Of Mediocrity, Memories, and Machines: A Short Note

By IMAN MITRA

 

Like all happy families, all mediocre films resemble one another. They all look like a white cow waiting to be milked in moonlight. The rest of the films are either bad or great, although the boundary between the two is incredibly flimsy. I often wonder whether the line exists at all. A case in point may be the whole career of Quentin Tarantino. Tasteless and epic, Tarantino’s films are everything but mediocre. On the other hand, take Tarkovsky. His films are somber and prudent, calculative and cautious, picturesque and beautiful. These are few definitive signs of mediocrity. These qualities indicate greatness only when alone. Whenever they are achieved in combination, the film turns into a refrigerator without electricity. Pointless. 

               

There is one advantage of mediocrity though. A mediocre film will never encourage suicide. It will never let you near a broken mirror on a Sunday afternoon. It will never allow you to recollect your fractured reflections from the remains of the day. A mediocre film is the best friend of a table with three legs. Both lack strength of character, but to what avail?

Now the question is: how should one write about mediocre films? Bad films generate excellent reviews – entertaining and capricious. Great films call for a more serious and meditative approach. Mediocrity brings home nothing. Nada. Not even a bitter aftertaste. Then how am I supposed to write about a film like The Artist, an instance of pompous buffoonery in the name of nostalgic remembrance of all that was jazz before speech killed pantomime?

 

We can talk about speech instead. Why is it so hated in today’s mediocre films? In fact, it’s been hated all the time. When I was growing up, Black-and-White TV was the soul of middleclass entertainment. Even then the Sunday horror of having to watch intellectual cinema characterized by sympathy for the poor and indifference towards technical expertise was enmeshed in funeral silence. The poor did not talk much. They stared at each other, slapped their foreheads to kill a mocking mosquito, and died in rain. Time changed and Manmohan Singh became the finance minister of India. The focus of intellectualism shifted from the hungry autumn of bonded labor to the virgin spring of chamber melodrama. Poverty was replaced by midlife crisis, mosquitoes by mosquito repellents. But the stares remained, now more angular and skewed, giving neck pain to most of the actors specializing in arty performances. 

Mediocrity, as it seems, cannot tolerate words. It tries to downplay witty dialogues as vacuous and insignificant. Silence is rendered with an auspicious charisma – a magnificent halo of superlative introspection. The actors today are trained to be mute while pondering over the imminent finitude of existence. Well, people do think in silence. At least, the sane ones. But do they think without words? There was a time, when thinking was communicated to the audience with a thickly voiced narration. Now the writers have dispensed with the voice of authorial intent. It reflects the typical reaction against literariness of cinema. Words remind the average mind of the terrible experience of reading books. So let’s get rid of them, create a visual bonanza for the self-proclaimed illiterates, and call it cinema.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against using silence in films. I’m aghast at the trend of treating words as en evil force acting in conflict with visuals. The hullabaloo over The Artist makes a case for this sordid attitude. The film, albeit being a parrot-y (in distinction with parody, which has politics, not only a widescreen grin borrowed from the Cheshire Cat) reconstruction of the American experience of silent film-making, received accolades from almost all the quarters. The fan-people jumped in glee when the hero in tailcoat did a tango with his pet dog on stage. The epileptic melodrama, the broad gestures, the whiny chemistry between the stars – all these perfunctory effects were recreated with a penchant for photographic detail. Even the silence.

  

When an assumption is repeatedly fed to the public, it becomes a truism. One of these truisms associates silence with universality. Isn’t it widely believed that the old silent films could easily sail across the tides of cultural difference and historical specificity? Words restrict people from different cultural backgrounds to mingle freely with each other. If we stop speaking and start whistling to order food in a Chinese restaurant, we can have the best burger and fries. Such is the range of cultural multiplicity induced by silence. The same universality is attributed to visuals as well. The over-sized costume of the Chaplinesque tramp may alienate the street children of Calcutta, but his tripping over a bucket of horse manure and then making a face like a heart patient coming out of anesthesia have them rolling on the floor in laughter. The foreignness of the western clothes is believed to be overpowered by the visual impact of the falling act. Together with the absence of words that mark the difference in all categories of life, the sheer visuality of action in its absolute indifference to living itself delivers a lump of homogeneous hobnobbing.

The enthusiasm around The Artist cashes on the reluctance to amplify cultural difference, as the film makes an effort to exorcise the last trace of literariness from the cinematic narrative. By reclaiming the mythical universality of silence, the creators of the film weave a seemingly innocent tale mired in a web of filmic referentiality. Surprisingly though, two of its major inspirations happen to be The Thin Man (the scene with the prancing dog) and Citizen Kane (the estrangement between the husband and the wife) – both talkies replete with verbose humor and wordplay. The Thin Man (1934), adapted from a Dashiell Hammett novella, features a relentlessly drunken husband-and-wife detective duo, whose conjugal banter outsmarts the contemporary weapon-heavy Mr. and Mrs. Smiths. Citizen Kane (1941), the greatest movie of all time, was written and directed by a playwright obsessed with Shakespeare. So overwhelmed were the makers of the film by the black-and-white photography of these two timeless classics, they shooed away any consideration for history and included them in their recipe for cooking up a pastiche.

    

No such blunder would have happened if they were a little sensible in handling the question of literariness in cinema. At least, two recent films did explore the complex relationship between nostalgia and memory through a prism of literary sensibilities. I am talking about the latest works of two of most revered American filmmakers still active in their seventies – Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Scorsese’s Hugo have one thing in common. They both project our past as a handkerchief left by a beautiful woman to be picked up and sniffed for the rest of our lives. The trouble with this enigmatic piece of cloth (is it silk?) is that it turns into a cat of rational stocktaking in the morning. Past is alluring; present is alarming; and future is calling. What is our destination?

The protagonist in Allen’s always-autobiographical narrative – the writer fascinated by the Paris in the twenties throbbing with intellectual nightcaps and sexual Ping-Pong – is faced with a similar question by the end of the film. He arrives at the present-day Paris with his fiancé and her parents on a trip filled with expensive wine and in-law sneering. One night, on a leisurely walk, when the clock chimes twelve, he enters the drag-on of nostalgic make-belief. Paris at midnight transforms into an older self, when the cars were bigger, the streets were darker, and the parties were an excuse for living, not page three face-lifting. In one of these parties, he meets a rugged American author named Ernest Hemingway who introduces him to a whale of a literary critic named Gertrude Stein, at whose place a squarely built French painter named Pablo Picasso is cubing up an impression of his ladylove, Adriana.

Gil, the author from the present, goes head over heels for Adriana, the compulsive muse of avant-garde painters (before Picasso, she has been painted in red and blue by Braque and Modigliani). Gil and Adriana traverse every joint in the city, find every occasion to make merry, seek every chance to get wasted. But isn’t she only a couple of months younger than Gil’s great-grandmother in real time? Worried and confused, he consults the surrealists like Man Ray, Luis Bunuel, and Salvador Dali. They don’t find anything wrong in it; but then, what can you expect from people who draw melting clocks and shoot interrupted dinners? To complicate the story further, Adriana expresses her lifelong desire to desert the present, that is the 1920s, and settle in the 1890s, because that, according to her, was the best of times with the worst of alcoholics around. Gil realizes that time flows, but nostalgia remains constant like a god with no name.

          

Both Gil’s and Adriana’s nostalgic fantasies take the route of literary imagination. And we can safely assume, Allen’s too. The plot of the film resembles one of his own pieces published in The New Yorker – ‘A Twenties Memory.’ Hinging upon his obsession with melancholic absurdity, Allen there records the reminiscences of an unnamed intellectual basking in the after glory of absinthe shots. “Picasso’s studio was so unlike Matisse’s, in that, while Picasso’s was sloppy, Matisse kept everything in perfect order,” the narrator shares a gossip. He immediately adds, “Oddly enough, just the reverse was true.” This is an example of the literariness of nostalgia, which sabotages memory, exposes the anarchy implicit in the assumed forms of storytelling, provokes a void of disbelief, and kills the author.

Nostalgia, as it seems, is organized like a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, maybe not in that particular order, to cite my favorite JLG axiom. It is a vehicle of deception – a ruse to make life less miserable than a pigsty. Like the unnamed narrator, Gil and Adriana cannot escape the labyrinth of temporal evenness. They are unhappy in the present, find the past more suitable, and see a future in it. Only words can bind these three worlds together. Words that flow from the bookish and pedestrian wisdom alike. Words that spill over from the hustle and bustle in the taverns. Words that don’t claim truth or fight for the honor of the factum. Words that make the universe, but are never universal. By the end of the film, when Gil is asked to make a choice between staying back in the present or moving forward to the past, he crumbles under the pressure. He finally decides to stay back, since the past as his future will not have antidepressants to save him from the pangs of non-belongingness. Nostalgia doesn’t help us belong; it only prolongs the illusion that we can.

 

What else does prolong this illusion than cinema itself? Nobody knows it better than Martin Scorsese, the most Catholic director drudging in the “Holly” land of California. His most recent endeavor Hugo re-presents a world where cinema is magic and machines speak the language of humans. The time is the 1930s and the film features a boy who literally inhabits time. Hugo, the teenage protagonist of our story, lives inside a huge clock over a railway station in Paris. Hounded by a Dickensian station inspector, he survives on stolen croissants and milk. Hugo’s father was an expert watchmaker, who found a broken automaton lying next to garbage in a museum and took it home. Before he could fix the toy, he died in a fire.

   

Hugo, now orphan and living in a clock all by himself, is enchanted by the robot. Its stillness haunts him though. His father left him a notebook filled with clues for its restoration. To finish the job, he starts pilfering machine parts from a gift shop owned by a grim old man. One day the man catches him on his covert adventure and finds the notebook. He spares the boy but confiscates the diary. Without the directions, Hugo cannot make any progress. He seeks help from his only friend, Isabelle, the granddaughter of the old man. They discover a key, which may set the robot in motion. They turn the key and the machine comes to life. It starts drawing a picture – a strangely detailed sketch of a rocket hitting the man in the moon in his eye. Eventually it is revealed that the automaton was designed by the old shopkeeper himself, who happened to be one of the greatest inventors of cinema, Georges Méliès. The sketch actually depicted a scene from his own film Voyage to the Moon, the first ever attempt in science fiction on celluloid.

Méliès was a true visionary and a genius technician. He came up with various novel techniques for shooting fantastic tales with gods, demons, and fairies. It took him nothing less than a world war to realize that the happy endings of his films were lost on a generation growing up with emotional scars and economic slumps. Frustrated and angry, he burnt all his films – every single one of them – and sold the melted remains to the manufacturers of ladies’ shoes. He now spends his evenings in a quiet corner of the gift shop, trying to disown his past of glamour and creativity, waiting to die alone in the darkness of oblivion. But not life’s every story ends in whimper and wet blankets. With the help of a film historian, Hugo and Isabelle recover most of Méliès’ films and arrange a retrospective amidst cheers and wonder. The spontaneous admiration of his work makes him want to live again, to dream and let dream, to imagine miracles and fantasies that will sway the most hardened of the cynics.  

If Midnight in Paris draws our attention to the literariness of memory, Hugo makes a case for its institutionalization. Scorsese, apart from being one of the most successful American directors himself, is a film enthusiast who passionately engages in archiving creations of the great masters. He runs a non-profit organization called ‘The Film Foundation,’ which has restored and preserved Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion and many other brilliant works of art. On the home page of its website, Scorsese states the objective of his project, “Movies are the memories of our lifetime. We need to keep them alive.”

Surely Scorsese makes a note here of the historicizing tendency of cinema – the way it archives the past in an essentially visualistic form. Archiving cinema therefore attains a life of its own, embroiled in the symptomatic unevenness – due to its essential selectiveness – of memory. Allen predicates his theory of nostalgia on the critical (literary) intimacy between memory and past. Scorsese translates the relationship in terms of craftsmanship and technology in order to emphasize its formal machinic structure. 

The opening shot of the film superimposes the interior of a clock onto an illuminated overview of Paris. This is an epigrammatic description of the cinematic gaze – the gawky technicality of the medium, which dissolves one object over another to achieve a sort of metaphorical association. These associations, Scorsese reminds us, are chemically maneuvered within the walls of a studio. The institutional form of remembering – the act of revisiting the past in its archival format – warrants awareness of the machinic tangibility of its production. It is never possible to realize this tangibility beyond a modernist paradigm, which seeks complete humanization of the machine; hence the robot draws the picture and emulates human emotions and sensibilities. The history of man is recorded by his android twin and both speak the same language of organic rationality.

     

The protagonist in Midnight in Paris, on the other hand, chooses to be oblivious of the humanized technology of illusion. He is enchanted by another sort of technicality – a romantic non-identity between words and things and the ensuing anarchy of communication. He is pained by its absence, its departure from the public domain of myth making. Everyday new myths are fabricated, new memories are manufactured, new pasts are promulgated, but all in a hurried, tongue-in-cheek, visualist diction of correspondence. His trouble is (and it mirrors Allen’s own tension with his oeuvre) that words cannot necessarily escape the mechanical directness of visual representation. Since the discovery of cinema, magic has become a truly visual culture. Hugo announces its arrival and chronicles its adventure.

However, as we begin to appreciate the advantages of digital film making, its frugal cost-cutting ability and its lightness of being, the machinic transcendental is doomed to obsolescence. Today the most complex shots are engineered out of thin air and number play. The sharpest editing tricks are performed by sliding and clicking the computer mouse. Cinema after the digital revolution is governed by an aesthetics of portability. The portable cameras and the editing softwares enable the younger directors to expand their visual horizon and disavow the restrictions of industrial film-making. They can go anywhere, shoot the film from any angle, cut the film at any point they want to. As a result, the earlier understanding of cinematic space has undergone a remarkable change. Every single point in the frame has become acutely approachable, deliberating the realist illusion of ideal representation and perpetuating a stronger connection between vision and intellect. Consequently, the human touch is sacrificed in favor of a more exotic notion of technology. The very fact of its approachability makes it less approachable at a visceral level, always drawing attention to its presence in the peculiar, its forced semantics of difference.   

If we see closely, at this juncture, the director of Hugo and the director of Midnight in Paris face the same trauma of extinction. They both see what is coming to them, their crafts and dreams, and they retaliate by doing what they do the best – by making films. If Woody Allen once again shares with us his anxiety of being robbed of slippages and deliriums, Martin Scorsese presents a world where magic is preserved in a tightly sealed envelope. Somebody will find it one day, and open it to spread the message – that’s Scorsese’s humanism speaking. Allen, quite presumably, is a little darker in his apprehensions, darker and more complicated. His narrative lacks self-confidence, and thereby is more real and frightening.

Allen and Scorsese are fellow New Yorkers, and are known to be fond of each other’s works. But never before they have come this close to each other in terms of presenting a narrative of desolation. In a sense, both of them are fighting democratization of cinema, its dehumanizing modalities and easy connections, its portable aesthetics and comforting silences. In the meantime, the consumers and the guardians of the art are celebrating entertainment a la frozen chicken – a film like The Artist, which is sufficiently disrespectful of history and insufficiently irreverent of tradition. Mediocrity has come here to stay. It has recently rented a beach house on Facebook. 

Being and Nakedness: Shame (by Iman Mitra)

Some films are made. They are made with hard labor and technical innovation. Some films are born. They are born out of imagination and passion for cinema. Some just happen. It’s not that they lack innovation; they too cultivate imagination and passion, both of supreme order. They involve a lot of hard work. But in the final instance, when we see them, finished and all prepped up, dangling in the air so as to enter the vision of the audience, nothing else matters. No consideration, no thinking or speculation come to mind other than the plain fact of their existence.

Are they the proverbial pure cinema? An act of creation that perforates the synthetic texture of the medium? Being a homeschooled cynic, I can’t allow myself to corroborate such naïveté. Perhaps these films are like dreams that escape analysis. Perhaps they are like stones, which cannot be turned. We watch these films with the disturbed innocence of a pubertal child. We don’t understand them, and never should we try, but we have a faint notion of what’s going on. And don’t tell me you don’t like it.

Shame. That’s the name of the film that happened to me the other day. It’s about a man in his thirties, living in New York and clinically addicted to sex, all types of sex, with others and himself. He rides subway, flirts with women, goes to office, downloads porn, eats takeaway food, has sex with prostitutes, takes a dump, and masturbates. His is a bare life strumming to the gushing monotony of secluded indulgence. The man is alone in his orgasms, alone and frowning, perhaps irritated, ashamed.

One day he returns home to find his sister waiting. She wants to stay at his apartment for a few days – not a comfortable arrangement for a compulsive masturbator. She is a singer at a local jazz club. He visits the club with his boss to listen her perform. The boss, married and looking for a vacation, gets all over her in a taxi. He sits next to them, listens to them making out, moaning and whispering; his face remains stern. They reach home. The sister retires to his bedroom with the boss. Evicted from his paradise, he gets out of the apartment and jogs through the empty sidewalks of the city that never sleeps.

He goes on a date with a beautiful woman from the office. They rent a hotel room. He can’t get an erection. She leaves. He hires a prostitute and gets it. He enters her against a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city. In a long shot, their shadow in unison hangs over the urban traffic of the day.
     

He tells his sister to leave the apartment. They have a fight. He goes out and drinks alone in a pub. A young girl approaches. He flirts with her in a shamelessly direct language. Her boyfriend beats him up. He wipes his face and follows another man to a gay club. The man goes down on him; his face remains bruised and merciless. Next time he has brutal sex with two women, penetrates them from all possible angles, assimilates with them into a singularity of copulative gyration. His organ moves like a piston, back and forth, efficient, impassive.

He returns home to find his sister in a pool of blood. She has cut her wrists. He admits her in a hospital and sits next to her bed for sometime. He takes the subway. On the train, a woman smiles at him – a knowing smile. He keeps looking at her. The trains stops. The woman is about to get off. He keeps looking. Will he or will he not follow her? Or better, will he or will he not follow himself?

Shame is the most naked film I have seen in years. Its nakedness presumes a set of contradictory sensibilities. It is alive yet cold, tactile yet distant, enquiring yet indifferent. All these contradictions are foregrounded in the big close-ups that inflate the visual universe of the man and his surroundings. It is a well-shot film, but that’s not the point. A few minutes into the narrative, the issues of quality control become redundant.

It opens with a top shot of the man in his bed; he is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling: a vacant gaze. The alarm rings. He waits for something – something more – to happen. It doesn’t. He gets up, all naked, and leaves the frame. The camera doesn’t move. It focuses on the bed, now empty, with wrinkled bed sheet and scattered pillows. The window blinds rattle open to let the morning light in. The name of the film – SHAME – in bold letters appears on the screen and stays there for a while, as if the letters themselves are now lazing on the bed.

The emptiness of the man’s gaze is supplemented by the emptiness of the bed, and then it is followed by a word, a coded description of his sexual afterthought. The man embodies his bedroom, its privacy, its darkness and secrets, its restricted homeliness. He carries it within himself to everywhere he goes: office, clubs, hotel rooms, whorehouses, everywhere he can seek pleasure and doom.

Shame does a brilliant job by blurring the difference between the man and his habitation. Even New York, the city he lives in, becomes a cave of his self-gratification, a giant bedroom with zebra lines and traffic signals. Take, for example, the scene of him jogging on the streets at midnight. It is a painstakingly long scene. The camera follows his every step; it runs along with him, smoothly and with compassion. He crosses the shadowy corners, stops at the signals, passes by the reluctantly open shops; the camera stays awake with him, observing, caring for him.

The scene reminds me of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, another film about a man with strong sexual guilt looking for redemption in the dark alleys of urban neurosis. In both films, when the camera tracks the moving objects – the yellow cab in Taxi Driver and the late night jogger in Shame – the tedious, unending travels along the long stretches of empty streets resemble the routine movements of a hand around one’s own member. Futile and effective at the same time, the masturbatory impulse of the man adds to the guilt and shame of his demand for seclusion in physical intimacy.

Yet the film is forgiving to his nakedness, oscillating between sympathy and empathy, looking at his face with awe and wonder. It never leaves him, in no condition, in no distress or dilemma. His being is concentrated in his face, its lack of expression and pain. In matters of crisis, in his most vulnerable nervousness, he turns his face away from us, but still we sense the intensity with which he exercises his sadomasochistic charm.

Just before the final showdown with his sister, we find the man watching cartoon on TV. The camera is fixed behind him; we can see the back of his head. His sister enters the room, sits next to him in a cordial mood, and he, perhaps betraying his rationale, reciprocates.

They initiate a conversation. One word leads to another, and the man asks her to take her own responsibility. “I am trying,” she replies. “Actions count, not words,” he retaliates. He calls her a burden, a dependency. She snaps at him about his sex life. “Whatever,” he says, and leaves the room. All the time, the cartoon plays in the background, out of focus, like a dizzy commentary, a limping metaphor.

In a lesser film more interested in quick resolutions, the cartoon would be properly visible, most probably at the end of the scene, when the girl is left alone by her brother to rot in the coldness of irreconcilability. It would be the easiest way to enhance her desolation: by contrasting it with the comic relief of animated slapstick.

Shame does just the opposite. By keeping the cartoon out of focus till the very end, it protrudes the irony of human suffering. The cartoon in the background is a synecdoche of the showdown; its incompleteness reinforces the conclusive nature of the clash. It is a point of no return, an emotional cul-de-sac, from where only the dead may dare resurface.

Is this a caution tale then, the film? A tutorial on the ethical consequences of full frontal nudity? A lesson in the requirement of social and familial bonding? A Judeo-Christian spanking of the sexual renegade? I don’t know. In the most enigmatic turn of events, the man is serviced by another man, both bathed in crimson light. Is this a violation? A purgatorial rite? A reference to Pasolini’s Theorem, where sex is the only way to god, revolution, and miracles? I don’t know. Perhaps nothing of the above. Perhaps everything and more. The film never speaks; and it speaks.

[Iman Mitra is my most ancient filmy co-conspirator, a friend for all seasons, an opener of doors, and surely, generations ago, he was a Satyr. Officially, he is completing a doctoral dissertation on (roughly) the emergence and development of Nineteenth century political economy as a discourse. I plan to make him a co-author of this blog, but that will entail a number of existential, political and strategical objections to be overcome!]

The Unbearable Empty-ness of Being Cute; or How to Sweep the Oscars

Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artist" is going to sweep the Oscars tonight (and as I am posting it, the prediction has come true). Every single award ceremony this year stands testimony to that. Indeed, if it does not, we can in all justification call it a 'revolutionary' day. And all we know revolutions do not take place in Hollywood. I also suspect all 'miracles'; they belong to the lazy and the guilty.

I condemn that. I know it is slightly stupid to condemn an Oscar favourite. (Who is being naive now, Kay?) But I still condemn because it is an issue that is not restricted to one single film. I condemn a trend.
"The Artist" is an almost silent film, and IMDB lists it as a 'romance'. It was shot in colour, and then transferred into black-&-white in the post-production stage; if you observe the light flares in certain shots closely, you will be able to deduce it. Which is a godsend, because that is the only worthwhile thing you might do during the screening.

The story of the film is abysmally simple. Once upon a time--and did I tell you I hate that beginning?--there was a great silent film star. In Hollywood mythology, great male stars are always from the silent era. The concerned star here is a combination of many such real figures, but the main reference here is obviously Douglas Fairbanks. He also has a dog (reminded me of Asta from the Thin Man series), a chauffeur, a disgruntled and cold wife (Penelope Ann Miller, wasted here), and a mansion. An ordinary girl bumps into him in front of the media glare, capitalizes it to gain a foothold in the industry, and a couple of films later, the star finds himself going through the ignominy of multiple takes so that he could dance with the girl working as an extra. In the meanwhile, sound comes. The star laughs at it. Does not think it is worth a penny. We all know what happens after that: he becomes bankrupt. But the girl's love must get him back. Does she succeed? Producers love such 'succinct' scripts; you can sell it to a stone-deaf man reading it aloud!

Then there is another film which plays through this one: Singing in the Rain. In fact, the male-female duo almost explicitly re-enact the same relation. Both the stars of the film--Jean Dujardin and Beatrice Bejo--are good dancers, and there is a bravura long take of their dancing at the end of the movie. A happy account of film history: silent era transformed itself to become the Musical!

Is there anything else in the movie? Yes, there is. None of the plot mentioned above are beyond and above the mannerism of the film. Indeed, the whole film plays like a museum slide-show of lost mannerisms and quirks of silent films. Problem is, if you have seen silent films well enough, you will find them ludicrous. And isn't it sad to find a French director equating the whole of silent cinema with Hollywood, that too a very limited perception about its complexity? What troubled me even more is the fact that the film could not decide what it wanted to be: an allegory of an ego-bound man's redemption, or a discourse about silent cinema, and stardom? But that is not a fault, or even a mistake. That is the signature of certain types of contemporary film. I call them the 'cuties'.

Hazanavicius and Dujardin, both of their previous claim-to-fame was through making nice and domestic-quality spoofs. In one sense, this is also a spoof which has lost its teeth. It does not know what to bite, it might have even forgotten that it is supposed to bite. There is a contemporary euphemism for such films: homage. But let us not bemoan the collective bad taste of our contemporaneity.

Spoof, as a genre, or even pastiche or homage, are necessarily bound to their reference, thus much more topical, contemporary and thus intentionally political than other films. You can not justify a spoof simply by saying I wanted to make one; you have to show more reasons. When spoof as a genre began to emerge as a major generic force in the Western world, it was downright subversive. When Mars Attacks! was made by Tim Burton, it not only lampooned Independence Day, it took mega-size pot-shots at American politics and mass culture. What followed next was the oft-repeated story of the domestication of a powerful cinematic weapon by the industry, and a slow dissipation of its energy into other fields and interests.

By the time "The Artist" is made, a pastiche or a homage has ended up being an euphemism for the most superficial brand of nostalgia films. In one sense, The Artist is a biopic that does not even want to go through the rigour-s of one. The psychological depth of a star's narcissism is lost in the quagmire of stylistic bravura. There is a section where Dujardin's character finds himself unable to produce sound in real life as well. Brilliant touch, but does the film follow it up? No, it does not. Is the film even knowledgeable by half about the silent film industry it refers to? No. The film resembles two things, firstly, a Disneyland trip through the supposed 'old golden age', and the crowd-pleasing antics of movie-stars doing 'numbers'. And I think that is precisely why the movie 'sells' across barriers, and is a darling for both Cannes and Academy Awards. And it is a crying shame that it is the recent bed-partner of Independent Spirit awards as well. Where is the spirit, dude, let alone the 'independent' part?

What we have in our hands is a new cinematic trend. In one sense, you can compare it to 'political correct-ness', although it is much shallower than that. It is a cinematic practice that carefully and almost pedantically sanitizes a film of all excess, depth, decision. It is the art of making a film without making one. You tell a story, but it is not 'your' story; you have a style, but not 'your' style, but always of someone else. And it is here the spoof/pastiche/homage angle comes in. This technique of talking in other's voice and accent comes from those genres. But unlike a true generic film, films like the "The Artist" has nothing to say beyond impersonation. If you take away the stylistic and other stereotypical quotations from "The Artist", you will be left with nothing. For a spoof, that is never the case. Thus, it is obviously symptomatic of a malaise that "The Artist" sweeps the awards and "Hugo" is left with technical awards, as if one is dealing with a Harry Potter franchise here. Obviously, serious engagement with history is too dangerous for the Cinema honcho-s of our time. [My friend Iman Mitra has promised me a piece on Hugo and The Artist, which I shall publish on this blog. With his erudition, I think he will delve much deeper into the comparison. I am merely extemporizing my feelings here]

Cinema is not supposed to be 'safe', and not supposed to be 'cute'. Even the most reviled populist films of Bollywood has more edge than this one. We live in an age of empty gestures, impersonations, stylistic pirouettes, technical skulduggery. As a historical period, it reminds me more of the Mannerist period of painting in Italy. We are exhausted of the creative achievements of our periods. The sterility of our imagination finds its best use in impersonation.

I think my point is buttressed by the fact that Maryl Streep winning the Best Actress statuette. She is a great actress, but in this particular film, she is left impersonating furiously with no character build-up whatsoever. It was role which went nowhere. And now, we have a candidate who won the prize simply because she could impersonate so well! Which is however better, because the Best Actor's performance consisted of being charming and showing a good set of teeth! Yes, I understand one feels nostalgic about Gene Kelly and his peers, but that does not justify valourizing a medium-quality impersonator!

If we love cinema at all, if we believe that it has the capacity of thought and expression, if we think it is more than a joyride, we need to condemn it, not just because of personal distaste, but because we are responsible as a community.

On The Politics of an Old Nation's Foreskin: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

                I had planned to begin this blog again with a review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, because, without any doubt, it is my favourite film of the year 2011. I first watched it at Prasad IMAX, Hyderabad, my most preferred venue; towards the end of the screening, a member of the audience got up and shouted, not addressing anyone in particular, “picture kisi ko samajh mein aya” (did anybody understand what happened in the movie)? I was feeling what I presume to be the opposite of what the man in the cinema hall felt, but I have to admit that going by the general vibe of the audience, many were uncomfortable about the fact that there were strands and suggestions in the movie that are not easily decipherable: it screamed for a second viewing (and when was the last time you watched a spy thriller back to back, that too in a multiplex?). I, on the other hand, was feeling what a really good film does to me: suddenly I could feel this immense surge of energy inside which I did not know how to utilize. Here was a film that has reportedly grossed $ 17 million at the American domestic box-office alone, despite clearly being a film not mashed and pulverized enough to be processed by any below-average intellect at any stage of slumber, and that itself is enough to give us a high, isn’t it? And yet, I dithered, I hesitated; now, in hindsight, it might have been a simple unwillingness to part with the object of one’s love. But I waited for one specific reason. I realized quite early on that this film is a brilliant example of an adaptation. By that, I do not want to repeat the obvious and known fact that it is a movie adaptation of John Le Carre’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (the comma-s were taken out of the film), but that the film is literary in a very modernist sense, and if one does not appreciate that, one does not even begin to comprehend the film.

                Generally, I do not read the literary source from which films come. By principle, I like to judge a film solely on the merit of what it shows and does not. Adaptation can be a good exercise to flex one’s analytic muscles for a film scholar, but for a film critic, they often act as unwanted sources of value-judgment that can a priori determine the outcome. It is a bit like being a Harry Potter fan: any bilge down the drain that stomps around carrying the holly banner gets an ear-splitting approval! But with Tinker, Tailor… I made an exception to this rule. Which was not really an exception, as I was not reading it because I needed to supplement my appreciation for the film or because they were needed to understand it; the film itself forced me to read the book, to experience it once again, under a different skin. This is a really rare phenomenon, and the last time it happened to me was at the very beginning of my film apprenticeship, at the tender age of sixteen, and the film was The Godfather (needless to mention, the book was inferior). Hence, I read the book. Then, I read the next two parts of the trilogy on trot. By now, I think I can safely say I have at least a beginner’s understanding of the intricate Smiley-Karla world so deftly and intricately populated by Le Carre’s details. Then, I watched the film again. It was even more electrifying than the first. In the meanwhile, two weeks have flown by.

                Thus, this piece comes already two weeks late. Now, I have a problem exactly the opposite of what has been called the ‘Beginner’s Dilemma’: I have so much and so many things to say that I do not know where to stop. Still, let is try.

                First of all Tinker Tailor is one of those very rare spy thrillers that you do not just need to understand, but feel. Today’s cinema rarely likes to demand from its viewers sustained attempts  at utilizing one’s critical and emotional faculties, and at best, emotions are only aroused when they can be controlled as a conditioned reflex: once the bell stops ringing, the dog stops salivating! On the other hand, the feel of this film can be quite depressing for the viewer longing for identification, easy cues for empathy, expectation etc. This is the first characteristic that makes this film stand out: it withholds obvious narrative clues, easy emotions, flimsy moralities. If you expect film to be like Pepsi or Horlicks, this isn’t it. This is a glass of very dry Chablis, and it demands the owner of the tongue to reciprocate the same sensitivity in kind.

                Secondly, the film uses the same sensitivity in the very look it produces. In one sense, this is a film about London, and not just any London, and especially not the London of tourism brochures. It is the gloomy and brooding London of the old Imperial “Great Game”, now bereft of its colonial glory, but still strutting imprudently into the thick of Cold War. This is a London of grey, brown and beige, and Alfredson, the director, eschews the seduction of cinematographic bravura quite comprehensively. In this age of tremendously mannerist film-making, such restraint is remarkable. The director, Tomas Alfredson, is Swedish, and he brings to the film and the film’s London the signature color palette of Scandinavian graphic designs, which, since Gurinder Chaddha, has become increasingly rare in British film-making. One of the scriptwriters of the film, Peter Straughan, has given us a glimpse into the directorial method of Alfredson here; he is found telling the cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema the film should look like the “smell of wet tweed”, and he reaffirms it with the scriptwriter, whom he tells to write a script whose feel would replicate that of a “old man’s foreskin”!!  It is indeed a story of an old man’s nakedness, embarrassing in its brash posturing and petty little games of the aristocratic elites. That is really the crux of Le Carre’s novel, and it speaks volumes about Alfredson’s directorial precision that he managed to condense the whole spirit of the novel so poetically in those few words.

                Le Carre’s novel, the first installment of what is known as The Quest for Karla trilogy, painstakingly constructs the world of British Intelligence Service (mainly MI6) that has absolutely no similarities to Ian Fleming’s absurd glorification of the male chauvinist spy. Instead, it is a bureaucratic world per excellence, where all the exciting bits of detection happens in a department called “research”. In Le Carre’s world, no one glosses you about the typical code language of the bureaucracy; if you need to know what a “lamplighter” means, you need to read carefully and deduce on your own. And this ‘world’ that revolves around the headquarters called—very significantly—the “circus” and especially the fifth floor where the honchos sit (who are, by the way, called ‘owls’) is a microcosm of the British aristocracy, and the ‘great game’ is still played in the spirit of a Test Match at Lords in summer. There is a character in the novel (and in the film), Connie Sachs, who indeed calls the spies her “boys”. In the movie, Bill Haydon (played with an awesome, almost monstrous mastery by Colin Firth) and Peter Guillium (Benedict Cumberbach; yes, yes, the Sherlock Holmes guy. Don’t get your hopes too high; he is a side-kick here) come into the office on a bicycle and check out the new arrival in the office—a secretary of tender age and of the other sex—with a ceremonial pomp that is unmistakably British. And yet, all of these are happening in the festering air of cold war, and soon the happy delusion of the imperial game was to slip away forever. The head of the Circus, known only as Control—which is odd, since the only other person who is only known by a code-name is the arch-villain Karla—realizes that there is a ‘mole’, that is, a double-agent (the word ‘mole’ came into being with Le Carre’s work) inside the very top echelon of the Circus, but before he could intervene, something disastrous takes place, and there is a complete overhaul of power on the fifth floor. Control is thrown out, and so is his right-hand man George Smiley. Years later, and after Control’s death, Smiley is brought back to force the ‘mole’ out after fresh reports reach the ministry about the existence of the traitor. Without spoiling the tale and its suspense, I can tell you that by the time Smiley gets to this ‘mole’, every remaining trace of self-importance the Circus possessed was crushed. We so seldom realize that a cleansing is by rule more disastrous than an act of betrayal.

The Owls (notice the texture of the wall)

The novel was a reaction to a real event which actually forced Le Carre to give up his real-life career in espionage and become a full-time writer. Consequently, it is Le Carre’s most topical and political novel. What Le Carre really wants to demonstrate in the novel is the fact that everybody in the Circus knew somewhere deep down there who the traitor was, but refused to accept it. They refused to accept it, because to accept it would have entailed a complete and horrible demystification of the British imperial romanticism which remained the pleasant veneer under whose cover the dirty work was conducted. In other words, it is a not-very-subtle critique of British elite class; it is the closest Le Carre came to being a Marxist. However, the strength of the novel lies in the fact that it is not so clearly propagandist. In fact, the act of criticizing is the source of all the pain: the novel undermines precisely what permeates it, what is cherished by it, what creates the only lightness in this heavy material. The sentiment here was probably best expressed by Smiley’s wife Ann in the third book: “the one thing worse than change is status quo”. Only in fiction can you hold such contradiction in such a spoonful.

                The film does not try to achieve this ‘heavy-ness’ by importing large portions of texts from the book. That is Merchant-Ivory’s period pieces for you. In fact, in a film that has very little action, there is also startlingly little dialogue. The film does not try to import the novel’s contents, not even its ‘spirit’. What it does is to import its feel, its skin, so to say. Alfredson has the unfortunately rare gift of talking visually, and his does so with an understated grace that floors me every time I watch it. I suspect the script was built around a centre-piece, a monologue by George Smiley (played by the great Gary Oldman, who will most probably again lose the Best Actor Oscar to a totally undeserving candidate like Jean Dujardin) delivered to Peter Guillium. It is a monologue where Smiley looks directly at the camera, and tells the story of his only encounter with his arch-enemy, Karla. As the monologue progresses, Smiley shuttles between the role of Karla and himself to such an extent that the moral separation between the two sides of the war vanishes. If you are looking for some sort of ‘message’ in this film, that is the closest it comes to delivering one. I suspect it is not a very pleasant message for most. Every other scene is placed around this center like interlinking mosaic, but the connection between the fragments is stoically understated. And the modernist bit about the film and the book lies there. Le Carre creates a comprehensive parallel world whose realism matches that of the outer world, but this is not the world of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. You do not get an architect who will give you a convenient lecture about the nitty-gritty-s of the complexity. There is no easy psychologizing, no exposition involved here.  The master-plan is absent. You are literally thrown into this world, and you need to be as observant as Smiley to become a part of it. It is not as radical a world as that of James Joyce’s, but the impulse remains the same. And that is precisely why I feel it is extremely stupid to ask for a more ‘fleshed out’ narrative. The point of the film lies in what it does not show, and what it merely hints at.

                You must have noticed I have not uttered a word about the protagonist, George Smiley, here. I shall not, because it is the central task of the spectator in the film to find out who Smiley is. Not who is the invisible traitor, but who the visible man is. Watch his glasses; they reflect light back and hide his eyes like a spider. You will in all probability never see more vocal a pair of glasses ever in cinema. In one sense, this is a bildungsroman about Smiley, only put upside down. Notice how ironic the sudden burst of Julio Iglesias at the end of a movie that almost always refuses to use any extra-diegetic music is.

You will in all probability never see more vocal a pair of glasses ever in cinema

                However, the adaptation does make significant changes. Although a certain homo-erotic angle was already present in the book, the script punctuates it much more explicitly. The Circus is thus not merely the last vestige of a class delusion, but also teeming with men masquerading masculinity simply to survive—I presume—internal persecution. Isn’t the pain of that repression enough to turn one into a renegade? More importantly, the topicality of the original book, by now, is really redundant; hence, the film, as an adaptation, is more allegorical than topical. In one sense, the story is no longer about cold war at all, but the very world in which we live. Let that remain there, hanging in the air, to provoke your thoughts.

                Consequently, the Smiley of the film is much more brutal than the book. Some people pointed out their preference for the TV version starring Sir Alec Guinness. I personally found it to be too close to the book, and thus, too talkative. But more importantly, the Smiley of the film is a slightly different man, which might have a very different political significance to our times. Notice how he wins over the chair in the crown room of the Circus with background applause in the very last shot of the film. But his table is empty. He has cleansed it so thoroughly he is left with none. His triumphant look at the end thus attains a slightly delusional aura. This Smiley is much more disturbing than the original. And much more thought-provoking.

                It is always a pleasure to watch ensemble films with British cast; that nation, backed up by its formidable theatre traditions, produces great actors at a mass production rate. The same applies to this film also. The center-piece obviously is Gary Oldman, the greatest living actor who has not received an Oscar yet. Here, he acts stillness, one of the very difficult things to do onscreen, especially when you are there in almost 80% of the movie. But the most surprising part of the movie belongs to Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux. After his interminably long stint as comic book villains, here he finally manages to pocket and execute a role which does not have him hamming inconsolably. I hope this marks the arrival of a potentially great British actor. Colin Firth manages to empty his considerable charms enough to suggest a sickness, an anger, and an aggression covering up a hollowness inside. And then there is John Hurt, who no longer acts, but lends the absurdly aged crevices of his face to the physicality of the film.

                Tomas Alfredson is a serious contemporary auteur, and his two feature film—the other one being the awesome Let the Right One In—stands testimony to that. He does not belong to the now-antiquated art house-cinema crowd; and his auteur-ism has nothing to do with those large and apparently philosophical issues. He is more concerned with genres, and both his films signify significant contribution to their respective genres. I shall wait for his next, although he has already announced his retirement from film-making once, even before this film was conceptualized!

                Such brave films do not win Oscars. They are a little too difficult, a little too uncompromising. They have no message, nor are the favourites of some at-the-moment fashionable political group or cause. Instead, the Oscar will in all probability go to “The Artist”, the hollowest and sensationalist film to become big in a long, long time, and even if it does not win, the Best Actor will surely go to Jean Dujardin, who will be eligible for the honour for nothing but raw charm and a good set of teeth. I shall be glad if I am proven wrong, but in all probability, that will not happen. And let us be glad of such certainties. There will always be commercial films that are too dangerous for such conservatives like the Academy, and they shall remain in our memory, unaided, by their sheer excellence.

And I leave with this video of the Julio Iglesias song (what went wrong with the son, eh?). Enjoy.

PROLOGUE: ANOTHER ‘GENERATION’ OF BLOG POSTS, OR, A NO-NONSENSE PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HOW TO LOSE YOUR READERS EVEN BEFORE YOU START TO WRITE

It is difficult to characterize my latest attempt at starting to post my write-ups on, about and around cinema once again on this blog as a ‘rebirth’. You do not get out of your grave after more than three years; even by “Twilight Saga” standards, that is highly unhygienic (and let us—civilized and decent people—not talk about the supposed real-life lack of personal hygiene of the uber-famous male star of the franchise—please!). Rather, this is the second ‘generation’ of this blog. Well, first of all, generation because my monomaniac ego is tickled by the prospect of trans-generational hyper-activity. There is also the minor glitch that even craps—that too of my standard, or the utter lack thereof—need to be ‘generated’ (see, I refrain from becoming scatological already!). And lastly, I hope and I fear that the newest ‘avatar’ will denote significant shifts from the older mode of looking at cinema. My purpose here is mainly to provide a tentative road-map of these potential changes.

But before that, I—in all honesty—need to provide the subjective background that pre-empts this change. And the simple matter of the fact is that when I last posted on this blog, I was truly and pathetically caged and repressed within a ‘corporate’ world (note: in third-world countries, that word actually stands for corporeal punishment), and hence, I was trying my pathetic best to please all parties concerned in the reviews. I did not want confrontations beyond a certain tolerable level; I was being house-trained in finding garden-variety ‘positives’ everywhere (Think positive!). Now, more than three years later and living in a very different city, I cannot possibly—even in my worst nightmares—begin to imagine doing that again. Three years ago, cinema was my escape; today, it is a part of my profession and everyday thought (which does not denote intellectual advancement at all; simply, now I am a student of films). Hence, I am afraid, the very tonality of my readings of films will be different. Secondly, I fear that more and more my thoughts will tend to move from the particular to the general, and readers will often find me looking at films as symptoms of the very health of the society to which such artefacts belong. Thirdly, and most importantly, I shall from now onwards also include a lot of analyses of Bengali and Hindi cinema, and—if the chance arises—other Indian cinemas from other industries.

There is something expressly maniacal about a blog-writer starting his blog: he writes presuming an absent readership, with the attendant existential angst of an egg behaving like a chicken. Thankfully, however, I belong to an utterly schizophrenic field called academics where things are presumed that can make Norman Bates blush. I am blessed. Anyway, there are two ways in which a blog-writer’s mania operates: either, he tries too hard to please his—absent, at that—readers, or, he tries to use pass Esperanto for English. Orson Welles once said that he found it disturbing that his younger generation used such long words; the younger, the longer the word got. My generation is even more absurd. Take this favourite cuss-word of film students for example: HETERONORMATIVITY (if you thought it is a horror movie in the league of ‘Arachnophobia’, you are profound). I first heard this word at a classroom from a hyper-urban, metro-sexual woman whose dimensions can easily challenge a strip of spaghetti; I came out with my castration complex in hand! I solemnly vow I shall not use such secret codes; and indeed, one of the pleasures I want to derive from writing this blog again is to enjoy the freedom of speaking simply. Which does not mean things will be simple; simpletons and simplifications are two of my pet allergies. However, even complex arguments can offer an equal chance of decipherment to everyone; I can and want to promise any and every reader that and only that.

More alarmingly, the readers of blogs can be even more maniacal. There is a whole dictionary of new codes that designates these new cyber-beings; for example, trolls, moles, snots, globs, gluttons, sea-calf-chattering-at-basso-profundo etc. I do not need them. If I have explained why I have found some actor’s work tedious, please do not comment to the effect that you love him/her and think that the sun comes up his/her...anyway. That is not a debate; it is basking in ‘contraries’. I do not like to wallow, and worst of all, I do not like to watch others wallow. If—let’s say—I have presented a critique of ce

rtain kind of ‘Art Cinema’ as politically and/or creatively dangerous, please do not comment that you love such films and you find them profound. I know that. I have been to Film Festivals. I am working my ass off here to present arguments; if you need to engage in a conversation, try to reciprocate that gesture. I believe I can demand that in all fairness. And, please, if you expect political correctness here, I am an impenitent criminal. If you are looking for a fellow traveller, try communicating with the ghost of Mr William Hayes (and convey our regards).

But then, why write the blog at all? In other words, what is the relation between maintaining this blog and the work I am expected to churn out within the field of film scholarship? Well, I personally hope that the relationship will prove to be complementary. Film Studies, as a discipline, is clearly the result of a historical sundering from the field of firstly film criticism and then film activism, and this division-of-labour has been global. Consequently, these are things one can and cannot do within the field of academics. Worse, there are things one cannot say within the field of academics, at least in certain forms. For example, one cannot really judge a film anymore; even if one can, one cannot condemn. The self-assured inferiority complex of a practice-less field necessarily wallows in false humility; my attempt here is to find out whether it is still possible to short-circuit the division. To do so is precisely to write a different language. It cannot be simply the language of the academia or the language of a half-baked rancid Bollywood “Adarsh Critic”; one needs to find a synthesis, one needs to envision a change in the diction in both directions. Is there a possibility of a ‘public sphere’ of film criticism that can maintain a relative autonomy vis-a-visthe simplifying language of th e contemporary market? Can we envision a community of people actually thinking (and not fact-finding, collecting, obsessing, culture-bashing, author-worshipping) in/of/about cinema, anymore? These are the loftiest expectations of my limited attempt;

I am almost convinced that it will fail. But there is a satisfaction to be derived even if one freely chooses the losing side, even if the hand in the game is forced by fate.

I have reserved the last words for the fans of the “Twilight Saga” movie fans. We will—I swear—talk about your favourite movie series and your favourite stars all the time. Indeed, it might seem we are obsessed with them. They will be our favourite garden-gnomes, goitre-d ghouls, etc etc. We will compare their flavours with ten-day old dry bogies. So, repressed boys-&-girls, would-be-spinsters-with-rolling-eyes, fake-leather-sugar-candies, chastity-fixated virgin-seekers, stick to this page, although your mental health will hereafter not be our responsibility.

I do not believe in copyrights, and shall be using relevant pictures from the internet. Please note that these will not be used for any commercial purpose whatsoever.

Lastly, this is a slightly belated birthday gift for Chandrika Acharya. I hope she will approve of it.

Amen.