Watching a movie-in a cinema hall

Went to see a movie in a cinema hall, actually it became two movies in quick succession in Mumbai and Pune. Thought I'd write about it earlier, but with the half-crazy schedules I've been keeping of late, it wasn't possible to write earlier.
My memories of cinema halls and whole experience of watching a movie are coloured by my experiences from earlier days in India when cinema halls were an entirely different species.
The cinema halls now were far superior in the picture and sound quality. With digital projection, the images were crisp and sharp, colour rendition was immaculate and the sound on Dolby and DTS systems was absolutely terrific, enhancing your whole movie going experience.
In a first day first show movie, it was a bit difficult to decide if some of the crowd were not a 'paid' one. Then there were the TV Crews outside, wanting 'bites' as they call them- the colloquial version of short snippets for TV or 'sound bytes'.
But yes, technically the experience of the cinema hall was quite breathtaking. Add the crowd to that and you can understand once again the longing for the 'cinema' experience. The sheer 'immersive' nature of the cinema hall experience doesn't quite come back in the home theater or small screen experience.
It would be tempting to say that certain stuff like pornography maybe better as individual private experience, but the success of Sunny Leone and the moving of soft-porn into the respectable sections of film production lend the whole thing a different dimension.
So do we belong to the cinema? Yes i do, too old to change that now.
Or maybe especially so now, when the boundaries have all merged into the 'moving image' business.

A Time to Ponder

Back at my Meerut base after two months of shuttling between Pune and Mumbai.

Teaching at different places, watching a few movies and a few job interviews- that was my time away at Western India.

Teaching was easy sometimes- like in teaching TV at MIT-ISBJ. I'd worked that out already, so it was not too tough to adapt to the knowledge level of the students.

Then came the tough one- teaching about cinema and the plastic arts. Had a tough times simplifying this to a level where the students would comprehend it all.

Yesterday it all came back to me when I began reading Andre Bazin's What is Cinema after a gap of thirty years or so and found that I had imbibed it in detail. All the theory coming out of my head was straight out of Bazin! My head spun when I realised that. How long do things stay in one's mind? Now I don't know, a few days back I might had a pat answer but not now.

The theory teaching eventually went off well, at least for me. Don't know how it went for the students as they seemed more eager to learn more 'practical' things. Its a classical problem, the students do not yet understand the relevance of theory to their work as artists, they only want to learn practical stuff- technical and craft knowledge.

All this became clear to me even more when I saw the dissertation films of the final year students. The work was interesting, innovative, full of glimpses of talent that could mature beautifully. But clearly without the knowledge of theory they lacked the ability to position themselves in a tradition and hence explore the limits of their work.

OK, all this is difficult stuff when you're younger and still struggling to find your 'voice'. I mean I can state now when I've been through these stages. But I guess its important to explain these contexts to the student-artists- that they work in a context, not in isolation.

That must have been the greatness of the Ajanta or Mahaballipuram artists- knowing and living their traditions, while today we have to struggle to find our traditions. 

Back from Rohtak

A few years back (in the good old days!), returning from Rohtak was all about returning from the back-of-beyond place-in-the-Hindi-hinterland, with some of your 'modern' sensibility intact. Someone decided to do something about it and set up the magnificent Raj Rawal designed integrated campus of the major visual culture institutions of Haryana state under one roof.
I was stunned when I saw the campus and its structure the first time, the sheer ambition of the place is breathtaking.
Then came the opportunity to hold a workshop in screenplay writing at the Film Institute of this campus and I was thrilled at the offer. Worked out a syllabus of what to me were basics of scriptwriting that I could introduce to the second semester students. And then just went across, hoping to get all this across to the student no matter where they were.
Teaching to the students turned out to be a lot tougher than I thought, they were bright and curious but had had very little exposure to cinema, leave alone to international cinema. But with the movies the students knew, the current Hindi blockbusters, their knowledge was impeccable. We saw a bit of 'Raanjahana' and the reactions of the students were simply amazing. I changed my opinion of them completely after those reactions.
At a personal level, this was the second time I was getting into teaching cinema in Hindi. Technically, I'm bi-lingual: I've always studied in English but my mother tongue is Hindi, so I'm equally fluent in both, but have never been comfortable translating from one language to another. But here I was having to teach in Hindi to make sure the students understood something, and struggling not to 'talk down' to the students, but rather to pull them up to the level expected of international film students at the first year level. Did I manage to achieve my aims? Don't really know, maybe the students can answer this better.
In a sense my life and work have been divided between Hindi and English, between Meerut and the other places that I've lived in. I guess its trips like this one to Rohtak that are helping me integrate the divisions of myself. Maybe, just like my parents and grandparents in their time, I too am trying to pull up standards and sensibilities out of our typical small town North Indian parameters into something more 'modern' and more 'international'.
There's a big 'maybe' in all this!

Watching ‘Directed by Andrei Tarkovosky’

Got a chance to watch this long documentary on Tarkovosky at work in Sweden, during the making of ‘The Sacrifice’. watched it over two sessions as it’s a long almost two hour long documentary.

Fascinating to watch how the filmmaker you like actually created- seeing him lay out the shot design to Sven Nykvist his cameraman, you can see Tarkovosky’s basic philosophy of the individual shot being a complete unit. He doesn’t want to do the classical cut and counter-cut to make his point- he wants to convey his meaning within the shot. Each shot becomes a sort of ‘tableau’, a near complete entity on its own. And yet when he’ll put in the final film, the meanings will be magically transformed.

At the same you can see that Tarkovosky is not moving the camera just for fun, its essentially to reveal more and more of the scene. The way he was adding elements to a scene to enhance the look and meaning of his moving shot was simply ‘magical’. The most interesting part is how aware he was as a filmmaker of holding his audience’s attention- he’s doing it by adding layers of visual complexity into his basic shot. He’s not saying now this is my subject, audience should pay attention because it’s a ‘serious subject’. He’s working towards holding your attention as an audience, very much like a classical filmmaker in Mumbai or Hollywood. His aims-in terms of where he wants to take the audience might be very different- but in the ‘construction’/’design’ of the shot and unfolding his story, there is a firm hand of the master creator.

That house burning sequence on screen and the episode on its making was fascinating. To see Tarkovosky as the very much Andrei Roublov like artist who wants to create his world precisely as he wants, not a frame this way or that way as his wife put it- that’s a lesson. Though of course it may not always be possible for all of us to pursue such a line of action. How much we need to flow with the moment and how much to be rigid is of course a big area in filmmaking/ the arts and we probably need to write about it separately.

Then there was the attention to detail- the way Tarkovsky kept the stool, the way he argued over the angle, showed up so beautifully in the final frame. But it appeared that no one seemed to have understood his work or method earlier. That was something interesting because in the classical filmmaking we are taught about planning and preparation and here was improvisation on properties. It maybe that Tarkovosky worked like that- figuring out his shot taking with everything in place. But then the Art Director/designers should have kept a few extra properties as they do in Mumbai, (just-in-case-props). But yes, Tarkovosky’s precise placement of the property was just spectacular.

‘The Sacrifice’ was produced by the Swedish Film Institute, so the unit was very European in size and method of working- everyone was doing multiple jobs. Even the great Sven Nykvist seemed to have only two assistants, plus the trolley and the lighting guys. That lent a certain intimacy to the whole group and perhaps the actors benefitted the most.

They difference between Tarkovosky directing Erland Josephson and the other actors was vast- he seemed to direct Erland very physically, give him the marks to do this or that. With the others, he was more inclined to direct all parts of the performance- giving them motivations as well. But directing without knowing the language seemed interesting- OK it was in a different league from my Somali venture for UNESCO.

His wife read a bit from the script and we saw the same clip in the finished film and it was quite uncanny how much of the ‘feel’ of words and literary language was up on screen. I guess that’s where the masters differ, they know how to put their visions on screen with great precision.

This was not really a film, it was like the Kurosawa documentary, an insight into how a master filmmaker organised himself into physical spaces and actions and instructions to crew. How does Tarkovosky preserve his vision faced with the reality of a unit and everyone wanting to know what to do next, that’s really the subject of the documentary and its lesson. I guess that’s where we all get lost!

A Personal Memory

No, this has nothing to do with movies or television that I usually talk/’rant’ about.
Escorted my mother to a wedding reception a few days ago, the groom was the grandson of my mother’s colleague of thirty years from the academic world. Quite naturally, the place was full of my mother’s colleagues from the college, now all senior citizens, but childhood aunties to me. Most of them have seen me since I was four years old and my mother joined the college, so it was a nostalgia filled event for me too.
Eventually, I went and sat alone, but the nicest of the aunties joined me with her husband. Soon other people came and sat on the table, including a lady that looked familiar. I thought the lady looked like the mother of a primary school colleague of mine, but not having seen them both for at least thirty odd years I was in no position to confirm the same and talk. But I kept looking at her and thinking I know this person.
As it became time to leave I realised that this was not the mother but my primary school classmate, so I asked her and she confirmed that yes she was the person. Of course she didn’t remember me, but with the common small town connections it soon became clear to both that yes indeed we had been classmates. I think we were both looking at the grey and white in our hair now and comparing it with those impressions we still had of each other as five year olds. We’d studied, married, had children, generally lived our lives before running into each other again.
My classmate went off with her children, I went off with my mother, I doubt if we’ll meet again. Maybe we will, but we’ll certainly not go looking for each other.
Coincidentally, the function was being held at a venue next door to our primary school, which is still there and going strong.

Adaptation

Trying to adapt a classic short story into a movie script.
Early days on the job, so I thought I should document the process.
Began by reading and re-reading the story, to try and get at its essence. Sort of finding out what was it that led me to the story in the first. In the case of this story, I’ve known it for a long time. Had lost touch with it and then found it again a few months back. So this process of ‘knowing’ the story was comparatively simple, or is it seems right now.
I like knowing the contours of the story, the visuals that mark it out, the buildings and landscape. So I mapped all that out, I now knew my opening and  the ending. I kind of know the way the story is flowing too, the overall structure of the whole thing- which is very well worked out in the story, I only have to ensure I don’t destroy the story’s structure.
The difficult part is trying to match the precision and economy with which a master story teller opens his story. In a few sentences you can visualise the character. Now I’ve got match that with scenes that conjure up the same atmosphere and deliver the same sense of character to a modern day audience. That’s a big challenge, but then who said adaptation was easy!