Dead writers' society: on Howard Jacobson's Zoo Time

In another few days, every town and street corner will be hosting a Big Literature Festival. It is natural then, around this time of year, to hear murmurings about smug, back-patting, liquor-guzzling intellectuals. Along with some less-than-tasteful suggestions: it may be remarked, for instance, that a giant Godzilla foot squelching down on the Jaipur festival lawns on a weekend evening would wipe out our literary community in one swell foop. But notably, most such comments come from insiders themselves and therefore have a certain amount of wistful self-loathing built into them – the last time I heard the Godzilla one, it was said at Jaipur on a weekend evening, and by someone who is himself sometimes regarded as being part of this putative “community”. (He, of course, denies it vigorously. He also denies being the present writer.)

Creatively executed, such self-commentaries – litterateurs sniffing or whining about litterateurs – can be a form of meta-fiction, and meta-fiction is all the rage these days. Much contemporary literature is explicitly about writers and writing, giving the impression that the Novel is not so much dead as trapped in a giant hall of mirrors. Self-reflexive writing of this sort can become tedious (witness the present column), but heading into December I found it almost comforting to read Howard Jacobson’s new novel Zoo Time, with its comically apocalyptic vision of the publishing world – a vision that almost makes our lit-fest and book-launch season seem stable and sane.

Here are some of the things that happen in Zoo Time’s hysterical universe. A publisher shoots himself in the mouth shortly after a meal with an author (during which they talked about a literary world forever altered by Twitter, blogs and vampire-replete bestsellers). Terrified agents lock themselves in lavatories “rather than have a manuscript handed to them personally like a subpoena”, and one of them is lost on the Hindu Kush with a manuscript in his backpack. (“Had Quinton lost his bearings and gone stumbling through the ice with my manuscript wrapped around him for insulation, or had the novel itself sent him mad? The question, to tell the truth, wasn’t much discussed. A literary agent going missing was much too common an occurrence to attract speculation.”) The marriage of the book’s narrator – Guy Ableman, author of a novel titled “Who Gives a Monkey’s?” – is in trouble, partly because the sound of his writing drives his wife to madness. (“But so did the sound of my not writing.”)

In this strangely familiar dystopia, literary parties are like funeral wakes (“except that at a wake there’d have been more to drink, and fuller sandwiches”) and a car exhaust backfiring might cause passersby to wonder if another publisher had taken his life within their earshot. The few remaining readers quiver with rage whenever they meet a writer (“was it because reading as a civilised activity was over that the last people doing it were reduced to such fury? Was this the final paroxysm before expiry?”) and are actively hostile in their dissection of his “berk” (no one says “book” anymore, it's too much effort). The best chance a young author has of producing a hit is to write a memoir about losing his sight when his adoptive mother’s silicone breasts exploded in his face.

Beyond all these things, Zoo Time’s threadbare “plot” is about the deep attraction Ableman feels for his wife’s mother Poppy, but he uses a literary analogy to describe even this: is sleeping with your mother-in-law like stealing your own book? Throughout, he is a self-conscious wordsmith in the act of constructing his own story, correcting himself mid-sentence, giving us glimpses – whether reliable or not – of how his real life intersects with his fiction. And in doing this, Jacobson’s novel asks that pertinent question: should a writer exist (for the reader) beyond the page? It is a question that was raised memorably in Jaipur two years ago, when J M Coetzee – among the last of the truly taciturn big-name authors – read a long extract from his work but didn’t otherwise say a word. Jacobson may or may not have had Coetzee in mind when he writes about a Nobel-winning Dutch author who simply sat on the stage in front of his festival audience: “So the hour would have passed, each staring at the other in silence, had someone not thought of showing slides of the bridges of Amsterdam. When it was over they gave him a standing ovation.”

Zoo Time is among the most tongue-in-cheek doomsday books I have read. It is about the long-awaited demise of writing and reading (and therefore about the end of everything, since it is narrated by a man obsessed with these things), but it is also a reminder that good meta-fiction can help keep literature alive in the very process of sounding its death-knell. If writers absolutely have to write solipsistic books about writing (and really, one wishes they wouldn’t), this is a fine way to do it. I do hope though that Jacobson is careful in choosing what passages to read at his (no doubt many) impending appearances in clubby literary festivals.

Perhaps the one that begins thus?

This is when you know you’re in deep shit as a writer – when the heroes of your novels are novelists worrying that the heroes of their novels are novelists who know they’re in deep shit... 

[Did a version of this for Business Standard's Eye Culture column]

New directions, new treatments (notes on some 2012 movies)

[Did this round-up piece for Democratic World magazine – a look at how some of the better Hindi films of the past year dealt with complexities of life in India]

There is a brief moment in one of the best Hindi films of 2012, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar, that almost cries out for subtextual analysis. The title character – once an upbeat army man and athlete proudly serving his country, but now a baaghi driven to a life outside the law – is nearing the end of his personal race. This section of the story is set in 1980, and on a transistor belonging to the policemen pursuing Paan Singh we hear a news item about the death of the actress Nargis. Given the film’s larger themes, it is reasonable to wonder if this scene is an allusion to Nargis’s most famous role: does it reflect the end of the Mother India ideal for the film’s embittered protagonist?

If so, it would be in keeping with this film’s subtle, plaintive tone. Though Paan Singh Tomar is based on a real-life tale that has the resonance of a Shakespearean tragedy, it doesn’t strain self-consciously to be one. It consistently stays in the moment, and even scenes such as the one where our hero remarks that apart from the Army everyone in the country is a thief, or the one where he says “Desh ke liye faltu bhaage hum?” when a policeman tosses his medals away, are handled with understatement – not least thanks to Irfan Khan’s brilliantly measured performance.
 
Our storytelling registers have been changing in small ways. Though mainstream Hindi cinema has always had narratives about the disaffection of the wronged individual with the System, they tended to be presented in highly dramatic terms, accompanied by flashes of lightning and over-expository declaiming. In contrast, some of the better, more provocative Hindi films of 2012 have treated such subjects as patriotism, national integration and the Idea of India with restraint as well as imagination.
 
If Dhulia’s film tells the story of an individual and his times, the claustrophobic gloom of Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai gives expression to a number of different stories – adding up to a tightly knit comment on the aspirations and power struggles that brush against each other in a many-tiered society. (The film’s protagonists include a lower-class man who fantasises about a job where he might one day get to wear a tie as well as a privileged man in a high-profile job who loosens his own tie every opportunity he gets; there are other such polarities and contrasts in the story too.) In some ways, Shanghai is a very “non-Bollywood” film. It has the self-consciously stygian look of a contemporary noir movie – it even makes Mumbai’s busy nightlife seem sinister in a way that has rarely been achieved in our cinema before. And it is adapted from a Greek novel, Z, which was about a very specific political context. But Banerjee and his co-writer Urmi Juvekar did a thoughtful job of fitting it to the contemporary Indian situation, depicting a world where where underprivileged people unwittingly participate in their own exploitation, and the rich indulge the hubris of yanking the country into the First World without looking at its ground realities.

Trying to keep your equilibrium, turning your face away from injustice until your conscience no longer lets you, and then realising that none of it may matter anyway...these are repeated motifs here. At the film's end the bureaucrat Krishnan (played by Abhay Deol) does something that in a more simple-minded story might have resulted in the summary cleaning up of the political order, but here we see that nothing has really changed. So, is Shanghai a cynical film? There is no easy answer. Banerjee himself sees it as an ode to individual conscience in a harsh world, while Juvekar told me during a recent conversation that they didn’t want to tie up loose ends and give the audience any false comfort. No wonder the film, even as it was widely acclaimed, left so many viewers with an uncomfortable, unresolved feeling.

Some other major films don’t deal explicitly with “national issues”, but they do reflect an increasing willingness by Bollywood to visit places that are not often charted by Hindi cinema. The authenticity of the hinterland depiction in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur has been called into question, but there is no doubting the film’s ability to establish the mood of a particular setting, and to reexamine stereotypes; while the bulk of the action is in Dhanbad, there are also two scenes set in Varanasi, revealing – with typical Kashyapian humour – an incongruously sinister side to one of our holiest towns. Meanwhile, Sujoy Ghosh’s fine thriller Kahaani – in which a pregnant woman comes up against a calculating Intelligence Bureau as she tries to find her missing husband – made excellent, atypical use of Kolkata as a setting, and even provided solid roles to the popular Bengali actors Parambrata Chatterjee and Saswata Chatterjee (as well as a supporting part for the veteran Dhritaman Chatterjee, who was such an arresting presence 40 years ago in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi). This is not something that would have happened in a mainstream Hindi movie a few years ago.

Bengali characters also featured in cute takes on inter-community relationships in two of the year’s warmest “little” films. In a charming scene in Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor, a Bengali girl hums a few notes of Rabindrasangeet to her Punjabi boyfriend; they are in a car somewhere between Lajpat Nagar and Chittaranjan Park (two south Delhi colonies located near each other in physical space, but traditionally the bastions of very different communities), and the scene is an important bonding moment in a romance between two people who hail from different universes. There is an interestingly similar moment near the end of Sameer Sharma’s Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, where a young Punjabi man serenades his lover with a Bangla song in the presence of his startled family, who can’t even make sense of what they are hearing. The scene feels a bit like cultural stereotyping at first (“Punjabis masculine, Bengalis effeminate”) but the film is clearly on the side of the young lovers, so it works well.

In any case, both Vicky Donor and Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana simultaneously indulge and overturn conventional tropes of “Punjabiyat”, encouraging us to see their people as individuals - capable of personal growth - rather than as representations of groups, permanently fixed in a way of life and thought. And ultimately perhaps that is the best way to make a film about the many colliding realities of a complex country. It's a lesson Bollywood has shown itself willing to learn in the past 12 months.

[Some longer posts about these films: Paan Singh Tomar, Gangs of Wasseypur, Kahaani, Vicky Donor]

By Brakhage (and others)

Have just come off two of the intensest writing months I've had in the past 5-6 years. Lots of multi-tasking (not something I'm adept at), two separate 4,000-word pieces involving Satyajit Ray (for different publications, of course), another much longer piece that I somehow completed in a six-day frenzy (having first taken a week to transcribe notes that added up to well over 30,000 words), plus of course the knickknacks – reviews, columns etc – that keep getting posted here. (Note: you know things have changed from five years ago when you start thinking of a 1,000-word review that takes hours to write as a “knickknack”.)

Anyway, this has been a convoluted way of justifying my latest extravagance: 690 minutes of Stan Brakhage films, as presented by Criterion:

Got the DVDs today through my kind-hearted friend Tipu; have seen only a few of the 56 films on these discs before, so there's plenty to discover. (Other Criterions bought include Science is Fiction, Kiss me Deadly and a great-looking two-disc set of Sweet Smell of Success, but more on those another time.) Any Brakhage aficionados around, please check the lists here and here and let me know if that seems like a good order in which to see the films, or if it should be done in another way.

Screen savers - 10 trailblazers of the new cinema

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

The Actor: Nawazudin Siddiqui

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

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

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


The Casting Director: Nandini Shrikent

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

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

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

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

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

 
The Wild Card: Qaushiq Mukherjee (Q)

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

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

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

The Documentary Maker: Faiza Ahmed Khan

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

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

The Scriptwriter: Juhi Chaturvedi

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

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

The Film Editor: Namrata Rao

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

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

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


The Cinematographer: Nikos Andritsakis

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

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

The Director: Anusha Rizvi

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

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

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

The Mentor: Anurag Kashyap

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

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

“Let filmmakers beware of films”

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

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

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

Bogdanovich: I think I agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[An old post about MM is here]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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