50 shades of Ray (and other glimpses of a cinematic heritage)

[An essay I did for the Delhi Art Gallery’s splendidly produced catalogue to accompany the Nemai Ghosh photographic exhibition]

Writing about Chris Marker’s short film La Jetee – a post-apocalyptic story made up almost entirely of still pictures – the critic David Thomson observed that this may be our perfect commentary on "the special way in which photographic images work with time to make the explosive equation of moving film”. In the film’s most spellbinding scene, lasting only a few seconds, the pictures on the screen “move” – the way they do in most regular movies – and a woman, hitherto seen only in photographs, comes alive before us. The result is a startling contrast between still images and images that, in Thomson's phrase, “work with time” – especially apt to a story that is about both time travel and the haunting, illusory nature of memory.

Motion pictures are, of course, a series of photos run together so fast that we can discover a narrative in them. And yet, when we think of our favourite movie scenes, we often think of specific shots frozen in time – shots that might be “unreliable” because they are idealised constructs of our brain, but which can capture something truthful and essential about a film. Similarly, a good photograph of a movie scene (or of a scene being filmed) can enshrine a moment for all time. It can reveal a good deal about what that movie means to its culture and about the circumstances in which it was made. At times it might even enable us to “play” a slightly different version of the scene in our head.

In the early days of filmmaking, the photographer loitering about the set was not always a welcome presence – actors were not usually happy about having to recreate a scene after the shot had already been taken. (The invention of the sound blimp, which allowed the still camera to do its work silently, placated many nerves.) But today, everyone agrees about the vital role played by a good still photographer, and Nemai Ghosh has been among the most dedicated and scrupulous of them all. His output would have been admirable in any place and time, but it acquires a special resonance in the context of a country that has never cared enough about its cinematic legacy. The story of preservation in Indian cinema has been a depressing one involving countless miles of deteriorating or lost film stock and an astonishing lack of written or pictorial records, even when it comes to major films. But Ghosh’s photographs are a wide-ranging documentation of movie memories, with a special focus on the work of India’s most widely celebrated filmmaker.

His association with Satyajit Ray – a life-changing one, by his own account – began during the shooting of Ray’s 1968 fantasy classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, which is among the best-loved of all Indian films. A chord was struck very early on. In his worshipful book Manik-Da: Memories of Satyajit Ray, Ghosh recalls the frisson of excitement he felt when the photographs he had taken were first presented to Ray, and when the great man looked up and said “You have done it exactly the way I would have, man, you have got the same angles!” Thus began a collaboration that lasted nearly a quarter-century (towards the end of which period Ray would write that Ghosh had been for him “a sort of Boswell working with a camera rather than a pen”).

A case can be made that the photographer missed out on some of the director’s best work. Not many film buffs would argue that Ray’s post-1968 output equalled the sum of what he had done up to that time: an oeuvre that included the three films of the Apu Trilogy as well as Jalsaghar, Devi, Mahanagar, Teen Kanya, Kanchenjanga, Nayak and arguably his most formally accomplished film Charulata. The heart sinks a little to think of what Nemai Ghosh’s eye and camera might have achieved if he had had a chance to shoot the magnificently crumbling haveli of the zamindar in Jalsaghar; the large house in which Charulata feels restless and unfulfilled; the ghostly mosquito nets that are such a constant, haunting presence in Devi; the lovely vistas of Varanasi where Apu’s father Hari breathes his last in Aparajito; or even the nightmare scenes (the telephone, the skeletal hands and currency notes) of Nayak. Imagine some of the location shots he might have captured for Ray’s lovely short film “Samapti” (a segment of Teen Kanya), in which a city-educated lad (Soumitro Chatterjee) becomes gradually drawn to, and also a little repulsed by, a feral girl-child (played by the young Aparna Dasgupta, later Aparna Sen) in his village. Imagine the mists of Kanchenjanga as seen through Ghosh’s frame.

But such “what ifs” are exercises in pointlessness – and besides, the very fact that we can rue these things is a testament to the value of what actually did emerge from the collaboration. Consider the films Ray made between 1968 and 1991, and the range of themes, moods and time periods they cover. There is Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and its much later sequel Hirak Rajar Deshe, two of our cinema’s towering achievements in whimsical, timeless fantasy. As companion pieces to these “light” movies, there are the detective Feluda films, Sonar Kella (based on one of Ray’s breeziest, most pleasing stories and shot on location in Rajasthan) and Joy Baba Felunath. On a grittier note, there is the Calcutta trilogy of Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya (and a key film that can be seen as a precursor to them, Aranyer Dinratri, about four men trying to escape city life by heading off into the forest for an excursion).  Then there is the period drama Shatranj ke Khiladi, Ray’s only feature-length Hindi film, based on Premchand’s story about nobles and Englishmen on the eve of the 1857 war of independence. The Government-produced Sadgati, a somewhat pedantic (by the director’s standards) examination of untouchability. Ghare Baire, an elegant adaptation of Tagore’s story about the personal and the political. And the comparatively lesser works of the final years – Ganashatru, Shakha Prashakha – which have their own merits but in which one also senses an artist stricken by poor health and beginning to wind down.

Every one of these films is represented – usually at incredible length – in Ghosh’s photography. “Incredible” because this was the pre-digital era and reels of actual film were being used up in the taking of these photographs; their number and variety tell us something about Ghosh’s personal dedication to his art, and about Ray’s capacity to inspire. And because many of the films are so iconic, these photographs provide us with some defining glimpses of our cinematic heritage. Through them, we get a tantalising picture: Ray as observer and chronicler of the many aspects of a culture, and Ghosh with his camera, observing the observer.

As the eye turns greedily from one picture to the next, a host of memories and associations come alive. Here is the filming of Ashani Sanket with the girl bathing in the river, an instant reminder of the haunting opening sequence of that movie with the fighter planes – “as beautiful as a flock of cranes” – passing overhead. Here, from the same film, is Soumitro as the young Brahmin in the bullock-cart, his director looking urbane and dapper next to him – the shot is an amusing reminder that some of the earliest Western critics who saw Ray’s work made the mistake of assuming that he was from an indigent, uneducated background himself and that the Apu Trilogy, with a young village boy making his way in the world, was an autobiographical story!

Here, from Shatranj ke Khiladi, are two noblemen as wastrels, looking on indolently as “interesting times” pass them by. An extraordinary photograph from this series has Wajid Ali Shah framed in a circle formed by the coiled tubes of a hookah; the image is a beautiful representation of a weak ruler trapped by history, and Amjad Khan – one of our most photogenic actors ever – is as tragically imperious here as he was terrifyingly imperious in his most famous role as Sholay’s Gabbar Singh.

Far removed in space and time from 1857 Lucknow, the great Bharat Natyam exponent Bala Saraswati (about whom Ray made a documentary, Bala) practises her art on a beach. And here is a more famous cinematic dance – precious shots of the staging of the extraordinary ghost-dance sequence from Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, with the bright white background contrasting with sharp dark costumes for an otherworldly effect. These stills should send a frisson of excitement through anyone who recalls the atmospheric sequence, as should the candid photos of the film’s unforgettable old magician Barfi (imagine a goofier version of Tolkien’s Saruman, high on mishti doi) on the set.

Here too is a feel for real places: the protagonist of Pratidwandi captured against the background of his bustling – often impersonal – city. And vistas from Sikkim, the subject of Ray’s long-censored 1971 documentary. “We traversed the entire length and breadth of Sikkim, shooting at various places,” Ghosh noted in his book, “From schools to slums to palaces – nothing was left uncaptured on camera.”

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“Humanist” is a word often used – to the point of cliché – to describe Ray’s work; it usually denotes that there are few bad people in his films, that ill-fortune flows not from the actions of a villainous “type” but from circumstances acting alongside the whims of personality. But the word is also a reminder of the director’s interest in the possibilities of the human face. He was an illustrator long before he became a filmmaker, and his drawings and paintings show an intuitive understanding of people’s behaviours, gestures and inner states – some of which Ghosh must have picked up over the years. Even in Ray movies that have stylistic flourishes, the first images one usually thinks of are faces in a variety of moods. The dreamy-eyed inwardness of the young Siddhartha in Pratidwandi; the look of unabashed delight on Goopy’s face when he realises that the king of ghosts really has given him the boon of a magical voice; Soumitro’s expressive visage in a range of contexts, from period rural drama to urbane Feluda adventure; Amjad Khan’s sensuous, melancholy gaze as Wajid Ali Shah contemplates oblivion. And the women: the impish, knowing smiles of Sharmila Tagore in Aranyer Dinratri and Seemabaddha; Shabana Azmi as the sullen wife in Shatranj ke Khiladi; the young Simi Garewal in one of her most atypical roles, as an inebriated tribal girl who catches the eye of a wanderer from the city.

Ghosh catches all these moods and countless others, but a striking aspect of his photos is how rarely they resemble the conventional ideal of a promotional still – something that has a long tradition in mainstream cinema in the West, with attempts being made to encapsulate the basic idea of a scene in one image and actors striking representative poses for the cameraman’s benefit. Much of Ghosh’s work, to the contrary, is characterised by the intimacy that can only occur when the still photographer has become an essential part of the unit – an unseen presence, silently observing and recording, with his subjects barely even conscious of his presence. There is an artlessness in these compositions that makes them an enormously effective record of the inner workings of an art form. (The exceptions are usually tied to the subject matter: so grand is the mise-en-scene of Shatranj ke Khiladi, for example, that many stills from that film inevitably look posed and self-consciously soaked in meaning.)

If Ghosh’s admiration for Ray, the tall (in every sense) Renaissance Man, can be seen on each page of Manik-Da, it is also clearly visible in his photos of the director. You can see it in the way Ray becomes the central, magnetic presence in nearly every frame, even when flanked by people like Akira Kurosawa and Indira Gandhi. You can see it in how the Gallic actor Gerard Depardieu – one of the most striking film personalities of his generation – seems almost to be dwarfed by Ray on the sets of Ganashatru. Without ever coming across as a minatory figure, Ray looms over actors and crew, a breathing redefinition of the term “larger than life”. We often see him behind the camera – though he did detailed storyboards for most of his films, he was also a very hands-on director on the actual set (not for him the Hitchcockian dictum “I never need to look into a camera”). An amusing photograph shows Soumitro and his director seated on adjacent sofas, making a “V” sign simultaneously though neither is looking at the other; a suggestion of the near-telepathic relationship that develops through long artistic collaboration?

Then there is Ray standing near a busy street, pipe in mouth, an expression of intense concentration on his face, while his beloved city’s trams pass in the background. Here he is taking his own photos of the women and children of Sikkim; with two other shining lights of world cinema, Kurosawa and Michelangelo Antonioni, at the Taj Mahal; sitting on a ledge along a slope from a Rajasthani fort, eating lunch with the crew of Sonar Kella.

Different moods coalesce in many of these pictures. He looks affectionate but also a little distracted as a child actor throws his arms around him and kisses him on the cheek. Standing on set, a microphone in hand, he seems benevolent and impatient at the same time, a kindly uncle set to turn into a martinet if his crew keeps him waiting for much longer. He hunches in the bonnet of an Ambassador car with his camera equipment and he stands pensively beneath a chandelier during a shoot (and manages to look equally dignified in both situations). Here is the man of letters, the product of 200 years of Bengali high culture, reading on the set while perched delicately on a makeshift bench; and there is the man of the world, playing blackjack in a casino during a break in the shooting of Hirak Rajar Deshe.

And everywhere, there is evidence of the multi-tasking auteur keeping a sharp eye on every element of the production process: looking down in deep concentration as he listens to his music performers; adding the finishing touches to an actor’s facial makeup. One lovely shot has Ray reading with two pairs of violins in perfect symmetry next to him; like the awed people who had the privilege of working for him or observing him at work, the instruments seem almost to be standing at attention, awaiting further developments.

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Viewing these images, one gleans the full meaning of Ghosh’s words “My experiences were but small pebbles that I picked up from the shores of a mighty ocean called Satyajit Ray.” Yet these words might also make one wonder: was the photographer a one-man Boswell, finding true creative inspiration only when touched by his idol’s presence? On the evidence we have, the answer is no. Many of the other film-related photographs he took – from Bengali and Hindi cinema – are just as stirring, in a number of ways.

They span both the mainstream and the non-mainstream, frequently giving us insight into what those categories really mean and whether they should be placed in neat opposition as they so often are. Thus, on the one hand, there are stills from such films as Gautam Ghose’s serious-minded Paar, about a villager trying to cross a river in spate with his pregnant wife and a herd of pigs. (That plot, along with the fact that the leads are Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah – who won a best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for this role – tells you everything you need to know about what sort of film it is.) But at the other end of the spectrum, there is Amitabh Bachchan in one of his most unabashedly commercial roles, as “John Jani Janardhan” in Manmohan Desai’s extravagant Naseeb, caught in a climactic song sequence with the glamorous Hema Malini. And somewhere between these extremes is an international production casting a loving gaze at Indian poverty more than 15 years before Slumdog Millionaire: Roland Jaffe’s City of Joy with Patrick Swayze and Om Puri. Other highlights from this series include stills from the Rekha-starrer Utsav, directed by Girish Karnad, the very young Anil Kapoor with an outlandishly swank car in a film you probably haven’t heard of, M S Sathyu’s Kahan Kahan se Guzar Gaya, and rare pictures of a corpulent, middle-aged Shashi Kapoor as Feluda in Sandip Ray’s TV series – a sad reminder, perhaps, of the compromises required in making a commercial project.

It is the juxtapositions and contrasts that make these photographs so interesting. How tempting it is, for example, to set the Bachchan of Naseeb against the Bachchan of nearly a decade earlier – a 1973 photograph of Amitabh with Jaya Bhaduri, before they were married and when she was the bigger star: a time before superstardom and its attendant threats, before the cares of domesticity, children and political pressures. The photograph makes it possible to postulate an alternate future for the superstar-in-waiting – a future where this lanky, awkward-looking young man made a brief career playing intense second leads (as he once really did in films like Parwana and Gehri Chaal), and eventually faded away. In this other universe, Bachchan might not even have looked out of place as the young marketing manager in Ray’s Seemabaddha!

Photographs can confirm the dominant images we carry in our minds, but the best of them also erase labels by capturing people in unusual moods or contexts. Consider the shot of a badminton match involving that most macho of north Indian actors, Dharmendra, with that most coquettish of Bengali actresses, Moushumi Chatterjee. The image – which one feels tempted to label “Di and Paaji” – is from the set of a film titled Dawedaar, so obscure that despite being made in 1982 and having a high-profile cast, there is practically no reference to it online. By this time Dharmendra was well past his sell-by date and mostly doing macho roles in assembly-line films, but looking at this picture one is reminded of the reticent bhadralok characters he played in such 1960s films as Anupama and Bandini (made by those other prominent Bengali directors, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Bimal Roy).

Here and elsewhere, Ghosh’s photographs of movie stars are testaments to wide-ranging careers and other possibilities for the history of Indian cinema. There is the heady glamour of commercial cinema, but there are also unobtrusive, stripped-down contexts. Here is Shatrughan Sinha, wearing sunglasses and outfitted in the style of the flamboyant Hindi-movie hero of the early 1980s, but he is flanked by – of all people – Ray and Soumitro, and one almost fancies that the director is giving him a patronising look, as if to bring him down to earth. To view Utpal Dutt as the king in Hirak Rajar Deshe is to see an artiste evincing a very different personality from that of the comical-old-man roles he was playing in Hindi cinema at exactly the same time.
 
For the eclectic movie-buff, the experience of viewing these images is a strongly affecting one: the divides between different “types” of cinema (commercial and art, loud and unobtrusive) begin to fall away and one sees these films, their directors and actors as part of a single continuum – with subtle shifts along the line coming to define entire careers and influencing entire generations of movie-watchers. And Ghosh was around to capture so much of this. In much the same way that Ray’s cinema illuminated so many worlds (both internal and external), these photographs give us a breathtakingly kaleidoscopic, complex view of Indian cinema and its many personalities.

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Here are two photos of the catalogue. (That “SR” in the second image represents Ray’s scrawl of approval on a series of photos.) 

[An earlier post on the Nemai Ghosh exhibition - with more photos - is here]

On Bimal Roy’s Sujata (and the invisible line in “Bachpan ke Din”)

It sometimes happens that you think you know a beloved old movie song really well – based on memories of listening to it on the radio or seeing it once or twice on Chitrahaar – and then you watch the full film and are struck anew by the quality of the picturisation and by how well the scene works within a larger context. The lilting “Bachpan ke Din” in Bimal Roy’s 1959 film Sujata had this effect on me. It is a happy number sung by two sisters, Rama (Shashikala) and Sujata (Nutan), who have a close relationship throughout the film; as such, it’s easily thought of as just a carefree ode to their shared childhood. But to watch the song is to be struck by how unusual its use of visual space is for a Hindi-film musical sequence of this type.



Rama, who initiates the song by playing it on a piano, and Sujata – who hums along – are in the same house, and there are parallels in their movements and actions (Rama spreads her dupatta playfully across her face, and a second later Sujata matches the gesture with the garments she is removing from a clothesline). But though their voices merge, and though they are clearly attuned to each other’s thoughts, they never share the frame – understandably, for Rama is indoors throughout while Sujata is on the terrace above the room. And this tells us some things about these characters and the film itself: it is shorthand for the fact that there is an invisible line separating the sisters’ lives and that Sujata isn’t, strictly speaking, part of the family.

A low-caste “untouchable” by birth, she has been raised by Rama’s parents, an engineer named Upen babu and his wife Charu, and their undoubted affection for her has been tempered over the years by their consciousness of social mores and restraints, so that Sujata has grown up yearning to hear them call her “hamaari beti” rather than the more formal and defensive “hamaari beti jaisi”. Thus, in the song that introduces the grown-up versions of the sisters, we see Rama, the real daughter, firmly ensconced inside the house, lively and at ease with her setting, while Sujata – whose demeanour is more reticent – is in an open space, underlining her outsider status.

The scene also provides one of our first views of something that runs through the film: the association of Sujata with the natural world, or the outdoors. Much of her time is spent in the garden and the greenhouse, tending to plants, and the film has many self-consciously beautiful compositions such as the one of dew dripping from a leaf as Sujata weeps. We are constantly reminded that she is a child of nature, her true origins unknown, rather than a legitimate member of the household (in the “Bachpan ke Din” sequence she literally has no roof over her head, but for the sky). The stylist in Bimal Roy shows fine fettle in a scene where a distraught Sujata is out in the rain, intense close-ups of her face and her hand clenching her shoulder intercut with shots of the Gandhi statue behind her, a flickering street-lamp and flowing rain-water. (This sequence plays like a pre-echo of the famously showy scene in Roy’s Bandini where the stricken face of the protagonist – also played by Nutan – is rapidly cut with shots of a bottle marked “Poison” and sparks from the tools of nearby welders.) Even a remarkable early animation sequence has the little Sujata dreaming of visiting a “sapnon ka sundar desh” where the trees have golden leaves – a place as mythical and improbable as a caste-free world.

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Rama and Sujata might fondly be recalling their bachpan in that song, but at this point the viewer is unlikely to need a memory-jogging: the film's early sequences, which show the girls’ childhood and Sujata’s gradual assimilation into Upen babu’s family, are lengthy, unhurried and very absorbing. Tarun Bose and Sulochana get a lot of screen time as the conflicted engineer and his wife, Lalita Pawar is superb as a disapproving aunt (at one point she flings the baby Sujata away and a nearby maid catches the child just in time. I was hugely impressed that this scene could be pulled off in the pre-computer effects era: Lalita mausi one, Gollum zero), and a full 40 minutes pass before Nutan - the "star" - makes her screen appearance. 

In these early scenes we see the pariah girl gaining acceptance in increments; well-meaning people trying to work out what is right through conscience and common sense, rather than through what their elders and holy texts tell them; and a fast-modernising India, across which the engineer and his family travel over the years, living in Dehradun, Bilaspur, Barrackpore and other places as Upen is transferred and promoted. But we also see how the ancient spectre of caste continues to dog their life even in this forward-looking milieu, and how social attitudes and prejudices form a mould, trapping even those who initially resist them. Watch how Upen is genuinely broad-minded about the little Sujata as he becomes fond of her – even sharing his spoon of halwa with this “untouchable” – but grows more circumspect over the years as he assumes positions of greater responsibility and has to keep in mind what other people will think about his family, and about the marital prospects of his blood-daughter. Later, watch how even Adhir (Sunil Dutt) – who epitomises the progressive, educated young man – hides his face from his grandmother when he has to express a view that he knows will run counter to her beliefs.

The prolonged establishing sequences work very well, first because Roy is a fine director of children and a fine observer of childhood (watch the opening 20 minutes of Devdas for confirmation of this), but also because they set up a touching contrast between the guileless self-assurance of the child Sujata – who doesn’t yet know about the harsh ways of the world – and the introverted woman she grows up to become, an adult who has learnt something about maintaining a slight distance from her adoptive parents (even as she calls them “Bapu” and “Ammi”). Nutan’s delicately observed performance conveys Sujata’s push-pull relationship with her family very well – it makes credible the simultaneous existence, in one person, of two apparently contrary personalities: one that is happy-go-lucky (or wants to be happy-go-lucky), with an inborn zest for life; the other emotionally guarded. And this is what makes the climactic scene, Sujata’s breaking down when she realises she has been wholeheartedly accepted, so powerful and cathartic.

Despite the excellence of her performance, though, I think I like the first third of the film best. The rest of it is just a little too hurried in comparison, a little too eager to reach a definite resolution and to unite Sujata with the upper-caste Adhir. One might also point to a minor unevenness of tone and character development: given that Rama never treats Sujata as anything other than a real sister (and shows an empathy that belies her outwardly giddy nature), it is possible to ask what exactly the inner dynamics of this family have been like over the years. Having formed a genuine parental attachment and sense of responsibility, how can Upen and Charu still keep Sujata at arm’s length on specific occasions (such as Rama’s birthday celebration) and deny her education? The Charu who is deeply stricken at the thought of packing the little girl off to an orphanage in the early scenes, can she be the same woman who later savagely lashes out at her “beti-jaisi”, accusing her of stealing her beti’s prospective groom? But perhaps this is another reminder of how lives can be petrified by strictures, how even powerful human emotions can be weakened by the magnetic pull of tradition. And perhaps that's why this mostly wonderful film seems just a little pat and contrived in the way it rushes towards a happy ending.

P.S. Attack of the Killer Subtitles
The subtitle-writer on the DVD I have must have been in a tearing hurry; when Sujata plaintively asks her mother “Main sirf bojh hoon?” (“Am I only a burden?”), the words “I bug you?” appear on the screen, contrasting surreally with the anguished look on Nutan’s face. Must look at the rest of the subtitles more closely and take notes.

Book-launch reminder (and an excerpt from "Milky Ways")

A final reminder about the launch of the motherhood anthology Of Mother and Others at the Jaipur lit-fest on January 25. (The invite is at the bottom of this post, but just show up if you're at the festival; some of the contributing authors will be present, and Shabana Azmi, who has written the book's Foreword, should be there too.)

And here, as a teaser, is a short excerpt from my essay about mother depictions in Hindi cinema:

Around the late 1980s, a certain sort of “liberal” movie mum had come into being. I remember nodding in appreciation at the scene in Maine Pyaar Kiya where Prem (Salman Khan) discusses prospective girlfriends with his mom (played by the always-likeable Reema Lagoo). Still, when it came to the crunch, you wouldn’t expect these seemingly broad-minded women to do anything that would seriously rock the status quo. In her younger days Farida Jalal was among the feistiest of the actresses who somehow never became A-grade stars, but by the time she played Kajol’s mother in Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jaayenge, she had settled into the role of the woman who can feel for young love – and be a friend and confidant to her daughter – while also knowing, through personal experience, that women in her social setup “don’t even have the right to make promises”. The two young lovers in this film can be united only when the heart of the stern father melts.

Such representations – mothers as upholders of “traditional values”, even when those values are detrimental to the interests of women – are not going away any time soon, and why would they, if cinema is to be a part-mirror to society? A motif of the 2011 film No One Killed Jessica was a middle-aged mother as a figure hiding behind the curtain (literally “in pardah”), listening to the men’s conversations and speaking up only to petulantly demand the return of her son (who is on the lam, having cold-bloodedly murdered a young woman). It seems caricatured at first, but when you remember the details of the real-life Jessica Lal-Manu Sharma case that the film is based on, there is nothing surprising about it.

But it is also true that in the multiplex era of the last decade, mother representations have been more varied than they were in the past. [...] Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na featured a terrific performance by Ratna Pathak Shah as Savitri Rathore, a wisecracking mom whose banter with her dead husband’s wall-portrait marks a 180-degree twist on every maudlin wall-portrait scene from movies of an earlier time. (Remember the weepy monologues that went “Munna ab BA Pass ho gaya hai. Aap agar hamaare saath hote, kitne khush hote”?) Unlike her mythological namesake, this Savitri is relieved that she no longer has to put up with her husband’s three-dimensional presence! Then there is the Kirron Kher character in Dostana, much more orthodox to begin with: a jokily over-the-top song sequence, “Maa da laadla bigad gaya”, portrays her dismay about the possibility that her son is homosexual, and she is even shown performing witchery to “cure” him. But she does eventually come around, gifting bangles to her “daughter-in-law” and wondering if traditional Indian rituals might accommodate something as alien as gay marriage. These scenes are played for laughs (and in any case, the son isn’t really gay), but they do touch on very real cultural conflicts and on the ways in which parents from conservative backgrounds often have to change to keep up with the times.

[The book will be available on Flipkart and other online stores very soon. Look out for it.]

Amma revisited / pup in plaster

An update on Pratima Devi/Amma, who looks after dogs near the PVR Saket complex. (I wrote about her in this post.) She was very unwell with high blood pressure and fever for a few days, but that hasn’t stopped her from keeping a close eye on her dozens of wards. Just as she was recovering and getting back on her feet, one of the pups got hit by a passing bike, resulting in foreleg fractures. With the help of an acquaintance (and characteristically neglecting her own health), Amma rushed him to Friendicoes for treatment; both legs are in plaster now and the poor chap is restless and depressed about not being able to play, but he will hopefully recover in two or three weeks.

Once again, please do spread the word about her to animal-lovers in Delhi. Also: she has a new litter of pups – eight of them – born to a dog who evaded the van when it came to pick up candidates for sterilisation. They are all adoption-worthy. Here are fuzzy photos of them sleeping in a cardboard box together (you might not be able to make each one out, but hopefully you'll get a general impression of cute multipupdomness).

Gender divisions and performance in Why Loiter? and Seeing Like a Feminist

In an earlier post I mentioned that our Kolkata lit-fest discussion touched on the portrayal of women in popular Hindi films. Shyam Benegal, who was on the panel, has had so many strong and interesting women characters in his own movies over the decades that he is often referred to as a feminist director. I don’t know how Mr Benegal feels about that tag, but I do know that the word "feminist" unfortunately draws ambivalent reactions – some people, women included, are not comfortable describing themselves as such, because it is sometimes used as a derisive term, built around the stereotype of the bra-burner or the shrill, man-hating woman who is venting personal frustrations. However, as the journalist Rebecca West has tersely pointed out, feminism is not a complicated idea at all – it is merely “the radical notion that women are people”.

Of course, treating women as human beings can seem like a radical idea in a milieu where they are typically objects to be possessed or goddesses to be worshipped. The two modes often go together: the role of women as custodians of a family’s “honour” can easily become a way of denying them basic individual rights such as freedom of movement. (Those big goddess idols you see in temples or at festivals – they stay where they are, they don’t move around unless they are carried by men.***) It is also at the heart of the appalling belief – widely perpetuated in our country – that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus she is no more than a living corpse, a blot that society must purge itself of and hurriedly forget about.

In such a climate, even those who consider themselves empathetic or enlightened can do with constant reminders of the many forms of discrimination that women face on an everyday basis. Here’s a recommendation for two fine books I read recently (one of them before the December rape/murder and the discourse around it). Nivedita Menon’s just-published Seeing Like a Feminist is an incisive, clear-sighted setting out of the many issues confronting feminists as they attempt to shift the markers of a patriarchal world; it is also an examination of the thought processes that lie behind mind-boggling prescriptions such as the one – frequently made by courts and other authorities here – that a raped woman marry her assailant. “The marriage is meant to restore social order,” Menon observes, “Once the rapist is the woman’s husband, the act of sex is retrospectively legitimised because of course, the consent of the woman to sex is irrelevant, in marriage and out of it. The morals of Indian society do not permit consensual sex outside marriage, but if you rape a woman, you can marry her!”

[That last sentence casts a chilling perspective on some of those Hindi-movie scenes we are all familiar with, where the hero “eve-teases” the girl he is attracted to. In most of those films, the heroine eventually reciprocates this strange love – but try extending the scenario into a hypothetical (and for a mainstream film, very improbable) one where the girl really isn’t interested, and then you wonder: how far will sweet-boy Rahul go to “get” her (and, with societal approval, “keep” her for ever)? Note: I’m not talking here about a film like Darr, where the stalker is presented as a psycho who gets beaten up by the regular hero in the end. Though even in that film, the character was treated at least partly as a figure of sympathy, a martyr to obsessive love.]

There is much food for thought in Menon’s book, but a section I found particularly stimulating was the one about the fluidity of gender, built on the idea that the classification of people into the watertight categories “male” and “female” can be misleading. Referencing the work of the feminist philosopher Judith Butler, as well as anthropological studies of gender roles in pre-colonial African cultures, Menon writes that being specifically a man or specifically a woman is to a large extent a performance that most people engage in, according to what society expects of them. Human bodies and psychologies are more versatile and complex than this, occupying various positions along a large spectrum (lactation can be induced in men, for example), but due to stern cultural codes “a range of bodies becomes invisible or illegitimate”. Thus a woman might, in a letter to a newspaper medical column, express her deep worry about her young son’s bulging breasts, and a doctor might reply that corrective surgery may be required – even though the boy’s condition is not necessarily a biologically abnormal one.

Nearly a third of the male population can have “breasts”, and if it is not due to rare endocrinological causes, the condition is perfectly normal. It seems to have no other ill effects than causing “disgust”, but, nevertheless, it is pathologised and made into a disease (gynaecomastia), and when other serious illnesses have been ruled out, the advice given is not to relax and stop worrying, but to undertake surgery, to make that body conform to a mythical norm.

[More excerpts from Seeing Like a Feminist are here]


Another book that touches on gender performance and learned behaviour is the very absorbing – and discomfiting – Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, co-written by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade. In public spaces in India, the authors note, the act of constant self-surveillance by women produces what Michel Foucault (in another context) called Disciplined Bodies. “At bus stops and railway stations, a woman will often hold a file, folder or book close to her chest, keep her eyes averted and seem to focus inward rather than outward. Men, on the other hand, stand in postures of control with legs held apart, look around with apparent ease and often occupy additional space with their arms [...] the average woman will occupy the least possible space, rendering herself as inconspicuous as she can.”

For a male reader, Why Loiter? is an eye-opening account of how hard it can be for women to use public spaces in a relaxed, comfortable manner, even in situations where there is no immediate sexual threat. Especially disturbing, I thought, was a chapter about the disgraceful lack of public toilets for women even in big cities, a feature of urban planning that tells us something about the still-prevalent attitude that a woman’s rightful place is in the home – that she has no business wandering about too much. As the authors point out, even in a relatively cosmopolitan city “the very presence of women in public is seen as transgressive and fraught with anxiety”. They must constantly demonstrate a sense of purpose when they are outdoors – they can’t be seen to be “merely” loitering, because respectable women don’t do that. Thus,

Women on their own in parks, for instance, produce a particular type of body language of purpose. They tend to walk a linear path, do not meet anyone’s gaze, and often listen to a Walkman or talk on their phones ... the effort seems to be to legitimatise their presence by demonstrating that they are walking for exercise and not for fun or social interaction. Similarly, when forced to wait in a public place, women will be careful about the kind of place they wait at, often choosing bus stops and railway stations. Tied to these spaces is a sense of legitimate purpose – that of commuting. [...] In other ways too, women legitimise their presence in public space by exploiting acceptable notions of femininity such as those which connect them intrinsically to motherhood and religion.

The very fact that presences have to be “legitimised” – and that many of the women who engage in this process are barely conscious of what they are doing, having internalised this behaviour – says something about how hegemonic our society can be towards 50 percent of its population. Both these books are a reminder of how far that hegemony and hostility has seeped into our everyday lives, and of the urgent need for both sexes to participate in the carving out of new spaces and new mindsets. Do read them.

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*** An old post on Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi – about a girl trapped in an image of divinity – is here

Chance and intent: the Murch-Ondaatje conversations, The Godfather, Shanghai, Touch of Evil

One of the charges most often levelled at detailed film criticism is that of “over-analysis”. You’re reading too much into this scene, the critic is told. Or more gently: yes, I get your point, but did the director really intend that? The easy riposte to the latter remark is to quote D H Lawrence’s famous line “Never trust the teller – trust the tale”, which basically means a critic is under no obligation to consider what an artist consciously intended (or claims he intended). But this line of defence can sometimes mislead: it can be a way of overlooking how much deliberate thought often does go into the making of a film – even into the use of “technique” in scenes that on the face of it have nothing flashy about them.

To take an example from a hugely popular film: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is a cinematic classic, a commercial as well as a critical success. But a case can be made that even the film’s biggest devotees – the ones who have seen it multiple times, gasping in admiration at its many setpieces – don’t completely appreciate the extent of the collaborative rigour that went into its creation at a sequence-by-sequence level. In the book The Conversations, a fascinating series of exchanges between film editor Walter Murch and author Michael Ondaatje, there is a mention of one of the quietest scenes in The Godfather.

The scene involves a hotel-room chat over wine between Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) and his girlfriend Kay (Diane Keaton). Michael, initially a young innocent, is on the verge of moving into a life of crime and distancing himself from Kay, and the first, more laidback part of the scene uses the classic film grammar of cutting back and forth between them, each person situated near the centre of the screen. But soon things become tense and Michael has to openly dissuade Kay from asking too many questions or coming with him. After he briefly gets up and sits back down, the framing has changed: he now occupies a space near the left edge of the screen, with a large empty space to the right.

Most viewers – including many professional critics – are unlikely to register this framing change at a conscious level, at least on a first viewing; and if they do register it, they might see it as a random camera-placement decision (or even as a “mistake” made by the cinematographer or director, working in a hurry). But as Murch puts it in his discussion with Ondaatje, it was a very deliberate choice by Coppola and his team – a subconscious signal to the viewer that something is off, that the terms of engagement between the young lovers have changed:

He is still looking at her, still facing her, but his framing is rejecting her. When the two shots are cut together, his image lands right on top of her, and there is a big empty space to the right of frame, the space into which Michael is going to turn when he leaves the room to go see his father. With that empty space, Michael’s family has made an invisible entrance into the room and is making its presence felt [...] he’s being pulled by something behind him, something that is going to take him away from her.

The Conversations contains many such insights into how the making of a good film can be a much more complex process than viewers realise. But as an editor, Murch was also well-placed to comment on the role that chance – or interference – can play in fixing a film’s legacy. In one of the book’s most poignant sections, he describes his work re-cutting Orson Welles’s great 1958 film Touch of Evil many decades after it was made, in accordance with the extraordinarily detailed memo Welles wrote to his producers (after just a single viewing of the butchered version of his movie). Murch relates how the removal of a one-second close-up of a character’s face late in the film has the effect of completely changing the viewer’s response to that character and the role he plays in the climax, and bringing the film closer to Welles’s vision (the original editors had left the close-up in). “Huge issues of character and story are decided by the inclusion – or not – of a single shot that reverberates throughout the film.” For any movie buff trying to grasp just how intense – and equally, how fragile – the filmmaking process can be, this book is a must-read.

P.S. Parts of The Conversations reminded me of something Dibakar Banerjee said during one of our meetings last year. A criticism directed at Banerjee’s Shanghai is that the two songs “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Imported Kamariya” were shot in a narrative-disrupting way that kowtowed to mainstream audiences but went against the general mood and look of the film; “Bharat Mata ki Jai” in particular has Emraan Hashmi’s Jogi practically stepping out of character to join the rambunctious dance. Dibakar told me that for the more minimalistic international version of the film, editor Namrata Rao cut the sequence to make it seem like Jogi was itching to join the dance but that he would probably not do so. “That was more effective than in the Indian cut, where he actually dances.” I haven’t seen the international version myself, but I imagine that the abrupt cut to the next scene leaves the viewer with an unresolved feeling that would fit very well with the overall tone of Shanghai.

[Also see: my Yahoo column about the relationship between film editing and performance. And related thoughts in this post about sound designer Resul Pookutty’s memoir]

In which I stalk elderly Bengali actors at the Apeejay Kolkata lit-fest

I enjoyed my time at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival very much – Maina Bhagat, Anjum Katyal and their team did a super job; the event was professional and extremely well-organised while also leaving a lot of room for warmth and personal attention. (This is a rare combination, for reasons that are sometimes beyond the control of fest organisers: the bigger a festival gets, the more impersonal it becomes; and if it remains too small or fund-strapped, a number of things at the organisational level can go wrong at the last minute.) Fine venues too, including the National Library and the Oxford Bookstore in Park Street, and the inauguration – which included a thoughtful speech on Indian film history by Shyam Benegal – was at the grandest setting one could have hoped for, the Victoria Memorial.

The session I moderated went off reasonably well, though given the many talking points and the number of panellists we could probably have done with an extra hour. (Then again, we could have done with an extra four hours, so no point in being too greedy.) The audience size and level of participation was just right too. Outside of the actual sessions, there were pleasing encounters with friends and new acquaintances. And I had a nice little chat with someone who played a notable part in two significant non-mainstream Hindi films of the mid-1980s before dropping so completely out of the movie world that you can barely find any mention of him on the internet today – but more on that, hopefully, in a subsequent post.

For now, I want to report that I shamelessly indulged my fanboy impulse by getting photos clicked with actors who played lead roles in two of my favourite Satyajit Ray films, Pratidwandi and Seemabaddha, more than 40 years ago.

First, the delightful Barun Chanda – in his 70s now but even more striking a presence than he was in his younger days – with whom I had two very warm conversations.

(At some point during the second meeting, we were both a little high and sentimental, and Mr Chanda may have sung a few lines of the song “Jeevan ke safar mein rahi / Milte hain bicchad jaane ko”. But don’t quote me.)

The second pic above came shortly after Barun’s dramatised reading with Tom Alter at the event “When Ghalib met Manto – Ek Guftagu”, centred on Rabishankar Bal’s book Dozakhnama (just translated into English by the tireless Arunava Sinha). Here’s a picture from that performance (Tom Alter as Ghalib on the left, Barun as Manto on the right):

And here is a photo from the Nemai Ghosh collection, taken on the set of Seemabaddha: the younger version of Barun, with Ray and Sharmila Tagore.

Second fanboy photo. I’ll probably regret revealing this in a public space, but Dhritiman Chatterjee’s Siddhartha in Pratidwandi is one of my big movie-fan crushes. Here are two pictures of him, one at the fest, the other from the film, in 1970.
 

(More notes from the fest in later posts)