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.
