PoV: the Amitabh cameos

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

Notes on Shor in the City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No newts are good news: on Karel Čapek’s great satire

[Did a version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

Isaac Asimov is the writer you immediately think of when you hear the word “robot”, but Asimov was barely out of his diapers when the word was first used in a literary work – by the Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It comes from “robota” which means mundane labour of the sort that’s better suited to machines than to thinking human beings, and it’s central to one of the big themes of Čapek’s writing – mass production as a vessel for dehumanisation.

Čapek's 1936 novel War with the Newts can be categorised as belonging to the still-nascent genre of science fiction, but it’s also one of the most incisive political satires I’ve read. This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and even to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways.

Soon secret temples for salamander worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches start bathing in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work, even creating a syndicate for huge engineering projects that will link continents and supposedly create a Utopia on earth. This in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; a German doctor proclaims the “ur-original German Salamanders” to be racially purer than other newts, an obvious reference to political developments of the time.

War with the Newts is narrated mainly in the third person, and in the style of anthropological reportage, but there are many tonal shifts and asides: from transcripts of newspaper clippings to a first-person account of the horrendous experiments conducted on the newts to a hilarious series of quotes from public figures of the time. (“They certainly haven’t got a soul. In this, they agree with men – G B Shaw”. “We can learn a lot from them, especially for swimming long distances – Johnny Weissmuller”.) The longest and most ambitious chapter “Along the Steps of Civilisation” has footnotes that are so elaborate they frequently take up most of the space on the page!

This is a very funny book in parts, and I have to admit that the humour was my first point of engagement with it (don’t miss the use of stream-of-consciousness in the chapter where a shallow young man named Abe - the son of a rich movie magnate - and his narcissistic girlfriend Li encounter the semi-literate newts on a beach). But it's also a far-reaching novel of ideas, a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others, the whimsical ways in which our civilisation – with its many differentiated races, countries, classes and communities – has been organised, and our complete disregard for (or inability to see) the lessons of history.

“Look here, Bellomy,” I said to him, “You are a decent kind of man, a gentleman as one says. Doesn’t it go sometimes against the grain to earn your living from what in actual fact is downright slavery?”

Bellomy shrugged his shoulders. “Newts are newts,” he grunted evasively.

“Two hundred years ago they used to say Negroes are Negroes.”

“And wasn’t it true?” said Bellomy. “Check!”

I lost that game. It suddenly struck me that every move in chess was old and had already been played by someone. Perhaps our history has already been played too, and we shift our figures with the same moves to the same checks as in times long past. It is quite likely that just such a decent and reserved Bellomy once rounded up Negroes on the Ivory Coast, and shipped them out to Haiti or to Louisiana, letting them peg out in the steerage. He didn’t think anything wrong with it then, that Bellomy. Bellomy never thinks anything wrong. That’s why he’s incorrigible.

As you can imagine, some of the content is polemical. I don’t think Čapek is attacking any single political, economic or social system (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for example), but War with the Newts can certainly be read as a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become over time. In one significant chapter, a philosopher named Wolf Meynert makes the cynical suggestion that heterogeneity is not conducive to happiness.

Nations, professions, classes cannot live together permanently without crowding in upon each other, getting in each other’s way to the point of suffocation. Either live for ever apart – something that would only be possible if the world were big enough – or in opposition, in a struggle for life and death. [...] We have created a fiction of mankind which includes us and “the rest” in some sort of imaginary higher unity ... It was magnanimous conceit. And for this supreme idealism the human race will now pay with its inexorable disintegration.

The range of ideas covered in this book is dizzying, and difficult to process in a single reading; so sharp and persuasive is Čapek’s examination of the human condition that when hostilities finally break out between the competing species and the Chief Salamander addresses humans with the words “Hello, you men. You will work with us in demolishing your world. Thank you”, it almost seems like a reasonable request. If human beings are diabolical enough to take an innocuous creature and reshape it in their own image – well, they may as well face up to the unpleasant results.

**** 

Speaking of diabolical, the following passage put me in mind of a generation that thinks and writes in SMS/Twitter jargon, as well as the general lack of regard for grammar that one sees even in newspapers today:

Their linguistic abilities showed strange shortcomings...it was with difficulty that they could pronounce long, polysyllabic words, and they attempted to reduce them to a single syllable, which they uttered sharply and with something of a croak...In their mouths every language underwent a characteristic change, and somehow became rationalised into its simplest and most rudimentary form. It is a point worth consideration that their neologisms, their pronunciation and grammatical simplicity were picked up rapidly, partly by the human wreckage at the ports, partly by the so-called better society, and from there these modes of expression spread to the daily Press and soon became general...

P.S. The Czech have a cinematic tradition of low-key satires or allegories, including such fine films as Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball and Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. Here’s an old post I wrote on the latter. And here's a post about John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids, a "logical fantasy" that's similar to War with the Newts in some ways.

Ibn-e Safi's Jasoosi Duniya, now in English

I’ve been relishing Blaft’s English translations of four “Jasoosi Duniya” thrillers by the legendary Urdu novelist Ibn-e Safi. Will be writing a longer piece about these books soon, but briefly: the central figures in the series are the unflappable crime-fighter Colonel Faridi and his assistant Captain Hameed. The world they inhabit is an intriguing one – though Ibn-e Safi was living in pre-Partition India when he began the series (and in Karachi when he wrote these four books in the mid-1950s), the setting is highly westernised in many ways, with the action moving between posh nightclubs and harbours, skating rinks, the hillock-and-cave-ridden “Fun Island”, and so on. Notorious international criminals flit in and out of sight, and the original cover art features blonde women in flouncy skirts and archers who appear modelled on Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.

Much of the likeability of these novels comes from the Hameed character who, though a resourceful sleuth when the stakes are high, is also a practical joker with a strange and inappropriate sense of humour. Some of his antics put me in mind of Amar Ayyar, the prince of tricksters in the Hamzanama.

At one point we are informed, quite casually, that Hameed has a pet goat named Bhagra Khan, whom he takes for long drives in Colonel Faridi’s air-conditioned Lincoln. Upon which I present you with the following mini-excerpts:

It so happened that around this time, pet billy goats had become very fashionable and the city was teeming with them. Many college students were now keeping billy goats, and they would walk them on the streets, equipped with all the latest modern accessories for billy goat keepers [...] Many respectable persons gave up wearing ties and felt hats, because they were simply unable to cope with the stylish ties and felt hats sported by the billy goats [...] Students would insist that their goats had just as much right to enjoy the silver-screen antics of Raj Kapoor as they did; that the goats were just as interested in chewing up and regurgitating the serious social messages addressed in these films.

[...] Hameed was of the opinion that if everybody in the world tried to study the newspaper with such concentration, at least half of them would go mad. Therefore, instead of reading the newspaper, he spent his mornings reciting ghazals to his billy goat, and lecturing it on progress and morals.

The critic and writer Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has done an excellent translating job. You get a sense of the spirit in which the original novels were written (and the spirit in which they must have been received by their readers), but these read like stories freshly written in English - transcreations rather than laborious sentence-by-sentence translations. (At the Delhi launch recently, Faruqi mentioned that he was reluctant to do the translations when Blaft first approached him, "because these books are so steeped in the local idiom and culture". He also made the very dispiriting proclamation that he wouldn't have the time to translate any more of the novels. Hope he changes his mind.)

More on the series soon. Meanwhile, here are some earlier posts about Blaft titles: Tamil pulp fiction, Tamil folk-tales, Kumari Loves a Monster. And here's a fine website on Ibn-e Safi's life and work.

"An essential moment, beyond all the formal planning"

[The full version of my Yahoo! film column for this week]

A few days ago I saw an old Alfred Hitchcock interview in a documentary titled “The Men who Made the Movies”. Among other things, the Master discusses his method of preparing such sequences as the shower killing – made up of 70 “pieces of film” – in Psycho.

“It has to be written out on paper,” he says, “You can’t just walk on to the set ... well, you can if you want to...” (disdainful shrug) “... but I prefer to do it this way. However tiny and however short the pieces of film are, they should be written down just in the same way as a composer writes down those little black dots from which we get beautiful sound.”

As you can tell, Hitchcock was fussy about getting a film ready long before the actual shoot took place – which makes sense of his famous remark that he never felt the need to look into the camera on the sets, and that he often felt bored and distracted during the actual filming. “I almost wish I didn’t have to go to the set and shoot the film, because from a creative point of view one has gone through that process beforehand... by the time the script has been finished, I know every shot and every angle by heart.”

In this light it’s notable that one of Hitchcock’s greatest champions, the critic Robin Wood, admitted late in his life that for all their artistry, Hitchcock’s movies “went dead” on him more easily (when he re-watched them for the umpteenth time) than, say, the movies of Howard Hawks, who was much more open to improvising with his actors and crew.

But by that logic, Victor Erice’s 1972 Spanish film El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) should be dead on arrival; this is a movie made so meticulously and self-consciously – with so much attention to the composition of nearly every frame – that it makes Hitchcock’s work seem laidback in comparison. While The Spirit of the Beehive is a very beautiful film to look at (especially in the Criterion Collection transfer), it also has a cold and detached quality that makes it easier to admire from a distance than to take to one’s heart.

Its narrative is a series of discrete episodes about the many terrors and wonders of childhood – beginning with a little girl’s discovery of cinema. In a makeshift screening room in her small village, six-year-old Ana watches the 1931 Frankenstein along with other children. “I would advise you not to take the film too seriously,” director James Whale warns the audience in the pre-credits introduction, but Ana is traumatised by what she sees– and her elder sister Isabel makes it worse by telling her the monster really exists.

Later, they play morbid games in an empty house that seems much too large for their small family. During a stroll in the forest, their father – a beekeeper – warns them about the dangers of poisonous mushrooms. And in one of the film’s most arresting vignettes, Ana and Isabel visit the solitary railway track that runs near their village and watch, petrified, as a large black train passes by, billowing smoke. (The almost primeval appeal of the locomotive is a reminder that one of the first true movie “monsters” was the Lumiere Brothers train that seemed to head straight towards a startled audience. But watching this scene, I also recalled another great movie moment that involved two fascinated children waiting to see a train – in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.)

The Spirit of the Beehive is a slow-paced film and Erice exercises tight control over his mise-en-scene and his symbolism. (For example, the bees – operating with mechanical precision – can be seen as representing an efficient yet emotionless society; Spain was under Franco's dictatorship at the time.) When I first watched it, it took me a while to understand the principal relationships, even though the family consists of just four people: the beekeeper, his wife and the two little girls. Soon I realised that this was because Erice deliberately avoids showing all the family members together, even when they are in the same room. One vivid scene with the four of them eating together at the dining table, but no two of them ever in the same frame, has the remoteness of the spacecraft scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey – it creates a distancing effect that’s central to the story.

And yet, this most carefully planned of films contains a single spontaneous shot, lasting just a couple of seconds, that shows us the precise moment when little Ana’s interior world becomes filled with dread. She is watching the scene in Frankenstein where a little girl offers a flower to Boris Karloff’s monster. Completely immersed, Ana leans forward slightly and moves her head for a better look; her mouth opens a touch.

How pleasing it is to learn that this wasn’t a rehearsed scene. Luis Cuadrado, the cinematographer of Spirit of the Beehive, was sitting on the floor in front of his young performer, holding the camera in his hand (and handheld shots are not the norm in this film!), recording her expression as she really watched Frankenstein for the first time. What he captured was a completely artless reaction: by all accounts, the real-life Ana Torrent (who played Ana) was just as affected by Karloff’s monster as her character was supposed to be, and the experience of shooting The Spirit of the Beehive remained a disturbing memory for the actress well into adulthood. In other words, that shot is a meeting point between film as a medium for fictional narrative and film as a record of reality.

In the documentary “The Footprints of a Spirit”, included as an Extra on the Criterion DVD, Erice says:

“It’s such a premeditated film, but what I consider the most essential moment in it goes beyond all that formal planning. It’s unrepeatable, something that cannot be directed. That’s the wonder and the paradox of cinema – it’s the best moment I’ve ever captured on film.”

Coming from a director who was known for his fastidiousness, I find this admission both moving and illuminating. It’s almost as if one of those worker bees broke away from its hive-mates for an instant and danced a little jig by itself, before getting back to its regimented work.

P.S. For all of Hitchcock’s careful pre-planning - and his occasional treatment of actors as chess pieces - it would be naive to imagine that his movies contained no improvisations or on-the-set additions. Watch the intense sequence in Psycho where Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is interrogated by Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) and you have a classic example of two Method actors improvising as they go along, playing off each other’s reactions in a way no director could possibly have foreseen. And despite Hitchcock’s supercilious attitude to actors (“they ought to be treated as cattle”), Perkins has said that the director was very open to his suggestions, such as the idea of having the nervous Norman perpetually chewing candy. Perhaps old Hitch wasn’t as averse to film sets as he would have us believe.

A girl, a monster and an unrehearsed shot

In the Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive, a little girl discovers something about cinema...and watching her, so do we. My latest Persistence of Vision column is here.

They also served: Navin Nischol, Farley Granger

The past month has seen the deaths of many film performers, most famously Elizabeth Taylor, who was everyone’s idea of what a Movie Star should be: someone who is the natural centre of every frame she appears in. Stories about Taylor’s screen presence – right from the time she was a little girl, in films like National Velvet – are the stuff of legend, and her most high-profile film as an adult, the bloated, forever-in-the-making Cleopatra, often seemed to be more about the actress and the media carnival surrounding her than about the Egyptian queen.
 
But two honourable “sideshow performers” also left us recently: one was Navin Nischol, who had a short stint as a leading man in the early 1970s – even playing the inconspicuous hero in the film Parwana, where Amitabh Bachchan had the (more interesting) negative role. [The poster on the left tells a story: Amitabh - looking nothing like he did in Parwana - occupies centrestage, and there is even space for Shatrughan Sinha, who made a guest appearance in the film. But Nischol, the hero, is missing.] The other was the American Farley Granger, a good-looking man (with somewhat exotic and effete features by classical Hollywood standards) and a competent actor if well-cast and directed, but best remembered today for films that didn’t rest on his shoulders.

The “Best Farley Granger Film” (defined as a judicious balance between the importance of his role, the quality of his performance and the overall quality of the film itself) is probably Nicholas Ray’s film noir They Live By Night, about a couple on the run from the law. And Granger did play lead in a couple of other notable movies, such as Luchino Visconti’s Senso. But the two best-known films he appeared in were directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and in both he was an effective second fiddle. In Rope (famous for Hitchcock’s use of long unbroken takes), he was the more passive of two young men who commit a murder “for kicks”, and in Strangers on a Train he was the limp-wristed Guy Haines (just your regular Guy) – the perfect foil and chump for the film’s charismatic bad boy Bruno. In my view, both films benefit from his casting: Strangers on a Train is particularly disturbing and effective because the villain is more interesting than the hero, and because Granger isn’t the strong Hollywood leading man who takes control of proceedings and compels the viewer to root for him.

It’s harder to make something out of Nischol’s older movies. To be honest, I don’t even remember most of them well: apart from Parwana, there was the atmospheric Dhund – where Danny Denzongpa stole the show as a sadistic, wheelchair-bound murder victim(!) – and the Ramsay Brothers’ quasi-horror movie Hotel. By the 1980s, it was more typical for Nischol to be cast in a 10-minute part as "Doctor" in a star-studded film like The Burning Train (a.k.a. The Turning Brain). 

Still, he did have one intriguing late-career role in Nagesh Kukunoor’s amusing but trite Bollywood Calling, about an American actor coming to India and getting involved with an assembly-line Bollywood production. Here, he played an ageing, megalomaniacal superstar named Manu Kapoor, pointedly addressed only as Manu-ji by the fawners around him, and there was something poignant about this casting – for Manu was exactly the kind of star that Nischol never became in real life (and the kind of star that the man who played a supporting role in Parwana DID become).

Though star power has been central to cinema’s mass popularity almost from the beginning, the movies could scarcely get by without their side-heroes: the comic foils whose double takes could make the lead comedian look even funnier; the supporting actors who tried to be stars but fell back into stock character roles; the players who managed leading parts in B-movies but never quite crossed over to the mainstream. Granger and Nischol are among the countless performers who shone for a brief period (even developing small cult followings along the way) and then faded, or turned to smaller roles or television shows. Their careers are a reminder of the inscrutable nature of movie stardom – how, for reasons beyond our full understanding, one personality might light a spark with an audience in a particular place and time while another simply doesn’t.