An Indian Film Theory?

For quite some time now film scholars have discussed and debated the relevance and importance of the 'national' cinema vis-a-vis the Western or more prevalent Hollywood films. They have argued the scope of cultural specificity in the paradigm of cinema studies and have observed that within the national cinema as well there are 'centre'-s and 'alternate'-s which means there are ‘national’ vs 'local'. This becomes a hierarchical trope then starting with the Hollywood - National to the National - Local duality. However, looking at the context of Indian cinema this looks an even more complex matrix. The problem is with numbers - India being the largest cinema producing nation of the world with her diversities - of language, culture and religion.So, to define a 'national' cinema is indeed a challenge. There is a systematic and definite ill purpose in identifying Hindi cinema (primarily made out of Mumbai) as the 'Indian national cinema'. This is where the problems of perception lie. The South Indian mainstream industry churns comparable revenue with the Bollywood films yet the tag of 'national cinema' is bestowed not on them. This in essence reflects the participation of the different sections of the country in the national politics that is controlled and masterminded from North India. All these films - mainstream of the South and the East should rightfully fall under the 'Indian National cinema' along with Bollywood. In addition, there are parallel walks by many which may constitute the ‘alternate’ one.

The question of the centre and the fringe becomes irrelevant in the Indian context since both as a single collective is in the fringe of World cinema - from the point of view of acceptance and also recognition and studying. Even with harping on the theory of a common diction of expression it can be argued that the common diction needs to be as much ours as borrowed.When the numbers are insignificant then the matters are different. But in the Indian scene that is not the case. We have a huge volume of the Hindi commercial films different from that of the Tamil ones and then the Bengali art-house cinema, the middle-of-the-road Hindi films or the Independent film-making wave. So to come to an Indian common diction is difficult to start with. This essentially confuses and poses a problem in the cultural experience of the viewer (Indian or from outside) even though there are certain homogeneities which at times are pointed at by the foreign viewer that we tend to miss and hence ignore.

The plethora of theories in culture studies have been dominated and dictated by the aesthetic standards of the affluent West.  Specifically cinema as a medium had treaded different paths in the Indian context - the mainstream and the 'parallel' often referred as 'art' films. The film critics and the film societies have for long aligned with the parallel flow since the critic and the maker both are supposedly 'enlightened' by the Western theories. They have harbored a casteist philosophy and castigated anything that is ‘popular’ and commercially successful as being less 'arty'. This only widened the divide and in a capitalist organization as the state this meant that the commercial mainstream cinema in India gained prominence over time. The numbers and the kitty amount are so overwhelming that the International film festivals have just no other option but to recognize and realize the market potential of the Indian sub-continent.

Where does it leave the film appreciation culture in India?Precisely it makes the arm-chair critic eat out of the commercial film-makers palm.  Rejected by the western bastions of 'art' cinema and have already shut out the mainstream from the cultural vortex leaves the critic confused and puzzled.  To overcome the slumber what is required is self-belief. To accept that in reality no love sequence is amplified by hundred people dancing on the streets. Just the same way as Avaatar is not a worldly reality and neither Speed and its sequels. For, cinema is nothing but only an illusion of reality. We need to look back and deep into the cinema of ours - with pride and reverence. The medium is developed and sharpened by the West but we use itto tell our story. The Indian film theory should emerge hence. Even if the 'enlightened' art film can be read as a text for conventional theory, the mainstream will surely make the theories numb. For example the primordial focus of classical film theory revolved round the concepts of 'gaze' and 'spectatorship'. This then gets contextualized with respect to gender, voyeurism etc. It has to be understood that the concept of gaze in Indian context is different than in the Western world where public exposure of the female body (for instance) happens in a different way than that in rural India, say.

Renowned film scholar Madhava Prasad argued that the Indian cinema is a product of a heterogeneous form of manufacture whereas Hollywood cinema is that of a serial form of manufacture.The 'story' is at the centre of Hollywood cinema and that being 'realist' (in most cases) the concepts of audience identification happens. Indian commercial cinema for instance, taking cue from Prasad is an assembly of dance, song, story, fight and the star. The success ofthe film depends on multiple 'visual pleasures' and not one only. This robs the viewer of the classical 'voyeur' gaze as 'his' 'gaze' is constantly subverted and dissected by these different sub-contexts. Hence, the melodrama as opposed to realism in Indian cinema lets the viewer to accept it as unreal from the very beginning and yet there is a wish-fulfillment attached to it. The film studies institutes unfortunately look down upon the Indian commercial cinema majorly. What is demanded of them now however is a serious and conscious effort to free reading (and thereby banishment) of Indian cinema from Western angle. The scholars and researchers instead can devote time to come up with an Indian Film theory (and its different branches) that would place the diverse films this land is endowed with in proper context.

[Published in The Bengal Post on 01-Jan-2013]

The critic and 'Ship of Theseus'

The philosophical thesis of ‘Mereological essentialism’ relates the ‘whole’ with its ‘parts’ and the condition of persistence of the state. In essence, if an object as a ‘whole’ loses or gains a ‘part’ (or ‘parts’), it essentially is ‘changed’. This is in line with the famous statement of Heraclitus - "You Cannot Step in the Same River Twice" since both the man and the river change. In essence what these theories try to address are the questions on the process of change and of identity and more importantly acknowledging that ‘change’ is actually ‘static’. However these theories and philosophies are subjects that one can choose to ignore and yet live their life in practice and theory. Any representation of life in art needs to draw as much from practice as from theory. Otherwise it remains primarily a philosophical journey devoid of social and physical semblance and sensibility in the life we lead and / or wish to traverse. Hence ‘Ship of Theseus’ – the paradox about interchanging ‘parts’ onto a ‘whole’ leading to the question on interchangeability of identity is one which is a primarily an academic debate rather than a practical physical entity. Anand Gandhi’s powerfully crafted film Ship of Theseus (hence forth referred as SOT) raises some questions – on identity, interchange and most importantly about ‘change’.

Narrative of SOT

Reportedly, Anand Gandhi defined his film and said-“The three short stories evolved to fill in the three corners of the classical Indian trinity of Satyam-Shivam-Sunderam (The pursuit of truth, the pursuit of righteousness and the pursuit of beauty).” SOT has three inter-woven stories which mesh into a collective ‘whole’ in the end. The film opens with Egyptian visual artist Aliya with a cornea infection. She takes up photography to change her creative output but maintaining the gush internal to her. She stays in Mumbai with her boyfriend and waiting for an eye treatment which returns her eyesight. Does she remain the same person as before since with her new-found vision she seemed visibly upset that her magic eye was lost in the process? The end of this snippet finds Aliya waiting in calm stupor in front of the magnificence of nature as she lets go the cover of her lens – an awakening?

The second of the trinity finds the monk Maitreya fighting a lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies testing their products on animals. Maitreya is lovable– he is intelligent, often Intellectual yet down-to-earth. He preaches his ideals and follows them in his life and more importantly he accepts the staggering differences amongst individuals. He is treated with an ailment which needs a transplant and he refuses treatment since to him that defeats the cause which he stands by in his life.  A young lawyer Charbak, who idolizes Maitreya but follows a different path of reasoning, tries hard to convince Maitreya who waits to embrace death. The exchanges are like Aristotelian debate where Maitreya plays the mature philosopher to Charbak’s questions on life, existence and identity – in isolation and in totality. Finally,Maitreya, relents and agrees for a transplant.

The final and more eventful last part finds stock broker Navin who is in constant tussle with his idealist grand-mother who rubbishes Navin as greedy and banishes the generation as irresponsible. Navin goes through kidney replacement and during one of his visits to the nursing home where his grand-mother is admitted, he comes across a poor, impoverished man whose kidney was illicitly removed during a normal appendix operation. Navin takes this as his personal responsibility and tracks down the kidney recipient in Sweden. Eager to close the circle of actions he arranges the Swedish donor to pay for a kidney transplant on the poor man only to find that the latter has amicably settled with the Swedish in exchange of a hefty amount.

The film takes into account different ways of approaching it. The first story of Aliya for example, in line with her hobby, takes up the handheld camera as the medium to reflect on her life and art almost in a self-reflexive way. In spite of the arresting visuals and the grand narratives there are questions on the philosophical aspirations of the theories garlanded in this part as well - if there is a question on her identity (changed or otherwise) after she got back vision, what happens to the same when she lost it in the first place? Was her identity changed then as well? It may well be so, and if that is the case aren’t we talking more about Mereology than the Theseus paradox? And then going by the essentialism theory we agree the necessity of change and the mandate it brings – what the big fuss then, or is it to have a pretense – and that too of being ‘philosophical’? Maitreya’s story for instance is unfortunately obsessed with articulating concepts at the guise of being overtly philosophical and laden with laboured dialogues leaving general audience like me confused and at times, agitated. Understood, that logical linearity is not what we should look for but we still need to yearn for cohesion and correlation. The problem is with how much concession one must provide considering this is an indie film by a debutant film-maker. The greatest analogy from cricket that comes to mind is the fact that a sixteen-something Sachin Tendulkar faced a Wasim Akram in the former's first tour of Pakistan, and, Akram didn’t bowl at him slow since Sachin was still almost a ‘kid’! If the rule is one for commercial pot-boilers, it has to be similar, if not the same, for any indie film as well.

Allegory of the Cave

Pauline Kael once remarked in The New Yorker -“One’s movie-going tastes and habits change—I still like in movies what I always liked but now,for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale-stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live—for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we’re tired of.” Not only Kael alone, this is the yearning of a section of the Indian audience as well which being lambasted with the popular Bollywood or regional potboilers look out for something which gives them some food for thought. Gandhi for one is intelligent enough to realize - “There is a set of people that has been engaging with world cinema, because of film festivals, retrospectives and the internet, and know that this kind of introspective film is what they’re starving for, and crave similar content from India.Even if we’re only talking about 2% of the total population, that’s about a crore people! Then, there is the potential audience that has not been groomed to this kind of cinema. They may not immediately fall in love with it when they watch it, but they will see that this is the kind of cinema that they want to engage with.” The recent surge of indie films in India thrive on that small percentage which actually becomes not so insignificant if considered in absolute terms. However to reach out to this 2% there are two modes of advertising the product – first, to brand it as different from the mainstream and secondly, to have a brand-ambassador (who also represents the face of alternate cinema) to present and promote the film. Even regional indie films are now being ‘presented’ by film-makers of repute.

Kiran Rao, who has ‘presented’ SOT was articulate enough to comment “It’s not a film that can take a wide audience.Everybody can’t walk in and watch this film because they are not prepared for this kind of cinema, and then they might be disappointed.” Cleverly put, the philosopher in you will stir her feathers in order to strive for being a tad different – to accept the film and in turn bask in collective vanity.

SOT ends with a small video clipping showing the man who donated the organs to the protagonists as shooting the interiors of a cave.The shadow of the man with the camera in his hand falls on the crystalline rock and immediately Plato’s Allegory of the cave comes to mind - the attempt to explain the philosopher's place in society, to attempt to enlighten the ‘prisoners’. If we can replace ‘philosopher’ with the ‘critic’ the picture becomes complete.

            Traditionally the role and place of the critic in society has been revered and defiled at the same time. But there had never been any denying of the importance of the critic in the social milieu in the practice of culture theory. Like any true art form, the role of a critique was also to foster dialogue and engage in debate – it was not about passing judgments without being accountable to the art in discussion. The role of the critic hence, was not trying to push the readers to the cinema halls for buying tickets, rather she should engage them to find the areas of disagreement,to analyse them and if it seemed a worthy visit, explore the same by viewing the film in question. With the explosion of data in the social media space there has been a conscious effort to make the consumer influential enough to share her thoughts and voice her opinion. The information out of this enormous data (termed as Big Data) is used in analytics for better understanding the consumer preferences as well as in determining market trends. IBM’s leading Social Sentiment Index which spurns millions of Tweets to derive positive or negative sentiments on a particular film is one such analytics that is creating a revolution. Professor Jonathan Taplin, Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab commented - "In the past, box office receipts indicated success or failure. Thanks to advances in analytics, movie makers now have the ability to analyze the public sentiments of their viewers in real time. With technologies such as the Film Forecaster, movie studios such as Lionsgate can go beyond receipts, to truly understand the voice of the crowd."Interestingly the sentiment of the crowd is something which snowballs on itself to dictate a trend – you read several tweets, look up the positive and negative sentiment markers and decide on watching the film or not. Technology is precisely taking over the role of the armchair critic whose views are to be waited for and consumed with much fervor. The crowd has the power now and the money – to produce a film and also to extrapolate it to be a hit or a miss.

            So where will the critic go? The critic will still remain atleast for some more time. But like an aged cricketer, he will enjoy his stance now – the burden of destining a piece of art to its proper future squarely rests on the new kid in the block – the New Media. The critic will persist to represent the old world, the world of the written words, of romantic misgivings and veracious thoughts. The images of Maitreya walking boldly through a field intersected by windmills or the caterpillar walking through a sea of human feet or Aliya groping on a wall to feel the texture will hang like a mélange of sensory perceptions which written words fail to attain. The critic, like the dead man in SOT will probably stand in muted wait within the cave – wait till the final words are crunched into a series of binary numbers.