Udaan Grounded

The Cannes selection may well be the best thing that can be said about Udaan because nowhere in the world is it more difficult to defy the mainstream than in India. The canted credits of the pre-release publicity promised an unorthodoxy of style and content that the film unfortunately does not live up to. It only reinforces some of the jaded stereotypes of Indian popular cinema that the film intends to oppose by infusing some degree of lived personal experience into it.

In the first place, the visual quality of the image leaves a lot to be desired. It may have had something to do with the digital projection at the theatre I saw the film (Movietime)  but the colours seemed washed out and the image was grainy like a 16 to 35mm blown-up print; it even pixellated at certain points. I am not sure whether this was an intentional effect of de-glamourising the image to make it look ‘real’ but certainly there is a desire to adopt a Dogme 95-style of filmmaking. I doubt whether the low-light scenes can survive a DVD transfer. More than a ‘cool’, ‘indie’ look, visually it felt like a 1980s Hindi film, in more senses than one.

The greatest problem with the film is the simplistic, one-dimensional villainous father in the film and the film’s use of cheap melodramatic tactics. The father-son relationship trauma has been the staple of several Indian films and so there is no inherent novelty in that. This is particularly disappointing because we have associated Anurag Kashyap with a kind of filmmaking where even the most villainous characters are understood on a human level and when the world is seen through their eyes, as in Black Friday where the most heinous acts look somewhat justified, leaving the viewer in a state of moral ambivalence. This approach to filmmaking looked at the same facts from so many points of view that it altogether undermined the notion of a unique stable perspective from which ‘the real truth’ can be known.

Udaan is devoid of any such understanding. That rich empathic attitude gives way to a simplistic, easy categorisation of good and evil in the most pathetic tradition of Indian popular cinema. Possibly the scriptwriters didn’t want to provide any backstory information but it leaves so many things vague that one feels the scriptwriters have conveniently brushed all the relevant aspects of the story under the carpet. For example, the man had two previous wives; the question remains where are they, what happened to them? Both of them could not have died. Did he kill them?  If the second wife was still alive, why did she not care about the kids? We do not even see the boys talking about their mothers. This is a world devoid of women but also devoid of any kind of tenderness or affection. The only flush of understanding that comes from the uncle is soon defeated by the crassness of ruthless masculinity. The only women who find a few frames of attention are either hookers in theatres or the third wife who looks the same or the aunt who is cold and distant. This has now become a huge problem with all of Anurag’s scripts.

It is this simplistic vision of life that trivializes an authentic pain by melodramatising it, by creating false oppositions of good vs bad, man vs woman, small town vs big city, child vs adult. The use of a cute but hapless child with markings of beatings on his back (who nevertheless tries to keep it a secret) is not something I would expect from a writer of Anurag’s calibre. It is the cheapest trick in Indian ads and films to instantly pull at people’s heart-strings. Bombay is seen as Paradise, a place of liberation, where teenagers start business outfits like restaurants and become instantly successful. Please, give me a break!

The film that obviously served as an inspiration and reference point for the film – Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959) – had also depicted a ‘wild child’ trapped in an oppressive social institution like a boarding school but did not have to rely on such melodramatic trappings. The film is alluded to several times in the film through the use of the liberational ‘running away’ or the final freeze frame but the fact that the boy has co-liberated his kid brother is a bit too much, that too in search of ‘Bombay’ (not the symbolic sea as in 400 Blows) suggests that his sense of freedom is another delusion.  

The ‘real look’ of the film cannot disguise the falsity of the world that Motwane/Kashyap seek to represent. 

Cannes Musings

Over the past three decades, Indian cinema’s track record at the Cannes Film Festival has been particularly miserable, if not a matter of national disgrace commensurate with our performance in the Olympics. It is not that it is any better at the other A-level festivals (Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Toronto) but despite the deep-rooted eurocentric bias, Cannes certainly has an ability to discern quality films from any part of the world irrespective of  the scale of film production in that country. Granted that the Cannes Festival is fiercely competitive, a country with a production of 900 films a year should fair better than Sri Lanka or a country like Brazil with 40 films a year which manages to get an average of two films selected every year.

How do we explain the misery of Indian cinema? We rub our noses so much in the dirt trying to keep our films ‘popular’ and ‘commercial’ that we hardly ever manage to make them any more memorable than yesterday’s newspaper. American cinema has the same intentions but it still manages to produce a few films every year that transcend their time. Since 90% of our popular films fail even at the box-office, they cannot actually be called either popular or commercial. Another lame excuse is that our film language is so unique (songs, dance, melodrama etc) that no one else in the world is capable of appreciating us! Why should we lionize Cannes or Venice as the true upholders of quality cinema? Why should we judge ourselves based on others’ criteria? Belligerence apart, it is a classic alibi that is tantamount to justifying our 132^nd position on FIFA world rankings on the ground that we could get entry into the World Cup only if the whole world played soccer according to our rules, whatever that may be. As a nation we are so deeply ensconced in our mediocrity that we have either refused to look at the larger picture of our position in the world (contrary to our aspirations to be part of the global village) or constantly need justifications based on jingoistic claims to uniqueness.

 

In that sense, Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap may have redeemed some degree of our cinematic self-respect though the selection of Udaan  at Cannes was in the Un Certain Regard category and not in the prestigious competitive section.  The last Indian film to get into competition was Murali Nair’s Pattiyude Divasam (A Dog's Day) in 2001 and the last film in Un Certain Regard was also Murali Nair’s Arimpara (2003). The last Indian film to get an award at Cannes competition was also a Murali Nair film, Marana Singhasanam (Throne of Death, 1999). Since Nair is based in UK and also financed from there, these cannot be considered ‘Indian’ achievements not unlike Chandrasekhar’s Nobel Prize but this is just the other face of globalization. Where does all this leave us? Twenty five years of solitude!

The 2010 Cannes edition, however, had two more Indian films in its selection. They take us back to 1983 (Mrinal Sen’s Kandahar - The Ruins) in the ‘Cannes Classics’ section and to 1973 (Ritwik Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam – A River called Titash) in the ‘World Cinema Foundation’ section. It is an irony that we still have to live off Ray, Sen, Ghatak and Gopalakrishnan for many more years to come.

The really sad part of the story is that the best of Indian cinema rarely gets seen in India. Let us first learn to respect our own selves before we can demand respect from others. World cinema can never be a substitute for our own cinema because it is from there that our filmmakers have to draw sustenance. As Gandhi said, ‘I want to open up all the doors and windows of my house so that the wind from all directions can blow into it on the condition that  I am not uprooted’.

NFDC has done a great disservice to our nation by making some of the most adventurous and landmark films in our history and then allowing them to rot in the cans without getting distribution. These films are not yet available even on DVD so that they may enter into our contemporary debates or shown in film classes. They have forced those films to be forgotten and thereby failed to make them contribute to the consolidation of a more substantial film culture. Even Satyajit Ray’s films are rarely seen in our country beyond Bengal and the only watchable DVD copies of Ray or Ghatak that exist come to us from UK or USA. We have had to wait for Martin Scorsese to restore Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948), the most extraordinary film made in India before Pather Panchali (1955)!

In other words, we reap what we sow. No country in the world is so disconnected with its own cinematic past and at the same time burdened by the baggage of film memory. I could not agree more with Anurag Kashyap whom I heard recently saying that more than innovative screenwriters, what we need in our country are creative producers. ‘Creative’ in this case means producers who are driven not solely by the dream of profit but also informed by film culture with a strong desire to push the bandwith of Indian popular cinema, making films with passion and conviction that any story can sell which has a ring of truth in it.   

The Emotional Algebra of Anais Nin

One of the privileges of the teaching life is the paid vacation. The torrential rains in Bombay add great value to life only if you do not have to go out into the ‘mean streets’.

Among other things, today I was browsing through some of Anais Nin’s writings and as always, I am endlessly fascinated with her, perhaps more as a bewitching woman than a writer. Her biographer gives her the epithet of being “a major minor writer”. I am not so worried about her position in literature but some of her insights into life cut like knife. I would like to share some of these.

Anais Nin became well-known particularly after Philip Kaufman’s film Henry and June, on her simultaneous bisexual affair with Henry Miller and his wife June Miller. Those who have seen the film have been captivated by the film’s erotic power (one of the most hauntingly sensuous films ever made) often without any awareness of her writing. Philip Kaufman did a workshop at my film school with this film when I was a student and so I have a special kind of relationship with the film.

To mention Anais Nin as the finest writer of female erotica is to trivialize her work. Besides, I have a problem with the word ‘female’ as applied to her work. For a quick overview, Anais Nin (1903-1977) was a French writer born of Cuban parents both of whom were classical musicians. Her great-grandfather ran away from Paris to Havana at the time of the French Revolution and she, in her lifetime, ran away from Paris to NYC during WWII. In the prime of her youth, not only was her libido the most active, she was also the toast of the entire Parisian art world. Nin was the lover of many leading literary/art figures including Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, James Agee and Lawrence Durrell, Otto Rank (psychoanalyst, Freud’s famous student), Gonzalo More (a firebrand Peruvian communist revolutionary) among others (C.G. Jung?). [The beautiful, expert ‘Madame’ in Buñuel’s Belle de jour is called Madame Anaís as an allusion to Nin.] Henry Miller took entire pages out of her diaries and incorporated them en toto into his novel Tropic of Capricorn. She let him do it out of sheer love. As she wrote somewhere: “…(I am) capable of every audacity in life but vulnerable in love.”

Her nine novels are actually pale shadows of an outrageously reckless and bizarre life (except Winter of Artifice, 1939, and the lesbian novel The Voice, which are my personal favourites). Her legacy to literature was her 69(hmm!)-volume diaries which explore every goose bump and furrow of one woman’s sexual consciousness. She spoke of her diaries as her shadow, her double. “I will only marry my double”, she wrote in one of her autobiographical novels.

And yet, as I mentioned earlier, I have some issues with the notion of ‘female’ erotica à la Nin. One French philosopher recently said that the male gaze was deeply planted within her notion of the ‘female’. Consider this, her most titillating triumphant declaration:

“… My recipe for perfect happiness – mix well the sperm of four men in one day … I walk joyously away, debtless, independent, uncaptured…”

Elsewhere in her Diaries, she writes:

“…I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding."

Even as you try to pass judgment on her moral ambivalence, she would reply with this:

“… We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences and very painful ones sometimes - the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do. …”


Since this is far from being an academic blogpost, I just wanted to make a few casual comments on re-reading Anais Nin but I want to leave the reader here with some flashes of her insights into life. I adore the passion with which she lived her life and the beautiful poetry inherent in them. They really sound like “quotable quotes” one could memorise and use on the right occasion or inscribe it inside a card for a friend who is lost in life’s dark alleys (like most of us):

o Living never tires one out as much as the effort not to live. And if one lived deeply, one also rested deeply. …People living deeply have no fear of death.
o I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
o Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
o Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
o We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
o We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
o We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
o There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
o I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
o Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
o I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.
o Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.
o Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
o Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
o Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
o If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
o There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
o The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
o The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
o Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

‘What cinema can be’

Roger Ebert is possibly the most influential film critic who surfaces on top of every film-related search ahead of IMDB or wikipedia. He is a truly sensitive person whose comments I look up after watching any film that I like. And so I was pleasantly surprised to see his insightful comments on Satyajit Ray, whom he considers on par with Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and Buñuel.  In fact, Ray used to say that despite the vast cultural differences, his more perceptive critics were in the West. Film commentators and scholars like Penelope Houston, Eric Rhode, Jay Leyda and Robin Wood have helped to canonise Ray as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time (and his position seems to be improving with time).  Here are some of Roger Ebert’s brief but superlative, moving comments about Ray:

   

• "The Big City,"(Mahanagar) which has crept quietly into Chicago, is one of the most rewarding screen experiences of our time. …  The remarkable thing that Ray accomplishes is to make us really deeply care about the fortunes of this simple family. … That is why I have so much trouble approaching Ray's films as "foreign." They are not foreign. They are about Indians, and I am not an Indian but Ray's characters have more in common with me than I do the comic-strip characters of Hollywood.… Ray's people have genuine emotions and ambitions, like the people next door and the people in Peoria and the people in Kansas City. There is not a person reading this review who would not identify immediately and deeply with the characters in "The Big City"… By contrast, Hollywood films with exploding cigarette lighters and gasping starlets and idiot plots are the real "foreign" films. They have nothing at all in common with us, and Satyajit Ray of India understands us better than Jerry Lewis.

• Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" (Jalsaghar)  (1958) has one of the most evocative opening scenes ever filmed. …  Ray (1921-1992) was an unusually tall man, handsome as a movie star, the grandson of a landlord such as the protagonist’s  ancestors. …. Perhaps as a reaction to the hundreds of overwrought Indian musical melodramas churned out annually, Ray made an austere character study--also with music. His hero deserves the comparison with King Lear, because like Lear he arouses our sympathy even while indulging his vanity and stubbornly doing all of the wrong things. Like Lear, he thinks himself a man more sinned against than sinning. Like Lear, he is wrong.

• The great, sad, gentle sweep of "The Apu Trilogy" remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be. Standing above fashion, it creates a world so convincing that it becomes, for a time, another life we might have lived. … Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture…. The relationship between Apu and his mother observes truths that must exist in all cultures: how the parent makes sacrifices for years, only to see the child turn aside and move thoughtlessly away into adulthood….  The way the film records his stay, his departure and his return says whatever can be said about lonely parents and heedless children….  It is like a prayer, affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray.

• Ghare Baire (The Home and the World)…  is a contemplative movie -- quiet, slow, a series of conversations punctuated by sudden bursts of activity….. Together, they form a small group of ideas and emotions, growing and shifting, mirroring in their secluded chambers the violent changes in India.

• While commenting on Luis Buñuel’s Tristana, he concludes: …  A few great directors have the ability to draw us into their dream world, into their personalities and obsessions and fascinate us with them for a short time. This is the highest level of escapism the movies can provide for us -- just as our elementary identification with a hero or a heroine was the lowest. As children, we went to Saturday matinees and for an afternoon we were cowboys and Indians. As adults, there are more intellectual routes to escapism. A powerful director like Buñuel (or Bergman, Fellini or Satyajit Ray) can open up his mind to us, the way an actress can open up her eyes. It is an experience worth having.

Do classics have an expiry date?

Of late I have been wondering whether all the films we used to call ‘classics’ or ‘masterpieces’ are ‘forever’, as they were supposed to be! Do some have earlier expiry dates than others?

My job as a professor of cinema has thrown up certain questions that I am still trying to answer. While teaching at a glitzy film school in Mumbai’s Film City, I have found a strange and challenging phenomenon - most students of filmmaking cannot really connect to many of the standard classics of world cinema. I had rarely encountered this problem to this extent but now that my livelihood depends on this, I intensely speculate on a daily basis whether a certain film, notwithstanding its status as a ‘classic’ would work with my students. May be this is specific to the place where I teach, which is a predominantly up-market institute that happens to attract students who are Bollywood-obsessed and have enough money to pay the high fees. We are aware to what extent in India, economic status determines – to a large extent - one’s cultural orientation, exposure and degree of rootless-ness. This, however, only partly explains the conundrum.

There are also other easy but valid answers: most students are frivolous, they are more enamored with glamour than with cinema per se, some of them are too immature, etc. And yet these also do not satisfy me though all of them carry a grain of truth. Even while teaching a group of ultra-serious IIT students, I have sometimes not found the desired emotional impact.

Is it my personal failure that I cannot excite students about these films? Is it the failure of these ‘classics’ that they have failed to transcend across time and space unlike earlier? After all, La Dolce Vita as a film hasn’t changed inherently. It has only become more accessible in its DVD avatar but its reception may have changed.

Then, is this the impact of Time? Has the world around us changed so much that ideas and emotions that excited us earlier do not move us any more? Has cinema (film language) changed so much that some of the great films do not ‘talk’ to us any more with the same degree of intimacy and instead look ‘slow’ and pretentious?

I guess there must a be a bit of truth in each one these possibilities. I do not intend to say at all that none of the classics work; in fact, several of them still work even with the uninitiated but even my response to certain films is not so enthusiastic any more and several films just fail to impact. The important aspect of this phenomenon is that this does not seem to happen with the traditional arts such as literature, painting or music. Only in the case of cinema, the classics seem to run the risk of being ephemeral.

I was delighted to find that Umberto Eco raised exactly the same question in one of his extraordinary essays titled ‘The Multiplication of the Media’ in his riveting collection of essays titled ‘Travels in Hyperreality’ (Picador, 1987). It happened to him when he was looking forward to a TV viewing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey after several years but was hugely disappointed by the experience.

… That film which had stunned us only a few years ago with its extraordinary technical and figurative invention, its metaphysical breadth, now seemed to repeat wearily things we had seen a thousand times before…. The final images are kitsch, a lot of pseudo-philosophical vagueness in which anyone can put the allegory he wants… (p 145)

He goes on to provide a sophisticated and elaborate explanation for this disenchantment for which neither Kubrick nor the viewer can be blamed:

… every new invention sets off a chain reaction of inventions, produces a sort of common language. They have no memory because, when the chain of imitations has been produced, no one can remember who started it, and the head of the clan is confused with the latest great grandson. …The spaceships of Star Wars, shamelessly descended from Kubrick’s, are more complex and plausible than their ancestor, and now the ancestor seems to be their imitator….(p146)

In other words, if Citizen Kane makes little impact on the audience of today, it may not be so because Orson Welles seems a less dazzling genius in hindsight but simply because all the technical and narrative innovations of the film have been cannibalised to such an extent that the film is reduced to a matter of historical curiosity. If this is a phenomenon unique to cinema, it is because it is a supremely technological form and therefore technology plays a crucial role in its accelerated growth and reception. Imagine watching Sin City ten years from now! We will not even understand why we were at all impressed with the film once upon a time. If Normal Mclaren’s Horizontal/ Parallel Lines do not work at all now, blame Windows MediaPlayer’s randomized visualiser for that which is actually far more sophisticated than what Mclaren could ever do.

Films whose reputation depend on technical or narrative virtuosity are more likely to get jaded earlier but this does not guarantee that films that depend more on the depth of its content are likely to have a longer shelf life. This is where our social atmosphere influences our tastes. When I see a Alain Resnais film with my students, I really wish that the editing was faster though I do not feel the same when I see the same film alone. I saw My Night at Maud’s a few months back and found it impossibly pretentious and boring. I am not sure whether it is so because these films are actually ‘boring’ or ‘slow’ but simply because now there is far lesser appreciation and tolerance for films that aspire to be discursive rather than narrative. So this is the extent to which the world around us changes us, imperceptibly. The supremacy of Hollywood storytelling has no one right now to challenge its aesthetic claim to universality.

May be a more interesting question would be to ask why certain films from the distant past and B&W still ‘work’ with the uninitiated. There are many such examples: Sunset Boulevard, Twelve Angry Men, Taxidriver, High Noon (all American examples) or Uday Shankar’s Kalpana or Shombhu Mitra/Raj Kapoor’s Jaagte Raho. Consider an ultra-avant garde film like Last Year at Marienbad. It was rated as the greatest film of all time ahead of Citizen Kane by the Sight & Sound board of film critics through the 1960s, 70s and 80s and then suddenly thereafter it disappeared from all lists into utter oblivion. Or consider Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism. I have rarely heard any film student or even scholar talking about these films in recent years. Something seems to have happened by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s – a kind of shift in popular consciousness and our collective aesthetic judgment.

Even as I try to disentangle this mystery about so-called ‘classics’ and need to get ready with the films for my class, I choose the ones which are popular among students for all the wrong reasons and then use them to deepen an understanding of cinema. As usual, life also brings surprises: our good old Man with a Movie Camera (1929) works with every batch because our students who are mostly hooked on hardcore computer games think it is a cool MTV-style music video, never mind it was invented in the context of a communist revolution.

And yes, sex is no longer a safe bet. ‘Classics’ that came with liberal doses of sex had viewers glued to the screens, if not for anything else. Last Tango in Paris, Salo or Sweet Movie doesn’t work as it did earlier. Only after the screenings did I realize that most of the students possibly have several GBs of hardcore porn on their laptops, far more potent in their evocative power than the stories with their narrative pretensions. Sex in European art cinema which was the uncredited staple diet of India’s film society movement is now ineffective. So, my films in the next few weeks are going to be City of God, Clockwork Orange, Amores Perros, Havana Blues…

What do I care if they are declared ‘classics’ from some pulpit or not! They ‘work’ better with my students than the most sublime of Bergman’s films.

Film Appreciation Course at NCPA, Bombay

Here are the outlines of the lectures that I shall deliver at NCPA through the month of August. In case you are interested in attending them, please register directly with NCPA by writing to Kavita Ogale kogale@ncpamumbai.com.

1^st Session: 7^th Aug, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – The Landscape of Cinema

Though certain kinds of cinemas have greater visibility than others, there is a vast diversity in the films made around the world. The general character of Hollywood cinema, ‘Bollywood’ and its relationship with ‘Indian Cinema’ and concepts such as ‘independent’, ‘parallel’, ‘regional’ and ‘world’ cinemas would be understood as stepping-stones for celebrating cinema in relation to the cultures and contexts from which they emerge.

2^nd Session: 8^th Aug, Sun, 2pm to 6pm – Visual Storytelling: Time and Space in Cinema

What is it in cinema that makes it unique from other forms? Is it a language with a certain grammar which we learn innately? Perhaps the better films are those that use this grammar more effectively by telling their stories visually rather than through words. If cinema fragments time and space and then brings them together, how does it manage to give us a coherent vision of an imaginary world seen through the window of the film screen?

3^rd Session: 14^th Aug, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – Evolution of Film Language and the Early Comedies

From its embryonic form in the closing years of the 19^th century, we trace the emergence of cinema through the early 20^th century until it grows into a dominant cultural form, both as art and industry. Some of the great filmmakers of the early years were comedians, many of whom have now been sadly forgotten. Films that we once saw as just hilarious are now perceived as works of great artists who explored and expanded the expressive power of cinema.

4^th Session: 15^th Aug, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – Understanding Story Structure in Films

What makes some stories more compelling than others? What dramatic devices do films often use to give ‘structure’ to a human experience that transforms character? There seem to be some general principles that work for films across cultures and these conventional notions of structure are referred as ‘classical’. However, wherever there are rules, there are exceptions. Is there any specifically ‘Indian’ way of telling stories? How does the Indian popular cinema draw upon the storytelling traditions in India?

5^th Session: 21^st Aug, Sun, 2pm to 6pm – American Cinema: Hollywood and the ‘indie’ film

Though film language was creatively explored in France, it was in USA that the cinema developed into a huge industry as early as 1919. While a few big corporations monopolised filmmaking and developed their own signature styles and dominated the world, the studio system gradually declined and took a different form. In resistance to the studio-system, there developed in America an off-Hollywood independent cinema tradition that subverts the mainstream and yet, it is from this alternative cinema that Hollywood continues to draw its fresh blood.

6^th Session: 22^nd Aug, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – Major European Film Movements

While in USA, cinema was primarily seen as an industry and films as consumer commodities, in Europe it has often been perceived as an art form and an expression of culture and history. Thus films often grew out of vibrant social, political and artistic movements that explored new avenues and deepened cinema’s engagement with the world. These pioneering movements had tremendous impact not only on Hollywood cinema but on cinemas around the world, including India.

7^th Session: 23^rd Aug, Sun, 2pm to 6pm – Mise-en-scène and Film Styles

Mise-en-scène refers to the articulation of cinematic space and defines the style of individual filmmakers. It involves almost everything that goes into the making of a shot: composition, movement of camera and characters, lighting, set design and sound design. Some films drive the story forward with every element in the frame contributing to that end while others invite viewers to pause and reflect on the compositional spaces of the narrative.

8^th Session: 30^th September, Sat, 2pm to 6pm – Concepts of genre and auteur

The idea of genre has defined Hollywood film production to a large extent where films are targeted at specific audiences who have certain expectations. Indian popular cinema, however, addresses its audience differently though it is increasingly embracing the concept. While the supremacy of genre obliges filmmakers to work within certain conventions, master filmmakers (auteurs) manage to transcend them and leave their signatures in terms of style and content on every film they make.

INDRANIL CHAKRAVARTY is Professor of Film Appreciation at Whistling Woods International in Mumbai’s Film City. He graduated in Film Direction from International School of Film & TV(EICTV) in Havana (Cuba) where he studied under the Nobel Laureate, Gabriel García Márquez. He was screenplay consultant for the European Union Cross-Cultural Programme. He has taught screenplay-writing and Film Appreciation at several universities and institutes in India and abroad. His book on Latin American cinema is now a reference text at several universities. He has also published a study of the Indian film industry and several essays in English, Spanish and Bengali. He was Manager of the Osians’ Film Archive and Convenor of the First All-India Screenwriters’ Conference held at FTII, Pune and has been on the jury of film festivals in Brazil, Mexico, Cuba and Spain. He is also the director of a foundation called ILACI (Indo-Latin American Cultural Initiative) which has exclusive collaborative arrangements with UNESCO and IberMedia and is currently producing a documentary series.

Bibliomania

The online bookshop www.flipkart.com (our own version of amazon.com), has had several casualties like me. Whoever I have introduced to this marvel has thanked me profusely but the spouses complain that I have created a serious financial imbalance in their private lives. The efficiency of flipkart is so impressive and the discounts so attractive that as soon as a book reaches me, I find myself ordering a new one from my endlessly long ‘Wishlist’. This means I end up buying one book every other day as I happen to receive one new book with the same frequency. My book-buying rate happens to be three times higher than my reading rate which possibly makes me more of a book-hoarder than a book-reader. If I had not picked up this habit, I would have more money in the bank but I would not be richer.

‘Are you a lawyer?’ ‘Do you sell books?’

‘So… you mean to say you have read all these books?’

While the first question is unique to Bombay where very few homes have book-collections unlike more cultured cities, the latter question is one that I encounter very often. Only someone who doesn’t share the passion of the bibliophile would dare to ask such a question because books are much more than just books. They exude a strange kind of positive energy that spreads a kind of tranquility that can impact any one. Kids refusing to go to bed fall quickly asleep in a room full of books and it can also provide a great backdrop for the drama of love and seduction. Live in a room surrounded by great books and realise how the wisdom of the ages seep into your body through the thin air. You do not even have to read them!

When we are collecting great books, we are collecting some kind of eternal happiness – a sort of guarantee in a life completely devoid of any other certainties. A person can surround him/herself with 6,000 books (and about a 1000 DVDs as in my case) and thenceforward have at least one place in the world where s/he can be happy! Borges once said that he always imagined that Paradise would be a kind of library – a labyrinthine one at that.

Anatole Broyard articulates it better than me: ‘The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.’ In other words, one has a specific personal relationship with each book in one’s collection. A private library is also a working tool and has got to do with a primitive sense of possession. I cannot find my peace-of-mind unless I wrap up the book in plastic, write out my name in the title page along with the date and place of its procurement and then read it with a red pen in my hand and a bookmark. That is also why I find it impossible to read a borrowed book and when I lend one of my own to someone, I feel like an anxious parent who waits at the balcony for a teenager child to come back home from a late night party.

So many hard emotions are experienced over the loss or procurement of books! Nazis burnt them in spectacular bonfires just as much as the Inquisition did five centuries earlier. And I too have lost half a dozen close friendships over books that were not returned and I certainly miss those books far more than the human beings. Gustave Flaubert wrote Bibliomania in 1836 when he was just 14 years old, his first published work. It is a slightly fictionalized version of a true story of Don Vicente, a Spanish monk who was literally willing to kill to possess a book he wanted for his collection. It still stands as a classic example of bibliomania taken to its extreme.

Our relationship with the electronic document is vastly different in its affective value though I find myself reading far more material online these days - particularly the ubiquitous wikipedia -than the physical book. With the increasing proliferation of the Kindle and the Sony Reader and the Google Library Project that promises to make available online every printed book in the history of humanity, I am quite convinced that we are the last generation of human beings on earth collecting books that may promote deforestation but reinforce our emotional bond with the world of ideas in all its physicality.