Screen savers - 10 trailblazers of the new cinema

[Doing the blog-as-storehouse thing again. This is an extended version of my piece on “young experimenters of the new Hindi cinema” for the 5th anniversary issue of Vogue India – short, snappy profiles of 10 people across categories]

The Actor: Nawazudin Siddiqui

At the time of writing this, Nawazuddin Siddiqui has his cell-phone numbers on his official website, much like a struggling actor piecing together a portfolio – it belies the fact that this grounded, soft-spoken man is becoming one of our most celebrated performers. As Khan in Kahaani – the intelligence bureau officer willing to be amoral in pursuit of a greater good – he was a stick of dynamite, smouldering and exploding in turn. As the sensitive Faizal, destined for a life of crime, he brought kinetic energy to Gangs of Wasseypur (in addition to looking as sensual as the young James Dean in the first part of the film).

For a long time, recognition eluded Nawaz because he wasn’t “hero material”. “Lamba hona chahiye, gora-chitta hona chahiye, aur woh toh main nahin bann sakta. (I can't become tall and fair-skinned.) When you send in a portfolio photo to someone, you can do a bit of colour correcting, but when you are physically present in front of the agent they reject you straight away.” But perseverance has paid off (“luck always plays a part, but it was also important that I didn’t let myself get depressed or negative”) and he isn’t interested in being a “star” anyway. An actor should play completely different roles, he says – there should be no residue of the body language and gestures he used for his last character. “That’s what makes the process exciting to me. When I see big stars who repeat mannerisms in role after role, I wonder how they never get bored.”

His own enthusiasm is very visible when he discusses the intricacies of Method acting (“it gets mocked in India because we don’t have a tradition of layered characters in our cinema”) or reels off the colourful titles (Miss Lovely, Haraamkhor, Great Indian Circus) of the many films he has due for release. Though he is swamped with projects, don’t expect this chameleon-like performer to repeat himself anytime soon.


The Casting Director: Nandini Shrikent

Before she was offered the job of casting director on Lakshya, Nandini Shrikent had learnt set decoration and worked briefly as an assistant director. “I loved being on sets, but couldn’t handle it physically.” Her current work has its own rewards. She gets to read scripts early, discusses them at length, and sees diverse interpretations of a scene at auditions. “Some actors come in complete character – costume, mood, vibe in place.” Her scouting methods include speaking to talent agents, monitoring an ever-growing database and watching lots of theatre: “It’s so much fun to spot an exciting new actor and imagine the roles he might be suited to.”

Since many “big” movies are launched expressly for stars, Shrikent usually finds it more challenging to work on lower-budget or independent films. “A big-bonanza film can work against you because there can be politics involved – different camps and cliques, making it difficult to cast a particular person.” But there are exceptions. “One of my most fun assignments was for Aamir Khan’s Talaash, because the script had so many finely etched characters.”

What is tough – and saddening – is being inundated by calls from struggling actors. “Thousands of people arrive in Mumbai with beaten-up attaché cases and a heart full of dreams, but it isn’t possible to engage with everyone.” However, this has made her more sensitive to day players who are vulnerable to being exploited. “It’s important to ensure that they are paid promptly and fairly.” And it’s hugely satisfying for her when any role has been cast well – even if the character is a deliveryman who appears for just a few seconds. “So much hinges on intuition – you only know if something has worked when you see the final film.”
 
The Music Director: Sneha Khanwalkar

Listen to Sneha Khanwalkar’s compositions and one imagines she has been an inveterate traveller all her life. Her incredibly varied scores – drawing on musical idioms from around the country – have defined the mood of such films as Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Gangs of Wasseypur (which includes the 1940s-style folk ballad “Ik Bagal”, the hippie-reggae tune “I am a Hunter” and much else besides). Her MTV show Sound Trippin also involves travelling to understand indigenous forms of music. It’s surprising then to learn that until the age of 21, Sneha was very much “the girl from a middle-class family, who never got to go out by herself”. Her mother’s relatives taught classical music in Indore, but her self-education began when she “became cocky” and set out to discover the world and its melodies.

Since then, with the encouragement of such directors as Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap, she has connected with local musicians and employed singers who have no link with the Mumbai film industry – people who have, indeed, never even been to a city. “The relationship between people and their music changes with each state,” she observes. There have been priceless encounters such as the one with the septuagenarian Des Raj Lachkani, who sang “Jugni” for OLLO. “His voice is incredible – it’s like he has an equaliser in his vocal box – but I was concerned that he would have trouble singing the whole song at one go. Thankfully, he nailed it at the actual recording”. With innovators like Sneha at the helm, such voices will continue to reach larger audiences and few will accuse Hindi-film music of being one-dimensional, insular or unimaginative.

 
The Wild Card: Qaushiq Mukherjee (Q)

How do you define “alternative” or counter-culture in a country like India? It’s difficult, admits Qaushiq Mukherjee, a.k.a. Q. “The western form of counter-culture works because life is much more homogeneous there. Here, cultural shifts and clashes are entirely natural.” For him, therefore, going against the grain means experimenting with form rather than content – as he did with the Radha-Krishna relationship in Love in India. “The strength of the story lies in the telling. I am trying to find my own language.”

Having worked on documentaries for years, he set out to make a feature film that would shock. The controversial Gandu – still officially unreleased in India – drew attention for its explicit sexuality (much of which features Q’s real-life girlfriend Rii), but there’s more to it than that: it’s a full-blown assault on the senses, mashing up and regurgitating conventional narrative language, forcing you to rethink everything you knew about “non-mainstream” cinema. The film has been widely watched on the internet and Q would love to show it “as it should be seen, inside a theatre. However, a stupid relic of a law from the colonial past is haunting the system, and making it impossible to distribute in India, while we are showing the film around the world”.

It’s no surprise that Q’s influences include the English street artist Banksy, the legendary Japanese cartoonist Osamu Tezuka and rap-rave musicians Die Antwoord – all known for subverting norms in their fields. Ask if regular Hindi cinema appeals to his sensibilities and he replies with a terse “No”. Do his family members refer to his film by its title? “Hesitantly.”

The Documentary Maker: Faiza Ahmed Khan

In under an hour, Faiza Ahmed Khan’s documentary Supermen of Malegaon captures a micro-universe about small-town filmmakers trying to make a Superman film on a tiny budget – with very basic computer technology and a bashful and emaciated leading man. The result is a story about people fighting the odds (the plural “supermen” in the title of Khan’s film refers to director Nasir Shaikh and his team), following their love for pure filmmaking and commenting on their daily hardships: poverty and pollution among them. (Superman has to fly upwards because the cell-phone reception in Malegaon is bad; the villain is obsessed with dirt and filth.)

Khan has always been fascinated by Iranian cinema, “in which the line between fiction and fact is blurry. That’s the space I wanted to be in”. Documentaries are not widely seen because a formal distribution set-up is lacking, but with companies like Magic Lantern Foundation and PVR providing new screening initiatives, she is optimistic that the medium will have a mainstream future. Her next film is set in Golibar, a Bombay slum that is being demolished by a builder in connivance with the government and the police. “The country is currently going through the Great Indian Clearance Sale, with the government out to sell everything they can. Someone has to talk about these things.”

The Scriptwriter: Juhi Chaturvedi

Writing always played a role in Juhi Chaturvedi’s life, even if it took the form of long, expressive emails sent to friends. “I’m from Lucknow, where everyone is steeped in the storytelling culture,” she points out. Working in advertising – including the Titan series with Aamir Khan – she learnt how to tell stories in 30 seconds, and then got a chance to pen the dialogues for Shoojit Sircar’s still-unreleased film Shoebite. Then came Vicky Donor, which became one of the year’s sleeper hits. The idea for a film about a sperm donor “just happened”, but more important was the execution: Chaturvedi and Sircar took a premise that was a magnet for crude, fratboy humour and fashioned from it a charming, life-affirming story, as well as a commentary on Delhi’s sub-cultures. “The subject is such a sensitive one, I was very conscious of not making it cheap,” she says, “The process of sperm donation instantly evokes certain imagery, but we didn’t go there at all.” Even the character of Dr Chaddha – who might in other hands have become a leering old man – is a likably obsessive professional who sees all people as “sperrrm” types.

Chaturvedi has no plans to give up her advertising career, but is currently working on another screenplay. “I normally write at night, and plan to concentrate on one movie at a time.” Dr Chaddha would call her a “busy sperrrm”.

The Film Editor: Namrata Rao

Cliché has it that the editor’s job is thankless: it is invisible, most viewers don’t even understand it, and there is always danger of conflict with directors or actors who don’t want a shot to be cut. But Namrata Rao enjoys working with opinionated people who have differing views. “My job is to add value to the director’s vision – to be a facilitator and a sort of psychologist, and to show that I’m as concerned about his baby as he is. For Shanghai, Dibakar [Banerjee] was clear that the film should have a closed, claustrophobic feel to it, with very few establishing shots; there are many scenes where you have the characters shot in close-up or medium-shot at most, so it had to be put together very tightly.”

When Rao discusses a film, her language is that of a good critic; clearly she spends time thinking about the characters (and how the viewer should relate to them), the setup and shot composition. It helps to be involved with a project from the very beginning, she says, but she came in late on Kahaani and that was useful too – she wasn’t emotionally invested in the making of the film and could look at the footage with a more detached eye. Thus, a beautifully shot crowd sequence, with the sun rising over a river, was dropped because “it held up the narrative – and this was a suspense film where the viewer mustn’t get a breather, which would give them time to think about all the plot possibilities”. The biggest-budget project she has worked on is the soon-to-be-released Yash Raj Films film. Compared to some of her earlier assignments, this is a more conventional film in the way it is shot, with an emphasis on dialogue and held shots – it doesn’t require frenetic editing. But it’s good to have different challenges, she says: “I can’t cut breathlessly all the time.”

For now, Rao’s acting aspirations – she did theatre in Delhi – are on the backburner. However, she did a short, very effective part in LSD as a loudmouth salesgirl – and one is glad that she didn’t edit herself out!


The Cinematographer: Nikos Andritsakis

Having directed six short films, Nikos Andritsakis became interested in cinematography during his time at the London Film School. “I was trying to understand how light and composition affect storytelling.” A Mumbai trip – to shoot a bike commercial – and a meeting with director Dibakar Banerjee led to the Love, Sex and Dhokha and Shanghai assignments. The challenge in the former, shot through CCTVs and handheld cameras, was “to simulate the un-staged randomness of real life – which is difficult because a filmmaker’s eye is always aware of technique even when it is trying not to be”. But the claustrophobic, noirish look of Shanghai was another matter. When he first came to Mumbai, Nikos says, he was impressed by the colourful night-time atmosphere in the streets. “This film was an opportunity to look back at my virgin, romanticised impressions and mould them into a cynical and threatening shape that would serve this story.”

With improved technology, he admits that today’s lensmen have much greater control over their images. “But this control has not always made films look better – sometimes roughness is part of the beauty of art.” He hopes to work on more Indian films because “there is a rapid transformation going on – it’s an exciting space”.

The Director: Anusha Rizvi

When Peepli Live was released, writer-director Anusha Rizvi was cagey about the label “Comedy” because she felt that would mislead audiences. But her film about farmer suicides and media excesses is very much a dark satire on the human condition – it has you chuckling and feeling squeamish at the same time. And it reflects a very particular sensibility. As Rizvi rhetorically asks, “How else do we deal with everything that’s going wrong around us? We have a headless government, and look at the crises in Chhatisgarh, in the north-east; at times it feels similar to the dying days of the Mughal Empire, when everything was getting decentralised. There are so many issues that one becomes numb to them.”

How do filmmakers living and working in the metropolises go about chronicling the many Indias hidden from their view? Rizvi believes it is possible, but you need a supportive and conscientious production team. Shooting in a village, she was adamant that her crew shouldn’t become as intrusive as the journalists depicted in the story. “We didn’t want to interrupt the villagers’ daily lives or usurp their space,” she says, recalling an incident where she stopped a light boy from chopping off a tree’s branch to set up his equipment.

Rizvi – who studied history and worked in journalism before entering the film world – is now working on Afeem, based on Amitav Ghosh’s sprawling historical novel about opium trade, Sea of Poppies. This may appear a very different sort of project, but as she points out, like Peepli Live it is a story about migration and its psychological and social effects. Ultimately, the human spirit is her subject.

The Mentor: Anurag Kashyap

One of our edgiest filmmakers, Anurag Kashyap overcame a long dark night-time of the soul – when his film Paanch was held up by the censors – and emerged from it stronger, wiser and ready to provide guidance to other writer-directors. Remarkably, he has settled into this avuncular role while losing none of his boyish enthusiasm for cinema. “I take a lot of time deciding who to encourage,” he says, “People like Vikramaditya [Motwane] and Rajkumar [Gupta] had worked with me for a long time. With others whom I haven’t had a long association with, I still need time to see their short films and scripts. And I prefer working with people who don’t know how to flatter you – people who haven’t yet learnt the industry tricks.” When he produces a film, he makes it clear he won’t step in for a quick-fix job. “I also give them less money than they need, to see if they have the courage to get it done on that budget, without stars etc.”

One of his protégés, Vasan Bala, showed exactly that initiative. “I initially rejected his script for Peddlers,” Kashyap admits, “but he went out and made the film anyway, and I was happy to be proven wrong.” Other acclaimed films to have received his backing include Motane’s Udaan and Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan – offbeat projects, but he believes the future lies in the coexistence of independent films with mainstream Bollywood. “There is room for both, and I will encourage both. Bollywood is very important and mustn’t go away – we need our songs and dances and our uniqueness – but the mainstream has to be redefined.”

“Let filmmakers beware of films”

Just quoting something from a cherished book, This is Orson Welles, a thoroughly engrossing series of conversations between Welles and the director-critic Peter Bogdanovich. This section begins with Bogdanovich asking Welles why he sees so few films.

Welles: Good ones in particular. I stay away from most of them out of sheer self-protection, to cherish what’s left of my own innocence...You smile. I’m being serious. Innocence is really quite a serious concern. The better another man’s film might be, the more I stand to lose by seeing it [...]

My own special case is that, to function happily, I like to feel a little like Columbus: in every scene I want to discover America. And I don’t want to hear about those goddamn Vikings. Each time I set foot on a movie set, I like to plant a flag. The more I know about the intrepid discoverers who’ve come before me, the more my little flag begins to look like the one on the golf course which you take out of a hole so you can sink a putt. I don’t pretend that my own delicate feelings in this matter should be taken as dogma, but I will say this: let filmmakers beware of films. They really are bad, you know, for the eyes. Filmmakers spend too much of their lives in projection rooms. They should come out more often into the sunshine. Other men’s films are a poor source of vitamins… You follow me?

Bogdanovich: I think I agree.

Welles: Other men’s films are full of good things which really ought to be invented all over again. Again and again. Invented – not repeated. The good things should be found – found – in that precious spirit of the first time out, and images discovered – not referred to.

Bogdanovich: Well, it’s a big problem for anybody starting now...

Welles: Everything’s been done, you mean? No, that’s not the problem. The trouble is that everything’s been seen. Directors see too many movies. Sure, everything’s been done, but it’s much healthier not to know about it. Hell, everything had all been done when I started...

---------------

“When I started” – that would be way back in 1940-41; even the boy wonder who made a universe-altering film like Citizen Kane knew that he was standing on the shoulders of giants. (In a video introduction to D W Griffith’s Intolerance – a film that was being prepared in the year Welles was born – he says: “Much too much literature has been written about me, and they give me credit for innovations that I'm not responsible for...but the film you're going to watch now deserves all the credit possible...there's almost nothing in the entire vocabulary of cinema that you won't find in it.”)

I also like the resigned, wise way in which Bogdanovich says “it’s a big problem for anyone starting now”, because the conversation quoted above took place in the late 1960s. It turns out that the great conundrum of being creatively influenced without being derivative did not spring into existence in just the past few years (or with the advent of Quentin Tarantino). That’s something worth remembering each time we hear about contemporary directors having huge DVD collections and drawing much too liberally from the thousands of movies they have watched. It isn't necessarily a creativity-wrecker, but they should be careful about those eyes...

Blonde on blonde: a new biography of the many Marilyn Monroes

[Did a shorter version of this review for The Sunday Guardian]

“She looks both triumphant and afraid,” writes Lois Banner, describing a nude photograph that a young model named Norma Jeane posed for in 1949, “With one arm extended and a hand in her hair, she looks as though she might be climbing up a wall – to achieve an exciting future or to escape a threat.” The photo – “A New Wrinkle” – is included in Banner’s Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox and her description is spot on: framed against a lush red velvet curtain that seems like it might swallow her up, Norma Jeane – the future Marilyn Monroe – could be from one of those classical paintings of rape where the subject is presented (invariably by a male painter) as both seductress and quarry. But of course, Banner’s words also suggest Monroe’s tempestuous push-pull relationship with her own myth – with the stardom that made her universally desired as well as conflicted and depressed.

“A New Wrinkle” was an early version of Marilyn the ethereal pin-up girl (the picture – which she posed for because she needed money – caused a stir when a conservative, early-1950s Hollywood learnt of its existence), but Banner’s grounded approach is more accurately reflected in the first two images included in the book, which are atypical for a Monroe biography. One is a drawing of witches and other grotesque figures that Marilyn said she saw in recurring nightmares; the other is an autopsy sketch, which coldly depicts the scar from a surgery to remove endometriosis, a gynaecological condition that afflicted her for much of her life. Bald, flat-chested, anonymous, mannequin-like, the figure in the autopsy drawing is a morbid reminder that the Marilyn Monroe persona was often a blank slate, a repository for other people’s fantasies – and that the woman behind it has remained an enigma for generations of fans, critics and biographers.

“I was drawn to writing about Marilyn because no one like me – an academic scholar, feminist biographer and historian of gender – had studied her,” Banner explains, admitting that she had once dismissed Marilyn as a sex object for men but later felt impelled to re-evaluate her, and to wonder if a proto-feminist lay beneath the dumb-blonde image. Her book emphasises the many contradictions in the life of a girl who had low self-esteem and a speech impediment, but who succeeded in “manufacturing” a confident alter ego. (In high school, Norma Jeane described herself as “the mmm girl” – a play of words that encompassed both her stuttering over the letter M and the effect her physicality had on the boys in her class.) It is a portrait of the sex symbol posing for the famous subway-grate photograph with her skirt billowing up, but also the story of the woman who, later that same evening, had a violent argument with her husband Joe DiMaggio, who was incensed by the sight of “several hundred men looking at her crotch”.

Among other paradoxes, Banner notes that while Marilyn was a “goddess” on the outside, universally desired for her body, on the inside she had a hormonal disorder that caused extreme menstrual pain and may also have made it difficult for her to have a child. Though a symbol for unbridled female sexuality, she may have learnt how to perform an exaggerated version of femininity by watching a man (the female impersonator Ray Bourbon). She often played po-faced characters, the butts of other people’s jokes, but was known to have a wry sense of humour in real life (someone as wacky as Jerry Lewis was impressed by her knack for absurdist comedy, and even Groucho Marx, with whom she worked in a lesser film titled Love Happy, described her as a combination of Mae West and Little Bo-Peep). Marilyn modeled herself on earlier movie temptresses such as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich, but also strove to haul herself out of her ditzy image by turning to high literature (from Thomas Wolfe to Dostoevsky and Balzac), performing Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy from Ulysses on stage, and stating a desire to play Lady Macbeth and Grushenka in The Brothers Karazmov; and in the process she sometimes resorted to the intellectual poseur’s strategy of reading selectively rather than reading well. (“When she browsed the shelves in Pickwick’s bookstore, she’d find an interesting paragraph in a book, memorise it and then go on to find another book.”)

It’s a fascinating story, with enough material to fill dozens of books – as indeed it has over the decades. The Passion and the Paradox has all the essential biographical information, from a childhood that was spent being shunted around foster homes (Banner gives more space to Marilyn’s early life and to the personalities of the many women who raised her than most previous biographers have done) to the final years: the bouts of depression, the overdependence on painkillers, the liaisons with the Kennedy brothers and the build-up to her mysterious death. But the “psychological” Marilyn is here too. Banner analyses her actions and choices and how they intersected with the larger world around her. In an effective structural decision, she includes a ruminative 30-page midsection titled “The Meaning of Marilyn”, which temporarily breaks the narrative as well as the fourth wall between author and reader.

In so doing, she situates the Monroe persona in the context of its time – “the ultimate blonde in a nation both fascinated by sexuality and uneasy about it, involved in both an ongoing sexual revolution and a conservative reaction against it”. (As one of Marilyn’s husbands, the playwright Arthur Miller, once wrote, America at the time “was still a virgin, still denying her illicit dreams.”) She makes special note of the function that Marilyn’s star-making roles may have served in a diffident, post-WWII era – the fact that she was regularly paired opposite older men or unremarkable Plain Joes may have been a subliminal ego-booster for the “regular” American guy. And she presents a nuanced view of the apparently all-American girl who could – perhaps due to her own troubled childhood – relate to marginalised people: reading Leftist literature during a time of the Communist witch-hunts; identifying with the black hero of Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson.

This is a compendious biography – reflective, scrupulously researched, moderately well written – though it isn’t aimed at the reader who is principally interested in Marilyn’s films. I get the impression Banner isn’t much of a cineaste: there is a formalness in her descriptions of even major movies (The Asphalt Jungle “fits into the genre of film noir, a postwar category generated by Cold War fears and influenced by German Expressionism that highlights social corruption and often features an evil, seductive vamp”). But otherwise, her distinct voice is a reminder that good analytical biographies can tell us much about the personal concerns and biases of the writers. “I was intrigued by similarities between my childhood and hers,” she writes; she was born a little over a decade after Marilyn, grew up in a geographically and culturally similar milieu, won beauty contests as a young girl and (according to her) had the opportunity to aim for movie stardom, but chose a different career path. Consequently, there is the hint of a doppelganger perspective (or at least a “what if” perspective) here – one that offers a thoughtful counterpoint to some of the earlier biographies and theses.

For example: in a capsule review I recently read of Some Like it Hot, David Thomson – an intelligent, sensitive critic – proposes that Marilyn was naive, unaware of how her screen persona was being used by director Billy Wilder; but this book presents evidence to suggest that Marilyn didn’t like the fact that her character Sugar Kane was a foil for the two male characters in the story and that she wanted Sugar to have a more distinct personality. (Years earlier, while shooting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she had insisted that her character speak the line “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” By the time Some Like it Hot was made, she definitely had her hackles up when asked to play a stereotype.) And as Banner herself notes, because Marilyn’s first husband Jim Dougherty said she was a virgin when they married, some male biographers dismissed her claim of being sexually abused as a child. This is a non-sequitur – sexual abuse doesn’t necessarily entail penetration – but it tells us something about the simplistic way in which a certain kind of man may view sexual assault or women’s “purity”.

I had a minor problem with the occasional bombast of Banner’s claims. Her Prologue is characterised by sentences like “Significant among my discoveries about Marilyn...”, “Revealing and analysing her multiple personas is a major contribution of mine...” – and later, “I will excavate the layers that lie underneath [her childhood], probing the texts and counter-texts...” Stretched beyond a point, this is tiresomely self-aggrandising language, and these claims – suggesting grand epiphanies and solutions – turn out to be contrary to the spirit of the book itself. For instance, Banner makes much of the question “Was Marilyn a feminist?” and then addresses it in a perfunctory, open-ended way in her Afterword. There is nothing wrong with this open-endedness – in fact, it affirms the author’s honesty, her willingness to acknowledge that a complex life cannot be easily explained – but why make the question sound so central in the first place? Especially when this book’s real strength lies in the attentive, well-rounded way in which it raises questions about Marilyn’s life and psyche, examining them from various angles but also permitting them to hang in the air if necessary – much like the girl in that photo, frozen on the cusp of becoming one of the great icons, and sacrificial lambs, of a cultural zeitgeist.

[An old post about MM is here]

Candle-lit memories: time and light in Shyam Benegal's Trikaal

“If the most important subjects of film are light and time,” wrote Peter von Bagh in this excellent essay about one of my favourite movies, “I can’t think of a more poignant work than A Canterbury Tale.” I was reminded of these words while watching Shyam Benegal’s 1985 film Trikaal, especially its first half-hour. Time and light can be said to be central motifs of Benegal’s film too (though perhaps not in the exact sense as von Bagh meant in that essay). One of its main themes is the continuing hold of the past on the present, even as an old and tradition-bound world makes way for a newer, brasher one: set in the Goa of 1960, on the verge of being “liberated” from the Portuguese, it is the story of a family trapped between a grand history and an uncertain future. And at a formal level, its most striking quality – one that consistently enhances the narrative – is Ashok Mehta’s camerawork and use of lighting, among the best I’ve seen in a Hindi movie. (Even on the standard-issue DVD I watched, this is a splendid-looking film; I can imagine how much more satisfying it would be in a restored Cinemas of India print.)

Mehta, who died just a few months ago, was a highly respected cinematographer, noted for his work on Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Girish Karnad’s Utsav and Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane (the last had a magnificently show-offish nightmare sequence shot in black-and-white and featuring three generations of the Kendal-Kapoor family). In Trikaal he composed some stunning interior shots using candlelight, which plays a big part in crafting the film’s dominant mood: that of an intimate chamber-drama in which groups of people play out their mini-tragedies and mini-comedies in an enclosed, isolated setting. The lighting brings a distinct character to an ancient house full of secrets, and creates a world that seems older than it actually is (offhand I can’t recall if there is a single scene in this film that even acknowledges the existence of electric lights).

In fact, the assuredness of Mehta’s camerawork – and its importance to the film – is obvious right from the opening sequence, in which we see a man journeying (almost literally) into the past. The middle-aged Ruiz Pereira (Naseeruddin Shah in a small sutradhaar role) is revisiting his Goan village Lotli after 24 years, and the taxi – his time machine, so to speak – passes vistas that are new to him, including bland cement buildings and roads built for the recent Commonwealth conference. Music, photography, acting and writing combine to very good effect in this fine establishing sequence. As the cab moves from open, sun-lit roads to canopy-shaded ones, shadows play across Ruiz’s face and long tracking shots from inside the car give us his dreamy-eyed view of his “watan”. (Shah’s subtle performance in this short role allows us to see the years falling away from Ruiz’s face; as the cab draws into Lotli he looks rapt and boyish.) Vanraj Bhatia’s lilting score is a reminder that the Benegal-Bhatia artistic collaboration is among the most underappreciated in our cinema. And there is Shama Zaidi’s dialogue. “Mera gaon jaise Ming daur ka khubsoorat phooldaan hai,” Ruiz muses, “Uska itihaas, uspe naksh kahaani samajh mein na aaye toh keval ek sundar naazuk guldaan hi lagega. Usski poori sanskriti ahista ahista mitt jaayegi. Beetay dinon ki yaad ki tarah.” (“My village is like a Ming dynasty bouquet. If you don’t understand its history, the story inscribed on it, it will only look like a beautiful, delicate cluster of flowers. The culture associated with it will gradually fade away, like old memories.”)

Leaving behind the markers of a modernising world, Ruiz instructs the driver to take the old, rough road and soon arrives at a haveli now fallen to ruin. Well-travelled, clearly a man of the world, having lived in Bombay and worked in the Merchant Navy, he is nonetheless nostalgic about the world of his youth, and much of that youth was spent around this house, which belonged to the Souza-Soares clan. As he enters the darkened hallway, the light around him changes, becoming lush and warm, and the film elegantly glides into the old days.

In a long, amusing sequence we are introduced to the events and people of 24 years earlier (including Ruiz’s own younger self). We learn that the family patriarch Erasmo has just died and that his widow Dona Maria (Leela Naidu) refuses to face reality, continuing to listen to loud music in her room while her family and acquaintances bustle about in confusion. Dona Maria’s shrill daughter Sylvia (Anita Kanwar) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she realises that her daughter Anna’s engagement might fall through because of the long mourning period. And watching quietly from the sidelines is Melagrania (Neena Gupta in one of her best roles), the illegitimate child of the dead man, now working as a maid for Dona Maria.

Soon after the funeral, the callow, blandly beautiful Anna (Sushma Prakash) begins a clandestine relationship with a distant cousin of the family, a fugitive named Leon (Dalip Tahil), who is hiding in the cellar. If Anna is the face of the future, her grandmother has a tendency to cling obsessively to the past (while not completely making her peace with it: there is a bizarre subplot in which the old woman is confronted by ghosts from her family’s closets, victims of a tortured colonial history). But the divide between old and new ways of life also manifests itself in class tensions. Though on cordial terms with the family, young Ruiz and his uncle – the local doctor – are clearly outsiders; Ruiz is attracted to Anna, but there is no question of him being allowed to ask for her hand. (Melagrania, a sort of “half-breed” between the upper class and the servant class, is much more accessible to him.) I thought Ruiz’s relationship to the family was comparable to that of Eugene Morgan in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons – a man who is an outsider in terms of perceived status but who is destined to cope more efficiently with the coming modern world than this family can.

Trikaal doesn’t quite live up to the assuredness of its opening 20 minutes. There is a hurried, incomplete feel to it, as if a couple of key scenes were accidentally left on the cutting table; there are more subplots than the film’s narrative can accommodate, we don’t get enough time with all the characters, and perhaps because of this some of the acting seems uneven or not fully realised. It isn’t as tightly constructed an ensemble movie as Party, which was directed by Benegal’s friend and former cameraman Govind Nihalani a year earlier. But there are things to recommend it, even apart from its visual quality. The scenes involving Dona Maria’s ambivalent relationship with Melagrania are particularly effective (Benegal has always been a sensitive director of women) and there are many interesting people in the large cast, including the under-used Ila Arun, a melancholy-looking youngster named Maqsood Ali (who would go on to singing fame as Lucky Ali a decade or so later), Jayant Kripalani as the perpetually drunk suitor of another Souza-Soares girl, and the rugged Nikhil Bhagat (whose only other major role was in Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray) as the young Ruiz. Remo Fernandes and Alisha Chennai show up too as a couple of local musicians.

Though the film’s ending was a little abrupt for my liking, I liked how the bookending scenes featuring the older Ruiz were used – how they have the effect of summarily cutting the past off from the present. There is something poignant about the fact that he never encounters an older version of any major figure from the past (which is something one might have expected in a narrative like this). He makes enquiries, gets token information about what happened to this or that person, but he doesn’t actually meet anyone again – there is no closure in that sense. And this allows the viewer to leave with the feeling that the spirits of all those people are still bickering and mourning and making toasts and partying in that creaky old house. In the lovely, ghostly light of Ashok Mehta’s thick candles.

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P.S. heavily made up in the role of Dona Maria’s mousy son-in-law Lucio is a difficult-to-recognise K K Raina – shuffling about in a hunched posture, with false teeth that have an embarrassing tendency to pop out during times of stress. I spent half my viewing of the film wondering which classical movie monster Lucio reminded me of – Nosferatu? No, not quite – and then at last I had it: Fredric March as Mr Hyde in the 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

(I’m not being facetious: it isn’t simply a matter of physical resemblance but of a certain nervous ferocity in both performances. No intention of offending people - or monsters - with false teeth or overbites, or taking anything away from the conceptualisation of the Lucio character, which I thought was quite effective.)

The true-crime chronicles

[From my Forbes Life column: some favourite literary treatments – non-fictional and fictional – of true crime]

“Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it,” the 19th century historian Henry Thomas Buckle observed, and indeed if you cast a quick eye over the daily news it's easy to see the many links between a societal framework and the crimes that occur in it. Thus, a series of child-murders takes place in a suburb of Delhi, and shortly afterwards it is revealed that one reason the killers got away for as long as they did was the mutual antipathy between the poor people of the area (whose children were mainly the victims) and the local police; the slum-dwellers, living on disputed land, were wary about going to the authorities to register missing-person reports, and when they did they weren't taken seriously, or were hounded.

Such fissures and barriers to communication exist in any society, and many fine books about real-life crime have dwelt on them. Among my favourites is Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a reconstruction of a famous 1860 killing in an English country house. A three-year-old boy – the youngest son of the large Kent family – was found murdered, his little body stuffed into an outdoor “privy” (toilet); the killer was almost certainly one of the 12 people staying in Road Hill House - three servants and nine family members, including a woman who had once belonged to the servant class but had, controversially, become the second wife of the patriarch.

Fascinating though the case is in itself (especially for anyone who enjoys a good locked-room mystery), the power of Summerscale’s book lies in its detailing of a society and the subtle changes it was undergoing. On the one hand, the milieu was a conservative one: the violation of a “respectable” family’s privacy (necessitated by the investigation conducted by the first generation of Scotland Yard detectives) was seen as a crime in its own right; a woman’s discarded night-shift, which may have been important evidence, remained unmentioned by the police because they believed the blood stains on it were menstrual and they didn’t want to have to deal with the garment. But at the same time this was a world that enjoyed peeping into others’ private lives. Little wonder that tabloid journalism was in its infancy, holding up a mirror to the hidden prurience of this society.

A century after the Road Hill murder, that prurience was echoed in a different setting. Gyan Prakash’s marvellous book Mumbai Fables includes (among other stories from Bombay’s past) an account of the 1959 Nanavati case, when a cuckolded husband shot his wife’s lover dead. The story, as related by Prakash in his chapter “The Tabloid and the City”, began on an almost genteel note – Commander Nanavati walks into the office of the Deputy Commissioner, confesses to the murder and is offered a cup of tea – but soon it acquired a more unsavoury tinge. Almost single-handedly responsible for turning the case into a long-running soap opera was the tabloid Blitz, helmed by the dashing Russi Karanjia. “The Nanavati case’s life as a media event is a quintessentially modern story of the entanglement of the city, mass culture and law in a single circuit,” observes Prakash.

A striking detail in his account involves the voyeuristic participation of “ordinary” people: the city’s teenagers, for instance, put new words to the tune of a popular song – “You’re not going to hang, Nanavati/You don’t have to cry.” Similar ghoulishness has pervaded other cases of high-profile crime. After the unmasking of the killer/grave-robber Ed Gein in 1957, local kids chanted variations on Christmas carols (“Deck the halls/with limbs of Molly”). Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is about the classic film (loosely based on Gein’s crimes) but it includes a very creepy account of the arrest of the middle-aged recluse whose gruesome escapades shocked a cosy Wisconsin community - and an equally disturbing insight into the underpinnings of the American dairyland. “The Gein farmhouse,” writes Rebello, referring to a house of horrors filled with disembowelled human cadavers, “offered testimony not only to man’s fathomless capacity for the barbaric, but also to the ability of an entire community to deny its existence.” Anyone acquainted with Gein had more than enough evidence that the man was not right in the head – yet they had chosen to disregard the obvious, even in light of the many mysterious disappearances in the neighbourhood.

****

Nearly 50 years after the Nanavati incident, another crime of passion involving three people caught Mumbai’s imagination. But it was a less refined age, a time of much more extensive media coverage, and this was a post-liberalisation society made up of people straining for more glamorous lives. The protagonists were a young TV executive named Neeraj Grover, a wannabe actress, Maria Susairaj, and her naval-officer boyfriend Emile Jerome. In Meenal Baghel’s Death in Mumbai, the intersecting stories of these three people becomes a commentary on modern India and its multiple divides: between towns and cities, celebrities and celebrity-aspirants. It also extends beyond the immediate details of the case and covers such disparate material as film director Ram Gopal Varma’s appetite for kinkiness and Ekta Kapoor’s teenage fascination for American soap operas, which eventually spawned a giant dream industry.

“This shop, it was his. Isn’t this world enough?” Such is the lament of a murder victim’s father trying to understand why his son needed more than the life he had in Kanpur. Death in Mumbai is a cautionary tale about what might easily happen to people for whom the world is never enough, and yet it passes no facile judgements. It also refuses to get unduly sensationalistic about topics that seem to demand sensationalism. And so, it’s interesting that at a literature festival in Mumbai, Baghel reflected on Janet Malcolm’s remark about the “moral indefensibility” of journalism and recalled a time when she found herself chasing a distressed old man down a spiral staircase in a courthouse, then stopping to ask herself “WHAT am I doing?”

Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer had sharply raised issues of ethics in reportage, using the work of the non-fiction writer Joe McGinniss as a focal point. While researching the 1970 killing of a pregnant woman and her two children, McGinniss spent time with murder accused Jeff MacDonald, husband and father to the victims; he gained MacDonald’s confidence, convinced him that he believed in his innocence, but eventually published a book – Fatal Vision – portraying him as a psychopath who was well capable of the murders.

One of the most celebrated of all true-crime books – Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – has a comparable back-story. As a high-profile member of New York’s literary circles in the late 1950s, Capote became deeply interested in the Kansas murder of the Clutter family, and ended up bonding with one of the arrested killers, Perry Smith. Over a series of meetings Truman won Smith’s trust, even helping him find lawyers to appeal his case. But later, he worried that the murderers might not get the death penalty – and that this would prevent his book from getting the dramatic ending it needed.

This makes In Cold Blood a work of deeper violence than is contained in its subject matter; beneath its narrative is a story about a man sacrificing his humanity at the altar of his art. And yet – this is a function of Capote’s immense talent – it is an empathetic, moving book, as in the passage where Mr Clutter genially gives a group of people permission to hunt pheasant on his land. “I’m not as poor as I look. Go ahead, get all you can,” he said. Then, touching the brim of his hat, he headed for home and the day’s work, unaware that it would be his last. And the final scene, where a detective meets one of the victim’s friends near the four graves, is as elegantly novelistic an ending as you can imagine.

Also novelistic – if not quite as skilfully constructed – is S Hussain Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai (co-written with Jane Borges). Zaidi is best known for his Black Friday, a meticulous reportage-oriented work about the planning, execution and aftermath of the 1993 terror attacks on Mumbai, but even more engrossing from the human-interest perspective is this book about the forgotten women of Mumbai’s underworld. It weaves together 13 stories, beginning with a profile of the iconic Jenabai Daruwalli, the “wily old woman of Dongri”, who was like a sister to Haji Mastan and a surrogate mother to Dawood Ibrahim. Jenabai’s role in effecting a compromise between “Mumbai’s warring gangsters” in Mastan’s bungalow is a key passage here, and the narrative includes minor stylistic flourishes, alternating from a reporter’s detached perspective to first-person accounts by such figures as Abu Salem’s moll Monica Bedi.

In such works of non-fiction, we see how the line between journalism and dramatic embellishment can get blurred. But true crime has also been given insightful fictional treatment, as in Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George – the story of two men whose paths briefly crossed in a case that made headlines in early 20th century Britain. George Edalji was convicted (on flimsy evidence) of mutilating farm animals and spent three years in prison; on his release he appealed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who proceeded to turn detective himself and helped clear Edalji’s name. In Barnes’s hands, this story becomes a thoughtful examination of the ambiguities that govern human actions, the interior lives of two very different men and the conflicts between faith and knowledge. What can one ever truly know? – this is a question that rears its head repeatedly in this narrative; Barnes contrasts the facile workings of detective fiction with the many uncertainties of the real world. (“Holmes was never obliged to stand in the witness box and have his suppositions and intuitions and immaculate theories ground to fine dust...”)

In True History of the Kelly Gang, that master of voices Peter Carey creates a thoroughly believable portrait of a person, the times he lives in, the world he comes from, the rituals and inner workings of that world. In the process, he takes a figure from misty legend – the 19th century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly – and brings him alive in a scarily immediate way. “God willing I shall live to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we Irish suffered in this present age,” writes Carey’s Kelly, addressing his daughter. This is a story about a social setting that becomes a springboard for crime, about modernity cautiously brushing against the law of the jungle, and apathetic authority figures who are unwilling to provide even-handed justice. But its real achievement is the breathless, unpunctuated, colloquial style used to suggest how the barely literate Kelly might have told his story.

Something comparable is achieved by Robert Graves in I, Claudius, about crimes that are somewhat different from those in the books mentioned above – crimes that were, in fact, committed within the aegis of authority. Graves takes a magnifying glass to the violent excesses and decadence of the Roman Empire – the homicidal megalomania, the almost casual poisonings and betrayals – and provides, among many other brilliant touches, a riveting portrait of the monstrous Caligula, aspirer to God-status. Like Mario Puzo did in The Godfather, this book places us right in the midst of a violent family’s life, making it intimate and easy to relate to, even when we disapprove of the characters’ actions.

But my favourite fictionalised take on true crime is the sprawling graphic novel From Hell, written by that giant of the form, Alan Moore, and masterfully drawn in sooty black-and-white by Eddie Campbell. From Hell is nothing less than an examination of Victorian society through the prism of the notorious Jack the Ripper murders, which held London in thrall through the second half of 1888 (and created urban legends for decades more). But it is also a commentary on the complex history of London, the vast class divide and the exploitation of women. Moore’s knack for linking events through time and space allow him to throw in fascinating, multilayered asides involving Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde and even Adolf Hitler (who was conceived around the time that the Ripper killings began, and who would become the poster boy for a century of very different horrors that lay ahead). 

"The Ripper murders, happening when and where they did, were almost like an apocalyptic summary of that age,” Moore said once. In his view of things, the murders were also a dark, mystical foreshadowing of the 20th century – an age that was expected to be more civilised but in which incomprehensible crimes would continue to be committed, and a variety of books - introspective, gratuitous, mournful, sensationalistic - would continue to be written about them.

[An earlier Forbes Life column about popular-science books is here]

'See the tree, how big it's grown...'

This young tree, with cars supplicating in front of it at most times, is growing by a natural mound in the park just outside my mother’s flat. It was planted sometime last year, and for several months the park maali had it covered with a cylindrical wire mesh to keep animals from destroying the leaves while they were still within reach. During that time the plant was quite inconspicuous, it was easy to pass it without really registering its presence – which is what Foxie and I routinely did on our daily walks. So we were both taken aback when we saw it the first day after the mesh was removed and the tree stood revealed as a strapping, six-foot-tall thing with a personality of its own, a distinct new presence in the terrain we knew so well.

In her last two years, after her chronic medical problems began, Fox was ravenous all day long and the only thing she was interested in doing when we went down was keeping her nose to the ground, searching greedily for scraps of bread or roti or other food. (Our walks had become a little stressful by this point: I had to monitor her every move closely, pull her away when she headed for things she wasn’t supposed to gulp down, and I badly missed the old days when we spent all our downstairs time playing ball.) But this was one of those very rare times where she showed real interest – for more than a few seconds – in something that wasn’t self-evidently connected to food. She circled the tree lightly, first in one direction and then, without breaking step, in the other. She got up on her weak hind legs for a closer look. She opened and closed her mouth repeatedly in that goldfish-like way that always seemed to us like she was muttering to herself. And she took the end of her leash in her mouth like she often did when she was nervous or shy around something or someone new. Finally, after a few soft growls she decided the tree could be permitted to stay, and shifted her attention elsewhere.

Just two or three weeks after this, she was gone herself.

At the Sai Ashram, where she is buried, we have planted a peepal sapling just behind the gravestone: it seemed to be doing well when I last visited a few days ago, though it isn’t tall enough yet for the protective mesh to be removed. I only see that plant every couple of weeks or so, but I see the one outside my mother’s house every day. It’s strange to think that in another year or two it will be a full-grown tree with a thick trunk and a life of several decades ahead of it. And it may one day be comforting - in a vague, pointlessly sentimental sort of way - to know that its long life intersected briefly with my Foxishka’s very short one.

P.S. here are two pictures from the pre-tree days. The little bench you can see in these photos – at the top of the 1st one and near the centre of the 2nd one – is where the tree now grows.

Aural storytelling: Resul Pookutty on film sound

[Did a version of this for Business Standard]

It is an oft-repeated dictum that the technical elements of filmmaking should be placed at the service of the narrative and must not draw attention to themselves. “If someone comes out of a film saying ‘Art design brilliant thi’ then it means we have failed,” the production designer Vandana Kataria told me recently, and I have heard similar views in many conversations with cinematographers, costume heads and other film technicians.

I get the broad point – that these things should work on a sub-conscious plane; they mustn’t stand out and distract the first-time viewer – but I also think a one-size-fits-all proclamation on this subject is naive. Much hinges on the type of film one is talking about (is it advisable or even possible to watch a late-1960s Godard movie, or a Peter Greenaway movie, in such a way that you’re completely submerged in the narrative?), as well as the type of viewer (a professional critic wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t consciously register some of a movie’s inner workings).

Also, the idea that technical crew should be invisible worker ants often becomes a pretext to neglect discussion of certain elements of movie-making. In a celebrity-obsessed culture in any case, most “casual” viewers discuss a film primarily in terms of its actors, or perhaps the music; this is unavoidable. But there is always a small stratum of engaged movie-buffs – keen to examine the filmmaking process at close range without necessarily getting involved with it professionally – who can benefit from accessible film literature about relatively esoteric subjects.

It’s pleasing then to come across Sounding Off, a memoir by the sound designer, sound editor and mixer Resul Pookutty (written in collaboration with Baiju Natarajan in Malayalam, and translated into English by K K Muralidharan). Pookutty is only in his early 40s and hopefully has most of his career ahead of him, but it isn’t hard to guess why this book has been brought out by a big-name publisher at this time: to cash in on the publicity from his Oscar win for Slumdog Millionnaire (indeed the gold statuette features prominently on the front and back covers). But it’s possible to ignore that little detail and focus on the content because this is an engrossing mix of reminiscence and information, and a useful primer to the thought that a good sound man must put into his work.

When Pookutty discusses the relationship between sound and imagery, and how the two things work in unison to create a particular effect, he almost comes across as an amateur psychologist; unsurprising, because his job entails understanding how the human mind works, how it makes connections and fills in gaps for us while we are watching a movie.

“The sense of reality that sound creates in cinema is a manufactured one,” he notes:

The visual provides the clue for the sound – the sound you hear is based on what’s happening on the screen. The visual hitches you to a certain sense of reality, and once you are hitched to that film reality the sound man can take you through many avenues. Then the possibilities become huge. This is the opportunity to lead the audience to another level or to another image track. People like Tarkovsky are known to be masters at it.

Thus, sounds can be triggers for images, but they can also be driven by the visuals. “You can mimic the sound of rain by making sugar fall on a piece of plain paper; but if you hear just the record of such a sound, it might not sound like rain. Only along with the visual footage of the rain can you feel that it’s raining.” Reading this, I thought about intensely atmospheric movie sequences set on rainy nights (for some reason The Road to Perdition came to mind first) and how convincingly they create a required mood, allowing the viewer to stay fully immersed in the world of the story. The idea that the pattering sound one hears in the darkness of the hall might be grains of sugar hitting paper casts a new light on conventional notions of cinematic “realism”, and on how we subconsciously interact with the movies we see.

Pookutty also makes special note of other film artistes who are especially attuned to the nuances of sound, such as Amitabh Bachchan, who once asked for a “reverb” effect in a dubbing studio because he wanted the setting to approximate the acoustics of the hall where the scene was shot; or Mani Kaul, who he reckons may have been the only Indian director who was informed enough to demand the use of a particular type of mike for a particular shot.

Each company’s mikes have a different timbre to the sound they capture – they differ in their frequency responses [...] it’s your call as to whether Sennheiser or Neumann is to be used in a romantic scene – your decision would be based both on the nature of the sound in the scene as well as on the quality of the actor’s voice.

Some of these passages may seem highly specialised, but the book’s chief mode is personal and friendly; there are many insights into the sort of person Pookutty is and the combination of qualities that led him to his field. His affectionate description of his time at the FTII conveys a sense of a well-rounded film education as well as a sense of a man from small-town Kerala discovering a wider world and even facing the shattering possibility (voiced by the visiting Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi) that there are more important things in life than cinema. As he relates the effect that a childhood memory of a rotating fan – during an intense illness – had on his sound career, or discusses the Malayali way of eating in terms of sound effects, “from guttural grunts to violent gargling”, one sees how he has brought his own experiences into his work.

I was particularly struck by an early chapter – not, on the face of it, directly relevant to Pookutty’s career – where he describes, with much affection, his close relationship with and empathy towards animals. Some of his most vivid childhood memories, he tells us, are the sound of cows’ hooves “scratching the floor on a quiet night; the sound of them getting up; the distinctive rhythm of their breathing”. “I have pondered over animals a great deal,” he unselfconsciously says, before embarking on a series of musings about donkeys (“a docile creature that has seen the world”), pigs and goats.

It’s a short section, and apart from an early reference to being cued in to the sounds made by animals and what they might mean (“sometimes the goats suddenly cried together and then would fall into an equally sudden silence. That meant one of them was gone”), there is no tangible connection between this aspect of his life and his profession. But when he attributes “humility, soulfulness and a sense of depth” to donkeys and later discusses the spiritual qualities of Robert Bresson’s cinema, it puts me in mind of the magnificent use of sound in Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, where (among other things) we respond to a donkey’s bray in a dozen different ways depending on what is happening in a given scene. Pookutty doesn’t mention this film specifically, but I’m sure it had an effect on him. In any case, by revealing things about himself (his personal life, his ideologies, inspirations and misgivings, his eye and ear for the natural world), he organically reveals much about his attitude to his craft too, and how the work he does subtly affects the viewing experience for millions of people. This makes his memoir a more useful window into his subject than a jargon-heavy textbook could be.