Fruition refers to the completion of an act or sequence of purposive actions. Intimation means getting information of an act or event. It is not itself an act. No fruition occurs when only intimation, nothing more, occurs. This is because an intimation can be erroneous or aleatory.
One very interesting type of fruition is that which occurs when 'scion wood' from one species of tree is grafted onto 'root-stock' of another species. Indeed, a single tree can produce peaches and almonds and apricots thanks to such grafting. Hybrid fruit are a separate and equally interesting matter.
In the art of cinema, it is certainly possible to speak of 'grafting'- e.g. movies made by people from one culture- America, in the case of Ellis Dungan, or Germany, in the case of Franz Osten- in another country for a very different audience. Equally, one may speak of 'hybrid' genres- e.g the 'masala Western' that was Sholay in which American stunt coordinators helped Indians recreate a cowboy film inspired by a Samurai film directed by the great Kurosawa.
Where there is neither grafting, nor hybridization, there can be no intimation of any type of 'fruition' save that of the rootstock.
Such is not the view of the always ridiculous Amit Chaudhri who asks in Scroll.in-
Why is it that, when a clearly modern non-Western phenomenon emerges globally – say, Mandela, or (Satyajit) Ray himself, or Arundhati Roy’s environmental activism, or a liberation movement – he or she or it is seen as a “beginning” rather than a “fruition” or “culmination”,
Mandela was the first Black President of South Africa. He began a sequence which is likely to endure.
The first Indian film to be screened in Venice was a Prithviraj Kapoor starrer in 1934. In 1957, his son's 'Jaagthe Raho' won the Grand Prix at Karlovy Vary while Ray's Aparajito gained a similar accolade in Venice. But Kapoor's film was clearly commercial, if pro-Communist. Ray's film was art. His Cannes award in 1956 for 'best human document' marked the commencement of an international market for miserabilist Humanistic Indian art movies which never tipped over into full throated Marxism.
As for Arundhati Roy- who had played a 'tribal' in a deeply condescending, utterly ignorant, film version of Joyce Cary's 'Mr. Johnson'- all one can say was that she was a dimmer, dottier, Shoba De from Delhi's Lutyens Left. Incidentally, she had previously received a prize for a TV film which nobody- I literally mean nobody at all- had watched.
as if they belonged to an intellectual environment without texture or entanglements or process, a history composed, astonishingly, of supermen or women who rise without explanation from the anonymity around them?
When we hear 'news', we assume the thing is new. It is a beginning. Some people who didn't know that K-Pop was a global phenomena, may have thought that Psy (of 'Gangnam Style' fame) must be the first pop star from that part of the world. But, such people were obviously as ignorant as shit. It would be like saying 'Bruce Lee invented Kung Fu'.
Jomo Kenyatta was the first handsome and charismatic African politician to star in a movie ('Sanders of the River' with Paul Robeson). Tom Mboya, a Luo- like Obama's Dad- had made a big impression on Americans- including Veep Richard Nixon- in the Fifties. My point is that Mandela wasn't the first handsome and dignified African President to gain International adulation. Still, it may be, some people in the West might not have been aware that this was the case. Similarly, there may not have been people who were aware that India had already produced many fairly successful female authors writing in the English language before Arundhati won the Booker. As for Satyajit Ray- it is certainly plausible that back in the Fifties, some film buffs in Europe or America might have thought he was the first darkie to make a feature film.
Ignorant people may well assume that Einstein invented Physics or that Freud discovered Sex. But academics don't normally concern themselves with utter ignoramuses.
Amit, it must be said, is an extraordinarily ignorant Professor. He thinks Carlyle invented the 'Great Man' theory of History. The fact is there already existed a hagiographical tradition with respect to great military leaders like Fredrick the Great and Napoleon and so forth going all the way back to Caesar and Alexander and Cyrus and Sargon.
Even more than Western history after Carlyle, non-Western history still seems, at least in the popular imagination, condemned to be an account of exceptional men and women and events springing out of an undifferentiated, homogenous landscape: the site of development.
This is a fair criticism of Ram Guha- but it is now obvious to all that the fellow is a Huccha Venkat type hysterical shithead.
In coining the wonderful rubric, “film making nation”, with its conflation of a specialist activity with a political entity, Ray is not so much being a cinema geek as he’s reminding us of the nitty-gritty, the materiality, the processes, of history, and of crafting history.
Amit is referring to a comment Ray had made on Kurosawa- “It was also the kind of film that immediately suggests,” said Ray, “a culmination, a fruition, rather than a beginning. You could not – as a film making nation – have a Rashomon and nothing to show before it. A high order of imagination may be met with in a beginner, but the virtuoso use of cutting and camera was a sort that came only with experience”
To us, this comment seems trite. We are all aware that every genre of movie including the Samurai movie- has a long history.
Ray, however, was writing this long before there were Video lending libraries. He himself needed to go on making lots of feature films- which meant finding angel investors- so as to perfect his craft. Sadly, most Indians, even at that early date, felt he had done enough. Let him rest on his laurels. He had succeeded in establishing, beyond doubt, peradventure, or infirmity of suspicion, that India was a deeply boring shithole.
Is that all, however, that the encounter with Rashomon hints at – a transplantation of an art-form, and its subsequent indigenisation? Is the history of the modern artwork simply a history of its production in the West, and its indigenisation elsewhere?
The development was nearly simultaneous.
(These are questions, of course, that have been raised by historians such as Dipesh Chakraborty and others in other contexts, to do with the nature of the “modern” itself, but not, I think, in connection to the specific business of genre.)
Amit is being silly. Both Indian and Japanese Cinema was predominantly indigenous. Even where foreign directors like Frantz Oste, and Ellis Dungan- operated in India, they had to get local theatre troupes to adapt their style. It was not possible to impose a foreign aesthetic or technique on a still highly traditional labor force and market.
We must remember that, crucially, Ray’s own response to Rashomon could not have come out of nowhere. We could not, to paraphrase his words on Kurosawa’s film, have had that response and “nothing to show before it”.
So Ray had said nothing remarkable. But then what he was famous for was making films not researching a particular industry.
That response to Rashomon in 1963 in Calcutta
didn't matter to Ray. He knew the film won the 1951 Golden Lion. Kurosawa was eleven years older than him. Both were the first directors from their respective countries to be considered artistic auteurs though, no doubt, Kurosawa always delivered 'paisa vasool'- your money's worth, in terms of entertainment- whereas pretending to have seen Ray's films was an economical way to come across as high brow.
is not so much a beginning as a “fruition, a culmination” of something and the history from which it emerged at that moment, in the context of Rashomon, cannot be summed up as a history of Western origination, colonial dissemination and, finally, indigenisation; of import and export.
This is silly. Japan had beaten Russia in battle in 1905. Six years before that, they had made a movie featuring two famous kabuki actors. By 1910, Japan had a 'superstar' one of whose big successes was a version of the 47 Ronin which in a recent cinematic incarnation stars Keanu Reeves. In other words, Japanese Cinema is as old as American Cinema and there has been plenty of influence going from West to East and vice versa. Kabuki actors doing ninja stunts a hundred years ago ended up changing the way Western superstars now fight. Gone are the days of John Wayne throwing punches at some equally elderly tub of lard. Now everybody and her cat is either Shao Lin or Samurai or some such thing.
‘Travel as a means of unravelling’
It is generally the case that you have to get out of your armchair to unravel a mystery- like where the remote got to. Why does Amit find it worth remarking this?
Yes, it is a history that involves travel, but travel as a means of unravelling meaning rather than just moving forward in a landscape.
but you are moving so as to find out something which you can't do sitting in your armchair. In any case, we all move through time- which is why history exists.
Modernity, in the realm of culture,
arises out of something happening now- not in ancient times.
appears to consist of a series of interchanges and encounters in which the putatively initiating meeting – such as the one between Ray and Kurosawa’s film – is also a “culmination, a fruition”, of interchanges that have already taken place.
Nonsense! One can encounter something ancient and imagine having an interchange with it. The reason we could speak of Ray reacting to Kurosawa as involving 'modernity' is because they lived at the same time in 'the modern age'. But Ray's remarks on Kurosawa did not represent a 'culmination' of anything. All he said was that the Japs had been making films in addition to fucking over the Chinese and the Koreans and Alec Guinness in Bridge over the River Kwai.
One is reminded of this if one thinks back to the emergence of Iranian cinema in the late ’80s.
'New Wave' Iranian Cinema had already emerged. Masoud Kimiai's films were popular and politically significant. The Rex Cinema fire was blamed on SAVAK precisely because Kimiai's film was playing. Suppose the film had been from Hollywood, the regime could have shifted the blame to the Marxists or the Clerics.
Obviously, the Revolution and the War disrupted the Film industry. Its re-emergence was associated with a large expat Iranian community cautiously re-establishing ties with friends or relatives as well a very different mood in a country exhausted by the storms and stresses of a turbulent decade. The high strung pre-revolutionary melodramas now seemed otiose. The regime too wanted 'reel life' to play out in a minor key.
There was that initial moment of surprise when, in London and other cities, audiences viewed the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsin Makhmalbaf and, in the ’90s, Jafar Panahi and others, for the first time.
Is this really true? Iranians, back then, tended to be a gregarious and intensely hospitable bunch. If you were the friend of the friend of someone from back home, you tended to be invited to a meal and then someone would get out a guitar and someone else would put a video into the VCR so as to get the singer to shut the fuck up.
There was fairly widespread acknowledgement that a form of art-house cinema that was at once deeply humane and innovative was coming out of a country about which the secular middle classes around the world knew relatively little, and about which they knew already whatever they needed to know.
Kurosawa famously said that Ray's death was compensated for by Kiarostami. But both were, in a sense, carrying forward the foreign policy of their respective Governments. Ray advertised India's shithole, but not Communist shithole, credentials so that Nehruvian begging-bowl diplomacy could thrive. Indians didn't like it but hey! it brought in PL480 wheat and 'trapped dollars' which were used to finance scholarships- i.e. middle class flight- to the USA. Similarly, Kiarostami's films sent a signal that Iran was a civilizational power with valuable resources and a sober and industrious populace who didn't look very different from Europeans.
Into this frame, the frame of preconceptions, entered, for instance, the engineers, film directors, and drifting professionals who drove through Kiarostami’s tranquil but earthquake-stricken landscapes, with middle-class children sitting, often, beside them in the car, journeying towards families in houses in remote villages; also in that frame appeared Makhmalbaf’s weavers, village primary school teachers, Afghan daily wage-earners, carnival bicyclists.
So, a country ripe for economic reconstruction but too exhausted to wish for war or political upheaval. Some 'Neo-con' Jewish intellectuals even thought an alliance with Shia Iran was on the cards so as to contain Wahabbi extremism.
Objects came into the frame as well – apples, fabrics, the blue tile on the wall of a village house, shoes in a shop window in Tehran. The audiences noted these people and things with a mixture of delight, surprise, and recognition, seeing them as elements of what they had not known before, as well as of the already known.
Is it just me, or does this audience come across as Amit Chaudhri level fuck witted? If they could get so worked about a Persian film, they'd lose their fucking minds if they watched Coronation Street.
The quality of the already known gave to these details their recognisability, their authenticity;
Look darling! A pussy cat! OMG! They have pussycats in Iran! This is blowing my mind!
viewers knew almost straight away that what they were watching was indisputably “real” cinema,
as opposed to a vulgar blockbuster which you might actually enjoy watching
with cinematic values of a high order;
like shots of authentic pussycats and balloons and a guy who is supposed to be a heroin addict because the hairdresser carefully mussed his hair.
the details possessed not just universality,
pussycats and balloons
but the pacing and an aura of the modern,
i.e. Black and White post War Italian or French shite
particularly modernism, with certain modulations on that sensibility that these very gifted filmmakers’ works introduced.
Though the thing had been a film school cliche for four decades and was already being parodied on TV & in mainstream cinema by the late Sixties.
So, “foreignness” was not the crux and core of Iranian cinema.
No. These guys were re-exporting something for which Film Appreciation Classes had created a market. I recall my mother gushing over the 'authenticity' of 'makonde' carvings in Kenya. A very elderly black man shuffled forward and explained that this particular 'folk art' had been introduced by West African soldiers about 30 years ago. At first it was just the Armenians who manufactured that shite. Now everybody was doing it. Genuine antique tribal totems carved while you wait.
The crux was its enlivening and dislocating recognisability.
'Look darling! That pussycat has just had its recognisability dislocated. It is a heroin addicted pussycat quoting Qurratul Ayn silently as a damning indictment of neo-liberalism!'
The fact that this cinema had its impact at a time when the infrastructure and raison d’être of the art-house cinema movement was, worldwide, being dismantled was an irony that was either not noticed, or not considered worth commenting on.
In other words, these stupid or senile poseurs were not saying 'We truly are retarded shitheads. Art-house Cinema has no place in a world where homosexuality isn't just legal, it's practically compulsory.
‘A convergence of links’
Yet the most important question regarding these films still remains unaddressed.
Were they any good? The answer is, no. They were tedious shite.
Here was a kind of cinema that “immediately suggested”, as Ray had said of Rashomon, “a culmination, a fruition, rather than a beginning”. What was it fruition of?
The pre-revolutionary New Wave which one faction of the regime revived for its own purposes but which the dominant faction decided should be 'for export only'.
What had happened, or was happening, in Iran, and, for that matter, elsewhere, that these films were powerfully hinting at – not through their subject-matter, but through the culmination of a certain practice, and all the more powerfully for that?
They were saying to ex-pats- it's safe to come back, or at least visit. We promise not to lock you up as a Zionist spy- unless, of course, we feel like it.
Not knowing leaves a gap in our understanding, and dependent on that model of transplantation and indigenisation.
This guy is a Professor of Eng Lit. Yet he writes a sentence like that. The truth is, there need be no 'gap in your understanding' if you just ask an expat Iranian dude my age why these films were financed and who promoted them.
And what happens when something that has purportedly been indigenised is carried back to the land it was transplanted from – an occurrence such as the first showing, say, of Iranian films in New York?
What actually happened was some influential Jews bought the supposedly 'moderate faction's story- or pretended to- while others dismissed the thing precisely because of its political nullity.
Whatever the answer to that might be, it cannot approximate the frisson that the actual event – the New York audience watching the Iranian film – would have involved.
Very true! Donald Trump and Michael Blomberg got such a frisson after queuing up all night to get a ticket that they bumped uglies.
The emergence of Iranian cinema represented not just a culmination of certain filmic styles and values, but a convergence of links, hitherto unnoticed, that came together to create a new-minted but unexpected, even unlikely, experience of the “modern”, in that decade when modernity, apparently, had finally begun to wane. “Modernity” was the unlooked-for culmination through which New York and Iran momentarily came together.
For whom? Anybody important? Anybody clever? No. It was only for shitheads like Amit who represent a vanishingly small minority of utter nonentities.
And yet this experience of the “modern”, which arises not from a canonical history
because experience does not arise from reading a history book- canonical or otherwise
of modernity written solely by and in the West, but through a series of interchanges
an experience of x can only arise from interchanges involving x. To say you experienced y from interchanges which didn't involve y is to reveal you are either a fool or a liar. If I claim that I experienced a vaginal orgasm as a result of interchanges with the complaints department of a leading online retailer, I am lying. I don't have a vagina. The thing is impossible.
and tensions (such as Ray’s encounter with Rashomon embodies) – this continual experience of the “modern” is almost always, if it involves a non-Western artist, subsumed under the categories of “East” and “West”, and within issues of cultural authenticity.
but this equally true of a Scottish artist having an interchange with a Welsh artist and having the experience of a vaginal orgasm peculiar to a type of walrus which went extinct in the last Ice Age. This raises questions of cultural authenticity- e.g. was the artist in question drunk off his or her head on Scotch whiskey? If the cunt confesses he was drinking Babycham, we are likely to lose all respect for him.
Everyone collaborates in this emotive and persistent haziness to do with cultural characteristics, including the commentators and the artists themselves.
So, nobody collaborates in this nonsense save some people who don't matter in the slightest.
That is, they fit their thoughts and justifications into one of two compartments: that either the artwork, if it was produced in the East, bears the unmistakable and ancient imprint of its cultural lineage; or that it transcends all those marks into the convenient domain of the universal.
Once again, this could be said of an English writer- like James Hadley Chase- whose American crime novels were a big hit in France and Japan but not in America. Indeed, the film version of his 'No Orchids' was panned as one of the worst movies ever made. We may say Chase is so English that his America is truly Universal except in America where it couldn't compete with the authentic product.
Only the artwork itself refuses to collaborate in this formula, insisting that the intersection between cultural lineage, foreignness, and recognisability must, in the time of modernity, be arrived at as, in Ray’s word, a “fruition”, that is, as a radical moment of awareness of underlying histories, and, at once, as an unpremeditated but considered acknowledgement of that “fruition”.
There is no awareness of underlying histories in the reception of an artwork. There may be ignorant or ecstatic babbling of a pseudo-intellectual type. Voltaire was taken in by an ancient Indian Purana created by the Jesuits. English people may have mistaken Chase's pulp fiction for the genuine American article. This was the fruition of but Goblin fruit- serving a market for escapism which trapped only those who sought to exploit it.
By “fruition” Ray means, as we have seen, not something static, not a pinnacle of development, but a sudden intimation of intelligibility,
an intimation involves being tantalized by a sight or scent or a sensation just beyond one's apprehension. Indeed, the aesthetic reality is, as Borges says, 'the imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced'. The utility of Brahmo immanence lay in its diligent abiding of the dilatoriness of its own universal saakshi or witness. A project can come to fruition. Purposive actions can have that quality. Intelligibility can't. It is once and for all or it isn't at all. Ray wasn't stupid. Amit is.
and modernity as a language dependent on, and constantly illuminated by, such intimations.
Modernity isn't a language. It may be a vocabulary or an idiolect which illuminates or obfuscates or is used solely for the purposes of vituperation. Amit is a cretin who, being a Professor of English, can't understand what Ray says clearly enough, that too in English.
But then Ray himself, in his essay, goes on to speak in the terms of the same dichotomy that I just described.
No. It is impossible for anyone who is not as stupid as shit to speak in the same terms as Amit.
“Of all the Japanese directors, Kurosawa has been the most accessible to the outside world. There are obvious reasons for this. He seems, for instance, to have a preference for simple, universal situations over narrowly regional ones... But most importantly, I think, it is his penchant for movement, for physical action, which has won him so many admirers in the West.”
This is a perfectly sensible, if banal, observation. Kurosawa was accessible for the same reason that Charlie Chan and Buster Keaton and Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan were accessible.
Ray then clarifies that he is not overly bothered by whether the “penchant” for action is a consequence of a “strong Occidental streak” in Kurosawa, or whether it springs from something “within the Japanese artistic tradition”; for he is still “able to derive keen aesthetic pleasure” from Kurosawa’s work.
Because Kurosawa was a great artist. Ray, obviously, representing 'Ahimsa' besotted India- and mindful of the recent sins of Japanese Imperialism- was pretending the Japs didn't have a strong native tradition of slicing each other up with Samurai swords. Nice Asian peeps be non-violent and spiritual. Those nasty Americans probably infected Japan with the virus of materialism and a cult of the sword slinging mass murderer.
However, he points out that “there is no doubt that he is a man of vastly different temperament from Ozu
who was important for Bengalis because he made a film on Subhas Chandra Bose in Singapore which he destroyed.
and Mizoguchi,
whose early life was a recapitulation of a traditional shinpa dramas because his elder sister had been sent off to be a geisha and she helped him get on his feet in the film business.
both of whom come nearer to my preconception of the true Japanese filmmaker.
Sadly, both were accused of opportunism because, to be frank, they too had contributed to an evil propaganda machine.
Here, too, I may be wrong, but a phrase of my dear old professor sticks in my mind: “Consider the Fujiyama,” he would say. “Fire within and calm without. There is a symbol of the true Oriental artist.”
Ray knew he was wrong but, like the Indian Judge at the Japanese War Crimes Tribunal, he was sticking up for his fellow Asians.
Ozu and Mizoguchi are actually, as far as filmmaking temperament and subject-matter go, quite different from each other: in contrast to Ozu’s subtle suburban idylls, Mizoguchi’s work, in fact, shares with Kurosawa a fascination with pre-modern Japan and its distinctive artistic resources.
Mizoguchi was poor and helped by his geisha sister. Consequently, his films were melancholy and female-centric. Ozu was from a merchant family and his best films were melancholy and family-centric. Kurosawa was of a Samurai paternal lineage. His older brother was a 'film narrator' in the age of silent film. He killed himself when Talkies arrived. Kurosawa's entry into the film industry was through an essay he wrote on how to correct the deficiencies of Japanese films. His genius was to spot that those deficiencies were in fact its strengths. Very wabi-sabi right?
I suppose what Ray is talking about – and the basis of the comparison he is making – has more to do with pacing: the “movement” and “action” of Kurosawa’s kind of cinema, the slowness of Mizoguchi’s and especially of Ozu’s universe.
No. Ray is talking about the canonical subject-matter, which is what determines pacing, of three different auteurs belonging to three different castes. Buddhism, it will be remembered, had introduced the delights of untouchability to distant Japan. However, Japan- unlike Bali, which has no untouchables- lacks Brahmins.
‘Slowness is a relative thing’
Slowness, who knows, may well be an Oriental characteristic. It may also be part of the colonialist construction of the Orient, as well as of the response of Western critics to directors like Ozu. Ray points out, bringing his own metier, at this point, into the picture, that the “complaint is frequently heard that some Japanese films – even some very good ones – are ‘nevertheless very slow’. Some of my own films, too, have drawn this comment from Western critics”. (Chandak Sengoopta, in an issue of Outlook magazine, reminds us of the sort of early criticism that Ray is talking about here.)
By the time Ray wrote this, the Beat poets had taken up esoteric Buddhism. R.D Laing would soon claim to be able to slow down Time and to enter the satori/samadhi of the kshanikavada Reality which is wholly momentary and unconnected with future or past.
Ray points out that “a slow pace is, I believe, as legitimate to films as it is to music.
The moving pictures needn't move very much nor is there any Silence which is not the memory of music which, after all, as Schopenhauer tells us, outlasts the world.
But as a director, I know that a slow pace is terribly hard to sustain. When the failure is the director’s fault, he should be prepared to take the blame for it. But it is important to remember that slowness is a relative thing, depending on the degree of involvement of the viewer”.
Perfectly true. The Malyalees soon outdid the Bengalis in slowness but, at least on occasion, the denouement was utterly devastating. Auspiciousness- Shivam- is what is lost, it seems, when the damaru beat too far declines.
With the phrase “a relative thing”, Ray is, I think, gently refuting the “universal” cultural situation presumed by Western critics,
They make no such presumption. The West has its adagio and allegro just as India has its vilambit and dhrit.
and arguing, somewhat diffidently, for his Easternness.
coz he was a darkie- right?
But he does not remind us
because it isn't true
that slowness is also a principal, even sacred, feature of modernism, which privileges the image over the narrative,
but a picture can tell a story perfectly well
the individual moment over the overarching time-span, thus holding up the way a story ordinarily unfolds.
Ordinary stories- maybe. But not all stories are such.
It is possible, of course, that Ray’s pacing is the result of an Oriental identity that he is usually at pains to distance himself from.
Only in the sense that it is possible that Ray's pacing was the result of his actually being Marilyn Monroe.
For instance, the sequence in Ray’s first film Pather Panchali (based on Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee’s 1928 novel of the same name) in which the camera spends a noticeably large amount of time observing the movement of water insects upon a pond during the monsoons might be, as Max Lerner said of the Apu trilogy in the New York Post in 1961 (and this kind of opinion is obviously still fresh in Ray’s mind in 1963), “faithful to the Indian sense of time, which is actually a sense of timelessness”.
Whereas, it was freakin' obvious, that it was faithful to our common intuition of how time passes in the eye's of a child. Ray was cinematizing a bildungsroman.
Or it could, more plausibly, be at once a sideways reference to the long descriptions of Apu reading by a pond in Banerjee’s novel (which Ray makes no attempt to invoke directly),
because the kid is too young. Also, apparently, the kid Ray had chosen was a crap actor. Sad.
as well as a homage to and a reworking of the forty seconds or so (a considerable amount of time in a film, even more considerable when the film is about half an hour long) in Renoir’s Une Partie de Campagne, given to the swirls and eddies of river-water as the holiday-makers paddle downstream.
A repugnant suggestion. In Renoir, the eddies are erotic. Maupassant aint Bibhuti babu.
The eddies of water in Renoir’s river and the agitated pool in Ray on which the narcissistic water insects jump, absorbed, not to mention the mysteriously alluring pool by which Apu keeps his vigil, are part of the gluey, non-linear substance of modernism, its flow and pattern of consciousness.
Nonsense! Ray's pool is reflection which itself conditions consciousness. This is Ramanuja's Trinity of bimba, pratibimba and Darpan- image, pre-image, and mirror- that is mind. I suppose one may mention Shantideva and Basho's frog jumping into the old pond in this context.
‘Other moments, other histories’
We do not need to decide, for now, whether or not the pond sequence in Ray’s Pather Panchali is “faithful to the Indian sense of time”, or is another instance of “transplantation and indigenisation”.
This is more particularly true if we have decided Amit is a cretin.
I see it as a “fruition” of something, giving way to a moment of recognition that undermines these polarities, and ramifying into an awareness of other moments and histories available to us in modernity, which we did not necessarily think of until that moment.
The rest of us see this as being awake and having nothing to do and, maybe, drinking too much cheap chardonnay because, fuck it, you realize there must have been some point of time when you were asshole enough to think maybe you aren't actually an alcoholic if you keep off the hard stuff. Also, maybe you are gay. Can I get hard looking at naked pics of Tilda Swinton? Just checked. No. So that's alright then.
Renoir’s own shots of the river, too (in a film based on a Maupassant story that comes from a different impulse: to narrate the arc of a lifetime without abandoning economy and compression), I am sure, must have appeared to Ray a “culmination, a fruition, rather than a beginning”.
Renoir was at his peak when he made it. This is a reasonable supposition. I suppose the thing was a 'Popular Front' critique of the petit bourgeoisie or some shite of that sort.
It is interesting, though, that, when Ray worries briefly about whether Kurosawa’s predilection for “action” comes out of a “strong Occidental streak” in the filmmaker,
this is easily explained by a fellow Asian seeking to acquit Japan of genocidal tendencies. That sort of stuff is Western- right?
or whether it arises from “within the Japanese artistic tradition”, he does not mean by the latter the work of Ozu and Mizoguchi, or the constituents of a “film making nation”, but an older, perhaps a purer, tradition.
Which didn't involve killing and raping and robbing the people of neighboring countries.
Yet, barely a paragraph ago, when speaking of the “culmination” that Rashomon is, he had appeared to be locating that film (and, by implication, his encounter with it), in a context more complex, more impinging, and less pastoral than a Japan seen through the eyes of Lafcadio Hearn.
Bengal's Titsingh had Japanese as well as Indic wives and kids. Dwarkanath Tagore had a Japanese pavilion in his garden. Thanks to the Dutch, Calcutta was connected to Kyoto long before Lafcadio Hearn was born
In fact, it was Rashomon that had led Ray to the idea of a modern Japanese cinema,
Nonsense! Ray was smart. He had watched a lot of international movies. Moreover, there was a strong Bengali-Japanese connection which pre-dated the political alliance forged by people like Rash Behari Bose.
and to discover and uncover the different perspectives and convergences that Ozu and Mizoguchi represented.
Why should they represent 'convergences'? Was there any such thing between Hitchcock and Mae West?
If we take stock today, we see that Kurosawa is still the best-known Japanese filmmaker outside of Japan; and, almost as well-known in the West, but certainly a slightly larger presence in Japan than outside it, is Yasujiro Ozu.
After Kurosawa, comes Miyazaki who elevated anime to a cinematic art form. Creature features and Sonny Chiba style martial arts movies have had a similar global impact. People pretend to have watched Ozu but, in many cases, these 'recovered memories' of horrific boredom are actually implanted by the CIA. Not the American CIA. The other CIA run by cockroaches.
‘Confluence of styles’
What is noticeable about this confluence – between Ozu and Kurosawa –
or Hitchcock and Mae West or Richard Attenborough and Jackie Chan
is how it brings into play two very distinct styles of seeing, two different approaches to time and movement, with the flow of the confluence, weighted more in one direction – Kurosawa’s – than the other.
Especially if Kurosawa was making a Samurai movie and Ozu was meditating on the loneliness of old age.
And, because of this difference of temperament (Kurosawa’s polyphonic, sometimes mythopoeic and Ozu’s urbane, quiet, and still), and also because, for a long time, we had come to identify Kurosawa with Japanese cinema – for these reasons, Ozu must, for us, even now retain the air and freshness of a secret, of a personal discovery: almost as much as, in fact, he would have for Ray.
No. Ray was an auteur familiarizing himself with the oeuvre of other great auteurs. Japan had a special connection with Brahmo Bengal before it impinged on the Occidental consciousness.
Akutagawa, like Bibhuti in his supernatural stories, draws on a folk tradition not unlike that of rural Bengal. Ray may have been of a superior class but that reality inhabited his own household in the shape of elderly widows or domestic servants.
If we look at the countries I have cited in the course of this talk – Iran and India
India exported films to Iran as the Hindujas are continually telling us. But it was Iran which gave Bollywood many of its themes and motifs. What is interesting is that Sharat's Devdas unites the 'hubb-al-udhri' tradition to the traditional Indic motif of the two love interests- representing two different aspects of the Eternal Feminine- of the hero caught in the toils of samsara.
– we see how this pattern, in the context of the film, repeats itself strangely but tellingly, and even, sometimes – challenging our preconceptions about cultural authenticity – inverts itself.
This is repetitious and inverted twaddle.
In India,
Bengal maybe
for instance, Ray himself is part of a pair, and the other half of the pair is
Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Had Ray gone to Bombay, he'd have been as successful.
the prodigiously gifted, but self-destructive, Ritwik Ghatak, who died in the Seventies probably as a result of his alcoholism.
Pair Ghatak with Mrinal Sen by all means. The plain fact is Ray wasn't a Commie though he had to go with the flow in the late Sixties.
Ritwik Ghatak.
There are many ways in which this pairing could be described and contrasted.
Only because it is arbitrary and misleading.
One could call Ray a classicist, and Ghatak the possessor of an operatic sensibility.
But some operas are highly classical.
One could also describe Ray as a progeny of the Enlightenment and its flowering in Bengal, and Ghatak as an errant son, someone who turned the enlightenment inside out in his movies.
No. Ghatak was a declasse Communist who didn't stick with the program. Ray was haut bourgeois.
More characteristically, however, Ray’s temperament has been called “Western” by some Indian critics, and Ghatak the more genuinely “Indian” of the two, and for reasons completely opposite to those pertaining to Ozu and Kurosawa.
Ghatak had been part of the Leftist PTA theater movement.
I think that, in this formulation, Ray’s slowness,
which is 'vilambit' or 'adagio' as is made clear by the background music (which, admittedly, deteriorated over Ray's career)
which in Ozu is a mark of recondite “Oriental” stillness,
why not say 'Buddhist'?
his air of “calm without, fire within”, is seen as a kind of European reserve,
so, now the English stiff upper lip dissolves into Oriental inscrutability.
and associated, in particular, with Western-derived realism;
in which it can't be realism at all.
while Ghatak’s narrative energy, his melodrama, his fascination with mythic grandeur (all of which in Kurosawa can be seen to be driven by a “strong Occidental streak” that prefers declamation to suggestion, “action” to stillness), is, in the Bengali filmmaker, often supposed to emanate from authentically Indian, and oral, modes of storytelling.
Ghatak could be compared to Mizoguchi but he built upon an indigenous Marxist tradition equally visible in Bollywood.
One can imagine a parallel planetary configuration in which Ghatak is more famous in the West than Ray, and Ozu than Kurosawa,
No. Ozu died in 1963. Ghatak lost favor with the Left and struggled from about that time. Kurosawa and Ray remained productive into the Eighties .
and sense that, in that universe, the terms would be adjusted, and mirror each other, accordingly, and essentially remain unchanged.
only if cabbages can mirror cartoon characters.
Similarly, Iran: the two major filmmakers from that country, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsin Makhmalbaf, have strikingly contrasting sensibilities, the former presenting a very interesting development on neo-realism, where nuance, bourgeois ordinariness, and leisureliness, along with odd but rich self-reflexivity, create the lens through which Iran appears; the latter, Makhmalbaf, making use of folklore, bright colours, and fairy tales.
It is foolish to pontificate about Iranian cinema unless one has immersed oneself in that very ancient and rich literary and artistic tradition. This Tamil won't rush in where Tajiks fear to tread. Amit, because he babbles nonsense about Bengali directors, is welcome to gas on in an equally absurd fashion about Persian or Patagonian Cinema
This sort of dichotomy rehearses one that has been familiar to us for more than twenty years now: the one that identifies suggestiveness, compression, and realism with
good cinema
canonical Western traditions, and storytelling, fantasy, orality and passion with
popular cinema.
post-colonial ones. When we are viewing Ray or Kurosawa or Kiarostami, however, we are really witnessing a “fruition” which always suggests more, which, at that moment, we are capable of sensing but not grasping.
In which case were are not witnessing any fucking fruition. Some pseudo-intellectual may get a frisson of some sort but we advise him to keep it in his pants.
Not necessarily more of the same – other Kiarostamis and Rays
Hitchcocks and Mae Wests
and Kurosawas, confirming, thereby, these filmmakers’ traditions and cultural identities – but of their opposites and others:
Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin
Ozu and Makhmalbaf and Ghatak. All these form the hidden co-ordinates of what that moment of “fruition” gestures towards:
in which case that 'fruition' gestures at nothing.
tensions and contestations that form the fabric around,
in which case there is no fabric.
and of, the art-work, and of which we too are a part.
unless we were smart enough to sneak away before the curtain went up
They make, in a sense,
which is nonsense
the old opposing categories of “East” and “West” seem cumbersome – even, in the limited but pervasive roles ascribed to them, redundant.
All Amit has done is whine about how the West treats the East as like 'Oriental' which is totes uncool and, like, complicit in genocide and Neo-Liberalism and other ghastly stuff of that sort.
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