Sarnath- travelling inside myself

Sarnath is a World Heritage Site outside Varanasi. It is the site where Gautam Buddha delivered his first sermon.

On a recent trip to Varanasi, which happened to be my second trip to the city, I was very keen to visit Sarnath. Finally, my local host and friend decided to take me along for a trip.

We went to Chaukhandi Stupa first, which is a little outside the main site. Our guide, a senior official of the Archeaological Survey of India, pointed out the central structure- an octagonal structure of red bricks with a tower at the centre. This was built by Goverdhan, the son of Raja Todarmal (the then Maharaja of Varanasi) to commemorate the fact that Emperor Humayun, the second of the Great Mughals, had spent a night here in a poor woman's hut when he was on the run after being defeated by Sher Shah Suri in a battle. Our guide who had a sound knowledge of Hindi literature, pointed out that this is the very monument referred to in Jayshankar Prasad's short story Mamta.

The mention of the Jayshankar Prasad's story Mamta, transported me to my student days at the Film and Television Institute of India from the early 1980's. I had read this short story in my school days and was very fond of it. When it was time to make a Diploma Film (the final thesis film at FTII), I wrote a few drafts of a script based on this story. Finally, I gave upon it as I couldn't think of the cast and in terms of production design it was too complex a story to handle as a student film. But the story has stayed in my mind ever since, a wonderful example of what could be possible with a closer relationship between Hindi literature and cinema.

And here suddenly was the real monument, the actual structure that had inspired Jayshankar Prasad's story! It was a moment beyond moving to me and became a deep reminder of where I should be going.

In a sense, the whole of BHU and Varanasi were a trip to connect me with what is lying dormant inside me, the deep connect with literature, arts and culture of Hindi that exists within. Somewhere I have to acknowledge that, only then will I be able to grow and move on.

RIP: Bernando Bertolucci

Bernando Bertolucci passed away yesterday. He was 77, not old by today's standards but seemed to have been ailing. In fact his last film was directed from a wheelchair.

His father was a poet, they seem to have come from an affluent family. Bernando too had been a prize winning poet as a young man, and he had gone on to assist Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the leading Italian filmmakers of the day. Which should tell you that Bernando began from a socialist/ Marxist position, to which he added psychoanalysis as a key source of his work. Bernando used to call the Paris Cinematheque as his film school and Henri Langlios of the Cinematheque as his main teacher.

Bernando Bertolucci was the big filmmaker that emerged from Italy after the Neo-Realist era, and by the time he made 'The Conformist' in 1970, he was already a formidable force in world cinema. His collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro was already the stuff of legend. And all this was before 'Last Tango in Paris' came along.

Think about the challenge of a young Italian filmmaker being able to get the finicky Marlon Brando to act in his film, and that too on a movie with a subject as novel and sex filled as 'Last Tango in Paris'. But Bertolucci and Storaro crafted a marvellous movie, that is still considered too controversial in most of the world (I think it is still banned in both India and Italy).

Bertolucci followed this with '1900' a lovely script with Robert de Niro and Gerard Depardieu, the two big icons of independent cinema of the 1970's. Watch this film for just its visual appeal and performances, its absolutely incredible.

The big break through for Bertolucci came with 'The Last Emperor', a movie about the last, child emperor of China. In those days China was a closed Communist society and to persuade them to participate in a big way in a movie about the emperor must have taken a lot of skill from producer Jeremy Thomas. Bernando Bertolucci must have felt like an odd choice for this kind of a subject, far away from his urban European roots, but Bernando brought poetry, intimacy into a background of huge palaces and courts and armies. Storaro's camerawork was perfect as ever. ' Last Emperor' went on to win three Oscars and established Bernando's international reputation beyond the European art cinema circuit.

Shortly afterwards Bernando came to India looking for locations for Little Buddha, but finally filmed it in Nepal. That's another marvellous film, less known due to its box office failure. But if you ever get a chance to see it, don't miss.

Bernando was known to be friends with Francis Ford Coppola, the Italian in USA. You can see both are filmmakers of the grand gestures- the flourish of camera moves, of linking history and individual lives, and simultaneously moments and faces of human beings- shown to you in ways that you have never seen before. The grandeur got to Coppola, he couldn't control his narratives beyond a point, but Bertolucci never lost his basic control over his narratives.

See 'Dreamers' to see how brilliantly a sixty year old Bertolucci could portray teenagers and their sexuality.

Has Bernando Betolucci gone too soon, did he still have movies in him? I guess one can never say that for sure. But the movies that we have are enough to mark him out as one of the biggest ever filmmakers. A difficult filmmaker to classify for sure, but one whose talent as filmmaker is unmistakable even if you see a few shots of any film.

RIP Bernando Bertolucci.

The Imitation Game and Jobs: biopics

I saw 'The Imitation Game' on Alan Turig's life recently. A bit late I know but I seem to prefer watching films a little after their 'hype' has died out a bit or at least lessened. Its very difficult for me to watch and form an opinion about a film when the media and by inference people around you are full of that movie.

The hype about 'The Imitation Game' has died out a while back, especially as it came from the West, where movies are an instant consumption item and new product needs to be constantly 'hyped'/ promoted by a PR industry. I did not even know the Director or Scriptwriter's name, though looking up I did learn that the movie had received the Best Adapted Screenplay Award at the Oscars.

It's a movie facing a classical problem- you think you know everything you need to know about Alan Turig and what is the new thing that you can learn about him from the movie now. I guess in the English speaking West the problem must be even more acute as Turig is a much loved and respected figure. How does the movie solve the problem? Very simply by 'showing' all of what became Alan Turig developing in front of your eyes as an audience. Classical, simple way to do it- create drama and let the audience enjoy it.

'Steve Jobs' has the same problem, a protagonist who was a recent public figure and a figure who generated love/ hate/ adulation. So what do Aaron Sorkin/ Danny Boyle and Micheal Fassbinder do? They create just three settings where we see the protagonist in a few scenes with people close to him and his life. In these snapshots from a life, they create our impression of Steve Jobs. Going by commercial success, 'Steve Jobs' was not a successful movie, but when you watch it, hey it works beautifully. I mean you can take Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs and do a long biography for Netflix that will spread over eight or ten hours. But a two hour impression of Steve Jobs' life? For that this movie works wonderfully well.

Two completely different ways to do a cinema biography. Is one better than the other? To my mind both approaches are valid. A Steve Jobs like impressionistic movie on Alan Turig would be a problem as you don't quite know enough about him. On the other hand, a blow-by-blow account of Steve Jobs' life would be too long and complicated (as I already mentioned above). So each movie adopts a style that is appropriate to its subject.

That's what we have have to do with biopics- go into the uniqueness of the character that you'd want the biopic to convey and then a structure and style will emerge from the subject. You just need to have the faith in the process that a structure will emerge. Having said all this I now need to look at some of the recent biopics we have done in India to put matters into a perspective. 

Two movies more

Living alone and working long hours mean that I rarely get the time to catch a movie in our cinemas, even though I live and work at a film school (Film and Television Institute of India, in case you were curious). I end up watching bits and pieces of movies on satellite television through the Tata Sky connection. Most of the movies I will be writing about below are ones where I have seen at least an hour of the movie. As a film student and filmmaker, I find that this much of a movie does give me a reasonable idea of the what the movie is like.

I started watching Anurag Kashyap's Mukabaaz (the boxer) after fifteen minutes and watched it through to the end. I am not a fan of Anurag Kashyap's movies, though I'd be the first to admit that he enjoys enormous public approval in India. Mukabaaz by most reviews is not one of Anurag's better works but is fairly recent so I guess it deserves our attention as encapsulating what Anurag Kashyap's work is all about. To me the most striking thing about the movie was its complete lack of moments, at the end there isn't a visual, a shot or a cut or a sound or the way music came into a scene that you remember. The script is content to knit together one cliche after another and at the end one is left with a very dissatisfied feeling- here was a subject full of potential, after all mainstream cinema doesn't deal with small town India anymore.But in this film, the subject doesn't stand out at all, maybe it's not foregrounded enough in the manner in which the visuals and the sounds of the film are organised. Am I cribbing too much, expecting each movie to be a classic? In a way yes, that's what we teach young filmmakers that each subject, each sphere of life that they are interested in, everything has the potential to be a great movie subject. Its a matter of how we look and deal with a subject. In Mukabaaz I am left wondering how the filmmaker looked at the subject.

Revisiting 'Cheeni Kum', yes R Balki's famous first film is now twelve years old- Amitabh (Big B) is sixty four in it and he's seventy six now. Like most of my generation we have grown up admiring Amitabh as he evolved into a superstar. Cheeni Kum is one of Amitabh's better performances in recent years, maybe one of the best of all times. As a sixty four year old bachelor who falls for a much younger woman, I love his scene with the girl's father on the roof top. It is the climax of the movie and Amitabh raises his performance by a few gears to make it the climax of a movie. Does it work? You bet it does. Shows you how a storyline needs performers more than anything else. There is no big fight at the climax, this big argument put forth by Amitabh is it. Afterall he is dealing with a formidable enemy- the girl's father is on a hunger strike, martying himself, how do you counter that? Its easy to write such a scene, but dreadfully difficult to deliver on screen- the dangers of cliches and bad performances run nearby. To me this is a classic film from our times, one that will stand the test of time.

There are a few more movies that I want to write about, but can't lump it all together into one post.

'GOLD' and 'THE BUTLER'

Resuming writing after a while! Understatement I know.

I chanced upon 'GOLD' last night on Tata Sky, where it seemed to be on some kind of a premiere show. Starring Akshay Kumar, written and directed by Reema Khagti, produced by Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar, all A-listers in the Hindi film world. Yes, I know it bombed at the box-office, so most people have written it off. But the subject itself makes at least a look at the movie compulsory. It is about the first team from 'independent' India that won an Olympic Gold in the 1948 London Olympics. Subjects don't get bigger than that, patriotism, hockey, underdogs winning in a white man's world-all combine into a single storyline.

What you do get is a poorly finished, technically incompetent movie without much of a storyline. (Can't blame the Camera Person and Editor too much, when the treatment itself has flaws). Yes, that's the surprise, there isn't a storyline in the movie, the characters are poorly worked out and don't move the narrative forward. Our hero, of course played by Akshay Kumar, is the only one with a motivation. The rest of the characters remain very near to ciphers- fulfilling a plot function and nothing else. Just look at the casual manner in which the 'white'/ British characters and their motivations are worked out- there is simply nothing to them.

The film does invoke the patriotism theme pretty well, especially at the end, the audience knows the story and plot so the challenge was always going to be in the treatment. Compare it to Niraj Pandey's MS Dhoni and the contrast is striking- the Dhoni movie builds up to the World Cup win, but this one is unable to do so.

By chance saw Lee Daniels' THE BUTLER' this afternoon to get a brilliant take on how to integrate an individual story with contemporary history, while being based on real people and real events. This is not Marquez and 'magic realism', this is simply a selection of events and connecting them to a person's life. Where does it connect to GOLD? Very simply - GOLD has a similar premise, connecting an individual's story with historical events. Why does it fail?

GOLD fails in the writing and the treatment, but setting its sight too low. The whole production is more worried about creating opportunities for the lead character to be heroic, than worry about the emotions the storyline is creating in the viewing audience. There are moments which have potential, the meeting with the chief monk at Kanheri caves for example, but the treatment sort of lets the scene collapse.

Am I being unduly harsh on a movie where the viewing audience has already passed its judgement? Can't say. But until each movie and every single moment in it aspires to rise up and the best it can be, we are not going to get great movies. And believe me, some of them will work with audiences too.

Revisiting 'Garam Hawa'

I lived through the 'Garam Hawa' era as an adolescent. Saw it in the final year of school. Learnt that it had been filmed in Agra at an area where a grand uncle was the top cop, so we got to hear a few of the 'war stories' of the making of the movie.
There was all the noise about it getting banned, then cleared by 'higher ups'. I seem to remember it doing reasonably at the box office, though I was an adolescent in North India, so I could be wrong on this.
The movie itself was good, it engrossed you in ways that the 'commercial cinema' regulars didn't.
By a pure fluke I located a digital file of the movie with a friend who runs a video library. I took it to my filmmaking class in Meerut, and we planned a screening.
Seeing the movie now was a revelation. The subject and the storyline were as interesting as ever, the performances mostly pretty good. The sound, especially the dialogues recorded by RK veteran Allauddin Khan, is especially noteworthy. Ishan Arya's 16mm-blown-up-to-35mm camerawork is outstanding. But the movie's basic premise and the ending seemed totally at odds with the rest of the movie, purely dramatically.
Younger audiences, who have grown up in the liberalised, highly 'capitalist' worlds of mobile n malls, and mostly have no clue that alternative ideologies exist, just couldn't relate to the movie. The young people aren't dumb kids but like most ordinary people, fairly centrist in their views, so the dreamy left-wing ideas at the end of the movie were just out of place.
Of course with Garam Hawa being a movie put together by the people from the Indian People's Theatre Association, (IPTA of Mumbai, an old Communist Party of India outreach program), a left wing slant to storyline was almost inevitable. But all the wonderful humanist ideas and situations that the characters portrayed were just wiped out by the almost imposed nature of the movie's ending.
The contrast with the Ray classics that we had seen earlier were stark. The Rays looked 'modern' as their storylines contained human truths that are eternal, the stylistics were wonderfully self contained and self referenced, so the movies don't 'age'.
'Garam Hawa' fell apart on all these counts. Its visuals are poor in terms of their cinematic value. Often the angles miss the important part of the action. Sometimes the key story element is missing from the visuals- certain points you can understand as lack of budget but others are just glaring mistakes.
One has to only see the other 'New Wave'/ FFC financed films- Mani Kaul or Kumar Shahani or Adoor Gopalakrishnan's work provides examples. You may not agree with the movies, but you cannot help appreciating them. With 'Garam Hawa' its the opposite- you love the movie but its faults are glaring.
To me, 'Garam Hawa' has always been the best example of a North Indian regional cinema. it still remains that- being far better than 'Tessri Kasam' or the newer Mumbai filmmakers-shooting-in-exotic-location feel of 'Mashaan'.
But one can why M.S. Sathyu's work collapses after 'Garam Hawa', the discipline and finesse of a filmmaker are just not there. Don't get me wrong on this, I like M.S.Sathyu as a person, but his filmmaking just collapsed and now I can see why.

Introducing Satyajit Ray

I have written earlier about my fears of introducing my students at Meerut to Satyajit Ray.
As it turned out, the first viewing of a Ray film happened with one of personal favourite films; Aranyer Diner Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest).
In a motif of the times we live in, a student downloaded the movie onto his phone, and then we saw it on a laptop.
A film made in 1968, in Black and White and Bengali. For its times, it was a multi-starrer, but to modern day kids, Soumitra Chatterjee or Simi Grewal or Sharmila Tagore mean very little. So for me, the movie started with the fear, how are these kids going to react to it?
I need not have worried at all, as the movie was a hit with the audience. The kids loved it.
Of course I knew it was a superb piece of cinema, each nuance beautifully worked out by a master filmmaker. But to see it look fresh and wonderful after all these years, ahhh, that's a wonderful moment. I can only compare it to my emotions when my son watched 81/2 and loved Marcello Mastronioni. You feel you have passed on a part of your heritage to another generation.
The real magic came in re-discovering Ray for myself, how wonderfully a great filmmaker works. The simplicity, the sheer elegance of the narrative moments, in the business of living one forgets what a great filmmaker does to his audience.
If this is classical filmmaking, why on earth does one need to go against these classical rules?
I guess at a certain level you feel relief that the classics are still valid, have a value.
As it turned out, the next day we saw Satyajit Ray's Charulata, to me one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever made.
What a pleasure to see the students loving it, and saying how does Ray make the movies so close to our lives. This in 2016 is a testimony to Ray's greatness as a filmmaker.