My new Criterion collection

Regular readers of this blog will know that Criterion Collection DVDs have been a big part of my movie-watching experience in recent times - they've helped me rediscover old favourites as well as other films that I wasn't too enthused by when I first saw them years ago (on grainy videocassette prints, most likely). Most of all, they've shown me that DVD packaging (which, as I define it, includes the quality of the print transfer, the look of the menu and the cover artwork, and the supplements on the disc) can be nearly as important as the quality of the the actual film.

And so, today's a special day for me: it's the first time, after years of buying these DVDs from Palika Bazaar, that I'm holding original, legitimately purchased Criterions in my hand. A loud burble and whiffle of thanks to my longtime blog-friend Tipu for facilitating this. The backstory is that a few weeks ago, in the comments of this post, Tipu gently chastised me for buying pirated DVDs (and boasting about it), and then offered to help me part-redeem my soul by purchasing Criterion originals for me at the 50 percent discount Barnes & Noble was offering. So I went through the list and selected a few, and now here they are, gleaming in their covers.


Just for the record, these are the titles I've bought:

- The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel)
- The Earrings of Madame De... (Max Ophuls)
- The Sword of Doom (Kinachi Okamoto)
- The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges)
- Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey)
- Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville)
- A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes)
- White Dog (Samuel Fuller)
- The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice)
- The Naked City (Jules Dassin)

The only films I haven't seen on this list are the last three, but I plan a viewing marathon of all 10 titles sometime in the coming days. Blogging may be scant during that time, though the sabbatical may also be interrupted by one-line posts that are nothing more than incoherent whoops of joy.

Template update

So I've added a couple of elements to the new template, including a longer "About Me" section and a "Search this blog" tab (which is awesome, by the way. The results are much more comprehensive than in the earlier Blogger Search tab - I even discovered some old posts I had forgotten all about. It's a bit like past-life regression, only more disturbing because I find that I now disagree with everything I wrote six years ago).

Against the advice of a few well-wishers, I've gone and expanded the sidebar list of selected book-related and film-related posts to what it was in the old template. I know it makes the sidebar very long and unwieldy but I like having it there - will figure out a way to condense it soon, or to create separate pages for those posts. Have also created a "City notes" section since I realised I had many old posts about aspects of living in Delhi: Metro construction, flyovers, the changes in Saket over the years. And of course there's The Domestic Life, Spleen, Ekta Kapoor's Mahabharata and so on. More categorisations to follow.

Need to tweak a few other things, experiment with fonts and colours, and add a couple of Widgets, but this is more or less what the site will look like for the rest of my life or the end of the Internet, whichever comes first.

The call of the wild

One of the most purposeful and to-the-point book events I’ve been to recently was the launch of Voices in the Wilderness, an anthology of wildlife writings edited by Prerna Singh Bindra. Bindra, whose own work in the field of environmental journalism I’ve long admired, kept her talk simple but oriented around the book: she used a Powerpoint presentation to take us through each of the 22 pieces in the collection, throwing in an additional bit of information about the topic or the author every now and again. (Note: I might steal the idea for my film-essay anthology!)

Voices in the Wilderness is a very eclectic collection, in terms of its content as well as the styles on offer. The personal essays and journalistic accounts (by such writers as Valmik Thapar, Bittu Sahgal, K Ullas Karanth, Tom Alter and Ruskin Bond) feature tigers, dugongs, birds, turtles, even the “humble” caterpillar (a finely observed piece by Ranjit Lal about “the making of a butterfly”). The range stretches from reportage-dominated writing (such as Bindra’s own “Red Cancer Green Quarry”, about the effects of Naxal insurgency on India’s forests) to free-flowing bits of whimsy (as in Janaki Lenin’s amusing “My Husband and Other Animals”, about living amidst assorted wildlife – mongooses, toddy cats, rat snakes, red scorpions, a leopard, you name it – in a farm on the outskirts of Chennai).

I enjoyed most of these pieces, but I have a special affection for “Barefoot Among the Turtles”, Shekar Dattatri’s vivid account of witnessing and photographing an “arribada” – the mass nesting of Olive Ridley turtles – on the Gahirmatha Beach in Orissa:

After she had laid all her eggs, “my turtle” began closing up the nest. She pushed the sand back into the hole using her hind feet and pressed it down firmly. Then she did something remarkable. Raising herself up on her flippers, she began to pound the sand with her plastron. She rocked her body from side to side, hitting the ground with force and packing the sand in the nest tighter and tighter. This thud of shell meeting sand can be heard from quite a distance away. By now there were thousands of turtles around me, in various stages of nesting, and the unearthly drumming could be heard from all sides.

I find that image so compelling – one human on a moonlit beach late at night, surrounded as far as the eye can see by thousands of ancient reptiles purposefully going about their life's work (“I seemed to have been transported back in time, to a period when dinosaurs ruled the earth”), their efforts often ruined by other turtles coming in and digging up their carefully laid eggs. It’s a splendid vision of the beauty as well as the implacable detachment of nature, but even more poignant is the account that follows, of the cruel fate of thousands of olive-ridley turtles caught up in trawling nets each year. “If we don’t act now, one more of the great wonders of the natural world will disappear before our eyes,” is the closing sentence, but this could easily be an epigraph for most of the pieces in the collection.


[Photo courtesy Dattatri's website]

A big part of being human and having relatively sophisticated brains - capable of reflecting on the interdependence of life and the fragility of ecosystems - is that the species must take some sort of responsibility for the planet. Speaking up for voiceless creatures is a big part of that responsibility. Despite the glimmers of hope in this anthology (as in “Munzalas in the Mist”, an account of the heart-lifting discovery of a new macaque species in Arunachal Pradesh), these stories are mostly a reminder of how much work still needs to be done in the field of conservation, and of the role literature can play in spreading awareness.

[Some related posts: on Ranjit Lal’s Wild City, Dhruba Hazarika’s Luck, and a chat with Vandana Singh, who wrote the essay “The Creatures we Don’t See”. Also, Prerna Singh Bindra's blog is here]

New template! New template!

Yes, well, after more than six years of blogging and more than 1200 posts, I've finally summoned the nerve to fool around with Blogger's upgraded template designs and get a new look in place. There were many reasons I didn't do it earlier - the main one being that whenever I attempted a change, my manually updated sidebar either vanished or spread itself all over the page in terrifying patterns. People have been telling me for a long time that the old template looked staid or that the green was too bright or that the space utilisation was poor (the main text in each post covering only a relatively small section in the middle of the page), but I didn't much care: if you read the blog through email subscription or a feed-reader, the template doesn't matter. Plus there was the comfort zone, the fear of technology and the fact that my priority has always been the actual writing.

But I've made the jump now, and much to my own surprise it took only a couple of hours of fidgeting around nervously before I figured out how to transport old page elements (such as the Sitemeter icon and the "Subscribe by email" facility) to the new template. Also had to update the "books" and "films" posts on the sidebar, which took a lot of time, and there's more that has to be done. I'm still experimenting, and will make further changes over the next few days.

Hope you get used to the new look. Meanwhile, any suggestions (for page elements and additions, not for colour) are welcome.

Martin Scorsese, movie buff

My latest Persistence of Vision column for Yahoo! India is about why I think of Martin Scorsese as a kindred spirit first and a great director second. Here goes.

Update: here's the full piece

The great director as permanent student

A long, long time ago, I got my hands on The Variety Book of Movie Lists, a collection of "best-of" listings in numerous categories. The contributors included critics, authors and directors, and most of their lists, as you'd expect, were restricted to ten or fewer films. Neatly selected and pruned, a single list rarely took up more than half a page. But there was one notable exception. Martin Scorsese - designated as "director and film history expert extraordinaire" - blithely named dozens of movies in each category that he contributed to.

His personal selection of noir titles ran to over 60 films, including many B-movies I hadn't even heard of. His list of "Best Colour Films" included nearly 80 movies, spread over three pages. (I soon realised that "best colour films" didn't mean best films that happened to be in colour - in that case, Scorsese's list might have been book-length! - but films that, in his view, made the best use of colour photography.)

Going through these lists told me a few things about the man who had drawn them up. They told me, first, that Scorsese had watched a LOT of films and that he wasn't obsessed with proclaiming favourites or ranking movies "in order of preference" (his lists were alphabetical). Also that he had very wide-ranging tastes and was unapologetic about it: he would put a brassy, big-budget Hollywood studio epic on the same page as an artistically high-minded European avant-garde movie; his choice of horror films from the Hammer Studios included movies that many respectable critics wouldn't even deign to watch.

At the time, the only Scorsese-directed films I had seen were Mean Streets and Taxi Driver (I was into Old Hollywood then, not all this new-fangled - meaning post-1960s - stuff). Both films feature a cameo by the director: in Mean Streets, he plays a hitman who gleefully kisses his gun before shooting Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy in the neck in the violent climax; in Taxi Driver he appears, bearded, sinister, looking vaguely Satanic, as a passenger who makes De Niro's cab-driver stop outside an apartment where (he claims) his wife is cheating on him.

These two roles were my first glimpses of Scorsese on screen, and they fixed him in my mind as a tough guy who made gritty, violent urban movies about gangsters and psychotic loners (and who presumably wouldn't have much time for the gentler films of an earlier age). But the Scorsese I subsequently discovered - through his interviews and the video introductions he did for various films - was the antithesis of those cameo roles, a kindly, middle-aged man with a seemingly boundless knowledge of film history.

Interestingly, many of the movies that Scorsese loves are movies that most viewers would think of as very un-Scorsese-like. Take Jean Renoir's The River, a beautifully photographed tale about an English girl coming of age, learning about love and loss, in Bengal in the early 1950s. I love the look of this film - particularly its poetic use of dissolves - and I also appreciate that though the main characters are British, it isn't patronizing towards India and Indians (quite an achievement for a foreign film made in that era). But The River is also static in places, heavily dependent on voiceover, and the acting is very uneven. I'm perplexed by Scorsese's unqualified adoration for it.

On my DVD there's a video introduction by Scorsese, who was instrumental in the restoration of the print. He first saw this film at age nine, he tells us, and it was one of his formative experiences as a child. "It was my first experience of a very different culture," he says, adding self-deprecatingly, "My family wasn't well-educated, I didn't know much about other places, but despite my own very different Italian-American background, I identified with these people on the screen, I felt for them."
****

Watching Martin Scorsese speak about a favourite movie is a good way to get excited about the medium. He waves his hands about, talks in the rapid-fire style one associates with gangster films of the 1930s; he's an excitable child, but he's incredibly eloquent and perceptive at the same time. You see the master technician take over when he discusses Renoir's careful framing of the lush tropical landscape in The River, the role of colour as a character in the film, and how the rich, intense photography reminded him of the Impressionist paintings of Renoir's father Auguste (whose work Scorsese had also seen as a child without knowing anything about the connection between the two men).

Many of us, after entering adulthood's prison, tend to be wary of the films that held us in thrall when we were children or adolescents; we are afraid that revisiting them might reveal them to be quaint and embarrassing, and destroy our idealised memories. But here's Scorsese, director of groundbreaking modern movies like Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, saying in the most matter-of-fact way that he still watches The River at least three or four times every year, he loves it that much.

Of course, it's one among hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of movies that he cares about. I've read his views on many films and I've rarely if ever found him saying something strongly critical - he comes across as the archetype of the open-minded movie-lover whose first (and often only) instinct is to see something good or useful in a film. I find this quality fascinating in a man who is himself a very exacting, particular filmmaker. Surely you'd expect Martin Scorsese to be more discerning, even snobbish?

When he does mention a film that didn't appeal to him too much, he's almost apologetic about it; he dissects his own response. Discussing another Renoir movie, Rules of the Game (in an interview in the book Projections 7), he says that he couldn't personally relate to it because he didn't understand the aristocratic world and the class divide that it depicted. When he says he prefers Godard's Contempt and My Life to Live to his later work, he adds, "It grabs me when his films tell stories; I'm not hip enough to get into the other stuff." (Italics mine.)

After I became more familiar with Scorsese's own cinema, I came to appreciate how often and how generously he pays tribute to the films that influenced him. The opening credits of Mean Streets (still my personal favourite Scorsese movie) include a shot of a motion-picture camera coming to life, which is reminiscent of the opening credits of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (another film Scorsese helped restore). In a pivotal emotional scene near the end of Casino, Scorsese uses a few notes from Georges Delerue's lovely, mournful score for Contempt. Unlike most other great directors, he unselfconsciously remakes films made by other people: films like the workmanlike 1960s thriller Cape Fear (which, again to my surprise, Scorsese referred to as a "gem" in one of his interviews; sorry Marty, but it ain't anything of the sort!).

Audacious as this will sound, much as I admire Scorsese's own body of work, I still think of him primarily as a film buff and permanent student - and therefore, a kindred spirit. If I had to name a single director, from any period or any country, with whom I'd want to spend a week discussing and arguing about movies, he would get my vote hands down.

P.S. For some of Scorsese's typically enthusiastic mini-reviews of old Hollywood films, visit this site and check the archives.

The psychopath as God: propaganda and pure film

[Did a version of this for my column in Business Standard Weekend]

Picture a documentary film that begins by extolling a great leader as a saviour for his war-ravaged nation, and announcing that he is “flying to meet and encourage his faithful followers”. The stately grandeur of the visuals and the language, and the dramatic music score, make it seem like an Olympian God is about to descend among his people, and this is amplified by the long sequence that follows – beautiful black-and-white footage of clouds seen from inside a small airplane. The effect is that of being placed, with the leader, in a celestial realm.

As the plane begins its descent, we see aerial shots, then close-ups, of a grand old city, full of towers and spires. It’s like something out of a medieval picture-book, and we feel a thrill; so this is the place that the Godlike being is presiding over. (An Indian viewer might well think of Vishnu's mount Garuda, or the Pushpak Vimana, during the remarkable shot of the plane's shadow seen moving in a straight line across a network of roads.)

At the airstrip, people cheer as the deity alights. Driven through the city in a cavalcade, he waves at his high-spirited subjects; there are close-ups of smiling, golden-haired children, the sun on their faces; a mother carrying her child hands him a bouquet. The sense of hope and bonhomie is tangible; as a viewer, it’s difficult not to be seduced by it.

But the year is 1934, the place is Nuremberg, Germany, and the leader is Adolf Hitler, who is promising a glorious future to a country that was devastated by the first World War. With the benefit of hindsight, we know what repercussions that march towards “glory” will have for Europe and the world.

Watching just the opening 10 minutes of Leni Riefenstahl’s great propaganda film Triumph of the Will, it’s easy to see why, 75 years after its release, this is still one of the most controversial movies ever made. It was authorised by Hitler himself (he wanted a filmed record of the Nuremberg rallies to inspire patriotism in his people) and the opening credits begin with the proud line “Commissioned by Order of the Fuhrer”. Discussing the project with Riefenstahl, he told her that he wanted an “artistically satisfying” perspective rather than a drab political document. He wanted the man on the street to be stirred by pure film.

The result is something that is part-documentary, part myth-making, and capable of creating some very uncomfortable responses in a viewer today. It’s a credit to Riefenstahl’s filmmaking skill that she turned Hitler into a living legend so effectively. But what were the moral ramifications? What role did this very successful film play in making Nazism attractive?


These are questions that continue to be asked, and they tie in to larger ideas about the relationship between art and morality. So powerful is the imagery of Triumph of the Will that even those of us who associate the Nazi swastika with something irredeemably ugly can, briefly at least, understand the patriotism inspired by the symbol - and the promises that came with it - at a very specific point in the country’s history. The many shots of the swastika on banners and flags are typical of the film’s contemplative style - Triumph of the Will is full of languid shots that don’t seem very relevant to a work of propaganda: city streets and vistas, people going about their work, even a cat watching a procession from a balcony, and of course those clouds in the opening scene. But this only heightens the build-up to the rallies, where Hitler and other Nazi leaders make fiery nationalist speeches.


It would be comforting to think that this film is now harmless from an ideological point of view, but I was taken aback during a recent conversation at a book event with a young man – one of many in this country who seem bizarrely obsessed with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “Wasn’t there a famous documentary about Hitler by a woman director?” he asked, “I’d love to see it – the guy was so charismatic, such a leader!”

If he does get around to seeing Riefenstahl’s film, he’ll probably become a card-carrying neo-Nazi. Or at least a regular commenter on Rediff.com messageboards. Perhaps I should email him this video of the globe-bouncing scene from The Great Dictator, just to balance things out.

Tell, don't show: Amarjit Sidhu's No Way Home

There are reasons to want to like Amarjit Sidhu’s novel about a young, emotionally reticent Sikh man drifting from India to America, then back to India and again to Canada, in the early 1980s – No Way Home is earnest and introspective and well-meant. But oh, the heavy-handedness.

On page one, it’s raining on the day that Dave (short for Davinder) goes to pick up his visa, so the third-person narrator tells us that “for him that afternoon, the rain became an obvious symbol of regeneration, of rebirth”. Is Dave always so preoccupied with the “symbolism” in the quotidian details of his life, one wonders. But perhaps he is: later, in America, when a woman dying of cancer pulls him onto a dance floor, “Victoria became a sudden assertion of life”. Peacocks perched on the wall of his family’s old village fort are “a symbol of its final absorption into the rural landscape”. (Never mind that the very next sentence mentions that the servant quarters now have television antennae and modern amenities.) When Dave gets a postcard from two friends, it isn’t merely a postcard, it’s also a confirmation “that the first movement in the performance was coming to an end, that lives around him were changing” (italics mine).

At other times we are pelted with observations about (among many other things) the nature of officialdom in India, the various types of national holidays, government-school education, the parent-child relationship in conservative families, and the differences between Punjabi and south Indian women. But these aren’t fluidly integrated into the plot – they are presented as discrete chunks of information, as if the narrator, suddenly bored with Dave, had begun conducting a private tutorial on the side.

Tucked into all this is a red herring: the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the anti-Sikh riots, which provides a marketing peg for the book, but which only makes up a fragment of the plot and doesn’t seem crucial to Dave’s story anyway; his unsettled state owes more to individual character than to external events. But the external events do provide a pretext for banal truisms like “No matter how fond one might get to be of an alien land, it could never be home” and musings such as “Was there really sufficient reason for so much anger in the world, reason for so much disapproval, disagreement, conflict and violence?”

In an age when mid-list books are assembly-produced with little or no editorial guidance, one has to sympathise with an inexperienced novelist writing a semi-autobiographical story – such writers need a good, firm editor more than most others do. Consider just this one sentence: “Names in the Sikh community are not gender-specific, and Dave often wondered how that came to be.” Simply modifying this to “Dave often wondered why names in the Sikh community weren’t gender-specific” would have not only made the sentence crisper but also incorporated the thought more casually into the narrative, instead of first giving us a piece of information and then Dave’s reaction to it. This might seem like nit-picking, but there are dozens of such examples scattered through the book, and their cumulative effect is to make No Way Home clunky and pedantic.

Or take this chat between Dave and a lady named Lalitha:

“You’re not a very happy person, are you?” she asked. Dave was surprised.

“I’m perfectly content,” he said.

“And you?” Dave ventured. “Are you happy?”

What was the need for the “Dave ventured” when we already have the “he said” in the previous line? Couldn’t the two lines be combined? Even if it was the author’s intention to provide a meaningful pause – a beat of silence – between Dave’s reply and the question he subsequently asks, surely a “he ventured” would have sufficed (though I don't much care for the use of the word "ventured" in this context anyway - it's just as awkward as the frequent use of "opined" by Indian journalists in interviews and profiles). Again, there are many stilted passages of this sort.

No Way Home does have a couple of things going for it. When Dave first comes to America, the writing has a gentle, tentative quality that mirrors his own wide-eyed first impressions of the place, and the culture shock isn’t presented loudly or dramatically – instead, one gets the sense that he is inwardly recoiling at certain things while maintaining his outward poise (and continuing to be popular among his peers). I also thought it interesting – in theory at least – that Dave’s story, which has all the signs of being a coming-of-age tale, eventually turns out to be an account of a man permanently stultified by internal forces that are never made completely clear. Unfortunately the promise shown here is laid to waste by a dreary narrative that doesn’t follow the “show, don’t tell” principle. This book is a case of “tell, tell, tell” all the way.