Deuce! On tennis narratives and rivalries (and Steve Tignor's High Strung)

[Did a version of this piece for Forbes India. Here's the - slightly shorter - magazine version]

Nearly every time I hear or read (or participate in) a sports-related discussion, I’m reminded of a single-panel comic I saw once on a website. “A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers,” one stick figure says. “Let’s use them to build narratives!” replies his companion.

The descriptor at the bottom? “All Sports Commentary.”

Building narratives is something sports fans spend a lot of time doing; one can argue that sports-watching wouldn’t be much fun if we didn’t do it. We are all guilty of reading too much into statistics, or tossing off smug statements about this or that player. (Try counting the number of times you’ve heard the remark “He can’t handle pressure”, made about someone who has been ranked in the top 10 of a sport for years.) In cricket, when a strike bowler gets a star batsman out a few times – even if a couple of those dismissals were lucky – it becomes accepted that the former is “in the latter’s head”. We think we know what is going on in the minds of our favourite players, and we make whimsical connections between athletes who lived decades apart. Even the more balanced, self-aware viewers frequently succumb to the human tendency to see patterns.

Aiding us in this is the sports media, which specialises in creating stories with a dramatic arc (they’d be out of a job if they didn’t). Thus we regularly get eye-catching headlines about eras ending and batons passing rapidly from one champion to another – when in fact sports history is more often marked by slow, incremental changes. The careers of top players overlap for long periods; a champion may begin his decline or get overtaken, but then return for a last hurrah when no one expects it. When he entered the 2002 US Open, Pete Sampras had gone 33 tournaments without a title – the “Sampras Era” was well and truly over – but he won that trophy against all expectations. Jimmy Connors reached the semi-finals of the 1991 USO at age 39, eight years after his last Slam win and more than 15 years after his peak. Sporting narratives are rarely cut and dried.

All that said, it’s easy to see why so many tennis experts consider the 1981 US Open a historically significant tournament, and the end of an important era in the men’s game. It was the last major, or Slam, played by Bjorn Borg, who had been the dominant male player of the previous few years. Borg's rock star-like status had defined the first decade of the Open Era, a period when the sport’s class division came to an end and some drastic changes did take place. And his own career, unlike those of most athletes, ended on a genuinely dramatic note: shortly after losing the USO final to his younger rival and nemesis John McEnroe, he announced his retirement, aged only 25.

It’s no surprise, then, that Stephen Tignor – one of the best tennis writers at work today – has written a book that dwells on the 1981 USO as the culmination of a dynamic decade, as well as a harbinger of the decade to come. But in looking at the period through the prism of its most celebrated rivalry, Tignor’s High Strung also recognises that the friction between great competitors is what makes sporting contests so compelling.

The Borg-McEnroe story had every element you’d want from a dramatic storyline – not least an attention-grabbing contrast in personalities. Anyone familiar with Tignor’s work for Tennis magazine will know that he is a writer with a real head for nuance, but even he can’t resist titling the first chapter of his book “The Angel and the Brat”, and setting one legendary persona against another: Borg the Ice Man, under whose imperturbable surface burnt hidden fires, versus McEnroe the Superbrat, perpetually on edge, scourge of umpires and genteel viewers. Weaving in and out of this story is the other top player of the time, and the Open Era’s first blue-collar brat: the mercurial Connors, who had separate intriguing rivalries with Borg and McEnroe. But there’s no question who the two protagonists are.

There is a temptation in sports writing – particularly in individual sports – to cast major rivals as doppelgangers with an almost mystical bond; as players who form an ambivalent relationship as they come to realise that their names will always be linked together. Describing McEnroe’s pursuit of Borg, Tignor writes: “At its deepest psychological level the match was a case of a little brother trying to slay a big brother, an acolyte attempting to kill an idol.” McEnroe had looked up to Borg, holding him as a personal standard, ever since he had served as a ball-boy during one of the Swede’s earliest matches; for him, the only truly meaningful way to reach the apex of his sport was by conquering his idol.


This romantic view of sporting conflict has it that Borg’s sudden retirement was a case of a champion crushed by the emergence of a rival capable of beating him. But Borg’s exit was equally the result of well-chronicled factors in his personal life. Even before McEnroe became a serious threat, there had been signs that the reticent Swede was being worn down by the grind of the celebrity life; twenty-five may not have felt very young to someone who, making his Wimbledon debut at 17, had been assaulted by hundreds of screaming schoolgirls in the first manifestation of a decade-long phenomenon called the “Borgasm”. (See photo near the end of this post.)


Even so, the rivalry was majestic on sporting grounds alone. Borg’s frustratingly consistent, error-proof baseline play contrasted well with McEnroe’s fine touches and all-court artistry – they played two classic five-set Slam finals in 1980, and their head-to-head record would end at seven matches each. After McEnroe swiped the Wimbledon title from Borg, it seemed almost predestined that Borg would return the favour at the USO. But that didn’t happen. And so, Bjorn Borg – who still holds the record for the highest percentage of Slam matches won – walked away defeated from his last major. For the sport – which had the young future champion Ivan Lendl waiting in the wings, as well as a new era of graphite racquets to come – it was an end and a beginning.

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This month’s edition of the US Open marks exactly 30 years since that fateful tournament, and once again we narrative hounds are on the scent of a Big Story. The interim decades did see a number of intriguing rivalries in the men's game – most notably the ones between Sampras and Andre Agassi, and between Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker – but they were relatively low-intensity or confined to specific venues; both players were rarely at their absolute peaks at the same time, and one never quite had a sense of big things at stake for the sport. However, the past few years have seen a rivalry that in some ways has eclipsed even Borg-McEnroe. And there are signs that the era it defined is ending.


For nearly seven seasons – a vast stretch of time in an athletic sport – tennis lovers have been riveted by the saga of Switzerland’s Roger Federer and Spain’s Rafael Nadal. Federer has overtaken Pete Sampras’s Slam record and set new standards for tennis dominance, holding the number one spot for 237 consecutive weeks and reaching an incredible 23 straight semi-finals at majors (for comparison, Sampras never made more than four semis in a row). But even in his peak years, the one player the Swiss could never dominate was Nadal, whose defence-to-offence baseline play, mental tenacity and powerful top-spin seemed almost laboratory-created to break down Federer’s more subtle game. In Federer’s greatest year, 2006, he lost just five matches in all – and four of them were to Nadal, all in finals, and most of them on clay, the surface where the Spaniard was best able to exploit the advantages his left-handed forehand gave him against Federer’s one-handed backhand.

Between them, these two men won 23 of the 26 majors that were contested between the 2004 Wimbledon and the 2010 US Open, and they maintained a stranglehold on the top two ranking spots for most of this time – a duopoly unprecedented over any comparable period in tennis history. In just five years, they played each other in a record eight Slam finals, on all surfaces. (The leading rivals of the 1990s, Sampras and Agassi, contested five finals over a 12-year period.) And there have been irresistible parallels with Borg-McEnroe: Borg took his fifth straight Wimbledon title in 1980, winning a classic five-setter against the young McEnroe; Federer won his fifth straight Wimbledon in 2007, beating off a similar challenge from Nadal; and in 1981 and 2008 respectively, the younger man reversed the result.

There are other similarities. At one point, Tignor suggests that McEnroe was at his best when he was the hunter, not the hunted – when he had a player ahead of him, whom he could run down – and that he was never quite the same after Borg had retired. Many have said exactly the same thing about Nadal, who appeared more carefree when he was ranked number two than when he took over the top spot. Perhaps he needed the mountain of Federer ahead of him.

But sporting comparisons are never so facile, and there is simultaneously a counter-narrative that casts Nadal as the modern-day Borg. There is a thirty-year age difference between these two champions, almost to the day, and both were teenage superstars. Like Borg, Nadal is a master of the natural surfaces, a clay-court monster (he recently equalled the Swede’s record of winning six French Opens, on the surface where it’s hardest to sustain excellence over a period of time) who successfully adapted his game to grass. The words used by Time magazine to describe Borg in 1980 – “an inexorable force that is one part speed, one part topspin and two parts iron will” – read like a sketch of the Spaniard.

Neither man ever seemed as comfortable on hard or synthetic courts: Borg’s Waterloo was the US Open, where he finished as runner-up four times; until last year it seemed like the same would be true for Nadal, but he completed his career Slam by beating Serbia’s Novak Djokovic in the US Open final.

Now, however, the same Djokovic is threatening to end the Federer-Nadal era. He has utterly dominated the men’s tour this year, beating Nadal in five finals, and the events of the past few months have raised the question: is history being rewritten on the 1981 palimpsest? Nadal is now 25 – the same age that Borg was when he abruptly hung up his racquets. Could it be that Rafa now has a “McEnroe” of his own?

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Ultimately, these stories can be spun in many different ways. What’s more interesting is how tennis rivalries – and our perceptions of them – have altered in the past three decades. In the Internet age, sports fandom is more intense and in-your-face. Everyone has not just an opinion but a public forum to immediately express it in; fans around the world can access even the smallest tournaments and discuss matches “live” on message-boards. Everyone becomes a psychologist when it comes to analysing the behaviour of their favourite – and least favourite – sportsmen. Thus, Federer fans see him as humble while his dislikers proclaim with equal confidence that he is unbearably arrogant. Nadal’s on-court mannerisms such as the vigorous fist pumps and shouts of “Vamos!” are decried by those who don’t care for his playing style, but his fans point out that these self-motivating gestures are never directed at his opponents, and that he is well-behaved off the court.

Leading players have always been cast into images that are impossible to break out of. Borg, for instance, was mythologised as having a resting pulse rate that never rose above 35 – a claim that is about as accurate as the one that he had ice in his veins. High Strung indicates how this reputation developed (“a two-inch dip in his chin after a missed shot was the equivalent of a racquet hurled over the fence for most players ... if he stared for a not-absolutely-necessary extra split-second at a line judge after a close call, it had approximately the same effect as a 10-minute profanity-laced tirade from McEnroe”), but there are also vignettes that show another side to the player – such as a remarkable photograph of a young boy looking more shy (and dazed) than aloof as police keep hordes of those schoolgirls away from him.

Simplifications have also plagued the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic rivalries. Nadal has been labelled the unrelenting “bull” (zoopomorphizing a Spanish athlete thus is an ancient tradition in sports writing), while Federer is the ballet dancer with the smooth and seemingly effortless game. Djokovic’s name has only just entered the great-player discussions, but a few years ago he drew attention for his locker-room imitations of other players’ mannerisms, including Nadal’s butt-picking gesture. This writer (a big Nadal fan) thought them funny, but people with thinner skins saw the imitations as disrespectful. At any rate, the Serb’s reputation has been fixed for all time in some minds: as the Djoker.

There have, of course, been positive changes in our perceptions too. Tignor’s book reminds us that Borg and McEnroe were friends off-court, but for most fans the dominant image of their rivalry is that of an undemonstrative or even sullen handshake at the net. Today, however, there is so much more coverage – not just on official media but through fans’ reports, photographs and videos – that we are constantly exposed to the goofier sides of players. We see them fooling around at exhibitions, participating in musical sideshows on the eve of a tournament, or having a casual courtside chat shortly after a seemingly acrimonious match – and so it becomes more difficult to sustain notions of deep hatred between rivals.

It helps that today’s top players have consistently been fine sportsmen – or “good boys”. The mutual respect between Federer and Nadal in particular contrasts strongly with the acrimony that dotted some player relationships in the past (and their hugs at the net have even spawned homoerotic online fan fiction that would have had Connors and McEnroe barfing into their racquet bags – but I’ll let that pass for now).

At this point, though, tennis belongs to neither Nadal nor Federer. With a 53-1 win-loss record for the year (at the time of writing), Djokovic is the clear favourite to take the US Open title. If he does (which will mean winning three out of four majors in a calendar year – something Federer and Nadal have both done in recent times but such greats as Borg, McEnroe and Sampras never achieved), it will be possible to speak of 2011 as another major shift in the sport’s history.

And then the weighted random number generator will probably kick in again, and we’ll have a completely different narrative to follow next year.

Professor Shonku and the sceptical scientists

[From my Sunday Guardian column]

Leading scientists and science writers often express irritation with what they see as unscientific, “anything goes” sci-fi writing – stories where outlandish scenarios are postulated just for plot convenience, with no heed to the laws of physics and biology. For instance, J B S Haldane and Stephen Jay Gould have written separate essays on the subject of optimum size in living creatures – the fact that a large change in an animal’s size inevitably carries with it a change in shape or form (if the new species is to survive for any reasonable period). When a creature grows in length while retaining the same basic shape, its volume will grow much more rapidly than its surface area: if it becomes thrice as tall, the surface will increase nine times but the weight will increase 27 times. Because of this discrepancy, any abnormal growth would cause problems in body functions such as respiration and digestion.

In this context, both Haldane and Gould make references to fantasy literature. Commenting on the giants Pope and Pagan from an illustrated edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, Haldane good-naturedly points out that if those monsters were ten times taller than regular humans, their body weight would be a thousand times greater, and their thigh-bones would break. “This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.”

Gould is more cutting. The creators of many science-fiction stories seem to have no inkling of the relationship between size and shape, he remarks. The miniature people of films like Dr Cyclops and Bride of Frankenstein “behave just like their counterparts of normal dimensions – they fall off cliffs or down stairs with resounding thuds, they wield weapons and swim with Olympic agility…and giant insects continue to fly and walk up walls”. But actually, a two-inch person’s experience of the texture of water and air – and the sheer business of moving about – would be very different from ours. And the wings of an insect several feet long would never be able to carry the creature’s weight.

I suspect Haldane and Gould would not have approved of the adventures of Professor Shonku, one of Satyajit Ray’s most delightful literary creations – especially the story where Shonku travels to Norway and discovers that another professor has captured a number of famous people and reduced them to a tenth of their size. But while I respect the concerns of the real-life scientists, the Shonku universe never fails to enthrall me. Even if these stories don’t stand up to the most rigorous tests applied to sci-fi, there’s no question that they are high-quality fantasy writing, marrying imagination and intelligence. The professor’s globe-trotting also gives Ray a pretext to share information – in his usual non-didactic way – about other lands and cultures with his young readers.

The most recent English translation of these stories was The Diary of a Space Traveller, which has 11 stories translated by Gopa Majumdar (who has also done fine work on Ray’s Feluda tales) and one story translated by Ray himself. Included in these narratives are an expedition to Mars, an encounter with a Chinese hypnotist, a colour-changing sphere that turns out to be a tiny living planet, and reflections on what makes a robot truly lifelike. The writing throughout is gentle and humorous, and Shonku’s references to his many eye-popping inventions (an incomplete list is here) ensure there isn’t a dull moment. Anyone who patronisingly suggests that these tales are "only for children" would do well to note the eye for detail and characterisation, as when Shonku says of his simple-minded servant Prahlad:

Sometimes slow and foolish people can show more courage than clever ones, as it takes them longer to work out the need, or reason, to feel scared [...] I remember one particular occasion very well. A gecko had fallen from the ceiling on my bottle of bicornic acid and overturned it. I could do nothing but watch helplessly as the acid slowly began to spread towards a little heap of paradoxite powder. All my limbs went numb at the mere thought of what might happen if the acid made contact with the powder.

Prahlad entered the room at this crucial moment, saw me staring at the acid, grinned and coolly wiped it off with a towel.

Since most of the stories are told the form of diary entries written by Shonku, it frequently happens that the final entry in a story begins along the lines “I’m shaken by what happened yesterday – it’s a wonder I’m alive to relate this tale”, after which the professor describes the climax to his latest adventure. For the thrill-seeking reader, this is a comforting device – it promises excitement but also reassurance that all will turn out well. These tales are fine examples of the talent for fluid storytelling that served Ray so well in his films. I discovered Shonku for the first time as an adult; I envy my Bengali friends who grew up with him.

Lit for Life

Spreading the word about the Lit for Life conclave being organised in Chennai and Delhi to celebrate 20 years of the Hindu Literary Review. Here's the programme schedule for the Delhi leg of the event on September 25 at the India Habitat Centre - some promising panels on literature, film and theatre, including one where I'll be in conversation with director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra. The shortlist for the Hindu Literary Prize will also be announced later that evening.

Social wishers

The challenge used to be in making the effort to remember birthdays. Earlier, you had to make a note of it in a diary or embed it in memory. And you only reserved this privilege for the important few. Now, people know it’s your birthday because Facebook tells them. You can write a wish without having to look at the date. Coz, hey, Facebook will prompt you next year as well. With minimal effort, you can hammer out a few words and then get on with checking someone’s vacation photos, or comment on someone’s status.

Here's Absolute Lee on Facebook birthday wishes (and the changing nature of birthday-wishing in general). I once wrote a rant on the subject too. This year I went to Settings a few days before my b-day and changed the date, to avoid a repeat of last year's creepy outpouring of good wishes, mostly from people I don't know. (Since I use Facebook mostly to link to my writings/spread info about the books and not for personal stuff, I accept friend requests from pretty much anyone.) As I've grown older and greyer I've become a little more tolerant of birthday wishes in general, but I draw the line at being wished in a manner that reminds me of the spam ads in my Gmail inbox.

Orhan Pamuk on readers and writers

[Did this review for The Hindu earlier this year]

In one of the essays that make up The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk mentions that after reading memoirs and conversing with other novelists, he came to realise that “compared to other writers, I put more effort into planning before I put pen to paper...I take somewhat greater care to divide a book into sections and structure it”.

This tone of this revelation is not self-congratulatory – it’s the tone of critical analysis, based on the understanding that there are different approaches to writing, each with its own strengths and limitations. If Pamuk takes some pride in his meticulousness, there are also times when he appears to express a melancholy envy for authors who are less self-conscious and to whom writing comes more easily.

The Nobel laureate’s repeated use of the words “naive” and “sentimental” in this book derives from Friedrich Schiller’s 18th century essay “Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung”, which distinguished between two types of poets: the “naive” ones who write spontaneously and unselfconsciously, almost as if they are being dictated to by an unseen power; and the “sentimental” ones who are painfully self-aware, reflective, questioning everything around them, including the artifice of their own writing. Novelists can be similarly classified, Pamuk proposes.

But it would be a mistake to think of this divide as a clear-cut one: the creative process is a mysterious and multilayered thing, in which “deliberate effort” and “natural, unforced talent” constantly overlap with and inform each other. For instance, if you read Pamuk’s own novels, you’ll probably agree that much of his work has a formal, cerebral quality that can have a distancing effect (an early book, The New Life, is a good example of this). But in the best of his writing – Snow and My Name is Red come immediately to mind – this quality coexists with an easy knack for humour, fluid use of language and a sense that the author succeeded in fully immersing himself in the world of his creating.

Of course, a novel hardly exists in isolation; it acquires a new life when readers respond to it, and readers can be categorised as naive and sentimental too. Extreme examples of the former are the literal-minded sorts who always read a text as an autobiography or as a disguised chronicle of the author’s experiences; on the other hand, there are completely sentimental-reflective readers who think all texts are constructs and fictions. “I must warn you to keep away from [both types of] people, because they are immune to the joys of reading novels,” writes Pamuk, tongue firmly in cheek. But somewhere between these two extremes lies the ideal reader, and as you turn the pages of The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist you begin to think that Pamuk himself must be very close to being one such.

Among the many pleasures of reading a good novelist’s reflections on his art is the pleasure of discovering that this writer is himself a passionate and opinionated reader, and that he responds to certain books and authors in the same way as “ordinary” readers do. Pamuk's descriptions of the effect that his favourite novels have had on him – “sometimes twilight would pervade and cover everything, the whole universe would become a single emotion and a single style” – are eloquent and moving. He uses great works of literature like Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick to illustrate important aspects of the reading and writing process (everyone, from Homer through Cervantes to Naipaul, is grist to his mill) and reflects on the novelist’s use of the tools available to him – character, plot, time and objects. What operations does the mind perform while we read, he asks. How do novels provide a rich second life for their readers? He also writes – somewhat enigmatically, not always with clarity – about the “secret centre” that a great novel should have, which the reader should – consciously or unconsciously – be seeking.

In such passages, some of Pamuk’s reflections can be arcane, especially if your level of engagement with literature isn’t as intense as his. But it’s a measure of the scope of this book that it allows this highbrow writer to show a charmingly down-to-earth side – when, for example, he compares the experience of following a soccer game on radio to reading a novel and transforming the writer’s words into mental pictures; or when he remarks that a reader like him has no hope of finding any kind of accessible meaning in James Joyce’s notoriously difficult novel Finnegan’s Wake.

Speaking of the artistic calling that he almost took up before becoming a full-time writer, Pamuk admits, “I have always felt more childlike and naive when I paint, and more adult and sentimental when I write novels.” It was as if – he says in a very revealing passage – he wrote novels only with his intellect, but produced paintings solely with his talent. However, he also reflects that with age and experience, he may have found “the equilibrium between the naive novelist and the sentimental novelist within me”. His best novels are certainly a testament to this, and The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist is a good companion piece to them, a window into the mind of a very special writer and reader.

Tennis, then and now

With the US Open beginning this week, the latest issue of Forbes India has an essay I've written about men's tennis - it's a comparison of the major rivalries at the seminal 1981 US Open (Bjorn Borg's final Slam) with the ones that we see today, 30 years later, as well as a comment on how sporting narratives get written, fandom then and now, and the mythologising of top players. I've also touched on Steve Tignor's fine book High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and the Untold Story of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry.

Will only be able to put the piece on the blog after 10 days (and it will also be on the Forbes India website then), but if you're interested in reading it now do pick up the magazine.

(Also coming up soon: a piece about Rafael Nadal's new autobiography)

Shades of Ray: the restored Jalsaghar

One of my Bengali friends tells me that when he watches a Satyajit Ray film on DVD with his non-Bengali wife, it takes them twice the movie’s running time to get through it. “I have to hit Pause every two minutes just to explain the finer points of a dialogue that was mangled by the subtitles.”

Wretched subtitling on home-grown DVDs is one among many reasons to welcome the fine new Criterion release of Ray’s 1958 classic Jalsaghar (The Music Room), about a music-loving zamindar living his last days alone in his decrepit palace as the world changes around him. Another reason is the film’s tremendous visual and aural beauty, something I could fully appreciate only when I saw it on this restored print – much superior to the faded, scratch-ridden TV version that assailed my senses a few years ago.

Right from the opening-credits shot of an ominously swaying chandelier (which will be an important part of the film’s mise-en-scene), Ray’s distinct visual sense and Subrata Mitra’s camerawork draw us into a world of grandeur lost and briefly regained. There are many exquisite shots, such as the one of the protagonist, Biswambhar Roy, gazing into an unpolished mirror, wiping the dust away with a puzzled expression, almost as if wondering if the great days of his past were an elaborate dream. Or the plaintive shot of him leaning on his stick, watching a lonely elephant in the distance. The new transfer makes these images vivid, perhaps bringing them close to the images Ray had in his head when he set about conceptualising the film. And the audio restoration is just as important, for Jalsaghar’s background score is by Ustad Vilayat Khan, and the film contains performances by such classical-music doyens as Begum Akhtar and Wahid Khan as well as a brief appearance by Bismillah Khan. A story about a magnificent, all-consuming obsession for music deserves nothing less.

This is a film about hubris and decay - classic themes of great drama - and about a society in transition, but at a more intimate level it’s the story of an individual falling into madness. Ray’s attitude towards the feudal system was not an approving one, and you can’t imagine him being over-sympathetic towards his tragic lead character - in fact, he had some reservations about Vilayat Khan’s score because it seemed to romanticise the zamindar. But Biswambhar Roy isn’t merely a representation of an archaic, hyper-privileged way of life that is now crumbling into the sand like Ozymandias’s statue: he is also a melancholy old man who has lost his family, most of his possessions and his status, and who is watching the only world he ever knew becoming irrelevant. Whatever you think of the class he belongs to, you can’t help feel for him on some level, and Chhabi Biswas’s magnificent performance, along with the film's use of music (and our perception that this haughty landlord was a genuine patron of art and artistes) makes us emotionally ambivalent towards Roy.

This friction propels the film. On one of the extras on the DVD package, director Mira Nair observes that given her own utter lack of interest in royalty, it’s remarkable how much she felt for the central character. I know what she means.
 

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Jalsaghar is also a key work in the context of Ray’s career: made shortly after the first two entries in the Apu trilogy, it came at an early stage in the forming of his reputation, both in and outside India. At that time, based on Pather Panchali and Aparajito, it was possible to pigeonhole him as a director who would operate in the mode of documentary-like minimalism; an objective chronicler rather than a stylist. (Hard as it is to imagine, during the earliest days of his career, some Western critics assumed that he came from a rural, uneducated background and that Pather Panchali, with its village setting, was an autobiographical work! Even today, some movie buffs are largely unaware of the rich vein of fantasy in his family background, and of his children’s films like Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Sonar Kella.)

But it’s clear that from the start, Ray intended Jalsaghar to be a film of visual flourishes. In an essay in Our Films, Their Films, he admitted that having won an award at Cannes shortly before making this movie, he allowed himself the indulgence of a crane for overhead shots (an accident with the bulky equipment would lead to the death of a coolie, causing Ray immense regret; clearly, he lacked Werner Herzog’s stoicism when it came to the casualties of filmmaking!). There are carefully composed shots which draw attention to themselves – the chandelier reflected in a glass, a spider scuttling across a portrait, a view of a stormy sky seen through the windows of the music room – as well as zooms and tracks that stress the contrast between the zamindar’s past glory and the delusions that now crowd his mind. One constantly gets the impression of a director trying to use the camera in inventive ways.

Perhaps this might explain why Jalsaghar was a bit of a puzzle to its initial audiences (who had formed their own ideas about the “type” of director Ray was going to be) and why it took relatively long to be rediscovered and appreciated. But happily it’s here to stay now, and I think it’s close to the first rung of his work.

P.S. This will sound whimsical, but Jalsaghar’s opening-credit sequence, with the camera moving ever closer towards that chandelier, and Vilayat Khan’s score becoming increasingly urgent, reminds me – of all things – of the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween, with the glowing pumpkin pulling us towards it. Yes, I know I have a weird mind. But just wait till I write that thesis about how both the chandelier and the pumpkin are deceptive facades, eventually revealed to be hollow, and symbolic of the inner emptiness of the central characters...

[Some earlier posts on Ray: Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Speaking of Films, Beyond the World of Apu, Charulata]