Spaces
The elegantly dressed lady asked, “What else do you need to know of an old woman?” and with that one question, the video ended. But did it end? The lines that time had delicately, trenchantly wrought on the once busy fashion designer’s face, the eyes that were bright and sad all at once, the hypnotic background score that accompanied the series of testimonies of varied, complete or incomplete lives kept spooling and unspooling in my mind-space. Or take the spirited Yulunga track of the Dead Can Dance, accompanied by Allan Ginsberg’s searing lines “Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!” And the poem juxtaposed with stills of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Two multimedia presentations by Simon Biswas and Arko, back to back… sound, image, words kept flowing in a loop on a flatscreen, in the darkness of a small room.
The setting was a photography exhibition. It could have been a café, it could have been my bedroom or a theatre, but what still haunts me are those moving images, their potency… the stories they tell and hide, the questions they raise and answer and the very idea of the shifting image.
Is Cinema dead?
Godard announced ‘Fin De Cinema’ with his 1967 minefield of codes and theories Weekend.
Single screen theatres have been shutting shop with relentless regularity. Hollywood keeps capturing new markets with 3 hour long video games, hackneyed sequels and prequels. Indie directors get co-opted into the studios to helm these ‘Save New York’ campaigns, while little gems from war torn countries only breathe in festivals… back home, the Kumars and Khans, in neon pants, with outstretched hands gyrate their way to the banks… So is cinema dead? Is Eisenstein’s theory of the transformative power of cinema only for archival reference? Is cinema all CGI today, is it just another assembly line production to churn money?
As my mind tries to join the dots between all the single screens in my city that have turned into banquet halls, shopping malls, my phone blinks… There is a Facebook notification. The online documentary film festival begins tomorrow from 7am onwards. From the comfortable confines of home, I can view documentaries from around the world! All I need is a fast internet connection so that the buffering time gets reduced… yes, filmmakers are uploading their works on culture unplugged and many other sites daily, reaching out to audiences which they could not if they were to resort to traditional distribution channels, namely mainstream release. So there are festivals with a clutch of films on one theme or from one region that are up for a certain timeframe, then there are others which stay permanently on these sites. And yes, you get to view them all for free! Now, does the timing of my Facebook notification and my ruminations on theatres sound too convenient, and hence forced? As one cinema space shrinks, another springs up…too dramatic, this? But isn’t that the power of the moving image… the amplification of reality? Even if I were to concede that my Facebook notification did not come at the exact moment of my reverie, does that take away from the ever expanding space for visual culture on the virtual platform?
The dream world of Satyakam, the dwarf; the Macedonian who cycled all the way to France with a prosthetic leg; the fascinating life of Vanessa, the drag queen; the varied contours of feminism; the refugee from Damascus… all crowd in my drawing room every evening to narrate their stories. They tease me, provoke me, fulfill me… and the charged up me then goes and shares my thoughts with other online junkies. We recommend films to each other; we dissect shots and plotlines and try to bring others on board, others who are yet to be initiated to this new feeling of community…to this new digital family of the world.
Does that mean it is time to write the obituary for celluloid, the whirring projectors and the 35mm screens? In a postmodern world of innumerable, disparate micro-narratives, the answer could be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. But more importantly, heritage cannot be preserved without appreciating history.
A fire at the National Film Archive, Pune ensured that there are no prints available of the first talkie of India, Alam Ara. If a doodle on Google is the only way to remember Ardeshir Irani’s adventurism (this being the 80th anniversary of the film), it only begs the question – are we yet to appreciate the role of cinema as a vehicle of change, as an artifact, as a sociopolitical document of the times? Else why are no prints available of Tapan Sinha’s first film? Why does the name John Abraham immediately get associated with the actor and not John Abraham, the auteur, who made films by collecting money from the people, long before Shyam Benegal but sadly has a cult following, only in his home state Kerala? Now juxtapose that with the fact that the Indian State needs a Martin Scorsese to restore a Mrinal Sen classic Kandahar and Uday Shankar’s Kalpana so that they can be screened at Cannes. While it is heartening to find that NFDC is finally waking up and bringing out dvds of Mani Kaul films, there are thousands of others wasting away in the cans. There can be no debate on the fact that there is no conflict between history and technology. With such rapid advancements in restoration techniques, will the State take note?
The only constant that is change can be a bloodbath or a fresh gust of wind, or maybe both. One has no option but to live, grapple and negotiate with it. If a single screen theatre retains its architectural and cultural integrity, and offers cushioned seats, air conditioned auditoriums with restaurants and cafes that advertise various brands and can continue to survive and thrive, then that’s the reality others need to note. Cinema is just another mode of entertainment amid many others. And when so many mediums are at the mercy of one button on the remote, then the only key is to innovate and diversify.
This is not to say that market is the only reality. Otherwise why would Dev Anand continue making movies till the end, even when they failed with both the critics and at the box office, or Terence Mallick still continue to experiment with new forms, unmindful of the market?
Romance and grit
He was a matinee idol of the Turks but not satisfied with just remaining in front of the camera; he went behind to tell stories of the underdog – stories of their hopes and despair. Predictably, this was deemed too Communistic and Yilmaz Güney ended up behind bars. At times he was released, only to be sent back till he finally fled to France from prison in 1981. However through these long stretches of incarceration, the State could not throttle his creativity. He wrote scripts in bits and pieces and stuffed them inside bread rolls for his associates to smuggle out. Then people like Serif Gören and Zeki Ökten executed his vision like Road or The Herd… films that continue to endure. Even while in Paris, he continued making films set in Turkey.
While we remember him, let’s not forget the journey of a masterpiece in a USB drive hidden in a cake. Jafar Panahi continues to serve his sentence but his latest effort This is not a film is touring the world, fascinating viewers, confounding despots. And that’s the power of the moving image; it keeps finding its way through it all. The Lumiere brothers had written it off as another business project but to this day the question still remains, have we been able to completely realise its potential?
Dying movements and little islands of Hope
The decrepit rooms with tattered posters of Antonioni, Ray and Fellini, worm eaten books on Kieslowski and the rusty board that sadly announces that it is a cine club, suddenly jerk into action during the annual film festival. Its members troop in for delegate passes for the fest. Throughout the year, however, they hardly manage to hold screenings. Even if they do at the government auditorium, very few attend them.
The Film Society Movement, started by the likes of Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Dasgupta and others is dying but it is a natural death, due to age. Where is the freshness of new ideas? The old guard laments that readily available pirated dvds, free downloads have killed the movement, that nobody cares for the community feeling of viewing cinema at the theatres anymore… yet the long queues at the festivals, the animated discussions on various online forums present a different picture. Why do these societies not care to invest in professionally managed websites? Why do they shun social networking like the plague? Is it enough to be smug about contributions made in the past? Stagnation kills romance. Why should the moving image be any different?
Yet there are shining stories of new initiatives. Meet Sudeb Sinha, secretary of Drishya, a film appreciation and research group set up in 2005. “We are trying to promote and propagate an alternative audiovisual culture at the grassroots. Someone who earns 150 rupees a day also has a budget for entertainment. But roughly speaking, 78% of our cinemas have closed down. So in the interiors, people depend on video parlours and makeshift halls. We have travelled to these places with Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Hirak Rajar Deshe (In the Land of the Diamond King). Chaplin’s early classics are an instant hit here. Students have told us how these films have helped them write essays on these directors. ” Drishya has even taken Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin to Dharavi and some slums in Calcutta. A Russian silent film… black and white… a man with a microphone translating the subtitles… yet each time it has been screened, the response has been “overwhelming”. Sudeb remembers how a girl from a slum was horrified by the image of the maggot ridden meat served to the sailors. And add to this, the journals, research papers of the collective, the astounding collection of dvds that are available for rent and a clean website! More power to this alternative visual paradigm.
Therefore…
‘Fin De Cinema’ did not mean that Godard would stop making films; it merely re-emphasized his all consuming engagement with the medium. He worked on TV, dabbled with the digital medium. His latest film Film Socialism continues his project of completely discarding narrative (this one is largely un-subtitled) to write visual essays that talk about politics, philosophies, childhood, families and so much more. And yes, the master has uploaded the entire film on YouTube, albeit at super speed!
So the screen may or may not have shrunk, the spaces may or may not have altered… but the caramel popcorn at the swish plex, the sweat and grime onscreen, the videos of the Burmese journalists being shot captured on phone, then uploaded on Youtube instantly for the world to view and the seeders and leechers – all jostling for space, eking out an uneasy peace till the next development is round the corner. They all tell a million stories, narrate a million ideas… they are the moving images.
(5 takes is the Iranian auteur’s Abbas Kiarostami’s tribute to the Japanese master storyteller Ozu. The writer could not think of a more apt title for his essay celebrating the moving image.)
