TEDx: towards more intelligent and engaged film literature

My TEDx talk about film writing is online now - video embedded below, and the YouTube link is here. (Note: twenty minutes - with the constant awareness that the clock is ticking away - is scarcely enough time to articulate most of one's thoughts on a very complex subject, but I tried to cover a few basic points about film reviewing and longer-form film writing. When I get the time, I'll put up the text I had written out as preparation for this talk. Meanwhile I will of course continue to write on related subjects through my columns and blog posts, as I have done in the past.)

The banal and the beautiful

In my Yahoo! column for today: some thoughts on great moments in average films (and the perils of nostalgia), via David Thomson's excellent book Have You Seen...?, the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers Swing Time, and Asit Sen's Khamoshi. Here goes.

Jalsaghar on Criterion

One of the most exciting bits of movie-related news I’ve heard lately: Satyajit Ray’s 1958 film Jalsaghar has got the Criterion Collection treatment. The DVD should be out in a month or so and it looks sumptuous – the Extras include Shyam Benegal’s 1984 documentary on Ray, as well as interviews with Andrew Robinson and Mira Nair (more here).

This is the first Ray film on Criterion (correction: the first Satyajit Ray film; they already have Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life on their catalogue). I don’t know what factors lay behind the choice (copyright issues, lack of accessibility to other original prints?) but the company often makes unconventional decisions anyway. One can certainly imagine their consulting team passing by acknowledged classics like the Apu trilogy and Charulata, and opting instead for this relatively low-key but beautiful-looking film which represents an important stage in an artist’s personal development.

Plug alert: Manjula Padmanabhan wrote briefly about a scene from Jalsaghar in her essay for The Popcorn Essayists. Here’s an excerpt:

I can see her even now, in my mind's eye.

She's holding one arm out straight in front of her, palm downwards. The other arm is bent at the elbow, hand at the waist. She appears to be stationary but her feet are in motion, drumming the ground with the rapid heel-to-toe movement that causes her ankle-bells to sound. She goes on and on. And on and on. She remains like this for what seems an eternity. Is it the camera or is it the performer? There is the tiniest of smiles playing on her lips, so tiny that it may just be a trick of memory.

If I'm not wrong, the dancer's name in the movie is “Krishna”.

The reason I mention it is that I thought at the time that the name was so perfect. The character of the dancer was beguiling in just that way, not quite feminine, not quite of this world. She was the visual epitome of a flute heard in the forest, bewitching, haunting, ethereal. Watching that performance in the film was for me the heart of the story. Everything else about the plot faded away and became secondary. I realise, as I think back to my reaction, that for the space of the movie, I became the zamindar. In his place, I would have made the same choices.

And here’s an old post – one of many on this blog – about my unreasonable and self-destructive love for Criterion DVDs.

An evening with Deewaar and Jaane bhi do Yaaro

If you're in Delhi on May 23 (because you're a masochist or too poor to spend the summer in Italy or suchlike), do try to come for this event (click to enlarge):

Vinay Lal and I will be talking about our books as well as the films, and Harper Collins is trying to get a few clips screened too.

Of zahreelay teer, paani ka dhuwaan and other lethal weapons

[Did a version of this piece for Open magazine]

Such books sell only if they are loaded with sex, the young Urdu writer was told when he began working in the thriller genre in the late 1940s. But Asrar Ahmed was having none of it. I’ll find another way out, he said (the pen name he had recently adopted – Ibne Safi – implied pure intentions), and so he did. In a career spanning three decades, he would publish over 240 bestselling novels, becoming a cult figure in his lifetime.

Around half those books make up the hugely popular Jasoosi Dunya series, about the adventures of the imperturbable super-sleuth Colonel Faridi and his happy-go-lucky assistant Captain Hameed. Now the publishing house Blaft – known for its Tamil pulp-fiction anthologies and for a refreshingly unconventional approach to book production – has brought out fine English translations of four of these novels. The titles – numbers 60 to 63 in the original series – are Poisoned Arrow, Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Doctor Dread. The covers, incorporating the original Allahabad-edition artwork, depict gun duels, skulls and crossbones, blonde women who look like they’ve popped out of a homely 1950s American sitcom, and an archer modelled on Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. And the stories within are as fast-paced and exciting as you’d expect. Each of these novels deals with a separate mystery – murder by poisoned arrow, the kidnapping of a young heiress, and so on – though there’s a linking device in the form of two shadowy figures: an enigmatic, monkey-faced man named Finch and the notorious criminal Doctor Dread.

As the stories unfold, we discover the connection between these two men and how their activities intersect with Faridi’s investigations. But first we must get to know our crime-fighting protagonists. Faridi himself is a dauntingly resourceful man, the sort of no-nonsense detective who barges into people’s houses saying “I am a search warrant”, and means it. Put him in a sticky situation and he’s liable to get out by hurling at his enemies a “stun grenade” disguised as a pocket watch. (This device “raises the ambient temperature dramatically within seconds”, making the villains very uncomfortable indeed; but Faridi and Hameed escape its effect because of the special oil massages they’ve been having for the past few days in anticipation of this very moment!)

An efficient, straight-faced hero needs a quirky sidekick. Hameed, a permanent house-guest in Faridi’s large mansion, is dependable enough when the stakes are high, but Lazy and Comfort-Loving are his default modes. “Your only problem is that you squander your intelligence in the pursuit of leisure,” Faridi tells him. However, the reader should have no such complaints; much of the appeal of these stories comes from Hameed’s infectiously madcap sense of humour, which often turns out to be part of a larger plan.

Ibne Safi worked at a time when a small-town writer could be deemed lucky if he had enough carbon paper to make an extra copy of a (handwritten) manuscript before consigning it to the postal system’s caprices – and yet, it wasn’t uncommon for him to write three or four novels in a month; a rich imagination allied to an easy, unselfconscious facility for writing can work wonders. Inevitably, some of the suspense has an assembly-line feel to it – in fact, Faridi doesn’t always bother tying up every loose thread. Since the plots have to move rapidly, coincidences add up. There are twists and red herrings and much banter, some of it a little puerile. (Faridi: “May God grant some sense to the girls.” Hameed: “Oh no, not to all of them! What then would happen to the likes of me?”)

But what makes these books really absorbing are the milieu and the characterisations: our growing familiarity with the people and their setting; the reassuring knowledge (important to the effect of any long-running series of this type) that there will be many more adventures to follow. Among the recurring characters we meet are the overweight buffoon Qasim, a “lady inspector” named Rekha, and – most amusingly – Hameed’s pet billy goat Bhagra Khan, whom he takes for long drives in an air-conditioned Lincoln (and whom he lectures on “progress and morals” each morning).

The world inhabited by these people (and animals) is an intriguing one. Though Ibne Safi was living in Allahabad when he began the series – and in Karachi when he wrote these four books in the late 1950s – the setting is highly westernised in many ways. The action moves between posh nightclubs, harbours, skating rinks and the hillock-and cave-dotted Fun Island; place names include the Arlecchino, the Niagara Hotel, Rexton Street and Gertrude Square; international thugs flit in and out of sight; a young (native) girl is described as wearing blue jeans. Despite the characters’ names and the occasional mention of an Arjun Pura or a Shabistan cafe, this isn’t a recognisable Indian or Pakistani city – it’s more like a self-contained fictional universe, created for the third-world reader seeking escapism. At the same time there are little traces of xenophobia, which is revealing when you consider India’s colonial history and recent independence. Foreign embassies are portrayed as shady places filled with dark secrets, white people don’t usually come off very well, a woman remarks at one point that “the East hasn’t yet fallen so morally low as the West”.

****

A couple of years ago, two other Ibne Safi novels – in the Detective Imran series – were published in English, but the translations were uninspired and joyless, rendered in much-too-literal prose. Pulp-fiction fans owe a debt, then, to the Urdu scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who did the Blaft translations. Faruqi was reluctant when first approached – “It’s difficult, because these books are so steeped in the local idiom and culture,” he said at the Delhi launch – but his work here is excellent. You get a sense of the spirit in which the originals were written (and the effect they must have had on zealous fans), but these books read like well-thought-out transcreations rather than laborious sentence-by-sentence renderings. Faruqi has fun in particular with Hameed’s tomfoolery as well as with Qasim’s unusual speech impediment (which leads him to say sentences like “she talks dribble, er, drivel” in times of stress). And though there are a few typos here and there (“By now, Shaheena had by now [sic] lost both her temper and her restraint”), there’s nothing that can’t be easily amended in a later edition.
 
One can anticipate the condescending view – frequently directed at genre writing of all stripes – that these novels are meant for readers with unrefined tastes. There are many ways of responding to simple-minded divisions between High and Low art, but for the purposes of this review it’s worth pointing out how deeply Ibne Safi’s work has seeped into our popular culture, and the influence it has had on respected writers and artists. There’s a strong symbiotic relationship between these novels and the movies of the subcontinent, for example; when you discover the reasons for Finch’s hatred of Doctor Death, it’s hard not to think of a certain tradition of revenge-seeking in Hindi cinema. Nor is it surprising to learn that screenwriter Javed Akhtar (part of the first generation of readers who grew up with Ibne Safi’s books) had his favourite Jasoosi Dunya adventures in mind when he created iconic movie villains like Mogambo in Mr India.

For the English-reading pulp fan who now has the opportunity to sink into these stories, it’s pleasing to know that these four books represent the mere tip of a giant ice-lolly. Which is why I, for one, was distressed to learn that Faruqi doesn’t intend to do any further translations. If he can’t be persuaded to change his mind, I hope other translators with the necessary skill and enthusiasm step up to do justice to Ibne Safi’s very particular, very colourful world.

How the Modern School man evolved to its present form

Press releases are usually dull, unreadable, Inbox-cluttering things, but every now and again I get one that is so magnificent in its terribleness that it makes me want to pirouette around the room, clutching a cushion to my chest, singing "Quando Quando Quando". Consider merely the following mail subject:

"Book Launch: By Rohan Shroff, 17 Old Boy, Modern School: The Origin of Species"
 

The interest is piqued immediately. Is "17 Old Boy, Modern School" an address ("Old Boy" being the name of the building where the embalmed bodies of this school's alumni are stored) or were they perhaps trying to say "17-year-old boy"? Also, the title of that book - surely he isn't passing off a 150-year-old classic as his own?

These doubts are cleared when one reaches the main body of the release and learns that the book's title isn't actually "The Origin of Species" (the PR guys got confused, and would you blame them?) - it's the much more elegant "The Species of Origin?". That's right, with a question mark at the end.
 

Now I quote:

A YOUNG MIND TRIES TO GRASP THE WORKINGS OF THE UNIVERSE

Challenging few of the aspects of Darwin’s theory, a book named “The Species of Origin?” is written in a very simple language by Rohan Shroff.Rohan Shroff, a student of Modern School, Barakhambha Road, has just given his +2 exams.

The focus of the book is on the creation of the universe and how the modern man evolved to its present form. The author accepts some of the views of the Darwin’s theory called the “The origin of species”, however, refutes some other views and hence has named his own book as “The species of origin” stating that some extraterrestrial species is responsible for the origin of species on the earth. Hence, the readers are requested to not hesitate from questioning the current beliefs or accepting the newly proposed one.

This book was inspired by the movie and book by Brandon Levon named ‘Old World Secrets the Omega Project Codes’.

This will be followed by the launch of Book by Dr.Geeta Shroff titled as "Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy Chronic Spinal Cord Injury Cases Descriptive Statistics”.

I have no intention of reading young Rohan's book (or the embryonic stem cell one, scintillating though that title is) but based on the synopsis I suspect what he's trying to tell us is that Charles Darwin was planted here by extraterrestrials. No doubt his book is full of excellent evidence for this thesis, carefully accumulated over 12 years of tiffin breaks and profound thought.

PoV: the Amitabh cameos

From Chhoti si Baat to Hero Hiralal...my Yahoo! film column today is about the intersection of mainstream and "Middle" cinema, and the use of the big star in a small frame. Here goes.

Notes on Shor in the City

“Mumbai mein ek bhi jagah nahin jahaan bomb ko shanti se uda saken,” (“There isn’t a single place in Mumbai where you can go to peacefully explode a bomb”) goes one of the funniest lines in the excellent new film Shor in the City. The context is that three small-time lawbreakers have a bomb in their possession (it was in a bag they stole from a train) and want to blow it up in an isolated setting, just for fun. But where and how? This city doesn’t encourage solitude and privacy at the best of times, but the film is set during the chaotic ten days of Ganesh Chaturthi. Roads are jammed, people dance wildly along the streets. “So much shor – how is a man even supposed to hear himself think?” a character wonders aloud.

It’s a question that will recur through the story, but some of the tensest scenes in Shor in the City hinge on silences. Fooling around with an AK-56 and other weapons recovered from the bag, the excitable Mandook (wonderfully played by Pitobash Tripathy) “fires” the unloaded guns at his nervous friends and then places a revolver to his own temple; time freezes as we wait, breathlessly, for a blast that will never come. (When a blast does come in a later scene, the build-up is stretched out, so that the long, silent wait is nerve-wracking, while the actual explosion feels almost like deliverance.)

Much of the pleasure of watching this film is to see the skilful weaving together of its three main stories, all of which are about people struggling to earn a living by fair means or foul – or to just keep their heads above water, while making whatever compromises are necessary. In the first, Tilak (Tusshar Kapoor), the most grounded of the three friends, tries to maintain some personal integrity even while running a pirated-books business. (He even gets a whole set of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist – what else? – reprinted because a few pages are missing, something that wouldn’t have troubled the conscience of most pirates.) In the second story, a foreign-returned entrepreneur named Abhay (Sendhil Ramamurthy) is terrorised by extortionist goons as he tries to run a small (legitimate) business. And in the third, a young batsman looking desperately for a break must organise ten lakh rupees with which to bribe a selector.

The constant shor in the background of these people’s lives is juxtaposed with patches of quiet, saner moments, such as Tilak’s attempt at self-education by haltingly reading the Coelho (which also gives him something to talk about with his new wife); or the cricketer Sawan’s relationship with a girl who is frustrated by his lack of initiative but who also clearly loves him. The characters’ paths intersect at times (and the detail of weapons changing hands is a little reminiscent of Babel), but there is no strained attempt to connect the threads; each story is taut and well-executed on its own terms. This script is so confident and focused that it doesn’t even feel the need to dwell on who the bag originally belonged to. (Terrorists planning an attack? Perhaps there’s another major story there, but so what? The ones on offer are interesting enough.)

What all this adds up to is a fine microcosm of a metropolis and its residents. There are many telling contrasts – between the guy who spends a month’s salary on a ridiculously fancy phone (and keeps the plastic cover on for weeks) and the man who rides a scooter now but assures his wife that they’ll graduate to “a big car – a Nano” soon. Even the most despicable characters have a moment where they look almost pathetic and helpless as they ask, “Don’t we have a right to earn our living too?”

I particularly liked the way the film uses the Ganesh Chaturthi motif. In the hands of directors Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru, this most familiar and mainstream of festivals – taking place in a contemporary setting – becomes a primitive, pagan thing. Watching the frenzied revelry and the continual sense of danger (some of the devotees being thugs and criminals of various stripes) is a reminder that many festivals in their origin were pretexts for people to let out the accumulated repressions of the year (and that Hindi cinema has long associated festivals like Holi with a scale of deviant behaviour that ranges from “harmless” eve-teasing to gang-rape).

Of course, the festive shor can facilitate some positive developments as well. It allows a likeable character, wounded during a heist, to simply walk away while policemen and bank managers bow piously before a giant Ganesha statue. It creates a smokescreen that allows Abhay to get revenge on his tormentors without drawing much attention. But by the end there’s little doubt that “visarjan”, apart from being the elephant-god's final immersion in the water, can also indicate a man hurling a revolver into the same sea after committing a triple-murder with it. As they say, it’s a city of unlimited possibilities.