Prenom: Carmen/Jean-Luc Godard

This is a blog recording my desperate attempts of touching screens through written words, which are seldom perfect vehicle of feelings.

If you find Bengali/Indian proper names as addressees of many posts, they are young and curious minds with whom I attempt to, five days a week, ponder on screens via spoken words, many a time an appropriate index of…feelings as ideas.

Well, the last post quoting Chief Seattle’s speech triggered memories of my MA dissertation on Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’s films. Since writer’s block continues, here is a revised section on one of this great Bengali filmmaker’s autobiographical works. The connection with the earlier post might be evident. The following has been published earlier…elsewhere.

Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (1925-1976)

Komal Gandhar (1961)

Komal Gandhar can be described as Ritwik Ghatak’s thesis-film. The film is a semi-autobiographical account of both the radical theatre movements in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly recalling Indian People’s Theatre Association, an important leftist cultural platform of which Ghatak was an active member and relatively calmer Bengal in the latter half of 1950s. So unabashed it was in its candor that the film landed Ghatak in major differences with the pro-soviet Communist Party of India, from which his distance increased slowly. The dialogue that triggers off the film is from a play which is being staged within the film, describing the effects of the Partition of India: “They have other-ed my mother, my own mother”. The narrative is about a couple of rival radical theatre groups, one led by Bhrigu, and the other by Shanta, of which Anasuya, the heroine of the film, is a member. Anasuya tries to bridge the groups. During the staging of a resultant joint-production of Bhrigu’s version of the Sanskrit classic Shakuntala, Shanta and her cronies deliberately sabotages it. Bhrigu and Anasuya, in between productions and journeys, fall in love. Now Anasuya has to choose between Bhrigu and Samar, her fiancée who lives in Paris.

The Mother and Memories

One can start by recalling a fuzzy area of Komal Gandhar: Anasuya sees her mother’s eyes in Bhrigu’s and addresses him as her mother’s son. The brother-sister relation is always implicit as the ideal one in Ghatak’s films. Ashish Rajadhyaksha says about Ghatak’s “increasingly nebulous, undefined relationships”: “These relationships which negate the surface realism of theme are important because the form itself suggests a return to the realist, at least insofar as the characters and situations are in his later work much more firmly rooted in the contemporary.” (Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982, p 82). But I wish to emphasize here that reading incestuous undertones between characters as a release of repressed sexual energies, as many would conclude, would be thoroughly misleading in the case of Ghatak’s films, since such a reading considers the characters as autonomous individuals. The incestuous undertones must be read in terms of allegory and ideations, in other words, as being associated to and defined by, the notion of the Mother. The brother and the sister dyad, as progenies, are to be read as the inheritors of the memories of the Mother/Land. Thus, Bhrigu and Anasuya, as characters and also repositories of ideas are children of the same Mother, i.e. the Land or rather the earlier state of the Mother/Land before it was truncated into two halves during the Partition in 1947. You can also read another article on this issue here.

Anasuya’s mother was murdered during the pre-partitional riots in Noakhali in 1946. She remains only as a diary zealously prized by the daughter, a diary where accounts of the successful anti-partition movements in 1905-12 are kept, laced with the political dreams of a mother. The film primarily presents the Mother, un-figured or rather un-personified in the film as we never see her, as an abstract ideation, as a repository of erstwhile values and, importantly, as a repository of memories. Komal Gandhar is an exercise of active remembrance of the historically forgotten, an activity that is almost ritualized. Bhrigu and Anasuya, in the process of falling in love, create an internal space where the Mother is given a domain: the space of memory. One must remember that flashback as a cinematic device retrieving or recalling time seems to be impossible in Ghatak’s films, as he threatens the resultant complacency of the cinematic experience when we ‘totally recall’ the past (The only flashback sequence in Ghatak’s entire career occurs in his autobiographical Jukti, Takko ar Gappo (1974)). Thus, in Komal Gandhar the Mother cannot be visualized in a flashback, as the process of personifying her will rob her of the status of an unrepresentable past. Therefore, the individual memory-spaces of Bhrigu and Anasuya, being the domain of the same Mother, are corollaries of a divided Bengal. Their consummation means the unification of their memory-spaces.

Marriage: ‘this land is my land, this land is your land’

What stands as a wedge preventing Bhrigu and Anasuya’s union? The interdicting ‘Third entity’ is (also un-figured) Anasuya’s fiancee, Samar (also named Ferdinand as he names Anasuya Miranda, alluding to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest). Anasuya – as she says once – is an embodiment of bilateral splits. Samar lives in Paris, a scholarly guy interminably extending his stay in the West while Anasuya is waiting for him to return, when they will get married and the couple will fly away from ‘this land’. She is torn between the memory of a past plenitudinal relation with the Mother and the choice of submission to the interdicting order of a submissive marriage, interestingly of her choice. The split is also figured between Shakuntala, the role she acts out, and Miranda, the name she is assigned. Ghatak has said that he was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore’s essay ‘Shakuntala’ (1802), which, in a critical response to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s essay compares Shakespeare’s Miranda and medieval Indian poet Kalidasa’s Shakuntala in relation to the spaces they inhabit. Rabindranath explains that Miranda can be easily isolated from the island she inhabits; but Shakuntala is organically linked with the forest that is her abode: passages describing the beauty of the heroine and that of the surrounding natural abundance of which she is the nurturer mirror each other. Probably this observation inspired Ghatak to comment: “The heroine is Bengal’s Shakuntala, Shakuntala is transformed into Bengal to me.” Anasuya’s possible de-patriation would complete the split between the body and the ground, a historical split triggered by colonialism; also a split which has its temporal dimensions, one is split from the past too. The split is again figured through words: her Mother’s diaries (relayed to Bhrigu) and the simultaneous presence of Ferdinand/Samar’s telegrams and absence of his letters for which she is eagerly waiting. So, who is Anasuya: the receiver of the letters from the past, i.e. her mother’s diaries or the receiver of Samar/Ferdinand’s telegrams and unwritten letters of an fuzzy future?

Thus, an array of marks of identification and difference are produced. Anasuya can either be the worthy addressee of her mother’s diaries or she remains the addressee of Ferdinand/Samar’s telegrams. Either, like Shakuntala, she remains organically, existentially linked to her land or she severs the link, like Miranda, in a marriage with the ‘brave new world’. The split selves seem unbridgeable. Her newfound desire for Bhrigu can only be fulfilled by rejecting the interdictions of the patriarchal Symbolic Order, in an effort to regain the lost maternal plenitude.

Ghatak multiplies the notion of marriage, harmony or union beyond the mere formation of the lead couple through the use of diegetic and non-diegetic music. While the diegesis presents stories of rifts, quarrels, failures and alienations, the soundtrack is replete with musical motifs of union. There are songs referring to the politically promising 1940s when radical cultural movements aided with an effective leftist militancy hinted at a possible socialist revolution. There are songs written by Rabindranath during the successful anti-partition movements of 1905-12. Then, as leitmotifs, there is a marriage songs culled from the ancient times. These musical motifs, thus, function in a two-fold way. They recall a buoyant and fruitful past and they also hint towards a utopian future, when radical cultural movements – bridging the past and the present, the urban and the rural – will lead to political upheavals resulting in a union of the split Bengal. So, the couple-formation of Bhrigu and Anasuya is a dream (the only dream Ghatak dreamt of): one marriage means the revitalization of the now-dwindling radical art movements, which will lead to a bridging between the urban sensibilities and rural struggle, leading to the birth of a revolutionary consciousness, which might result in a union of the two Bengals.

Marriages, consummation, union, and the resolution of divided are all ideas which the film tries to present: either of the quarreling radical theatre groups, or of the divided Bengal, or between the past and the present, or between subjectivities. These ideas remain on the plane of abstract ideation i.e. something that cannot to be diegetically worked out in narrative logistics, something which must not bring a cathartic closure, something which must not be a resolution of problems, suturing the loose ends. Otherwise the political purpose of activating the spectator would be defeated. It must be stressed that Ghatak’s cinema is “meant to bring back the moment of rupture to consciousness, a moment that the traumatised do not know how to remember” as Moinak Biswas says. In other words, the narrative must not follow the beaten path of wish-fulfillment. Thus, the evolution of ideas does not take place only through the allegory of the protagonists’ union. Bhrigu is just a catalyst of a process, not a half to be united with the other. His eyes reflect back Anasuya’s desire of the Mother in both the senses. She recognizes her desire for the Mother/Land (thus she rejects the call of the interdicting ‘third entity’) through Bhrigu. She also realises she is the Mother’s desire; she must be what her mother wanted to be: a woman belonging to the land.

The Mother and the Land

The notion of the Mother in this film evolves from the unrepresentable abstraction of Anasuya’s mother to the concrete icon of Anasuya as ‘the Mother’. A Mother synonymous to the ‘land’, not a map but the tangible, experiential, concrete land is iconised as the Mother. This happens with a simultaneous mobilisation of the landscape in the film. The Shakuntala/Miranda binary has established two options to the narrative resolution of Anasuya’s character: either linked with or divorced from the Mother/Land. To Bhrigu and Anasuya, the notions ‘Mother’ and the ‘Land’ is relegated to the past, in the domain of memory. Their memory-spaces comprise only memories about the land across the border. The space of plenitude is rendered inaccessible, like the nourishing past, since it is politically relocated on the other side of the border, in the land of the political ‘other’. The other half of Bengal – which they inhabit now – is never something they nostalgically long for. In one of his essays Ghatak says that in spite of the richness of the Indian half of post-partition Bengal, he can’t work to his full potentials, the other half being inaccessible to him. (from Bengali essays collected in Chitrabikshan, No. 18, 1984, 35-36) Incidentally, Ghatak, made Titash Ekti Nadir Nam in 1974 in Bangladesh. Therefore, the eastern/Indian half of Bengal needs to be functionalised. This happens through a rare discursive use of the landscape. The Land/Mother performs the function of priesthood over the final couple-formation. Before illustrating how let us have a brief glimpse at Paul Willemen’s observations on the use of landscape in particular sequences of several new British films:

[In a new sort of avant-garde film] the use of landscape requires what Raymond Williams, following Brecht, called ‘complex seeing’: the reading of landscape within the diegesis as itself a layered set of discourses as a text in its own right. In these examples, landscape is not subordinated to character or plot development. Instead, it is offered as a discursive terrain with the same weight, and requiring the same attention, as the other discourses that structure and move the text. (Willemen, ‘An Avant Garde for the 90s’, in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, 1994, London: BFI, 141)

He further elaborates:

In conventional narrative, the diegetic setting (location, décor) is rigorously subordinated to plot and character development. Setting is deployed according to the dictates of psychological realism and motivation. It functions either as metaphor…as a picturesque backdrop… as a symbol for a character’s environment in the sociological sense… or simply as the necessary collection of props required to give a character a realistic space to inhabit.

None of the conventional uses of landscape, for instance, whether rural or urban, insist on offering the landscape as itself an active, multi-layered discursive space demanding to be read in its own right. Invariably, a tourist’s point-of-view is adopted as opposed to the point of view, for example, of those whose history is actually traced in the setting, or for whom the land is a crucial element in the relations of productions governing their lives. (Willemen 1994, 155-56 emphasis mine)

In my observation, while the non-diegetic soundtrack of Komal Gandhar is replete with ancient marriage-songs and the diegesis spells out splits and disharmonies in urban settings, the scenes of harmony take place within the landscapes of Bengal. Anasuya’s epiphanic realization has an important corollary; redemption of the urban spaces takes place. Earlier in the film, Calcutta is described as a “hazy city, filled with dust and smoke”, divorced from the plenitudinal and perennial rural Bengal. Being the dumping ground of the East Bengali refugees, the state of the city is perceived as “fallen”. This aspect can’t be fully explained by clichéd city-village dichotomies. A separate post would be necessary to elaborate how Ghatak’s films are exemplary instances of a discursive use of landscapes.

In Kurseong (a hill-station in North Bengal), we are presented with the elaborate visuals accompanied with a song composed by Rabindranath celebrating the human subjects’ plenitudinal relationship with the land. In following dialogues Bengal is described as a sweet, young girl, intertextual references are made to imagery from poems of Rabindranath and Bishnu Dey, from which the title of the film (literally meaning the musical note E flat) is derived (One can relate this also to poet Jibanananda Das, especially, his poems in Rupashi Bangla, literally ‘Pretty Bengal’, originally published in 1957). In Lalgola and Bolpur, Bhrigu and Anasuya share their memories about the Mother. A composition from the Lalgola sequence is illuminating. In the foreground Bhrigu and Anasuya share their memories. In the background the river Padma flows, the place is located in the border of the two Bengals. In the mid-ground stands an enormous weight-scale, signifying that the place was a marketplace in yesteryears. Similarly, a disused rail track is also shown in the sequence. Bhrigu describes it as a sign of conjunction between the two halves of Bengal in the past and a sign of disjunction in the present. Ironically, its status of a conjunction-marker in the past can only be derived after the track is halted at a buffer in the present (in a famous tracking shot ending the sequence the camera charges towards the buffer accompanied by a choric wail).

Only once is the landscape remarkably used as a site of split: in the Aaj jyotsna raate song-sequence. The song, another composition by Rabindranath, is a lament of an individual separated by choice from the collective, who is in a state of blissful plenitude with nature in a night of a full moon. The shots frontally present the audience instead of the singer (a panning long-shot actually leaves her in darkness), almost leaving the shots unsutured. The spectator’s expectation to see Anasuya singing is consciously thwarted, forcing him/her to hear and contemplate the song and observe the nocturnal nature. The Khowai sequence is a tribute to Rabindranath (whose iconisation of the land in his numerous patriotic songs, <<urghhh! badly described>>, comes closest to Ghatak’s in this film); Bolpur and Khowai being places associated with the poet in Bengali culture. To illustrate, one can quote Rabindranath: “This Bengal sky full of light, this south breeze, this flow of the river, this broad leisure stretching horizon to horizon, all these were to me as food and drink to the hungry and thirsty. Here it felt indeed like home, and in these I recognised the ministrations of a Mother.” (from translation of Jibansmriti, quoted in Rajadhyaksha 1982, 87). The sequence is dramatically important because here Anasuya divulges about Samar/Ferdinand to Bhrigu and gives him her mother’s treasured diaries. A recognizable strain of one of Rabindranath’s swadeshi song is heard (The first two lines of the song, ‘Sarthaka janama amar’, can be loosely translated as ‘my birth is worthy because I am born in this land, my birth is blessed because of your love, Mother’). This is an exemplary sequence where “a use of setting interacts with other elements in the text in the same way that, for example, a written text inscribed in an image would interact with it” (Willemen 1994, 156).

In these sequences (and also in the other films of the Trilogy), whenever the camera records the landscape, the use of the panning movements is marked. Recalling Sergei Eisenstein’s observations that “landscape…is the freest element in [a] film which is liberated from the tasks of narration”, Ghatak’s panning camera renders the landscapes visually musical. The volumes, lines and contours move and change in crests and falls as the camera pans. The graphic limits of the shot, i.e. the frames and the cuts, are transcended as the lines and contours flow and melt into each other across the shots. Characters are located within this panorama.

As the landscape becomes the site of harmony one must be aware of the fact that here the land comprises of only the western, i.e. Indian, half. Thus, one half of the land is activated in the memory; the other half becomes functional in the present. While the city-space is the domain of rifts and splits, when Anasuya evolves to become the Mother, it is redeemed too, in lieu with Bhrigu’s words that Calcutta can become a new idyll for the new Shakuntala. Anasuya’s realization that she belongs to the land renders her act of refusing Samar a political act. In an epiphanic moment a street-urchin pulls back her sari, begging for a coin or two. Anasuya reads the act as her land pulling her back, resisting her de-patriation, recalling the dear calf similarly pulling back the Shakuntala’s sari when she was leaving her parental abode in the play. As the soundtrack is saturated with gunshots and bombings (obviously non-diegetic) a political worker addresses her as “the known one”: the people of Bengal exist because women like Anasuya sustain them. Ghatak’s familiar compositions of his women reappear, enshrining Anasuya as the Mother, iconising her. The final ‘marriage’ between Bhrigu and Anasuya is rendered embedded within a montage of panning shots of all those landscapes of Bengal we have seen so far, even the Calcuttan cityscape find its place here (though one is painfully reminded that this is only half of Bengal, the other half is missing leaving the merging of the landscapes unsutured; the memory-space remains ‘unfigurable’, for obvious political reasons). An aural montage of ancient marriage-songs and the song by Rabindranath featured in the Khowai sequence fills the soundtrack.

Sorry folks, this prolonged and unending writer’s block is really turning out to be a pain in the posterior. Dhriti requested me yesterday to write about my impressions on John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Now here is a damaging reply to that: I intend to write a series of posts on the plethora of westerns I immersed myself in for the last couple of months. So you get it, a man suffering severe writer’s block promising a series of 30 or so posts!

Let me instead present you something poignantly beautiful. This might act as a preamble to our possible discussions on the Westerns. This is excerpted from the famous speech given in the 1850s by Chief Seattle, the famous leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish Native American tribes of Washington, USA in a response to the authorities’ decision to buy Indian lands. Of course the speech is translated and the authenticity of the text is questioned by many.

Chief Seattle

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man — all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children.

So, we will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you the land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father’s grave, and his children’s birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.

I do not know. Our ways are different than your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of the insect’s wings. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around the pond at night? I am a red man and do not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man for all things share the same breath, the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow’s flowers.

So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will make one condition – the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.

I am a savage and do not understand any other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be made more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that we have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know which the white man may one day discover; our God is the same God.

You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land; but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. The earth is precious to Him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

But in your perishing you will shine brightly fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man.

That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.

Where is the thicket? Gone.

Where is the eagle? Gone.

The end of living and the beginning of survival.

This is supposed to be the version of least authenticity. Visit this site for other versions of the Chief’s speeches.

The Monument Valley

Sorry folks for keeping few of you (unfortunately and thankfully) waiting! Remember I told something about my discipline in that first post? For further excuses: had to reformat my computer the day before yesterday. Below are those images referred in the classroom. I will not comment much regarding why I cited the first couple of photographs which are definitely not surrealist ones; but I consider them to be more surreal – stuff out which nightmares are made – than the latter, properly surreal one. Before you view them, the passage which provoked it…

Photography can even surpass art in creative power. The aesthetic world of the painter is of a different kind from that of the world about him. Its boundaries enclose a substantially and essentially different microcosm. The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint. Wherefore, photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it. The surrealists had an inkling of this when they looked to the photographic plate to provide them with their monstrosities and for this reason: the surrealist does not consider his aesthetic purpose and the the mechanical effect of the image on our imaginations as things apart. For him, the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography ranks high in order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. The fact that surrealist painting combines tricks of visual deception with meticulous attention to detail substantiates this

– Andre Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image (translated by Hugh Gray).

Nanjing Massacre in WWII: 300,000 Chinese People Killed, 20,000 Women Raped …

Image: Kevin Carter; 1994 Sudan Famine

And a rather more cheerful and properly surreal one (thanks Anamitra!)

Salvador Dali photographed by Philip Halsman

Viewing Degree Zero. That’s something which crosses my mind sometimes.

While writing here, sometimes I am trying that, revisiting Film Studies and starting from degree zero. Keeping in mind how much you freshers know after a month of classes and maintaining the vantage-point. Not a particularly easy thing to do. But viewing degree zero is something else, though somehow related.

Thinking of the moment when mankind encountered cinema for the first time. Thinking of the moment when a human being…when I encountered cinema. Trying to recall when I understood that this is a magic for a lifetime! Regretfully, these are memories and emotions which you are bound to lose forever, it slides into your unconscious, therefore probably emerges in appropriate guises in our dreams. Have you ever dreamt of films? I have. But afterall we are inundated with images each waking hours. It damages…the virginity of our vision, as one of my teachers said. And once you spend few years immersed in images and sounds, thinking about cinema, helped by a career of course, you might reach a moment when you wish you could have started again. There are so much overkills.

Teaching Andre Bazin gives me an inkling of how it might have been: viewing, reading degree zero. There are ways to teach Bazin. Elaborating the context, giving a broad overview, reading what his discursive opponents meant, then again the reappraisals. It gives you a very good spectrum of what was happening during those key moments in the history of our discipline.

But this year I haven’t attempted it. I felt that I will miss precious hours. One might instead devote the class-hours reading him entirely and just think aloud, think laterally and perpendicularly, the way his words provoke. In the initial moments you might find his propositions naive (now that also depends on my efficiency; I might fail in convincing you), probably he also knew it. But you will understand, after you have read a tonne of others’ writings and if you revisit this man after completing your course (yes, after completing it; you need to read him not out of compulsion, but out of curiosity) that here was an extremely intelligent man who had a hunch of probably all counter-arguments his words will invite.

We have just read half of an essay (we will read a couple in the classroom this semester and a couple more when we will discuss neo-realism), we have read nothing of his ideas on cinema. So, it might be a bit premature discussing further. Still, would like to underline few things broadly…

Remember, Bazin is never prescriptive. He is open about his bias but he never claims his preferred one is the only cinema to be reckoned. He was very vocal about his disliking German Expressionist instances (considered by many of his contemporaries as instances of supreme cinematic craftsmanship), but he knew his propositions are pitted against the most revered name in (prescriptive) film theory of his times: Sergei Eisenstein. Bazin just vehemently states what he prefers. He never ever laid the yardsticks of what a better cinema will be by proposing devices, as they did during his days. Instead, he takes another route, a bit contentious one of explaining cinema’s past arriving the present, to prove his thesis.

Probably he was the first critic/theorist who was thinking from the vantage point of a viewer (than the maker, another thing they did those days). Therefore Bazin would be a transitional figure in the history of film theory. And when he was thinking as an viewer he is always underlining the ‘freedom’ of the viewer. One should always remember, as I am harping now and then in the classroom, he was writing during and after the fascist era of Europe. He knew what ‘tyranny of meaning’ can historically be like. A response would have been, as it shaped up after the WWI with the Dadaists and the Surrealists, a jubilation of ‘anti-meaning’ (forgive the clumsiness). But Bazin would have found that oppressive too. Bazin was talking about the ‘freedom’ of the viewer in the process of making meaning out of a cinematic image.

I have designed a page in this blog where you can post your thoughts which might provoke a longer response from me. This is something Dhriti wrote this evening there:

Bazin writes -”between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of the nonliving agent.” Well, Bazin certainly addresses the act of reproduction but what about the act of representation???? Act of reproduction may not incorporate the act of representation…though in the very next line there is a mention of the purpose of the photographer…but he again he negates it by suggesting the photographer’s absence…i find this contradictory…and as to the act of representation, i find Bazin a bit indifferent, i.e. in the particular essay that is being discussed in the class…

Correct exasperation there! Now this is what I wish to explicate in the following classes: Bazin would prefer an art which does away with the quota of interpretation in the act of representation. He would consider the quality of an artist in his process of lessening interpretation in the act of representation to be higher in value. You might find this naive, but you should keep in mind that Bazin was writing when cinema has already reached its pinnacle of craftsmanship. Cinema has learned to lie convincingly. Bazin was talking about unlearning cinema, something achievable only by the most cerebral cine-artist, because when you dismantle what has been erected for 50 years, you need to know exactly what to dismantle and yet leave an impressive artifice standing. Bazin was talking about filming degree zero.

I know that doesn’t properly answer Dhriti’s question. My design is to provoke more rather than close questions. Before the Bazinian era, film theory was only bothered about the moment of production. Production of what? Production of cinematic meaning (I don’t understand why a certain phase of filmmaking is termed ‘post-production’; it is the moment when ‘meaning’ is being finalised!). Bazin is precisely aware of the moment when meaning is being born: during the viewing of the film. Therefore he is talking about a filmmaking which is intelligently and progressively aware of the moment to come. Bazin’s is a film theory about the moment of reception. Any act of filmmaking which restricts the freedom of that moment is retrogressive, or, to use a term more in sync with his era, fascist to him.

Would have continued more. But let me lead you to few more writings in the net which will illuminate more:

• Andre Bazin’s Writings in Girish Shambhu’s Blog: I have the pleasure of linking to a blog which I enjoy immensely. Before you enjoy all of Girish’s posts just go through the comments in this particular post. It will be highly rewarding. I have gathered few links from those comments below so that you don’t click away during reading!
• THE RECEIVED WISDOM OF ANDRÉ BAZIN—J. Hoberman Quotes: Michael Guillen responding to Shambhu’s post; collection of Bazin’s quotes.
• THE RECEIVED WISDOM OF ANDRÉ BAZIN—Online Resources: Michael now doing an enormous favor! A very comprehensive list of Bazin’s writings available online.
• The Innovators 1950-1960: Divining the real from BFI | Sight & Sound | A good introduction by Peter Matthews.
• Andre Bazin’s Destiny: A review of Dudley Andrew’s biography. Also for a feel of post-Bazinian thoughts.

Lastly, an image from Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98). It’s Francois Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Leaud, who played the former’s alter ego in 400 Blows (the kid you saw running). Bazin died the day after Truffaut started shooting his first feature-length film.

Toi, toi…you…you…

Is The Dark Knight stinking of Imperialism? one of my dear friends asked, rather answered affirmatively in that post I have quoted. I have still not been able to view the film (holy lethargy and weariness of mine) but I thought I might deal with the question tangentially. Christopher Nolan is a favorite director and I wish to write a bit about his films in few forthcoming posts (thanks Prithwish and Aniket! Did I get your names right?).

I don’t think Nolan’s Dark Knight will stink of imperialism. But there are immense possibilities of doing so. I don’t think it will, because it is Nolan and Batman, or, because of the way Nolan approaches Batman, recalling Batman Begins. I think it might, because Hollywood is a big powerful conservative system, greater than individual visions.

For last few years, blame my middle-youth for that, I am hooked to one of the most enduring genre (genre? or style? or movement? or simply a phase?) Hollywood has ever produced: the Noir. Now, my eccentricity doesn’t allow me to watch more, I am sure that’s the better way to appreciate. Few noirs I have seen triggered thoughts, and I have enjoyed more by thinking about it. Noir builds a ‘world’ of its own, and to me, that is the modern-metroplitan, noir is. The more you brood noirish, the more the America in the ’30s and ’40s, during the Prohibition, after the Great Depression and between the Wars, will haunt you. And it is not exactly the documentary history, but the history as it is viewed through Hollywood what haunts. It is history which turns into a mindscape, filtering out certain essential drives out of events and anecdotes, creating a ‘world-view’. I will gush in a next post about noir, but to sum it up: noir had the courage of viewing America’s darkness without any resulting skirting of issues, neither providing easy solutions. It is noir’s cynicism, its reversal of standard values, its uncompromising tendency to unsettle, its knack for troubles rather than trouble-shooting which has made it probably the most revisited genre in Hollywood’s history. Take any director of substance, he has dabbled with it at least once.

Was watching Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) few days back, considered one of the greatest mob-films (the gangster genre, another output of the period) like The Godfather. I really wished to see a film entirely set in Chicago in the ’30s. My immediate response was: well, not a great movie though very earnestly made. Inspite of those stellar performances by Sean Connery and Robert De Niro and Kevin Costner’s sincere one, I thought that the film should have been more gritty; It rather turned out to be cheerful! I considered the dialogues and situations to be too cliched.  Subsequently, Ennio Morricone’s music continued to haunt and the film settled in my mind. Ask me, I actually liked the ‘Odessa Steps’ tribute to Sergei Eisenstein though it was ripped off of all montage! Then I understood why the film should be treated as a good one. When I was expecting more grit, I was actually hankering for a more realistic portrayal of Chicago in the Prohibition era. But this is where Hollywood is marvellous: it can turn the historical into mythical! Myth being repositories of meanings. That’s the liberatory aspect of popular imagination; well, one aspect of it, and if De Palma decided to take that route, it is neither wrong and the film actually excelled in its cliches. It is cheerful because it knows it is a fable. The thing De Niro does with the baseball-bat: it created new cliches too!

Cover of Batman: The Dark Knight #1 (1986). Art by Frank Miller.

If you thought that I am really rambling, well I am actually not. Take noir, it filters out a ‘world-view’ out of the ’30s and the ’40s America. Take the gangster/mob-films, it turns the period into a myth. If you consider Batman – again, I have read few and I brood more about the better superhero – it is both. First appearing in Detective Comics #27 in 1939, the Bat-world is probably the most enduring paradigm of popular imagination arising out of the situation which still harbors the spirit of the times. I haven’t read any article which discusses Batman in its originary context, but can the Gotham City be anything but Chicago in the 1930s? Is it just a coincidence that Chris Nolan, in his intelligent decision to heighten the second film’s realism-quotient, exactly situates in Chicago?

What my friend ranted against is actually a general criticism of the superhero genre. Well, I think it might be more appropriate to Iron Man, this year’s other superhero-blockbuster. Entirely dependent on the US military-complex, it would be rather too appropriate. But the Dark Knight? I would rather differ.

The system called Hollywood might turn any vigilante-icon into an imperialist goon. Take the worst case: Rambo was not written – I am referring to the novel and the first film – to be a shirtless commie-basher. He was supposed to be a symptom of Vietnam war, but look how easy it was turning him into a reagan-head. Similarly, Batman can easily be turned into such a figure. But I doubt if it has been true in Nolan’s case just because Nolan is more interested in the darker, more mature origin of the franchise. I repeat: the origin.

Go through the strips, comics and graphic novels…since a superhero is an idea which is elaborated by many people (and not necessarily in a linear way) you will find many Batmen. But thanks to Frank Miller and Grant Morrison, he turned out to be the only superhero who grew up after the Cold War. I think this has been possible because Batman is the only icon to encapsulate and preserve the originary world-view: I am talking about the world and times which gave birth to the noir, the gangsters and the mythical Chicago.

The Prohibition and Depression era Chicago was America inverted. One can write miles to explain why, I am trying to be precise (looking at the length I have already churned out): the era actually drove the final nail in the coffin of the Great American Dream, i.e it is the land of opportunities where everyone gets his chance to make it decent or big; it is not Europe with centuries-old hierarchical structures, America’s boon was its lesser burden of history. But that the dream is an impossibility was ruthlessly proved during the ’30s and the ’40s: it was proved easier to make it bigger in the rough and indecent way, that is what was being proved in the streets. Sometimes you are left with no other ways but the rough and the indecent. Take the cases of the immigrants, consider the way they arrived with the hope of starting anew and then discovering that it is arduous to prove yourself to be a truly decent American; and then you start mourning and frantically preserving your better origins and land up in cultural contradictions: is it preferable to be an American of the ‘allowed’ future or should one remain true to the roots, how long does it take to be a legitimate American (consider the Italians and Sicilians in tales like The Godfather)?.  Greed, corruption, violence, power was swaying everywhere and the system turned out to be all wrong. This is the moment when you start imagining superheroes; you pit this world against the superhero and he sets things right. But if you start ‘internalising’ this world within the superhero? Well, a Batman is born. Few people who have already read my scribbles before know that I like to consider the Gotham City as a mind in itself!

It is easy to consider Batman as a capitalist fantasy. Recall how stinking rich papa Wayne was?  He was that impossibility: a benign industrialist. Well, okay, comics are places where you dream. But isn’t Batpower entirely derived of those lucre, filthy or not? Everyone knows that Bruce Wayne doesn’t have any superpowers, he is just cerebrally superior and he has the state-of-the-art technology at his disposal. He might turn out to be the nether-side of capitalism. Bruce Wayne is just that what died away with industrial capitalism: the dream of a capitalist progeny, rich dad begets richer son.

And he was not any other dad; he was the father of Gotham City, papa Wayne was. But then Gotham city mugged and killed him off: that’s patricide! (Incidentally, Batman Begins is inundated with father-figures played by senior actors, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson…and isn’t it interesting that Batman was finally pitted against one of his mentors?) So logically, revenge would be to kick asses of the poors who did it and do it in a way which the public face of capitalism wouldn’t allow. But this is where Nolan and David S. Goyer’s script got it politically right! Bruce Wayne understood that the man who shot his parents shouldn’t be the one he will be fighting against, he should fight against power and more elaborately, the system which keeps Gotham City in its hellish status-quo. What died with Thomas and Martha Wayne is the possibility of an altruistic capitalism. Yes, it is the moment when the great American dream died. What was left is the real face of capitalism in its most vicious. And Bruce Wayne turned into a capitalist gone wrong! Just to observe, the Bat-industry inside Batcave produces nothing which can be sold! It involves no exploitation of labour, no profit! Batman is the aborted son of capitalism. He is the symptom which emerges after repression (I am speaking psychoanalytically) and a symptom is not a cure, it cannot be healed unless you address its deeply embedded roots and if it cannot be healed all you are left with is the option of suffering and enjoying it. Batman is too introverted to be propagandish.

And then the ideas of ‘escalation’ (Gordon’s words in the finale of Batman Begins). Just because of Batman’s presence Gotham City will be infested with increasing degrees of criminality (in other words, if he is banished, Gotham might be a safer place to live in). Just read it in terms of capitalist competition, since he is the most powerful, he will generate the most powerful competion right there in his place! His is the task of a Sisyphus, it won’t be ever complete. And when he faces his final foe, he faces the most incorruptible evil. Joker isn’t driven by profit or greed (I know he has burnt dollars in the film), he is pure id if Batman is Gotham City’s superego. It is Batman who is shivering at the edge of moral corruption because Joker tests his endurance, teases him to release his brutality, coaxes him to be his other face. I can recall the unleashing of Arkham Asylum in Nolan’s first film, it is nightmarish because the unconscious was being released (Nolan has still not been able to achieve the nightmare; if he achieves it, he will cease to produce a Hollywood blockbuster; I am recalling the brilliant and ‘un-readable’ Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean). Now you have too many crooks to bring in to the book. Much has been written about how Batman painfully stretches the limits of vigilantism, how the notions of justice, revenge and decency are questioned … I won’t repeat them.

If someone is true to the Batman spirit (I think Nolan is), it will be difficult to produce something easily imperialistic, because Batman is essentially dialectic, riddled with contradictions and schizophrenia and is a dream turned deliciously wrong. It was a critique of the superhero genre from the word go, though being the exemplar. It is impossible to produce something monolithic and linear through Batman if you are sincere. I know a myth is open to be contemporanised, but a myth also is a repository of historical meanings, it preserves the Weltenschaung of an era. The heart of Batman, I argue, lies in that pre-Cold-War era when American popular imagination was in its most fertile and fearlessly self-critical, when the noir and the gangster genres were born. It just gave a damn.

Pure Id, Incorruptible Evil: Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight

I dreamt I am two-faced, dear blog. Half of it is painted with a purple grin, the rest is hooded as if it is hiding a scar. One appears shameless, another covering a shameful eye. Before the grin menacingly reminded the scowl that he makes him ‘complete’…they were talking. When they are…sometimes…poised to kill each other, they recall that they are supposed to, born to, destined to talk with each other, interminably.

When the hood asked “why are you what you are? Bizarre and faulty?”, the grin answered, after looking up askew, rolling eyes clockwise twice and anticlockwise once and pretending once-in-a-lifetime introspection: “because I look the way you see me, I am the way you react to me, I am what I provoke in you, i am what you are afraid to be!”

“You are scarred, challenged, amputated and incomplete!” the hood hissed and invited the final wordplay, replete with chuckled glee.

from a post to be published elsewhere.

And for die-hard Batheads: The Sequart Continuity pages on Batman

Now this one is just for entertainment. A song I wrote a year ago and previously posted in two of my earlier blogs. This is recycling myself because I have still not gathered much for my next post. (Darn! I’m posting poems again! Okay, this won’t be repeated)

Its not irrelevant coz you have seen the film today; I just wish to extend the feel. Breathless (French: À bout de souffle; literally “out of breath”, 1960) by Jean-Luc Godard remains one of my evergreen favorite films. Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, remains a lovable thug with whom one will always identify, as long boys-as-men will fall in love with Jean Seberg, hopelessly…till he dances to death in the final scene (he knew it was coming within days and therefore considered it to be the adequate time to proposition an impossible love). Continue…

“I shook off the sweat and the sun. I realized that I’d destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach where I’d been happy. And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.”

The Outsider, Albert Camus

Break the Law
Scream your Thoughts
Pull the Gun
Shoot the Sun

Burn the Bridges
Scald the Beaches
On the Run
Beat the Sun

If you ask me why I wired and stole that car
I would say that I did it just to freak
Didn’t know that in the age of machines
It would turn out to be a lifetime hellbound trip

Shadows of shifting clouds
Fleeting like shapeless doubts
Neon-signs tell my stories
Newspaper astrologies

If you predict that a bad day lies ahead
I will rub my shoedust-disdain in your face
If you send your kafka-cops to trail my fate
I will boogey-woogie, Bogey to my death

Peep the Butt
Jump the Cut
Scoot to Hell
Cat the Bell

Syncopated
Synch belated
Pull the Gun
Shoot the Sun

If she tells me that I am not meant for her
I will tell her baby love me meaningless
If she nods her pretty crew-cut Renoir-head
I can drop the hat and stop the skirt-chases

The sky above is bleached to white
Someone shrieking like a kite
A kitten litters in the gutter
It is dead, I cross my chest

If you ask me if I church the bloody Sundays
I will say that you’ve got me baby wrong
I know God is that gutter-dead kitten
The chaplain’s just a bored booky-moron

Think before taking a step
Step before thinking it late
Screw all bullshits
Raise the Hell

Grab the Girl
Grip the Gun
Sulk or Snarl
Shoot the Sun

I know I am not drifting in another movie
I know I have received no lines for me to speech
I know still I must traipse up-and-down the frame
I can see the sunglassed fool is in the game
I know he will give me away and lay the blame
Over the confused conduced striped-T-shirted dame
I know I will turn immortal and then I’ll die
I am trying to jump the cliff and then fly
I know I have waxy cursed daedalus-wings
I know I am throat-cut Orpheusinging
I know I am Mersaulting in the blanded beach
I know I am post-war cold-war Prometheusing!!!

Shit the beat
Beat the heat
Hit the nadir
Don’t retreat

Burn the Bridges
Scald the Beaches
On the Run
Beat the Sun

Break your Laws
Scream your Thoughts
Pull the Gun
Shoot the Sun

Disgusting … I’m done …

Jean-Luc Godard

Well, let me have the pleasure of introducing my close friend and comrade in the uncertain raft of ‘Film Studies adrift’ having his take on The Dark Knight, currently crashing box-office records and winning critical acclaim of similar proportions. Let me introduce you to…err…Mr. Hollis Brown (what is your name, HB?)
Consider his take on the film (click the title of the article below to visit his blog). Consider how damaging we become to common-sense ideology and discuss! I will abstain from my comments since I haven’t seen the film and HB has forewarned that I might turn out liking it since I like Batman.

Update @ 27/07/08: click to read my response: Speaking of the man trapped inside Gotham City

Batman: The Dark Knight!

Watch out Robert Mugabe they are coming after you. You don’t seem to behave cordially with western folks these days! Eh? Are you too big for your shoes? Have you heard about a dark knight? He is coming after you.
Iran, stop enriching uranium! You folks are a real menace to ‘western democracy’. Look at North Korea they are now, with ‘us’. The coalition of the willing! Want to know who else is there? Well our man from ‘Gotham city’- Batman alias Bruce Wayne.

‘With a fantastic collection of stamps
To win friends and influence his uncle..’
I see Donald Trump (in Christian Bale) wear his bat suit amidst the ruins of ground zero. He is busy punching digits on his i-phone; frantically calling his servant Pedro (Michael Cain). He wants to know if the Wall Street came crashing down? Or if his stocks are safe at the aftermath of the tragedy.

Discipline and Punish!
Capitalism has a new task in hand. It is called Disciplining. It is the first step. Punishment will follow in the next step and third is re- structuring. From the streets of Gotham to that of Iraq we have seen the ‘western democracy’ teaching truant street thugs like Jack Napier (Joker) how to behave.

By now all you ‘baddies’ have got a feel of how ‘we’ operate. The latest Bat-flick will tell you. We no longer care for international law. We violate your air space if we have to. We take prisoners right from your own door step. No, you are wrong: CIA is not part of this ‘operation’; in fact we retired those guys long time back. It s Batman we trust in and the rest is strictly in cash!

The City(Bank) and Batman never sleep at night!
‘Police doesn’t know how to make a man guilty or innocent
…against the repression of the police….’
Dear
Joan Baez,
I suggest you take a closer look at the brutal representation of violence in police custody (Batman beating up Joker right under the watchful eyes of police chief in a police station). Guantamo bay style of torture was on the surface!

Vigilante as the last man standing in the west (ern) democracy of nightmarish dystopia.
‘This city is like a sewer….. Some one has to clean it up…’
-Travis to a Senator Charles Palantine.
–Taxi Driver, 1976
Travis is a war –veteran from Vietnam. He wants to clean up the city! He is getting organized. Does he call Batman? No, he takes the onus on himself. Shoots his way out of the whore house after rescuing Iris. Applauds. – ‘Gary Cooper rides with Grace Kelly into the sun…you ********- John McClane, Die Hard, 1988.

‘There must be a way out of here …said the joker to the thief?’
This is what most of us in the third world are wondering.There must be a way out of this uni- polar world and its obscene representation. Christopher Nolan’s Batman – The Dark Knight is just an entry point into the heart of present day world order. It can be read as an allegory of things that just doesn’t seem right .The end doesn’t justify the means.
This is popular culture at its best. Thrilling experience for kids and right wing adults too.
A dark tale of popular culture degenerating into the political pedagogy of the far right!
The white man has to carry his burden for few more blocks. Passing through Baghdad, Tehran and Kabul…
The march continues…
Someone in his/her blog has called Dark Knight a tragedy of Nietzschian proportion. I agree. This is the tragedy of western modernity and capitalism.

So, here is the couple of film-clips I was struggling with. The first is from Satyajit Ray’s classic Pather Panchali (1955), the scene after Durga dies. Just watch Subrata Mitra’s gentle camera turning almost divinely indifferent to catastrophe at the beginning. The way it describes the storm-ravaged house in unperturbed langour, the way the camera stands still after Harihar (Kanu Bandyopadhyay), back home after months and ignorant of his daughter’s untimely death, arrives at the vicinity of the house and exists the frame. No cuts follow. The camera just watches the cow in the midground until Harihar enters the background after many seconds. It is only the profilmic space rumbling with poignancy for minutes until the news breaks through the mother’s breaking down. The scene is famous for the sudden muting of the voices and the wail of the tar-shehnai which is muted again to release Harihar’s  shriek in its utter starkness.

Follows the climactic scene of Francis Ford Coppolla’s Godfather III (1990). The Coppollas and the Scorseses are known to be Ray afficiandoes. I think the scene is a sort of tribute to the above scene. Watch for the similar muting of the voice and overlay of music and Al Pacino’s heartrending cry shredding the soundtrack. Well, when daddies are deprived of their daughters in these ways they are rendered motherless.

Sorry, for that jab at pains, usual of me…

21/07/08 12:12 am

Trying to answer Anamitra’s query below. He said that inspite the similarities he is not supporting me “as the consequences of these two sequences and the sequences in whole are totally different”.

But sometimes, in some films, something peculiar happens Anamitra. This is what the idiosyncratic world of French Nouvelle Vague taught us. It is like this: they saw cinema as an archive of ‘written memories’., to put it bluntly. Recall the scene in 400 Blows where Antoine Doinel is reprimanded because he lifts an Balzac piece in a classroom exercise? He is immediately labeled a plagiarist. 400 Blows is a film on language – writing, reading, teaching language feature many scenes in the film if you can recall – it is about the language as imposed by the masters and language as it is creatively twisted by the renegade students, in a way which will never be allowed by the authorities (not surprisingly, the French has the strictest language academy existing).

Why language? Because it is the Cahiers du Cinema critics who turned into New Wave filmmakers who maintained that cinema is a sort of ecriture, a sort of writing. So whenever language appear in the film, try to think about it in terms of ‘film-language’. Thus what is the Balzac sequence putting forward?

According to me, this: Doinel is claiming that he has not ‘cheated’. He has quoted. He says that when someone is writing in any particular subject (can’t recall what it was in the film) why should someone be ‘original’ if it is already well-expressed by someone else in the language? One recalls, one quotes, one pays tribute, thus on the moment of quoting one creates his own legacy. Not ironically, nouvelle vague filmmakers, especially Godard will be continuously alleged of lifting and plagiarism by critics who never exactly understood.

I am not actually talking about intertextuality. I am talking about cinema as memories of a language. Cinema is a peculiar language. It is not like – Bengali is a language of communication and certain fellas use it to write poetry. Film-language lacks the functionality of spoken language, you don’t find a grammar-book nor a dictionary. Instead you have ‘filmic-utterances’ piled up in history. Godard used to quote a close-up, a tracking shot. Tarantino does it almost in every frame. Its about connecting things.

So you have a situation: a father suddenly encounters daughter’s untimely death. You recall another instance in the memory of the medium. You recall the power of it, you recall the impact. You quote. Cinema is writing. You recall how it was ‘wrote’. Overlay the voice with music, turn the scream visual, as Joanna describes below – as if the voice is choked, as if it is a gasp for air and life – then suddenly release the sound in it’s crescendo. You recall not what was written, but ‘how’ it was written. The language, the style, the rhetoric. Yes, the situations are different: a poor brahmin and a rich mafia-lord are not similar persons too. But at that moment they are similar fathers, bereaved. You connect a couple of fathers in history of cinema. It is like asking a pissed-off young man in a novel what’s aching him and he answers: “to be or not to be…that’s aching me”; he sums it up by quoting. He is not Hamlet, it is only the moment which matters and the act of reading it. The act of ‘reading’ is important, because only then is the quotation recognised.

No point ringing up Copolla to substantiate the quotation. Because when we see films we connect again. It is not only the artist’s private pleasure; it is also the viewer’s method of ‘perpendicularly integrating’ (that’s clumsy, sorry!) cinematic memories.

]]> http://thinkingscreens.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/bereaved-fathers/feed/ 12 Life's Elsewhere http://thinkingscreens.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/lets-see/ http://thinkingscreens.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/lets-see/#comments Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:07:45 +0000 Life's Elsewhere http://thinkingscreens.wordpress.com/?p=17 ]]>

Okay! So I think the blog has started fine. Thanks to all of you who have commented; you guys and girls have set the mood and seriously, I really am suffering trepidations about how to keep up with your expectations. Have I gulped more than I can chew?

Phew…should have taken a few.

Dhriti, as I said, your comments on the country-city binary need longer posts for better justice. I will take it up later, we can surely do it in the classroom (or outside it). Speaking is easier than keying it down, specially when it is a legendary lethargic like me.

Actually, I was preparing for a different post. Thought will post something on the Pather Panchali and Godfather III clips. But I am – err – defeated! The Godfather clip was easy to search out, but ‘Durga’s death’ is nowhere in the net. There was one in the Google videos, but turned out to be something in a 3rd party hosted server which has closed down. Therefore thought of uploading the clip myself. Now that turned out to be a whimper of a task. Had a bad CD at my disposal. Clipped it in WMV format. Then tried to convert it into flv, the format YouTube uses. Landed up with a brilliantly rendered soundtrack with no visuals. I liked hearing the track, but it serves lesser purpose you see, that one can’t see. Therefore, converted to MPEG4 next. Uploaded in a ziffy this evening. Happily went to a friend’s house for a longish cinephilic sojourn (my idea of a weekend), came back and YouTube intimidated that the conversion has failed. Oh, well…I was about to write a long laudatory post on online film-archives. Need to attempt it tomorrow again.

As you can see it, this post falls under the category ‘meta’: posts on posts. And the blog is supposed to be a journal, so few posts will be rather random (like, if I don’t get my YouTube clips and if conversions fail). I like planning things more than executing them (thus, I am perfectly happy since I have made many legendary films in my daydreams!). I will be planning how this blog might turn out to be and talk a bit about my affair with films and Film Studies.

To go straight to Anamitra’s being aghast that I am really ‘underviewed’. I know you guys have seen more films than I have. The primary reason of course will be my lethargy and certain situations in life which don’t…well, let you view films. But it is also because of my bringing up in a city which is miles away from Kolkata. During our childhood in Durgapur, an industrial township with a couple and one cinema-halls, cine-going was frowned upon by parents and I was, sadly, an obedient little boy even in my teens. Television arrived late and in those era of 12 hours or so of only national television channel, one hardly saw much films. But I should say that I saw many quality films during those days in TV. Saw the entire gamut of Ray, Ghatak and many Indian New Wave films, for example, and a huge spate of Bengali mainstream classics.

From 1994, my connection with television snapped. Went to the hostel leaving home, was more enthusiastic about music and theater for a couple of years. The flirtation with theater was rather short, actually accompanied few friends who were more engaged. But music – it was the era of Suman and Mahiner Ghoraguli, somehow equivalent to the American ’60s – was heady! ’90s will forever remain musical to me.

But strangely films were an earlier love, a clandestine one, I can recall. I remember, each childhood year when we had our annual visit to Kolkata where all our relatives stayed, the journey from Howrah station to the southern part of the city was a magical mystery tour to me; I would stretch my neck outside the vehicle we were traveling and just ogled at and voraciously devoured all those magical posters and hoardings strewn all over the city (I still remember a huge one featuring Amitabh Bachchan in Yaarana). And also lapped up those shot-to-shot narrations by friends (with their imaginative falsifications, of course!) who were permitted regular visits to Amitabh-Mithun starrers. Cinema to me was largely unseen, a prohibited zone of magic and mystery. Much later, thanks to Satyajit Ray’s writings and lots of film-society journals, I was initiated into the aesthetic/arthouse aspect of cinema. But we had no film-clubs, no DVDs to download (I got a comp and a broadband just few years ago), no arthouse venues like those of Nandan in my childhood places.

Therefore, entering the Department of Film Studies in Jadavpur University was an entry into a goldmine for me (I am a rather newcomer in Kolkata, I settled here permanently in the latter half of the ’90s). I was dazzled! Just to mention, we didn’t have the bigger screen and better DVDs you see today. Smaller rooms, smaller screens, worse VHS tapes were all we had (couldn’t switch on English subtitles in English films, for example) and of course the annual feast at Kolkata film festival for 7 days.

But somehow, even after it became a profession and a career, this involvement with the screen has still not lost its charm for me. I am an erratic viewer. I have my phases when I become engrossed with particular types of films (I am into Noir these days). I can’t venture into other sorts during those phases. My postgraduate years were deep into Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, Welles and Ghatak particularly, largely European cinema which was new to me. These days, I see less and think more about them. I haven’t watched TV for the last 4 years, believe me. No, not even HBO or other movie channels which I used to watch for hours earlier. Suddenly I outgrew contemporary Hollywood and longed for the classical B/W classics.

Will be happy if I can generate this contagious fever called movies in this blog (expect some loony posts!). Your generation is inundated with it; I think that’s a problem, being overfed.

So, the first ordeal is to unlearn, erase memories and look into her – the screen – and get smitten. Let’s see…