prosperity of Hollywood imperialism somehow sustains the health of cinema industries in the world, even for indie markets through collateral benefits? Or does this omnipresence act as a deterrent glass ceil-

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ing blocking the growth of domestic films?

I have spent much of my life looking at the question of Hollywood, and turning it over from different angles. It does not take so much of my time now, simply because I have made the personal decision that I want more to look at world cinema, experimental cinema, and other more overlooked forms. But it is certainly safe to say that I have been through every available position and emotion that a critic can take and experience in relation to the ‘passion for Hollywood’: defending it, rejecting it, rationalising it, exploring it, becoming disenchanted with it, becoming re-enchanted with it.

Now, I feel I am ‘out of the cycle’ of this difficult passion. Like many critics, my interest in the resistant streams in world cinema has steered me more towards the true American independents: not the Sundance or Miramax camps, but people like James Benning, Yvonne Rainer, Travis Wilkerson, Jon Jost, and many others. In the semi-commercial cinema, the only Americans I really defend today are those precisely ignored (for the most part) by and in America, and discovered elsewhere: Ferrara, James Gray, Larry Clark, Monte Hellman, Elaine May. Rouge magazine, which I co-edit, supports these directors in its choice of published pieces.

But I am drifting away from your question, which is about this strange thing we call ‘Hollywood’ cinema: is it universal? What is its power? It is clear we can never overlook the imperial, invasive, economic power of American cinema: cinephiles traditionally have a hard time facing this reality, and when they do, they often then dramatically ‘disavow’ what they formerly loved (it is a common drama of disillusionment, which lays the ground for ‘falling in love again’ later). On the other hand, and equally, we cannot deny the ‘genius of the system’ in Hollywood, roughly between 1920 and 1960. So many great films and filmmakers in that grove! And, for a time, a truly multicultural pool: Hollywood cinema is considerably less without its many illustrious émigrés (Lubitsch, Lang, Ulmer, etc). Which, extraordinarily, created a cinema absolutely connected to a mass, popular audience: the kind of thing Bollywood can boast of today.

Also, I continue to be fascinated by this remark-

SPEAKING DIRECTLY : YVONNE RAINER (above) & JON JOST(below)

able period of transition, precisely into modern cinema, carried by Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minnelli, Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis and others. All this can be studied, and has been studied, endlessly. The politics of it can be tough, and sometimes they wipe out the aesthetic or popularcultural considerations. But this is bound to be the case whenever we have small, oppressed nations toiling and fuming in the shadow of the USA Goliath – I feel this intensely in the Australian context.

And this is another, simple but profound thing I have come around to realising, after having passed beyond the ‘for or against Hollywood’ debate: who you are, in terms of where you were born and raised, is something you never escape or transcend (however much you might try to, or imagine so), and for a film critic that means, at some point, coming back around to look at your own national cinema (in all its diverse forms), and especially your own cultural context. You have to start from where your two feet are most firmly planted – like many great films, today or yesterday, do.

(The interview was completed with the contribution of HarryTuttle).

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CROSSING THE BRIDGE. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. DEEP IN THE VALLEY. ANIMAL TOWN

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BERGMAN’S CRIES AND WHISPERS

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more laurels to rest on. But one of his best works is the little documentary that he made between his Berlin and Cannes victories.

Crossing the Bridge is set in and deals with Istanbul, the Turkish city that has been the setting of almost 50% of both his critically-acclaimed films.

CROSSING THE BRIDGE : THE SOUND OF ISTANBUL

shot by Hervé Dieu directed by Fatih Akin has as its subject, Ceza, Orient Expressions, Alexander Hacke, Baba Zula which is edited by Andrew Bird and the script is written

by Fatih Akin English, German, Turkish/2005

by GAUTAM VALLURI Fatih Akin has been one of the most exciting filmmakers to have come out of Germany in the past decade.

His last two films Head On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007) have won the Golden Bear and the Best Screenplay at Cannes respectively and with his much awaited contribution to New York, I Love You (2009) and the upcoming Soul Kitchen, he has

In this documentary, Akin travels across the city with German musician Alexander Hacke on a mobile recording studio as they interview and record the music of the local music scene.

The eponymous bridge divides Istanbul between Europe and Asia and throughout the film, one can see Istanbul itself becoming a metaphoric bridge between Europe and Asia. The cultural diversity and extremes are plainly visible as on one side, the traditional Turkish folk music is kept alive by some veterans and young people alike while on the other side some younger Turks cast the first stones of Turkish Rock and Rap. The 90-minute documentary is filled with some great performances from some of the best musicians of contemporary Istanbul and their ideas on the artform.

Hacke becomes the representative of the viewer as he gets lost in the streets of Istanbul and is more than glad to be so. Akin handles the camera himself, providing for some breathtaking rooftop shots of Istanbul’s streets and a jam session on a boat against the orange setting sun on the Bosphorous.

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The film features 20 amazing performances by Oriental Expressions, Baba Zula, Sezen Aksu, Orhan Gencebay, Replikas, Istanbul Style Breakers, Ceza and more. Kurdish singer Aynur Doğan talks about how Kurdish music was banned till the 1990s and the usage of the language was punishable as an offence.

There is an interesting recording session she undertakes with Hacke inside a Hamam, a Turkish steam room. The Hamam provides for some excellent natural acoustics as Aynur’s voice takes on an almost-otherworldly quality. Her command over her skill and her ability to leap octaves take on an operatic characteristic as she and her backup musicians carry on with their haunting song through tremendous sweat and visible discomfort.

Akin, apparently shot over 150 hours of video footage for this film and spent a good 7 months cutting it down to its final cut of 90 minutes. His skill at putting together this documentary matches his subjects’ musical skills note to note. The film itself runs like a long song and leaves the viewer wanting for more at the end.

It is interesting that Akin chooses to end the film with Hacke sitting on the side of the street with his luggage beside him waiting for his car to pick him up and one can sense somehow Hacke doesn’t want to go back, much like ourselves.

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DEEP IN THE VALLEY

shot by Noriyuki Mizogucchi directed by Atsushi Funahashi is performed by, Mayu Satô, Yuki Nomura which is edited by Atsushi Funahashi and the script is written

by Ayako Negishi, Atshushi Funahashi Japanese/2009

by ANUJ MALHOTRA Deep In the Valley remains a unique video, for it cleverly applies the digital medium to scrutinise the nature of the filmic one. It is in this move that director Atsushi Funahashi expresses a belief that video’s inevitable self-sufficiency in the near future would only make it more subservient to film; and the further it escapes from the shadow of film, the larger it will loom. For by choosing an idea which utilises

a digital format to pay an ode to the immortality of film, it deems video only as a means to capture the eternality of film, while not being capable of similar eternality itself. It remains a unique piece of filmmaking (and not a film itself), thus, for it cleverly attempts an ambitious application of two different formats: one as the record, and the other as its subject, and attains it.

The subject of his video is an area in Tokyo, known as Yakata. It remains essentially about the efforts of a female member of the Yanaka Film Association and a slacker swindler, to collect pieces of film from the elders of the society; mostly to be screened later as documents of another time; thus evoking a sense of nostalgia within the attendees of the screening. There is the mystery, also, of a five story pagoda which was razed down to the ground by a fire in 1957.

The video devotes itself, after a point, to the fanatical search of the two protagonists, for a film about the five story pagoda, or one that has captured it. As both of them, thus, carry on with the untangling of the pagoda mystery, documented interviews with people from the area reveal the existence of a book written

by Rohan Koda about the fictionalised rebuilding of the pagoda.

Funahashi bases his narrative and aesthetic choices purely on what his contemplation about the nature of film is. At a very preliminary level, the utilisation of old homemade films by the

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film association from the elders in the area, reveals Funahashi’s belief that film is essentially a document of a period in time.

Tradition passes from the old hand to the younger one in terms of a film. The films they pass on to the younger generation, thus, become artefacts of their lives 50 years ago; and thus, their contribution to the formation of the renewed version of tradition. ‘ If a tree were to fall in the forest, but no one saw it falling – would it still have fallen?’

This theme about the existence of an object being subject completely to its documentation is interesting, if not wholly original, having been explored before in films such as Night and Fog, Cinema Paradiso and Inglourious Basterds. At its very core, Funahashi’s film is also about scepticism that brews within the members of a younger generation regarding the truthfulness of the history that their elders have passed onto them. They find their immediate history fascinating, but dubious. They are ready to believe in it as fascinating verbal traditions that they will pass down the generations themselves, but not necessarily as what truly happened. Therefore, the two protagonists (the film association girl and the swindler), piqued by the mystery of the pagoda, instead believe in replacing a mere verbal document (as told to them by an elder), by a tangible one ( a photograph, a film), and thus, go around look-

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ing for an elusive film about the five story pagoda, in order to subjugate the ambiguity over its existence for once and for all. The conflict between what is ‘said’ and what is ‘shown’ – between a verbal account and a visual one is pronounced even more when residents append photographs with their descriptions, as if to assure conviction in their ‘listeners’. Funahashi seeks to pronounce this conflict even more through the inclusion of inter-titles at specific moments in the film, which provide the viewer with ‘written’ accounts of history. He then proceeds to extol on it visually, and challenges the audience to observe the differences between the written account and the filmic one.

Funahashi claims that film is thus, the definite proof. Anything captured film, has to have existed. It evokes legendary French critic Andre Bazin’s ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ wherein he conveys an idea about the cinema essentially being a mode of preservation of a historical truth, and thus, a means for its immediate user to ‘defeat time’. Therein, Deep in the Valley makes another statement about the permanence of film itself – or its capabilities of immortalisation.

Interestingly enough, however, Funahashi refuses to be the mere spectator to this fantastic search for the five story pagoda film, instead going a far step beyond and simultaneously, making the film himself. There exists, thus, an evocation of Abbas Kiar-

ostami’s meta-cinema, wherein the film and its subject exist in a constantly interactive state, each threatening to overwhelm each other, instead of the subject merely being subservient to its recorder. He creates a distinction between the film about the protagonists’ search for the film about the five story pagoda, and the film he is making about the five story pagoda, through a transition he achieves between two aesthetic approaches – that of the film and the documentary.

While he shoots the protagonists roaming around the city looking for the film, his aesthetic is distinctly inspired by Hou-Hsian Hsien’s still life filmmaking, wherein the camera stands static, absorbing each inch of the space and not artificially influencing the working of the world, or the perceptions of the audience of it.

With the documentary, however, he adopts a conventional approach, by beginning his scenes with shots of inanimate objects being narrated over by the subject of his interview, before cutting to the shot of the interviewee himself. The conventional approach sets to enhance the distinction between docu and fiction. Essentially, also, his documentary consists mostly of verbal accounts again.

But they are verbal records captured on film. Does that lend them more credibility by the virtue of their immutability?

The docu-fiction approach has been applied before in films, as recently as District 9, but he uses it cleverly to deem himself not

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an objective detached witness of a generation’s travails, but a member of it, by sharing their curiosity about the existence of the five story pagoda – only claiming a superior advantage over all the other members of his generation because of the virtue of his status as a filmmaker himself – thus enabling him to simultaneously conduct the search and create an object that consummates it. The question, however, remains : Isn’t the film about the pagoda meant to be a historical document, one made in another time? Does its creation as we go (thus, in the present era by Funahashi himself) defeat its historical purpose? Therein lies Funahashi’s point about the process of making a film (nevermind he’s shooting digital) being an act of the creation of a certain history itself (by the virtue of being able to record a moment in time).

Therefore, even as his protagonists look for a piece of history, he cannot quite overlook the fact that he is creating that history as he goes. For while he might not be able to capture the pagoda itself, he contemplates on the tropes of a documentary form – the vaux-pop, eyewitness accounts, interviews – being the sources through which the pagoda exists still; for if not for them, it wouldn’t exist at all – thus in a manner, capturing the existence of the pagoda (and its essence), if not the pagoda itself.

“We would run around the pagoda. All we children would always be playing around it.

The pagoda was like our fa-

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vourite play area” says one elder, thus letting the pagoda ‘exist’. By the act of recording this account with his camera, Funahashi lets the elder exist.

In the third narrative track within the film, Funahashi adapts Rohan Koda’s novel about the fictional rebuilding of the pagoda by an ambitious young artist named Jubei ( played by Yuki Nomura, who also plays the swindler in the modern era), set fifty years or so ago, after it was razed down to the ground. Funahashi directly intertwines this literal rebuilding of the pagoda with the modern day search of the two protagonists for the lost pagoda film – thus, in a manner, equating the act of acquiring a film with the reconstruction of its subject’s existence.

He achieves this through crosscutting between the two eras – as soon as the mysterious film is attained in the modern era (through a mythical old man), the construction of the pagoda is completed in the film based on the fictionalised novel.

In the following scene, as members of the Yakata film association play the film in the projector in marvellous close-ups to check the old film for glitches, they find it absolved of any such errors and thus, fit for a public screening. This scene is immediately followed by a wide-pan of the city skyline where the burning pagoda exists. Thus, by filming the fictional novel about the reconstruction of the pagoda – Funahashi proposes, also, that while film is capable of documentation of history,

it is also, of its replacement.

Transition between two eras, as between other things – aesthetical approach, films that we watch (his film and the film), colour and grayscale (a subversive representation of the past as being colour-marked gray and so on), remains a consistent theme throughout the film. As in the director’s own words during the introduction of the film, “The film is about a link between the present, past and the future.” As we see later, that link is film.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS shot by Robert Richardson directed by Quentin Tarantino is performed by, Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent which is edited by Sally Menke and the script is written

by Quentin Tarantino

English/2009

by GAUTAM VALLURI At its heart, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film “Inglourious Basterds” is a western. The es-

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tablishing shot in the opening sequence, drenched in the orange light of the French countryside serves as the perfect stage for a powerful scene as a car filled with four German officers pulls up to a farmer’s house.

One could imagine a similar scene opening a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. The exchange of pleasantries and the lengthy, satisfying dialogue-dominated scene carries on until it reaches a rather surprising turn. This opening sequence is perhaps the best that Tarantino could come up with ever since the sweet, sugar-filled exchange between Honey Bunny and Pumpkin at the start of Pulp Fiction (1994).

Other elements in Inglourious Basterds that one could trace back to Pulp Fiction are the opening credit sequence and the multiple storylines that converge at a common point. The film is chopped up into several chapters, like a cheap paperback novel. It should be kept in mind that Tarantino started writing the initial draft for Inglourious Basterds right after Jackie Brown (1997), around the same time that he was developing the Kill Bill duology, perhaps this is why both films share the chapter-wise division.

The film recalls Reservoir Dogs (1992) in the sequence where the Americans and the English team up to discuss Operation Kino at an underground tavern. The entire plot is accidentally foiled by an undercover British Agent Lt. Archie Hicox (played by the

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magnificent Michael Fassbender) mistakenly giving away his Britishness by ordering for three glasses to go with scotch. The entire tavern is held at a Mexican standoff and in the end, almost everybody dies. Tarantino had previously used this same plot device in the Tony Scottdirected True Romance (1992).

There is also a heavy usage of nicknames in the film such as The Bear Jew, Aldo the Apache, The Jew Hunter etc. This is a throw back to the colour coded aliases from Reservoir Dogs and the famous nicknames of Bill’s Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in Kill Bill.

All these elements may sound like Tarantino is re-hashing himself and is resorting to his limited bag of tricks but Tarantino is careful in not allowing any room for that.

He instead, compiles all these old tricks of his into a sort of a “Greatest Hits” album with some new and un-released bonus material.

Tarantino draws inspiration from genre-specific stereotypes a lot.

His earlier films reference themes and mannerisms of exploitation cinema (Death Proof), blaxploitation (Jackie Brown), Yakuza Gangster films (Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs), Westerns and Wuxia films (Kill Bill). With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino brings to light a very short-lived genre of war-inspired B-films that surfaced during the late 1960s affectionately termed as the “Macaroni War films”. Much like the spaghetti westerns, these were also English productions shot cheaply in Italy and Spain, often starring a lone C-grade Hollywood actor. Most of these films feature Hitler as more of a villainous character than a dicta-

tor- most often; the climaxes featured the protagonists killing off Hitler, usually in some brutal manner. One of the forerunners of this genre, Antonio Margheretti is mentioned as one of the aliases of Eli Roth’s character in the film.

Another genre that Tarantino explores and draws inspiration from for this film is the World War II “Films of the Third Reich “movement”, the notorious Nazi-propaganda genre commissioned by Hitler himself. The film mentions one the movement’s pioneers, Leni Reifenstahl and a comparision is made between her and Shoshanna Dreyfus, the cinematically-inclined character of Mélanie Laurent.

In a way, Inglourious Basterds comes out as Tarantino’s love letter to cinema. Apart from the numerous homages and references to his favourite films, actors and directors, Tarantino devices cinema as a weapon and a battlefield in the film. The fact that the central assassination plot “Operation Kino” is set in a cinema hall is itself testament that cinema becomes the battlefield. Shoshanna’s plot to use highly-inflammable nitrate film to burn all the Nazi’s alive while locked inside the theatre is how cinema becomes a weapon.

As for the performances, each of the members of the great cast take turns in delivering some really commendable performances. Michael Fassbender plays a pre-war film critic who can speak German and is given the responsibility to go undercover as an SS officer and help push “Operation Kino”.

Fassbender’s Lt. Archie Hicox comes almost half-way through the film but plays an important

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role. In his interview with Cahiers Du Cinema, Tarantino expresses how when he cast the part-Irish, part-German Fassbender, he was thinking of a young George Sanders for Hicox. Melanie Laurent and Daniel Bruhl also come up with beautiful turns as the impossible lovers and almost become a metaphoric representation of France and Germany respectively especially how Bruhl’s character’s persistent and sometimes forceful advances towards Laurent’s character somehow reflect Germany’s persistent and sometimes forceful advances towards France’s beauty and vulnerability during the Second World War. Diane Krueger provides an important supporting role as Bridget Von Hammersmark while Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine provides much of the film’s comic relief. Mike Myers and Rod Taylor guest star in short but memorable performances with Taylor playing none other than the then British Prime Minister- Winston Churchill.

Martin Wuttke plays a neurotic and tantrum-throwing Adolf Hitler but in a film filled with so many great performances, the show is stolen by Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa a.k.a. “The Jew Hunter”.

Tarantino had said Waltz had “given him his film back” as he felt this character was unplayable.

In the end, this film is a critical and commercial success for Tarantino after a slightly-disappointing “Death Proof”. QT fans all around the world are tremendously satisfied and perhaps this is a milestone in his career from where things might take a different direction.

REVIEWS

Lee, who has been living alone is asked to vacate the house and is also evicted from his job as labor. This followed his start as a taxi driver.

ANIMAL TOWN

shot by Jin Kyung Kim directed by Kyu-hwan Jeon is performed by, Joon Hyuk Lee, Seong-tae Oh and the script is written

by Kyun-hwan Jeon Korean/2009

by SUPRIYA SURI Animal Town by Kyu-hwan Jeon was an anticipated enthusiasm to look at the Pan Asian aesthetics through a new emerging director from Korea. However the dark story telling about urban isolation left the viewers isolated in connecting a few sequences and justifying a lot of actions in the film. The film deals with two characters; A laborer (Lee Jun Hyuk) and the other (Seong- tae Oh) running his own firm. Due to the financial constraints the (Lee Jun Hyuk) loses his job and Seong- tae Oh had to dismiss a few employees.

Animal Town, started off with a journey of Lee Jun Hyuk through which we gradually learn he is a pedophile and is under medication.

Seong-taie Oh on the other hand due to recession is forced to expel his workers. This leads to crisis in his life, since his work was his family. His loneliness is often shown through his conversations with wife and the off screen daughter to which he never replies and These two characters are linked together through their loneliness and isolation in urban milieu, and are segregated by different social class undergoing common crisis. How both of these characters deal with their life and situations is what follows next. The narrative in its first half keeps building up slowly with these two characters life running parallel, however just after a brief introduction to these character begins the unconvincing actions which are also the most significant points to build the characterization and the film.

In other words the film had weak characterization and unconvincing plot lines.

Seong through a coincidence meets Lee, and starts following him. The linking factor to justify the coincident meeting between the two and what interests Seong to follow Lee was one such weak plot. We are never quite sure what got Seong attracted towards him. While there was another such important segment when Lee one fine day gets attracted towards a small girl, who never goes to school and is often, working near superstores starts following her. Even though the direc-

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77381 tor didn’t quite directly tell the audience reasons in both these cases, yet in case of Lee, due to the past experiences of the character like having no sexual satisfaction with a girl, already under medication justified why Lee should follow around the small girl. Whereas in case of Seong what led him to follow Lee was not quite understood.

Apart from above even the expressions of the characters leading to violence were quite unjustifiable and out of place.

Even though Lee was already suffering through problems like loss of job and house along with the medication, one did not feel his frustration and loneliness that could be expressed through this violence with the lady.

Finally the reasons behind Seong’s aloofness at home and his loneliness otherwise is revealed which is also the last segment of the film and the surprise element of the narrative. Seong’s reasons for loneliness was the loss of his family and what we saw (his wife and the conversations) was an illusion and built out of memory.

This is shown through a dissolve when Seong finally enters his daughter’s room and we find out through a dissolve first for his wife and then the daughter showing that they never existed. This was also the lazy final dissolve in the film that showed the disappearance of the character through the most conventional way and seemed a lazy way of revealing their absence and aesthetically not sync with the rest of the film.

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IA/NOVEMBER 2009

FROM THE VAULT In the section, IA seeks to introduce its readers to misplaced and yet relevant pieces of Indian cinematic literature that, like any precious scrap of film, need preservation and distribution.

MAX SCHRECK WAKING UP FROM SLEEP IN NOSFERATU

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84 INTRODUCTION India has a rich culture of documentary filmmaking that has continued to thrive till today. Every person, at a certain point in time, has been involved in some form of documentation whether, social or personal, using the camera as a tool to capture their lives or reflect on others. Each, through his own history and tradition, but in the large context of “ cinematic documentation”, the history of Indian documentary is something that does not exist for most us. What exists is the rise of mediocre works in the name of documentary.

Today, not much has been written or is available online on the legacy and history of this culture. However, in print, film historian like B.D.Garga has written extensively on the medium, he is one of the towering figures of our cinema whose contribution is similar to that of George Sadoul for French Cinema.

Here is an excerpt from In “Cinema in India”, Vol. II, No. 2 that would give cinephiles an insight into the rich tradition and history of Indian documentary films.

n a i d n y I r e Th menta u c o D

by B.D.Garga

W

hen the war finally ended after America dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki reducing the two cities to rubble, Wavell, who had succeeded Linlithgow as Viceroy, drily remarked,

“Now for the horrors of peace”. For India, the horrors of peace included the bloodiest ever communal carnage in which over a million were killed, leading to the partition of the subcontinent. In the two-way trek between India

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7 85 and Pakistan some seven million refugees crossed over the borders of the two Bengals and Assam.

This was the biggest exchange of populations in human history. What we see in films like Gandhi and Jewel in the Crown is a mock-rehearsal of the real human tragedy. The horrors of war have been recorded in great depth and detail by Russian, British and American cameramen, but there isn’t even 100 ft. material of this awesome diaspora. Great events in which we are not personally involved are often forgotten. As someone remarked, “With the passage of time we become so insensitive... that we can lie in the disused ovens of Auschwitz and have our photographs taken as souvenirs!”. Filmed history has the unique capacity to warn us against the repetition of such horrors.

was to eventually become the largest film unit in the world with an assured (through compulsory exhibition) network of well over 12,000 cinemas throughout the country. India seemed the most exciting and challenging country in the world to a documentary filmmaker. The German filmmaker, Paul Zils, who made India his home for nearly two decades, describes the scene: “This period of ‘47 to ‘49 was a most exciting one. It was the period of an all-round awakening, the beginning of an awareness of the role of the documentary film... in the interest of the reborn nation... Four hundred million people were involved ... most of them illiterate, speaking different languages, highly provincial-minded, industrially backward, exploited and poor, burdened by age-old tradition-customs and superstitions. This was a tremendous challenge”.

IFI (Information Films of India) had been disbanded like so much else after the war. National leaders were busy bickering and bargaining amongst themselves and the British, ironically, in a great hurry to quit India. As a reminder of how little time there was, Mountbatten had devised a tear-off calendar indicating the number of days left for the transfer of power. Sadly, there is no newsreel of the winding up of the empire except for a solitary photograph.

No less a loss to posterity is Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech delivered with a depth of feeling he alone was capable of. We have the words but not the face. This, at a time when any number of sync-sound cameras were around! No film can ever hope to recreate such momentous events in history.

PAUL ZILS WITH FELLOW INDIANS

The aftermath of global war, and the dissolution of colonialisn that followed, was to create new tensions and fresh opportunities. A film unit became “an expression of nationhood, a chronicler of achievements”. In April 1918, the national government approved a scheme for continuing the work of the IFI - now called the Films Division - to produce films “for public information, education, motivation and for institutional and cultural purposes”. Starting with a modest programme, it

The war-weary documentary was on to an exciting mission. In 1948, when the organisation was revived, Government’s first choice fell on Ezra Mir, the former head of IFI. But Mir was abroad “doing some consultative and adaptation work for Gabriel Pascal”. In an interview with me, Mir recalled, “I received several cables from Mr. M.A.

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Hussain, Deputy Secretary, Ministry of I&B [Information and Broadcasting], to return and take charge of the newly-started Films Division, now functioning under the national government... Owing to commitments abroad, I could not return”.

Mohan Bhavnani, a veteran feature film producer, was then appointed the Chief Producer.

After a lapse of nearly two years (IFl’s assets had been taken over by A.J. Patel of Central Cine Corporation who tried to keep alive its activities for a while. But Rule 44A of the Defence of India having lapsed, exhibitors could no longer be compelled to show short films), Bhavnani had to start the department from scratch. M.V. Krishnaswamy, who had worked with the Films Division for several years, said of Bhavnani, “His efforts were chiefly directed towards putting the organisation on a firm basis...

Bhavnani’s problem was to justify the utility of the organisation and the money spent on it both to the public and the government. This was the reason for the intensely practical and utilitarian approach adopted by Bhavnani in moulding the organisation.

He was also not unduly tormented by thoughts of the Art of Documentary or a Documentary Movement”. Bhavnani’s chief concern was to make films quickly and cheaply to suit the tastes of a mass audience which comprised the rural and the urban, the literate and the illiterate Bhavnani elucidates, “Realising that these films would have to cater to both urban and rural audiences, a simple technique was evolved which would convey their message in a simple and direct manner... modern techniques rather confused village and illiterate audiences... therefore technical devices were avoided, the tempo slowed down, and sometimes shots were repeated to stress the main idea of the film”.

While scores of films dealing with industry, agriculture, health, family planning, literacy, community welfare, rural crafts and development stuck to the formulae evolved by Bhavnani, he was not unaware of the raison d’etre of a documentary. “Most of the films produced through the years and even today, are incorrectly called documentaries”, wrote

Bhavnani. “A pure documentary... should be able to create a true story around everyday life... and the problems that confront us.. without, in any sense, white-washing the subject... A film such as this, presents certain problems to the producer”. Rather than face the problems, the practical Mr. Bhavnani opted to direct his energies to building an organisation, a nucleus of technicians, a name, a habitation (the present premises that Films Division now owns). From all accounts, Bhavnani was a strong and domineering man who stood by his directors and often came to clash with pompous bureaucrats.

More is the pity then that such a man should have paid scant regard to the creative aspects of documentary or to helping build a meaningful documentary movement with social purpose and clear identity. As a result, none of the spirit of a nascent nation coming into her own, or the new conception of citizenship, found its way into the 250 films produced during this period. The idea of national pride was too often treated in images of parades against a skyline with flags flying, and seldom in serious, social studies of India’s people and their myriad problems. A favourite theme that could loosely be described as the ‘art film’ was the glorification of our past cultural heritage. Thus followed a string of films, Indian Art through the Ages, Cave Temples of India, A Page from History, Forgotten Empire, and many more. Let us examine the source material of some of these films before we come to the end products .

One autumn day, in l949, the gates of the heavily guarded Government House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) in New Delhi were thrown open to the public. Admittedly, for some it was an opportunity to peep into the fabulous mansion that Lutyens had built with Renaissance trappings for the highest representative of the British Crown. For some others, however, the occasion held a different, more exciting promise - the chance to savour something of the beauty and variety of Indian sculpture, painting and metalwork, extending over a period of nearly 5,000 years, specially exhibited there.

A splendid sandstone male torso from Harappa, a

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FROM THE VAULT

slim bejewelled dancing girl from Mohenjodaro, innumberable steatite seals with pictographs, representing the 3,000 B.C. Indus Valley Civilisation - all fashioned with unequalled beauty and skill; the 244 B.C. colossal stone bull which had once crowned one of Emperor Asoka’s many edict pillars, displaying unusual technical skill and a profound understanding of form; the serene and sublime figure of the Buddha, with features of an Apollo and clad in a Grecian mantle, obviously belonging to the hybrid Gandhara school; lovely maidens of the 2 A.D. Mathura school, lithe, sinuous, full-blown, the expressive Buddhist sculptures of Amravati - who else but the Amravati masters could show in stone the difference between a dead man and a sleepin one?

The Buddhist and Brahminical motifs of Gupta sculpture... and lest it seemed that the artist of the great Hindu Renaissance concerned himself only with gods, there was the superbly-executed figure of a woman writing a love letter, the powerful head of a horse, a graceful huntress sculpted in intricate detail. Neither the eye nor the mind could take in such splendour, so much loveliness, in one visit. One longed to return to it again and again.

When the newly-created Films Division of the Government of India, decided to capsulate the labours of countless artists, cramming over 5,000 years into a 10-minute film called Indian Art through the Ages, its maker showed little imagination or feeling for his material. It was a depressing sight, indeed: images appeared and disappeared with such suddenness that it was hard to distinguish the Mohenjodaro dancing girl from the Mathura maiden! One could neither savour the beauty of these magnificent pieces, nor grasp anything about the context in which they were created.

What was true of this film equally applied to others in the same genre, Saga in Stone, Cave Temples of India: Buddhist and Hindu, and Mahabalipuram.

Saga in Stone clumsily catalogued sculptured reliefs in the Sun Temple of Konarak, the temples of Khajuraho, the ruins of Hampi and the relics of the mighty Vijayanagar kingdom in the south of India.

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The two-part Cave Temples of India took us on a hurricane tour of Ajanta, Ellora, Elephanta, Bagh, Badami, Sarnath and Sanchi in an attempt to recreate a biography of the Buddha in the first part and the legends of the Hindu pantheon in the second.

Mahabalipuram made a feeble attempt at capturing the magnificence of its richly-carved caves and the enormous open-air rock-cut sculptures.

Jean Bhownagary, who was later to join the Films Division as Deputy Chief Producer, observed: “When you see such sculpture, slowly you realise that you need perhaps half a day to look at each of those faces, those bodies and those postures. You need time for they have time on their side... And if you do not have the time, you must replace it with an intensity of vision which recreates the raison d’etre of these works of art. For this, the film, the camera and the cutting table are unparalleled instruments - concentrating all our forces of assimilation... (on) that which the creator of the film wishes to paint with imaginative sound and moving light on a bright rectangle at one end of the darkened room...

Thus every shot, every movement of such a film must be conceived and fashioned with the same creative fervour that inspired the original artist whose work is to be truly recreated on the screen”.

This may sound like a tall order - and one might even argue whether or not it is possible for the filmmaker to be seized “with the same creative fervour that inspired the original artist”. The art film had so far touched but the periphery of India’s artistic traditions without ever delving deep into its sources of inspiration. But with Khajuraho, produced under Jean Bhownagary’s supervision, the art film in India seemed to come into its own.

Khajuraho explored the magnificent medieval temples built by the Chandela kings between 950 and 1050 A.D. Of the 85 temples built then, some 20 have survived the ravages of Man and Time.

But what remains is enough to dazzle the eye and delight the mind with the wealth and variety of its sculptures. Looking first at life in the village of Khajuraho in Central India, the film then shifts its gaze to the sandstone city that perhaps contains

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more sculpture than all the museums in the world!

At an unhurried pace, reverent like a devotee, the camera discovers the temple for us: the long friezes, the inner precincts, the richly ornate ceiling . . .

Towards the concluding passage, the film recreates a day in the life of gods and mortals. The drum-beater, the flute player, the singer and the dancer take over. And the galleries resound with the deep resonance of their music, which is both evocative and sensuous. Like Eisenstein’s lions in October, the dancing girls and singers suddenly appear invested with life. And when the musicians have departed leaving behind only the echoes of their songs, the lovers return to each other’s embrace and love-play. The erotic sculpture both boldly and discreetly assumes the metaphysical concept of creation as originally intended by the carvers of a millennium ago. Within the space of less than half an hour, a relationship has been created, a mood and milieu evoked. And we are beginning to understand a people remarkably free of inhibitions, and artists who raised one of the most durable monuments to life and creation.

Konarak, yet another striking film, was made by a young cameraman P.S. Dasgupta, who died tragically, struck by lightning, while location shooting for a film. Dasgupta had earlier served a period of apprenticeship with Claude Renoir and shown all the signs of an original talent.

Like Khajuraho, Konarak too abounds in erotic sculpture. But unlike Khajuraho where erotic groups are rarely higher than two feet and often less, Konarak presents life-size couples in amorous poses. But as the monument rises, the sculpture too becomes less frenzied and more serene, to end with the celestial musicians and dancers so gracefully and exquisitely shaped. Dasgupta’s film was refreshingly free from all technical bravura. Cut to the bare bones, it achieved its eloquence through a simplicity of form and technique. The filmmaker avoided the trap of pretty frames and yet managed to impart it a poetic air.

Arun Chowdhary, a sensitive filmmaker, working with the Films Division, produced a strangely evocative film, The ]ain Temples. Chowdhary

A STILL FROM OCTOBRE. EISENSTEIN ON HIS THRONE(inset)

kept his camera incessantly on the move, closing in on a detail now, traversing rows upon rows of delicately carved figures and then suddenly whirling about the pendant of the temple’s dome.

From sculpture to painting was a natural transition for the filmmaker. When the puritanical Aurangazeb banished painters from his court, many of them migrated to small native states up in the foothills of the Himalayas. Moghul influence mingled with Rajput tradition and Pahari art, creating an unique and distinctive style. More fully than at any time since Ajanta, painting now concerned itself with women as the prime source of romantic enchantment. Thus the profusion of paintings depicting the Radha-Krishna legend. The love life of Krishna as sung in their folk songs, greatly fascinated the Pahari painters and found expression in their sensitive and tender work. The legend and the paintings both eloquently suggested their filmic use. Jean Bhownagary was quick to sense it and produced Radha and Krishna in collaboration with Shanti Verma.

Radha and Krishna, in austere narrative style, recounts the familiar legend of Krishna and beloved milkmaid Radha, as seen by the l7th and 18th century Pahari painters, who lived and worked in the small hill states, particularly the Kangra val-

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FROM THE VAULT

ley. The poetry of the miniatures and their delicate colouring is brought to the screen, with taste and feeling to recount the tale of Krishna from his birth, to his exploits in the magical countryside of Brindavan and his love for Radha, most beautiful of all the Gopis, to his overthrow of the tyrannous King of Mathura. The film ends with the famous Ras Leela dance in the forest of Brindavan.

The music, provided by three of India’s most vigorously creative artists - Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar and Vishnudas Shirali - was worked out with intense feeling and fervour. Radha and Krishna established that only a film charged with emotional interest and poetic feeling can result in authentic revelations.

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Pliyanersh, her grandson, and it is through them that we discover the ritual and routine of their lives. They are the traditional lords of the Nilgiris. Whence did they come from? No one knows, for sure. Maybe they are descendants of the Aryans who crossed the Himalayas into India? Or of the Macedonians? Or Phoenicians? It is a film full of keen observation and sympathetic detail. It is a film charged with curiosity, made with love.

Zils was to guide and nurture the independent documentary movement in India for nearly two decades. He also groomed many a talent among them, Fali Billimoria and S. Sukhdev.

Out of the scores of humdrum films made on India’s sculpture, painting, music and dance, the films I have discussed above form isolated (almost accidental, it would appear) peaks of achievement. Even the celebrated painter M.F. Hussain’s Through the Eyes of a Painter, a rambling collage of Rajasthani scenes, was a flash in the pan.

Another favourite theme of the Films Division has been the exploration of people of various ethnic groups. Unfortunately, the temptation to do so has more often resulted in the exotic rather than the sociological. It is the colourfulness of the costumes, the strange customs, the quaint rituals, that have received more attention than any sincere urge to understand and establish communication with the people. Films like Adivasis on the tribals of Madhya Pradesh or Our Original Inhahitants - an omnibus film on the entire tribal population of India - or Report from the Hinterland, made no attempt to know the tribal people, their problems, their way of life. More often than not, the tribals appeared like puppets, carrying out the bidding of some government official hidden behind the camera!

In sharp contrast was Paul Zils’ The Vanishing Tribe, on the Todas who live in the Nilgiris.

Within the space of less than 20 minutes we get to know these proud and handsome men with flowing hair and beards and the Putkuli-clad women with curls and ringlets. Zils introduces us to the oldest woman in the settlement, Bjak, and also

A MOVEMENT IN MAKING In the fifties Indian documentary seemed alive, well and bouncing. Among others, the man most responsible for it was Paul Zils. Zils had arrived in India almost by accident. Starting his film career in 1933 as an apprentice at UFA studios, Zils was said to be a favourite of Goebbels because of his handsome blond looks and ‘full Aryan credentials’. But obsessed with Asia since reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddharth, Zils defected to the United States. It was there that he got Paramount interested in a film project to be shot in Bali, Indonesia. He was hard at work on the film when, on May 10, 1940 he was arrested along with other German nationals and imprisoned in a Sumatra jungle stockade.

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A year later, when the Japanese were moving rapidly on Indonesia, the German prisoners were shipped to India and interned in a large prison camp in Bihar. Zils found that among the inmates there were a number of musicians, a conductor, composers and writers. With his usual drive and resourcefulness he began to organise musical shows in the camp. The British were so impressed with Zils’ skill that they offered to release him if he would go to work for Information Films of India.

To quote Zils, “I distinctly remember that day in late October, 1945 when I arrived in Bombay first,with a contract signed by the then British Indian Government to head the external unit of their Information Films of India... I assembled one of the best Indian documentary units ever. There was Aubrey Menon, as the scriptwriter and Jean Bhavnagary as research worker and Brian Eastdale, the music composer. And there were some more keen and enthusiastic helpers who contributed considerably to that wonderful spirit which turns a unit into a team”.

When IFI closed down, Zils found himself at a loose end. Many of his compatriots went back to Germany, but Zils stayed on, a decision which proved wise and beneficial both to him and the Indian documentary movement.

The revival of the Films Division on the one hand had made regular film production and exhibition an accepted fact. On the other, it had choked all outlets for the independents. Hardly a healthy situation when a movement was just beginning to emerge. Paul Zils immediately perceived that what the independent filmmakers needed was a forum to stimulate interest in Indian documentaries, “to provide a rallying centre for the documentary film movement”. He sponsored the publication of a quarterly magazine, Indian Documentary, the like of which had not existed before or since.

The inaugural issue came out in early 1949. It had a very impressive editorial board comprising Mulk Raj Anand, B.K. Karanjia, Vikram Sarabhai, Frene Talyarkhan with Jagmohan as Execu-

tive Editor. To give an idea of its contents - there were articles on scriptwriting, discussions on Indian documentary children’s films, Unesco’s report on the educational films in India, reviews of recent documentaries, profiles of eminent documentary filmmakers, book reviews, technical notes - all suitably illustrated. This was a valiant effort although doomed from the start for lack of resources.

It shut shop after four issues. But Zils was not a man to give up. The magazine reappeared after five years. Its revival was greeted by the Indian press enthusiastically. The Current wrote, “After five years the Indian Documentary makes its appearance as a quarterly with a far wider scope and with very attractive presentation”. The Times of India commented, “With growing interest in documentaries and educational and scientific films, the revival of this journal after a lapse of five years is opportune....by providing a forum for intelligent discussion of documentaries and for comparing the work in this country with what is being done elsewhere, this magazine should help in the raising of documentary production standards”.

It is a tribute to the tenacity of the man that without any help from anywhere he published the magazine for five long years, till it folded up forever in 1959. It also speaks of the bankruptcy of our official and non-official organisations that we should have let such an excellent forum close down.

At the time there was much rethinking on the role of cinema in general, and documentary in particular, in a growing, evolving society and the forces unleashed by technology and industrialisation and tides of social change. This process was greatly helped with our contact with European filmmakers, first through their films at the 1952 International Film Festival and later in person. Jean Renoir came as early as 1949 to scout locations for his film The River based on a novel by Rummer Godden.

It was during the filming of The River that Satyajit Ray met Renoir and observed his shooting which was to provide him with the necessary technical

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VINOBA BHAVE A DISCOVERY IN HINTERLAND: JEAN RENOIR’S THE RIVER. POSTER(inset)

knowhow and encouragement to make his masterpiece Pather Panchali. Roberto Rossellini who had startled the world with his neo-realistic masterpieces Open City, Paisa and Europa ‘51 came to India in 1956. He was well informed on Indian history and civilisation Rosellini was also deeply moved

by Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement. With his own cameraman and a unit provided by the Films Division, he travelled around India for several months taking in the Indian scene. The result was India ‘ 57, an episodic film which showed the indelible impression India had left on its maker. At first sight, the film appears to be no more than a series of images of the Indian countryside and people but a closer look unravels its depth and complexity.

Truffaut likened the film to free verse and called it “a meditation on life, on nature, on animals....”

About this time, two other well known documentary filmmakers, the Russian Roman Karmen and the Swedish Arne Sucksdorff, were drawn to India to witness not only an ancient civilisation but also the exciting drama of a young nation on the move.

Karmen had come to India with a formidable reputation, having vividly covered the Spanish Civil War, Mao’s long march in China, the war in Leningrad and the Nazi trials at Nuremburg. While Karmen preferred to film the emergence of industrial India in his feature length film Dawn over

India, Arne Sucksdorff went to Bastar in Madhya Pradesh to film the life of the Murias, a people unchanged for thousands of years. Like Flaherty, Sucksdorff spent 18 months with the tribe to get as near to an authentic record of their lives as possible. He is reported to have exposed 120,000 ft. of film for his feature which was eventually named The Flute and the Bow. Two other extraordinary films that he made in India were Indian Village and The Wind and the River, stunningly beautiful, keenly observed, and warmly human.

These filmmakers apart, what really contributed to the growth of the documentary movement was ample sponsorship to independent filmmakers by agencies like the United States Information Service and the Technical Cooperation Mission familiarly known as TCM, the Shell Film Unit and industrial houses like Tatas, Scindias, ICI, Hindustan Lever, ITC, Dunlop, etc. Of the two American agencies, the USIS produced a number of elaborate documentaries on river valley projects, malaria control, road building and Japanese method of rice cultivation. These films had a certain ‘studio’ quality and finish not often found in documentaries. Obviously they had the advantage of sizeable budgets and enough time for production. The TCM sponsored an extensive programme of functional films on subjects relating to agriculture, animal husbandry,

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irrigation, cattle improvement, farming implements, fertilisers, health and hygiene, literacy, etc.

TCM also involved itself in community development programmes (at the time the most radical programme in India) and made motivational films like the one on Etawah in which villagers build roads with their own resources and labour. While the programme had a certain educational value, it also provided “important bread and butter contracts for the established documentary film producers”.

Perhaps, more ambitious than both were the films of the Shell Film Unit, which commenced production in the mid fifties. Stuart Legg, head of the Shell Film Unit in London, came over to India to prepare a blueprint for a film programme which included films on the major industries of India, village crafts, folk dances and a series called Life in India. To supervise the programme Stuart Legg secured the services of James A. Beveridge of the National Film Board of Canada. Beveridge was an ideal choice having worked with John Grierson, Legg and Ross Maclean. Beveridge realised the importance of documentary and specialised films in the process of India’s dynamic development.

“Nowhere in the world could there be a greater testing ground, and a more challenging opportunity for film to prove its worth, than in modern India”, he wrote. Paul Zils and Hari S. Dasgupta were two of the producers who were assigned to make films for Shell. Both had impeccable credentials.

In technique and format the Shell films were distinctly different from those of Films Division.

Beveridge attached much importance to thorough research and well written scripts - the foundation on which a good documentary can be created. This is well borne out from the films Shell sponsored.

In the Major Industries of India series Paul Zils shot a 40-minute documentary at Jamshedpur showing how people in the steel town live and work. It had an interesting structure built around seven workers in various sections of the steel plant. What emerges at the end is not only an impressive portrait of the steel plant but also considerable insight into the lives of those who man it.

Similarly in the Life in India series, Hari S. Dasgupta adopts the dramatised documentary form for his film A Village of West Bengal, (This film could be said to be a forerunner of Fali Billimoria’s The House that Ananda Built). Dasgupta’s film depicts life in a Bengali village on the banks of Mayurakshi river during various stages of Durga Puja celebrations. A newly-wed girl returns to her parental home just as the goddess is brought during the festival. A parallel is subtly established between the human and the divine. As the village artisans and craftsmen feverishly prepare for the great festival, the social and religious significance of the event is driven home. What further sets the film apart is the fact that we get to know an entire village through an individual and an event.

Zils made several films for Shell on subjects as varied as A Village in Travancore, The Martial Dances of Malabar, and the Oraons of Bihar. Of these I particularly remember the first two. A Village in Travancore showed the life and problems of a family, not without a certain lyricism.

It won an award at the Cork Film Week and in the words of Basil Wright, the Chairman of the Jury, “The film deserved its award because when we have seen it we are not only better informed about a group of people in a certain far away place, but have received that aesthetic satisfaction that comes from a film sensitively directed...”.

Martial Dances was a shorter film but equal in impact. It starts with references to martial and maritime traditions of Malabar. We see the ritual dance of Vela kali and Kalari and boys and girls being trained in the use of swords and daggers.

At the end is tharayaitam, the ceremonial dance in honour of their legendary hero.

Happily Beveridge allowed his filmmakers total creative control. Said Zils, “Shell’s programme is an immense opportunity for the documentarian of my type always keen on covering fresh aspects of the Indian panorama....they give full freedom in handling the subjects in a creative manner...since they have no axe to grind, much objectivity in the treatment is allowed”. Within four or five years Shell/

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Beveridge created a sizeable body of films - films that were wide in sweep, human in approach and innovative in technique. Even today the Life in India series retains much of its interest and relevance.

SYNCHRONOUS SOUND & FURY

The sixties turned out to be an exciting decade.

At last, the documentary idea had caught on. Its tremendous potential, range and effectiveness as a medium of communication was becoming apparent to the policy-makers and intellectuals alike.

It is not without some significance that India’s leading art magazine Marg devoted an entire issue to documentary films. So did the prestigious political monthly Seminar. Abroad, a new type of documentary film was taking shape. Aided by lightweight cameras and synchronous sound taperecorders, filmmakers in France (Jean Rouch, Ruspoli) and the United States (Richard Leacock, Al Maysles, Pennebaker) had given their films (Yanki Noe, Primary, Crisis, The Chair) a depth of detail and a sense of urgency unknown to cinema earlier. The filmmaker was no longer the promoter of ideas or ideals that Grierson had ordained him to be, his credo (the cinema verite or direct cinema practitioner) was to bear witness, to observe a situation as faithfully as humanly possible, without his own prejudices intruding upon it.

The Indian filmmaker could not remain untouched by these stirrings. Commenting on films like Face to Face, I am Twenty, Report on Drought, India ‘67 and Explorer, the noted film critic Bikram Singh said that they reveal “a degree of sophistication which was rarely to be seen before the sixties.. there is today greater willingness to face facts and, occasionally, even to stick the neck out (and) say an oblique ‘boo’ to the establishment”. Before I come to avant garde filmmakers like Sukhdev, Pati, Sastry and Chari, it is necessary to discuss the work of Fali Bilimoria, Clement Baptista, Shanti Chowdhury and some others, which had the necessary innovative edge and a healthy regard for craftsmanship. No one epitomises these qualities better than Fali Bilimoria.

THEIR OWN WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS: JEAN ROUCH(above), RICHARD LEALOCK(right)

Fali Bilimoria started his film career with Paul Zils in the late forties and later became his partner. He was trained as a cameraman under Dr. P.V. Pathy, an early associate of Zils. Bilimoria was to later direct a large number of films including such well-known ones as A Village in Travancore, The Vanishing Tribe, The Call and Water, but the film that brought Bilimoria much critical acclaim (and a nomination for an Oscar in 1967) was The House that Ananda Built. A quiet film about a vaishya peasant family in Nadpur village, Orissa, it examines the farmer’s traditional way of life and changing relationships with his sons who have migrated to different parts of the country and are living at varying levels of modernity. In the Indian context, it was a very interesting theme, but unfortunately the 20-minute format within which this was sought to be examined defeated its purpose. In the process it became a well researched, well written, long essay illustrated with portraits of the family and other inhabitants of the village.

It’s a pity, because Bilimoria had the necessary expertise and his writer K.S. Chari, a keen exploratory sense. Despite all this, it remains a landmark film. Bilimoria followed this up with two

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other films the Last Rajah - a film on the ruler of a small state who had to change his lifestyle with the dissolution of the princely system - and another film on theAnglo-lndian community.

Clement Baptista had come to films after securing a diploma in Fine Arts and mural painting. He had also taught at J.J. School of Arts. During the War he joined the Army Film Unit as an art director. After the War, together with his friend and co-officer in the army, V.M. Vijaykar, he formed his company Hunnar Films. Clement Baptista made films on a vast variety of subjects but his natural inclination was for art and animation films. This came out strongly in Kailash at Ellora, on the famous rock-hewn temples. Baptista’s approach was uncommon in the sense that he used architectural designs to bring out the fact that carving out a temple of this size and dimension from solid rock was a unique accomplishment of man and his endeavour at artistic creation. A film in an entirely different mood and genre was Dubbawalla (Tiffin carrier).

It examines the daily collection, transport and distribution of hot lunches to tens and thousands of Bombay’s workers from suburban homes to metropolitan offices. The dubbawalla is a unique institution in the life of Bombay’s citizens. Baptista covers not only the journey of the dubbawalla but also shows the housewives bargaining at vegetable markets. This unique enterprise is run by totally illiterate people who have an amazing capacity to remember which dabbah belongs to which person.

Shanti Chowdhury came to film making via civil engineering which he had studied in England. It is no wonder then, that his work was marked by a certain precision and a good deal of concern for detail. This was clearly evident in his film To Light a Candle about Dr. Welthy Fisher, the renowned adult educator who had set up the Literacy House in Lucknow in 1953. This was followed by Entertainers of Rajasthan which concerned the itinerant minstrels and entertainers of the desert. These ranged from puppeteers to acrobats to singers, actors and dancers. Chowdhury was able to capture not only the colour and spectacle of these traditional artistes but he closely observed with compassion their lives, their sorrows and frustrations.

A STILL FROM BILLIMORIA’S THE HOUSE THAT ANANDA BUILD

Sukhdev, who had served a long period of apprenticeship with Paul Zils and later became his assistant, is generally regarded as one of India’s best documentary filmmakers. He showed an early promise with films like And Miles to Go and After the Eclipse, both of which had a socio-political content. However, he came to the fore with an hour-long documentary India ‘67. This was followed by another monumental work Nine Months to Freedom on the emergence of Bangladesh. And Miles to Go, Sukhdev’s first angry documentary showed us the inequalities of Indian society.

While a lady applies perfume, a slum dweller is shown taking out lice from her hair. In a similar vein contrasts are juxtaposed at every level of urban living. Unfortunately while the visual impact, as in most of Sukhdev’s films, was stunning, the film lacked depth and analysis. It created a sensation but did not set the mind thinking. After the Eclipse, much of which was shot inside a prison with Sukhdev himself playing an inmate, was a compassionate dramatisation of jail life. It is the essential humanity, even among murderers, that Sukhdev brought out with considerable success.

His earlier two films could be said to be a preparation for Sukhdev’s most mature work India ‘67.

The film was a highly cinematic perusal of the contrasts and contradictions that abound in Indian life.

In the film the filmmaker takes us on a countrywide tour and provides a kaleidoscopic view of the new

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with the old, western ways encroaching upon tradition, technological advances and age-old methods. All this is familiar stuff but what gave the film its uniqueness were the keenly observed small details. I think Satyajit Ray was entirely right when he remarked: “I like India ‘67 but not for its broad and percussive contrasts of poverty and influence, beauty and squalor, modernity and primitivity however well shot and cut they might be. I like it for its details - for the black beetle that crawls along the hot sand, for the street dog that pees on the parked bicycle, for the bead of perspiration that dangles on the nose tip of the begrimed musician”.

Nonetheless, India ‘67 is a film of extraordinary visual beauty and unfailing compassion.

It is a film charged with passion. With its rather loose structure and occasional self-indulgence (it is by no means a flawless work) but these are the excesses of a brilliant talent. That it aroused diverse and extreme reactions was a tribute to its maker who despised neutrality in art.

When the Bangladesh pogrom began, Sukhdev was one of the very few Indian filmmakers who was in ngladesh pogrom began, Sukhdev was one of the very few Indian filmmakers who was in the thick of the action at considerable physical risk. The result was Nine Months to Freedom, a work of compelling power. The Bangladesh story is placed in historical perspective from the emergence of Pakistan upto the return of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to his people. The basic conflict that arose between the two wings of Pakistan - the language problem, the riots, the demands for freedom from exploitation and for self rule, the crackdown by the Pakistan Army, the exodus of refugees, the nine-month-long struggle, the genocide and the rapes and mass destruction - Sukhdev’s camera shows it all. Here I must mention that the young Dacca filmmaker Zahir Raihan gave Sukhdev some of the grisly footage personally shot by him, of the atrocities, including a view of a corpse with its innards being ripped open by a dog. Later Raihan was killed by Pakistani forces .

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One man had enlivened the documentary scene and some of this excitement spilled over even to 24 Peddar Road, the headquarters of Films Division in Bombay. There is no doubt that filmmakers like S.N.S. Sastry, T.A. Abraham, Chari, Prem Vaidya and Pramod Pati were greatly influenced

by Sukhdev, not so much in style as in spirit .

Pramod Pati who died of cancer at a young age, was probably the most original talent working in the Films Division. He made a number of films on a variety of subjects including, This Our lndia, Ravi Shankar, Hamara Rashtragan, which were all competently made, but it was in his very short films lasting sometimes one or two minutes such as Klaxplosion, Perspectives, Trip, Violence and Explorer (seven minutes) that Pati came into his own. Here it is well to mention that Pati had his early training in animation filmmaking under the celebrated Jiri Trinka, the Czech master.

With work ranging from folklore (Czech Legends, 1953) and national literature (The Good Soldier Schweik, 1954) to Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1959) Hans Anderson and haunting visions of present and future, Trinka made the puppet film into a new and important genre.

His example was of inestirnable importance to other filmmakers working in the same genre.

Pati’s work evoked extreme reactions. Explorer which lasts just seven minutes but whose visual and aural impact is felt a long time after, is a probe into the young urban Indian mind. Pati contrasts and juxtaposes Tantric symbols, images of meditating sadhus collide with teenagers doing the twist, computers are cut with the chanting of prayers. But the camera always returns to the young people in labs, libraries, fields - all of them searching, seeking, exploring. The film had no narration. When it was shown in theatres the audience reaction was extreme. Used as they were to the didactic ‘narrated’ documentary, the film came as a shock. At a seminar in the Films Division after the film was shown, the noted film critic and filmmaker K.A. Abbas called it a waste of pub-

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lic money. K. Subrahmanyam, the veteran Tamil filmmaker, compared Pati to Norman MacLaren.

James Beveridge was so impressed as to say that the film “as well done as one could find anywhere, in any country no matter what its resources”.

That Pati was not given to gimmickry but had a genuine urge for experimentation was clear in a much shorter film Perspectives which lasted under a minute and had no commentary. It is virtually a oneshot film in which the camera follows a jet plane taking off and pans down to show a little girl and a wrinkled old woman sitting close together in front of a hut, saying the letters of the Hindi alphabet aloud together. The film was produced to mark International Adult Literacy Year and won Pati a well-deserved international award. Pati’s early death was a tragic loss to experimental cinema.

For too long the Indian audience had been “informed and educated” through didactic narrated documerltaries, it was about time - and 20 years after Independence, the right time - that the Indian citizen would speak from the screen. Two films that started the trend were K.S. Chari/T.A. Abraham co-directed Face to Face and S.N.S. Sastry’s I am Twenty. Face to Face showed a cross section of people - students, workers, taxi drivers, intellectuals and peasants (and the distinguished journalist Frank Moraes) - airing their opinions on democracy and India 20 years after Independence. These expressions of criticisms, frustrations or optimism are placed in the context of the sharp, distressing contrasts of life in contemporary India. This was probably the first film which gave a sense of feedback. Chari, who had started his career as a senior commentary writer in the Films Division, went on to make two more films, Transition and Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan.

S.N.S. Sastry, whowas a diploma holder in cinematography from the Bangalore Polytechnic, had joined Films Division as a cameraman and started directing films in 1956. Sastry had made a large number of films but it was with I am Twenty that he made his mark. I am Twenty was structured around interviews with young people who were born in 1947 when India attained her freedom. The film made a tremendous impact

because the young people whom Sastry interviewed on camera came out with force and pungency. They looked credible and convincing and expressed their feelings with candour. Young men with uncertain future questioned bitterly: “Is it freedom to starve and go naked?”

“Well I don’t love my country... and even if I did, to whom should I speak of my love.”

This note of dissonance, an element of doubt was something new to Indian documentary, at least the official documentary. The value of the film lay in the fact that it provided a basis for discussion. This is what a good documentary is all about. Sastry later made several other notable films like And I Make Short Films, On the Move, Yes It’s on, Burning Sun. Like Pati he too died tragically young. While driving his daughter to school he suffered a fatal heart attack.

The interview film initiated by Chari and Sastry was put to effective use in Report on Drought which was factual, terse, stark. A film that created something of a commotion was O.P. Arora’s Actual Experience, on family planning. Arora who had earlier made films like Kulu Manali and Narmada revealed remarkable aptitude for interviewing people. In Actual Experience Arora’s concern was to find out if the new methods like loop were favoured by women. Most women came out forcefully against the use of loop for various reasons. As expected, the film was held back from release. This was significant as the interview film had irritated the authorities and startled the smug.

TURBULENT YEARS The 70s were both the best and the worst of years.

Best, for the exciting new talent that appeared on the documentary scene bringing in fresh energy, radical outlook and innovative technique, notable among them Shyam Benegal, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Vinod Chopra – the last three being alumni of the Film Institute, Pune. Worst, for the trauma caused by Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s Emergency that stifled much of the creative impulse and the equally barren period of the Janata party rule, remarkable only for its ambivalence. More of these later.

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Shyam Benegal who shot to sudden fame with his first feature film Ankur (1974) had begun his career with the well-known advertising agency, Lintas. He worked his way up from scripting ad films to making them himself. He had also been a film buff and read a considerable amount of theoretical work on cinema before he made his first documentary, A Child of the Street (1967) about juvenile vagrancy. It traces the traumatic experiences of a nine year old boy in a metropolitan city, his search for parental love and shelter before he ends up in a rehabilitation centre. The film had urgency, compassion and sociological concern. For a first film, Benegal also used his camera with surprising skill.

His next film Close to Nature took us to the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh, providing a kaleidoscopic view of tribal life at different times and in varying moods – worshipping their gods, singing and dancing as dusk fell, bargaining in the marketplace, living in the ghotul (an institution where young people live together). It was a tricky film to make and required greater involvement and rapport with the subject. Unfortunately, Benegal failed to achieve this. One wishes Benegal had put to better use the words of Verrier Elwin with which he ends the film: “We must help the tribals to come to terms with their own past so that their present and future will not be denied from it, but be a natural evolution from it... we must not impose our own ideas on them. We must not create a sense of guilt by forcing on them laws that they do not understand and cannot observe”.

Nevertheless Close to Nature was way ahead of Films Division’s scores of films on tribal life where the district officer gets them to parade before the camera. (Perhaps an exception could be made of Prem Vaidya’s Man in Search of Man on the tribals of Andaman and Nicobar Island.)

Indian Youth: An Exploration, as the name suggests, was Benegal’s attempt to understand the problems of modern Indian youth, both urban and rural, at various social and economical levels.

Here he is clearly more at home than in the world of the tribals – eschewing a didactic approach, he presents a panorama of quick, flashing episodes, of several young people as they struggle through a fast-changing world, so different from the world

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of their parents. Another film, Horoscope for a Child, on protein deficiency among growing children, succeeds in being much more than that. Woven around a taxi driver’s family living in one of Bombay’s numerous chawls*, we get acquainted with a whole way of life, thus experiencing the problem in a socio-economic context. Benegal later moved to a different genre, and made several films on Indian music, notably Tala and Rhythm, The Shruti and Graces of Indian Music, The Raag Yaman Kalyan. In a sense, this was pioneering work which found greater maturity and finer expression in Mani Kaul’s hour-long Dhrupad.

Mani Kaul came over to documentaries after he had made three feature films, Uski Roti, Ashad Ka Ek din and Duvidha. His first documentary was The Nomad Puppeteers of Rajasthan, an area he knew well enough having been brought up there.

Mani follows a troupe of puppeteers as they move from place to place entertaining and ekeing out a miserable living. An entire family is involved in entertaining and making the puppets which they carve out of softwood and then paint and clothe.

To our dismay we discover that this remarkable art is on the wane with the easy accessibility of the moving pictures. What is even worse, the puppeteers now prostitute their art by enacting scenes from popular cinema where the puppets dance to the tunes of film songs. But it need not have been so. Mani carries out his argument with great force and urgency in his next film Chitrakathi.

Made for the Films Division, in a 20-minute format which proved hopelessly inadequate, Chitrakathi is about the folk artists of western India who narrate with the help of leather puppets. Mani takes us to the sleepy Konkan coastal village and introduces us to the family that has preserved this unique art for several centuries. Now it faces extinction because younger men would rather go to the city and earn a living there, than practise an outmoded art which holds no future. What happens to these men who migrate to the big cities?

Mani Kaul presents a searing study in Arrival. To the city come men, women, fruits, flowers, vegetables, goats and sheep – all ready for consump-

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tion. It is the process of consumption/exploitation that forms the core of the film. In a collage of images held together by an engaging soundtrack we are shown the brutality and dehumanisation of city life. Perhaps the best part of the film is the scene in the slaughterhouse where Mani shows us the routineness of death – rows upon rows of slaughtered goats and sheep, all ready for human consumption. Because he refuses to sentimentalise, the effect is electric. Only once before have I experienced the same cold academic ferocity, in Franju’s La Sang des Betes. Mani extends the slaughterhouse metaphor to labour-intensive areas where human beings are exploited and reduced to insignificant cogs in a giant, merciiess machine. The film raises more questions than it can possibly answer. That perhaps is its intention.

Dhrupad, a 72-minute long film which features two famous masters, the Dagar brothers of Dhrupad school of Indian classical music, is truly a pioneering work in the sense that nothing quite like this had been attempted before. It not only captures for us, and posterity, the magical quality of the two great masters’ voices, but provides a valuable clue to the evolution of their art with its beginning in tribal music; Mani Kaul puts forth the argument that tribal music had two aspects: one concerned itself with ritualistic hymns and the other related to changing seasons, as also birth, marriage, death, etc. While the folk music stayed in the villages, the ritualistic music evolved into classical music and moved to the courts. In a simple yet effective structure, the film opens on the historical monuments at Gwalior, Agra, Amber and Mandu to the accompaniment of veena* recital. It is in this setting that the great Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar explains the intricacies of Dhrupad style. The concluding passage of the film is on a panoramic shot of Bombay as the music reared in the courts of princely states undergoes a subtle change in a vastly different, industrialised milieu. Shot with immense love and care for tone, texture and colour, it is a landmark film.

Unfortunately, Kumar Shahani has not been very active in the documentary field, but one still remembers his moving film on spastic children, A

Certain Childhood (a Leela Naidu production). It was probably the earliest in-depth study on the subject. Abandoned, vagrant children was also the subject of Vinod Chopra’s An Encounter with Faces which won him several awards, including nomination for the Oscar at the 51st annual AcademyAwards. In this film Chopra takes over where Shyam Benegal had left off: he examines the lives of these children who lead a dreary, loveless existence at a rehabilitation centre. Using no narration and letting the children speak for themselves, Chopra turns his film into an authentic document.

A STILL FROM DHRUPAD MANI KAUL(inset)

A determined man can beat the system. Loksen Lalwani did. Working within the fusty Films Division (which he later left) Lalwani made a searching study of the lives of coal miners in Bihar in his film Burning Stone. Lalwani shows us the inhuman conditions in which the coal miners work and live. He also underscores the constant fear of the money-lenders and the shenanigans of the politicall trade union leaders. Lalwani’s camera follows them to the pits – revealing their primitive safety measures and the unremitting misery and squalor of their hovels. The only place where they can seek oblivion and indulge in fantasies of a glorious future for their children is the cheap liquor shop.

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When asked why he chose to call his film Burning Stone, Lalwani replied, “I could have called it ‘black diamond’ as coal is referred to... but for the miners it is a burning stone. It is burning in the depths of the earth like a volcano waiting to erupt..”

They Call me Chamar, Lalwani’s next film, was reportedly based on a newspaper item, of a brahmin having married a Harijan* girl. Socially ostracised, he is driven to the bustee* of the chamars* who live by skinning dead animals.

Vultures peck at dead carcasses as we approach the chamar bustee to meet our protagonists. Lalwani lets the couple alternately relate their story which forms a powerful indictment of a cruel social system. It is a pity a man of such strong conviction and social consciousness died so young.

And now the bad news.

The portents were all there but it was the suddenness of it which took everyone unawares. On 26 lune 1975, the President of India through a proclamation declared that “a grave emergency exists, whereby the security of India is threatened by internal disturbances”. Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister, was more reasurring, “The President has proclaimed emergency. This is nothing to panic about”. As always, the axe fell on the media – press, radio, television, film. The earnest, authoritative Vidya Charan Shukla took overcharge of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry from Inder Kumar Gujral. Soon after assuming office, Mr. Shukla went into action.

What happened to the press, radio, TV and feature film industry is only too well known. Perhaps less known is the irreparable damage Emergency and men like Shukla did to the documentary film.

Emergency highlighted the vulnerability of the government-controlled media— AIR [All India Radio], TV and Films Division. Mr. Shukla and his ilk instilled fear in every area of creative and organisational activity. And to use Mr. L.K. Advani’s famous phrase, men began to “crawl when asked only to bend”. Fear stalked the corridors of

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Films Division. “The largest documentary film unit in the world” was reduced to an impotent giant. In an atmosphere rife with suspicion and supression, ‘seasonal’ filmmakers and political adventurists jumped on to the gravy train. According to the White Paper on Misuse of Mass Media, a number of films including Agya Do Hukam Karo, Zimmedar Waris, A New Era Begins and Godmen of Ganges were purchased by Films Division on orders from the Minister, bypassing both the Film Purchase Committee and the Film Advisory Board. Crude propaganda, hastily churned out by Films Division, filled the screens of the country.

Mercifully, people could not be forced to watch it.

The pity and sorrow of it was that when Mrs. Gandhi was voted out of power and the Janata Party brought in, nothing but nothing changed materially. Although the government was new, the men who constituted it were not.

No sooner did they get into power than they resorted to the same old game of revenge and reprisal. Mrs. Gandhi was declared persona non grata on AIR, Doordarshan [televisione nazionale] and Films Division. Once when a TV producer unwittingly allowed a documentary in which Mrs. Gandhi had briefly figured, he was summarily sacked.

Worse still was the case of an FD documentary which showed a portrait of Mrs. Gandhi in the background. All prints of the film were ordered to be withdrawn from the national circuit. So much for the high-minded declarations of Mr. L.K. Advani.

Like the proverbial silver lining to the dark cloud, a significant development in the aftermath of Emergency was the political comment film.

Credit for this should go to a young man, Anand Patwardhan [Patvardhan], who was more of a political activist than a filmmaker. He took to filmmaking to put across his socio-political views to a wider audience. Patwardhan got considerable media attention with his half-hour 16 mm black and white documentary Prisoners of Conscience on the condition of political prisoners in India before, during and after the Emergency.

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Another documentary on political prisoners was Utpalendu Chakraborty’s Mukti Chai. Shot mostly with hand-held camera which gave it a certain sense of urgency, Chakraborty postulated that right from the Rowlatt Act to the proclamation of Emergency, the repressive forces have never really let the individual out of their grip. A more effective, well-made film was Gautam Ghose’s Hungry Autumn which won its director a prize at Oberhausen.

Taking off from actual famine conditions in 1974 in West Bengal, the film analyses the basic Indian agronomic situation, widespread destitution and its repercussions on rural and urban societies.

In the investigative genre, a truly courageous film was the Tapan Bose [Bos]-Suhasini Mulay [Mule] film, An Indian Story, on the notorious Bhagalpur blindings and the whole pattern of police brutality in India. Anyone who has ventured to make an unsponsored film knows the hazards of raising funds.

Even the eventual fate of such a film is uncertain as Tapan was to discover later. Bhagalpur blindings had hit the headlines when it was discovered that some policemen had forcibly blinded 34 under-trial prisoners by puncturing their eyes with a thick needle and then pouring acid on the wounds.

Tapan Bose started off by interviewing three of the blinded men in Delhi and then went to Bhagalpur to finish the film. Needless to say, the authorities tried every trick to dissuade Tapan and uniformed policemen shadowed the crew throughout. To cap it all, the censors banned the film only to be saved by a court order. For the socially committed, independent filmmaker it is a tight rope walk. It would appear that the establishment takes sadistic pleasure in keeping him poised so precariously.

IS ANYONE WATCHING? The ‘80s witnessed the pathetic downhill slide of Films Division. Lacking leadership, ideology and creative impulse, it now seemed to have lost the will to live. It was no longer the favoured agency of propaganda for the government. Those favours were now being bestowed on Doordarshan. In a bid to cut it to size, in 1984, the government drastically curtailed its production programme from 104 to 52 films a year, and suspended the produc-

tion of about 200 films “to clear an unprecedented backlog accumulated over a period of four years and involving crores of rupees”. This led Chidananda Dasgupta to write in the Indian Express, (Chronicles of a Death Foretold – Nov. 24, 1985) “Now, rumours are afloat that Films Division is on its death bed. It is time for the scribes to get their obits ready – or so it seems. If true, is this a case of murder, suicide, or just slow decay?....

It is alleged... that Films Division has fallen into official neglect and is now being readied for axing. But the seeds of its destruction were planted earlier. The hardening of its arteries, to change the metaphor, has been evident for a long time”. Harsh words these, but they underline a painful reality.

As early as 1966, the Chanda Committee in its report on Documentary Films and Newsreels had remarked that “because of organisational defects the documentaries are produced mechanically and disinterestedly, making them dull and uninteresting. Their treatment is often superficial and the absence of humour and satire is a contributory factor. Also, the pattern of documentaries has now become so stereotyped... it is easy to anticipate sequences and conclusions”.

It is a saddening thought that in its 40 years existence, Films Division has failed to build an identifiable image of Indian documentary. If anything, it has become an object of derision typifying Donald Richie’s famous quip, “Official anything is bad but official films are worst”. It is a wellknown fact that most theatres in the country show these documentaries under duress and sufferance. The common practice is either to keep the lights on while the documentary is screened or to show only the beginning and the end of the film. However, Films Division can take comfort from the fact that the country’s well-over 12,000 theatres contribute to their kitty substantially, while they may deny exposure to their films.

A true documentary must mirror the conditions and probe into the problems of human life. Its tradition has not been self-congratulatory, but self-questioning. Unfortunately our bureaucrats have never understood this, their argument being: as they were paying the piper, they must call the

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tune. That tune has never been in consonance with the mood and reality of the situation. Hence, the credibility gap and walkouts from the theatres. According to the Working Group on National Film Policy (May, 1980) one reason why Films Division films fail to attract audiences is their superficial and simplistic approach, and the non-involvement “of the filmmaker with the problems which he attempts to depict”. Any documentary worth its name is never neutral and non-controversial. If it is to serve as a positive catalyst of social change, it must shock, inspire and provoke and not indulge in a balancing act as most FD documentaries do.

Indian documentary faces an unprecedented crisis.

It can only come out of it if the government relaxes its vice-like control on exhibition outlets. Nothing else will change the situation. In an editorial in Screen, B.K. Karanjia put it succinctly, “The very manner in which we exhibit the Films Division’s newsreels and shorts (by compulsion and,

adding insult to injury, on payment) makes a travesty of a fundamental democratic principle. The documentary in India is made and shown by bureaucratic fiat, but that is not how good documentaries are made and it is certainly not how good documentaries need be shown... There is also no dearth of exhibitors who would be willing to show such films provided they have interest and quality. That is the first thing – compulsion must go”.

Despite official apathy and indifference, a new kind of documentary has taken shape – not of smiling faces and lush fields but the struggle and strife of our multitudes. Scraping together the funds somehow or the other, the filmmakers have gone ahead regardless of the limited outlets available to them. Subjects which had been taboo earlier and swept under the carpet by the official media were now brought out in the open. As a result, we have courageous exposes of caste and communal riots, police brutality, industrial neglect, urban unem-

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ployment, bride burning, and other issues of social urgency. Interestingly, a number of films on current social problems have been made by women directors, among them Uma Segal, Meera Dewan, Mira Nair, Manjira Dutta and Suhasini Mulay.

Uma Segal, a graduate of the Film and TV Institute, Pune, made a 42-minute film Shelter (1984), on the plight of pavement dwellers in Bombay whose dwellings had been demolished and who were deported to far-off places. Using a candid camera style of spot interviews, Segal examines the issues involved and builds up a case against the demolition of the hutments. The film makes the plea that the pavement dwellers provide essential services to nearby high-rise buildings but are unable to get accommodation for themselves. Interestingly, the film was awarded the Special Jury Prize which Segal refused: “The very government which was and is responsible for the demolitions, instead of showing reason... has continued demolitions with impunity on a massive scale. I find it ironical that the very same government chooses to give me an award”.

Anand Patwardhan’s Hamara Sheher ([La nostra città] 1985) centers around the same theme but has a greater thrust. Made possible through donations from individuals and public bodies, Patwardhan’s film was well over two years in the making. Motivated by the large scale attacks on slum dwellers in 1982/83 he found, “that it wasn’t just the authorities who were determined to demolish them, but that the entire middle-class opinion was being mobilised against slum dwellers”.

The film counters the argument that slum dwellers are a drain on the economy. On the contrary, Patwardhan avers, they contribute to it as workers in industry and other labour-intensive fields. The filmmaker was criticised for manipulating some of the interviews – specially those of the affluent section – and using them out of context. Dismissing the criticism, Patwardhan said, “the objection is come because we have actually put them in context... the background of poverty”. It is a film made with compassion and conviction. Pity that it has remained unseen except for special screenings for film circles and seminars on housing.

Another film which focussed attention on the (in) human condition is Sashi Anand’s Man Vs. Man (1983) which questions the wisdom of government legislation banning hand-pulled rickshaws in Calcutta which would throw well over hundred thousand people out of employment. Meera Dewan who had been deeply concerned about the plight of women in a traditional, male-dominated society, won a prize at Oberhausen for her film Gift of Love (1983). It is a trenchant indictment of the widely-prevalent but pernicious dowry system.

ALWAYS WAR, NEVER PEACE : ANAND PATWARDHAN

Not a day passes without some young married women, unable to meet the demands of her greedy in-laws, being set aflame. Meera Dewan’s film deals with two such cases. Interviews with victims, relatives, a lawyer and a social scientist are juxtaposed with scenes of merry-making during an Indian marriage. The filmmaker thus effectively brings out the brutality of the system which, to quote a critic, “penetrates right into the skin”.

Communal clashes have been a part of the Indian scene from the days of the Raj. The official media has either tried to cover it up or play it down. What is needed is a more mature approach to a problem that cannot just be wished away. Hence it is rare that one comes across a film like Deepa Dhanraj’s What Happened to this City (1986). The film depicts

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a Hindu-Muslim communal riot in Hyderabad, a city where for about 800 years the two communities had lived in harmony. It attempts to analyse the 1984 riot when for nearly 10 weeks large parts of the city were swept by waves of communal violence followed by a continuous period of curfew. It also exposes the process of political manoeuvering.

On December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide’s plant at Bhopal filled the air with the deadly poison methyl isocyanide (MIC), leading to the world’s biggest industrial disaster. Thousands died and many more were permanently maimed. The Tapan Sinha-Suhasini Mulay-directed Bhopal Beyond Genocide is a powerful expose of the multinational’s criminal negligence. The film highlights the inadequacies of relief which made the aftermath even more tragic, and predictably, like their earlier film An Indian Story, the Censor Board refused its certification and the producers had to take the matter to court. Though the film was chosen as the ‘Best Documentary of the Year’ it has never been publicly shown. The producers refused the award in protest. “It was the frustration of many years which came out in the open,” they stated.

MUZAFFAR ALI(above) DEEPA DHANRAJ(inset)

of the Ammu Swaminadhan family where traditionally the property has been handed from mother to daughter for generations. At a family get-together the women recall their childhood nostalgically. It is an intimate and keenly-observed film.

It appeared that the 20-minute format forced by Films Division was being increasingly discarded in favour of longer films. Prolific as always, Shyam In contrast, Prakash Jha’s Faces After the Storm, Benegal made two important films in 1985, one on on the victims of communal riots at Bihar Sharif Jawaharlal Nehru (180 mts.) and the other on Satywas a tame affair. Sponsored by Films Division, ajit Ray (150 mts.). The Nehru film, an Indo-USSR the constraint showed in its content and approach. coproduction directed jointly by Shyam Benegal and Yuri Aldokhin was an ambitious production, Oppression and exploitation is the stuff of Manwide in scope, rich in resources – technical, artistic jira Dutta’s Raaste Bandh Hain Sub ([Le strade and archival. The filmmakers chose a first person sono tutte chiuse] 1985) too. In the anthropologibiography approach, relying for the spoken text cal genre, this could possibly be the first film to entirely on Nehru’s Autobiography, his Selected explore in some depth and detail the lives of a Works, and Glimpses of World History and his backward tribal people living in the hilly terrain speeches. The film opens on Mrs. Indira Gandhi of Jaunsar Bawar, in Uttar Pradesh. The film also recalling that the most remarkable thing about her focuses on the failure of rural land reform meafather was the poet in him. What follows – after his sures, the persistence of bonded labour and pobirth in Allahabad and early life at Anand Bhavan, litical corruption which makes a mockery of rehis student days in England at Harrow and Camhabilitation programmes. Another film that has bridge – is as much the contemporary history of the same anthropological motivation is Muzaffar India as the life of Nehru, so intermingled were the Ali’s Vadakath – A Thervad in Kerala. The film, two. Nehru’s was a fascinating life. The man who based on the Vadakath family of Anakara in Kerbelieved in ‘living dangerously’ was at once a poet, ala, focuses on the matrilineal system, in accora romantic, an idealist, a revolutionary, a writer dance with the prevailing customs of the region. and historian. Unfortunately, the film fails him, Muzaffar Ali takes us to the beautiful old house and remains at best an overlong, dreary document.

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The Satyajit Ray film is the more interesting of the two. Probably the presence of Ray has something to do with it. Opening with Ray at work on the sets of Ghare Baire, most of the film is composed of conversation between the two filmmakers interspersed with excerpts from Ray’s films. In both films one got the feeling that Benegal was in awe of his material. While the first-person approach can make for purity of a kind, it can also place severe limitations on critical analysis and comment .

Talking of feature-length documentaries, I must mention Mani Kaul’s Mati Manas ([La psiche dell’argilla] 80 mins, 1985). Like his earlier film, Satah Se Uthatha Aadmi [L’uomo che si erge dalla superficie], on the Hindi writer Muktibodh, Mati Manas is multilinear and defies conventional distinction between a documentary and fiction film, thus creating, what Mani calls, “a non-fictional reality”. The film traces our entire cultural superstructure, myths, rituals etc. in the act of pottery making, one of man’s earliest occupations. Mani’s film starts with a museum exhibiting terracotta of the past and moves out to the vast central Indian plains which saw the rise of one of the most ancient civilisations of the world, and the extreme south with its ritualistic pottery, linking the pot – a symbol of creation – with the rhythm of life.

Barring the films of Shyam Benegal and Mani Kaul, most of the films mentioned earlier were unsponsored – undertaken as an act of faith, by courageous young men and women. Deeply troubled by certain socio-political problems, they sought to bring these out into the open for a wider discussion. That they failed to achieve this, is a sad commentary on the state of affairs. It is a frustrating situation. On the one hand, Films Division will not let go its control on exhibition outlets; on the other, Doordarshan is too busy profiteering from the insatiable hunger of the audience for jejune entertainment with its incredibly bad and indifferent sitcoms and soap operas, forgetting its function towards the community.

Doordarshan’s in-house production of documentaries is lamentable. In the past, they have been rehashing material acquired from Films Division.

I may be forgiven if I cite a personal example. On Sarojini Naidu’s birthday this year, DD had announced a film, Sarojini Naidu - The Nightingale of India, the title of a film which I had produced and

directed some years back for Films Division, and had won me Filmfare’s Best Documentary of the Year Award. On viewing the film, I was shocked to discover that large chunks from my black and white film had been clumsily strung together with material shot in garish colour. Shown on the national network, it was a Calcutta Doordarshan presentation.

There was not so much as an acknowledgement of the original material which had taken me months to research and acquire.Sooner or later Mandi House must realise that television is at its best when tackling non-fiction subjects. Doordarshan suddenly came of age with graphic reportage on the surrender of terrorists in the Golden Temple and the two-part

Bofors programme. These have not only given DD a raison d’etre but proved the power and potential of the medium. Which brings me to Ramesh Sharma’s two documentary-based programmes: Focus and Kasauti [La pietra di paragone]. Kasauti is about the ‘marginal people’ – people who are not in the mainstream. It is a new concept for Doordarshan though an old and tried one elsewhere. Ramesh Sharma, its producer who first came into prominence with his feature film New Delhi Times, confronts us with the stark reality of Indian life with subjects ranging from prostitution to mental asylums, drug addiction to dacoits. His style is direct, the approach compassionate, the result disturbing and thoughtprovoking. In Focus, Sharma goes into areas as diverse as advertising and tourism, Gorkhaland and nuclear power, the Punjab problem and the new Indian Cinema. Programmes such as these earn DD the discerning viewers’ patronage and respect.

The tragedy of Indian documentary is that for too long it has leaned on official patronage. This has stultified its growth and deprived it of an identity.

The honest fact is that we do not have what can be called an ‘Indian Documentary’. We have to create one, in order that o ne of the greatest mediums of the 20th century is not mortgaged to the purveyors of meretricious and mindless fare. As Goethe said:... “a great public is entitled to our respect, and should not be treated like children from whom one wishes merely to extract money”.

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As Jean Kabir said, “There is so much beauty in the mundane...”

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