100 years (more or less) of "Hollywood"

[Did this - somewhat basic - tribute essay for Business Standard Weekend]

Intro: Whether you love its vitality or hate its excesses, cinema wouldn't have been the same without Hollywood


The early years of film history are so heavily shrouded in mist – especially with many key works from the first two or three decades having been lost forever – that one must be cautious about pinning down dates, or suggesting that a particular studio, industry or director was the “first” to achieve something. One thing is beyond dispute though: a hundred years ago, give or take a few months, some very interesting developments were taking place in a small Los Angeles municipality called Hollywood. Studios like Paramount and Warner Bros were setting up camp and calling in trucks full of unwieldy motion-picture cameras. Artists with names like D W Griffith, Charles Chaplin and Mary Pickford were being drawn towards the region, almost as if by some mysterious magnetic force – as if a nascent art form knew that it had found a space from where it could begin showing itself off to the world, and that it need the right sort of people to get it going.

And show off it did. From the ground-breaking silent epics of Griffith to the inventive masterpieces of Buster Keaton and Erich von Stroheim in the 1920s to an explosion of sound films in a variety of popular genres – Westerns, musicals, screwball comedies, noir – in the 1930s and 1940s, American cinema quickly took the lead in demonstrating the possibilities of the medium. Of course, much pioneering work was happening in other countries at the same time – notably in Russia and Germany – but they couldn’t match the scale on which things were done in Hollywood. So it has remained to this day.

Today, a century after those beginnings, Hollywood is less a tangible place and more a state of mind. Geographical accuracy has never mattered to most people who use the word: growing up in India in the 1980s, for example, it was common to hear any English-language film (even a British one) being referred to as “a Hollywood movie” – even by film magazines, which should have known the difference.

For serious film buffs, “Hollywood” has often been synonymous with a crass, studio-governed style of moviemaking – one that is sometimes seen as the antithesis of art. The very word sometimes elicits knee-jerk negative reactions, partly because popular American movies are considered rude envoys of American cultural imperialism. There’s a stage in the trajectory of most film students when it’s fashionable to be snobbish about Hollywood (even the classics) and learn that the really “worthy cinema”, the cinema of integrity, comes from other countries – Italy, Denmark, Japan, Iran.

This view of things is understandable to an extent, especially when you look at the amount of big-budget cinematic dross that America churns out each year, and consider that many small countries barely have the resources to produce even half a dozen (good or bad) movies annually. But there’s another side to the argument. The fact is, in no other moviemaking industry in the world has commerce and art combined so fortuitously, so often, and with such strong reverberations for the rest of the world, as in Hollywood.

It’s true that for decades the studio regime and the star system led to certain artistic constraints, and there are plenty of stories that testify to this: for example, the rewriting - and compromising - of a script because a character played by a matinee idol couldn’t turn out to be a bad penny (or a "wrong 'un") at the end of a film. But it’s equally true that those same studios, and the talents working under the limitations they imposed, produced a rich and vibrant cinematic legacy that explored the full potential of narrative filmmaking. Directors realised powerful individual visions even while operating under the watchful eyes of their financiers (who, by the way, weren't always philistines; sometimes they were good at reining in artistic temperaments that might otherwise have self-combusted). Star-actors showed tremendous versatility not by submerging themselves in a dizzying variety of characters but by exploring the range of emotions within a certain type of role, dictated by their popular screen persona. And the world responded. When cinema exploded internationally in the 1950s and 1960s with an outpouring of independent, “art”-driven films from countries such as France and Sweden, the debt to the American film was enormous. The new European directors expressed their love and admiration for Hollywood, pointing out the subtle and complex techniques embedded in the best of its movies, and this led to a renewed study of American genre films, many of which had earlier been dismissed (by homegrown critics) as "mere popular entertainments".

American cinema would see a second renaissance in the 1970s, with the flowering of a generation of filmmakers who were students first – deeply knowledgeable about and respectful of movie history – and directors second: Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, De Palma among others. And though the decades that followed haven’t been quite as rich, Hollywood, for all its excesses, has always had space for the high-quality “indie” film.

But of course, the ambivalence continues. I remember a discussion with a friend who had just discovered the films of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and was (for reasons that I can’t quite fathom or relate to) smugly proud that this “Asian” filmmaker had been an inspiration to Western directors like Sergio Leone and George Lucas. His face fell when I pointed out that Kurosawa himself had been deeply influenced by the very American films of John Ford. In the 21st century it would be silly to think of “Hollywood” as the be all and end all of filmmaking, but there’s no question that it has been the wellspring for many of the best developments in the seventh art.

Learning to laugh...at anything

Do read this excellent piece by Mitali Saran in The Caravan. I especially enjoyed this bit (and agreed with it most vigorously):

But are there things so wrenching that you cannot joke about them — starvation, for instance, or loss, or violence? These are issues that engage the emotions at a visceral level. You could argue that India wrestles with the kind of terrible, serious problems that it would be tasteless to make fun of. Yet, that is the root of black — and gallows — humour. It is possible to be genuinely anguished by starvation and still smile when someone says, 'How many Ethiopians can you fit in a bathtub? None, they keep slipping down the drain.' (Too far from home? Replace Ethiopian with the starving Indian of your choice. There are lots to choose from.)

It is possible to tell a joke about a dead guy, or about an axe murderer. It is seen as more acceptable for a Dalit to make fun of a Brahmin; but it should also be possible for the joke to go the other way. It is possible to do these things when the cool eye puts the warm heart on hold, temporarily, and can see inherently funny paradoxes. It isn’t a permanent condition; it’s not the death of compassion; it’s not because of a fundamental lack of empathy.

I can't count the number of times I've had to roll my eyes when someone says, "Humour is fine, but it shouldn't be offensive or tasteless." This is such a banal suggestion. Whether something is in bad taste or not is, by its very nature, subjective - there are no measures for such things. Some people have an extraordinarily high threshold for black humour or “tasteless comedy”, others get hurt very easily and are eager to proclaim it from every rooftop. (Which in itself is fine - all of us have the right to feel offended or hurt. We even have the right to not be offended but still not find a joke particularly funny. The trouble starts when we try to ensure punitive measures against the thing that has so wounded our feelings.) If you were to stick the label "Bad Taste" on anything that offended a sizable number of people, you’d be left with hardly anything that isn’t “in bad taste”.

The idea that it's okay - even desirable - to laugh at jokes about one's most sacred cows reminds me of an incident from a couple of years ago. Never thought I'd put it up here, but well, it seems like a good context. My maasis - my mother's cousins, both in their sixties now - were in Delhi and they were all sitting around talking about old times. The conversation soon turned to my aunts' recently deceased parents, very dear to them both; soft, misty-eyed recollections gradually made way for bawdy anecdotes, all narrated in rustic, quickfire Punjabi. It reached a crescendo when my aunts recalled their father grumbling lightly about his wife's bout with Parkinson's Disease in her last years. "Jab usse hilna tha, tab toh kabhi hildi nahin thi," he told his own daughters.

The English translation, "She never shook when she should have", doesn't convey anything of the superb lewdness of the Punjabi version, which caused one of the most memorable spontaneous outpourings of laughter I've ever experienced. It took a couple of minutes for everyone to finish catching their breath and wiping their eyes. Then my maasis went back to talking about the abiding love between their parents and remembering how well their dad had looked after their mom in her final days. It was a very nicely spent afternoon.

The cowardly Samurai: audience manipulation in Harakiri

[Full version of my latest Persistence of Vision column]

I’ve been a big fan of classical Japanese cinema for a long time, and like most other viewers who develop an interest in that country’s movies, my approach route was through the three big names: Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. But in recent years I’ve been following other Japanese directors of the 1950s and 60s – Kon Ichikawa, Masuki Kobayashi, Kaneto Shindo among them – and I’ve been struck by the recurring themes of pacifism and anti-heroism in some of the best films of that time; the revulsion for the idea that there’s something glamorous or exciting about a life of violence, even when the violence is supposedly for a good cause; and the reminders of how conflict affects “little people”. These motifs probably come from introspection about the country’s very martial past – especially between the late 19th century and WWII – and you’ll discover traces of them in literature too, often in unexpected places (e.g., a bulky Haruki Murakami novel that’s set mostly in 1980s suburban Tokyo but contains unsettling inserts about the Sino-Japanese conflict). In cinema, this introspection can take the form of a “war is hell” story such as Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, about a sad-faced soldier turned away by his own army. Or a horror film – Shindo’s Onibaba – in which a scarred face beneath a demon mask suggests the visages of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.

Or it can take the form of a period movie that sharply debunks some of our ideas about those enigmatic warriors, the Samurai.


Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri is just such a film. There’s a lot that can be said about this plaintive, beautifully composed movie, but I’d like to dwell on an audience-manipulation technique used in its first half – a technique that implicates us in the idea that the Samurai code of “death over dishonour” is an inherently noble one, and then pulls the carpet (or tatami mat) out from under our feet.

To discuss this properly, some plot exposition is required. Harakiri begins with a title card telling us that it’s set in the early 17th century, a time of relative peace in Japan. An unemployed Samurai (or ronin) named Hanshiro arrives at the feudal estate of the Iyi clan with a request: being master-less and with nothing left to live for, he wishes to commit ritual suicide (seppuku or harakiri) on their grounds.

The estate retainers and their lord, Saito, are sceptical: there have been many recent cases of destitute Samurai visiting wealthy houses and making such assertions when what they really want is money or employment. They try to dissuade Hanshiro by telling him a story about another ronin named Chijiwa, who had come to them a few months earlier with a similar request, and this story is shown to us as a flashback.

In the images now presented to us, we see that Chijiwa is much younger than the scruffy, steely-eyed Hanshiro. He’s clean-shaven, somewhat shifty, he doesn’t look like he’s ready to stare death in the eye. From our first viewing of him we suspect that he’s a wastrel seeking easy money, and these suspicions seem confirmed when he expresses almost indecorous delight on being told that he will get to meet the head of the clan (perhaps to be employed as a retainer?) – and later, when he looks terrified on hearing that his wish for harakiri has been granted and the ritual dress is ready.


Now he loses his nerve, stutters, asks for respite: he has some important business to take care of, so could he be granted two days’ leave? His pleading comes across as pathetic and cowardly, and his hosts will have none of it. You came here to kill yourself, they say. Now do it. Or else...

Forcing young Chijiwa to commit harakiri is a ploy by the Iyi clan; they figure it will teach a much-needed lesson to any other Samurai who might want to come a-begging. And at this point in the story, the viewer’s feelings are likely to be divided, especially if he doesn’t know much about the nature of feudalism and the class divide in medieval Japan. For one thing, Lord Saito and his retainers aren’t sneering villains. They speak in restrained tones to each other, talk about the need to preserve the dignity of their house; there’s something melancholy about Saito (an understated, arresting performance by Rentaro Mikuni) himself. Also, if our main acquaintance with the Samurai culture has been through action movies, we have certain pre-conceptions. We have been conditioned to think of Samurai as men who never cringe or beg, and it strikes us as shameful that this young man is using a “noble” ritual like seppuku as a cover-up for his greed.

Thus the film, in a way, makes us complicit with the actions of the Iyi clan. But then, as the flashback continues, we see the long, increasingly disturbing scene where Chijiwa is forced to disembowel himself. Further, the Iyi sadistically insist that he do it with his own sword, which is made of bamboo, not steel. Somehow, with great effort, the young man manages to pierce his belly with this wholly inadequate weapon, but it’s impossible for him to complete the ritual, which entails cutting across his chest, left and right, up and down. Meanwhile his “second” (the swordsman who is assigned to cut off the warrior’s head once the self-mutilation is complete) stands about impassively, refusing to bring down his sword and end Chijiwa’s agony. Eventually Chijiwa takes the “easy” way out – he bites off his own tongue.

As you can imagine, this is a difficult scene to watch, even though it isn’t too gruesome (this is, after all, a black-and-white film made in 1962). It amounts to a bucket of cold water in the face of the viewer who may have felt that Chijiwa was getting what he deserved. Perhaps some of us even thought Lord Saito only meant to frighten this craven Samurai before sparing his life and booting him out of the gate – that would have made for a nice comic sequence! But what actually takes place is horrific and forces us to think again. Harakiri has only been running for half an hour at this point and its central themes aren’t clear yet, but at a subconscious level it has already started demystifying the grandeur and honour associated with the Samurai code.

The misleading nature of the Chijiwa flashback will become even more apparent as the story progresses and Hanshiro relates a tale of his own. We will discover something of young Chijiwa’s background, discover the circumstances that led him to the gates of the estate. In retrospect we will realise that when he asked for two days’ respite he was being sincere and would probably have returned to fulfill his promise. (When we first view the scene, we assume that he’s making an excuse to escape.) Our subsequent knowledge gives a whole new complexion to that early sequence, and makes a second viewing even more disturbing.

I’ve written mainly about (an aspect of) Harakiri’s narrative here but what strikes me most while watching it – especially in the sharp new transfer on the Criterion Collection DVD – is the cleanness of its composition. Some of its frames are like minimalist paintings, a reminder of Kobayashi’s gorgeously shot ghost film Kwaidan, which was full of sequences that look like lovely colour dreamscapes placed end to end. In their own discreet way, Harakiri’s black-and-white images are equally striking.

****

Among the many high-quality action films with pacifist undertones is Kurosawa’s great The Seven Samurai, about ronin protecting a village from bandits. There’s a melancholy strain in this masterpiece, a genuine sense of regret for the loss of human lives, and its protagonist (the wise Samurai leader Kambei) is a reluctant hero who has already seen too much bloodshed for his liking. But precisely because Kurosawa is such a superb director of action, and because he puts us right in the middle of the battles, it’s impossible not to feel a thrill during those scenes – and this can end up being our lasting impression of the film.

On the other hand, Harakiri has a formalness, a stillness, that goes with its plangent subject matter. A lengthy swordfight towards the end is filmed mainly in long-shot and though it’s extremely well-choreographed, there’s also something detached about it. We aren’t placed right in the middle of the blood and the grunts; there are several cutaways to Lord Saito sitting alone in an inner room, almost in a meditative state, listening to the swords clanging, waiting for his men to come and tell him that the fight is over.

Even though Hanshiro is a truly heroic figure (in a deeper sense of the word “hero” than the average action film gives us), the emphasis isn’t on the glamour of his sword-fighting, merely its efficiency. It’s possible at this moment to see a Samurai warrior as an individual worker, doing a job that circumstances have equipped him for – rather than as a representative of a way of life. Kobayashi’s haunting film is about the human beings – men with families, hopes and emotions – beneath the garb of the Samurai.

P.S. Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays Hanshiro, was one of the great Japanese actors. He makes a poetic remark in an interview included on my DVD of the film. “My twenties felt like a long climb up Mount Fuji,” he says, “and the burden I was carrying on my back was everybody’s masterpieces – the films of Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Ichikawa, Naruse.” It’s hard to believe Nakadai was only 30 when he played the aging, weary Hanshiro; it’s even harder to believe he’s the same actor who, only a year earlier, played the young, chuckling, pistol-wielding psychotic in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Sagan's inquisitive alien

Carl Sagan was among the kindliest and most restrained of the modern rationalist writers – much less strident than Richard Dawkins, for example – but few others punctured the balloon of human hubris as adeptly as he did. I was reading Pale Blue Dot recently (the title is a reference to the Earth as seen in a sprawling galactic photograph taken by a spacecraft 3.7 billion miles away) and there's a chapter titled “Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?”, where Sagan imagines an alien visitor orbiting our planet for the first time and trying to understand its topography and the possible life forms it hosts. The alien examines the Earth’s surface at increasingly high resolutions (think Google Earth!), and when it reaches a 100-meter resolution “the planet is revealed to be covered with straight lines, squares, rectangles, circles – sometimes huddling along river banks or nestling on the lower slopes of mountains, sometimes stretching over plains, but rarely in deserts or high mountains, and absolutely never in the oceans”. This sort of thing implies the presence of intelligent life. But of what sort?

At a much higher resolution, the alien eventually finds that:

...the crisscrossing straight lines within the cities are filled with streamlined, multi-coloured beings a few meters in length, politely running one behind the other in orderly procession. They are very patient. One stream of beings stops so that another stream can continue at right angles...at night they turn on two bright lights in front so they can see where they are going. Some, a privileged few, go into little houses when their workday is done and retire for the night. Most are homeless and sleep on the street.

Naturally, the alien visitor assumes that these polite, multi-coloured beings (which we, the human reader, immediately recognise as road vehicles) are the planet's dominant life forms. (At a stronger resolution yet, the alien observes “tiny parasites that occasionally enter and exit the dominant organisms”, but it doesn’t think of them as particularly important!)

Pale Blue Dot is full of many such moments that make you think about aspects of our world and what an outsider might make of them - like the best works in its genre, it forces you to step outside your own skin for a while. But reading the passage above, it also strikes me that if Sagan’s alien were to home in on a busy Delhi road during rush hour, all its notions about “patient” life forms would quickly evaporate. Instead, it would witness the sort of anarchy that would make it difficult to understand how life on this planet could ever survive for any length of time. In that sense, Delhi traffic is probably more representative of the general human condition than the “orderly processions” on the roads of other major cities are. And that's before all the waterlogging began.

[Related posts: new ways of looking at the world, Clarke's short stories, Climbing Mount Improbable]