Amit says
It seems that there are all kinds of unresolved problems to do with Satyajit Ray
Not really. Ray is studied in Film schools or, more recently, thanks to Youtube, anyone sitting at home can go through his films virtually frame by frame and thus grasp his technique and how it evolved.
– to do with thinking about him, with finding a language to speak about him that does not repeat the indubitable truisms about his humanism and lyricism.
This problem is resolved easily enough by anybody who is good at writing. Sadly, Amit is not such a person.
How does he fit into history, and into which history – the history of India; the history of filmmaking; some other – do we place him first?
We place him in the history of Indian cinema because he was primarily an Indian film director.
We do not ordinarily talk about Ray “fitting in”, because he is an icon and a figurehead, and figureheads do not generally have to fit in.
Yes they do. You can't put up a Hindu icon in a mosque or a synagogue because they would not fit in. I can't become the Queen of Engyland even though such a personage is merely a figurehead. This is because I don't fit into any of her dresses. Sad.
Traditions, schools, and oeuvres emanate from them.
No. They emanate from the founders or originators of particular doctrines or practices. But, those founders may be unknown or less important than some subsequent figure.
Glancing toward Ray, we see, indeed, the precious oeuvre, but it’s more difficult to trace the tradition – either leading up to Ray or emerging from him.
Not really. We know who influenced Ray because he told us.
People closer to home will mention something called the “Bengal Renaissance” and Tagore when thinking of lineage. Even those who are not students of film know who some of the precursors are: Jean Renoir, Vittoria de Sica and John Ford.
They were influences, not precursors. Ford didn't make boring films about malnourished Bengalis. de Sica was a good actor and his films had dramatic tension. Renoir could make entertaining films though, like de Sica, he was a Communist.
As to inheritors of the style, you could, with some hesitation and prudence, point to Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and, a bit further away, to Abbas Kiarostami.
They have their own style. One might speak of an elective affinity but that is all.
But what does this constellation of names and categories add up to?
Nothing. Ray's uncle, Nitin Bose had invented playback singing and was a big wheel in Bollywood. Ray's wife acted in his films till she married. Ray was determined to get out of the studio and pursue a more naturalistic style. Sadly, his films were not entertaining.
For, in the end, we are reduced to looking at Ray as if he were alone, as someone who possessed, as Ray said of Rashomon, “just the right degree of universality”.Sayajit Ray.
No. Bimal Roy got 'out of the studio' first with 'do bigha'. Bollywood made plenty of movies based on Bengali novelists like Sharat. But they were entertaining. Ray's films were wooden. Still he launched the careers of Sharmila and Aparna.
To me, it is increasingly clear – especially in the light of the changes in politics and culture in the last quarter of a century
Modi is Hitler! He will send all the Muslims to Gas Chambers!
– that Ray is the only embodiment of an Indian “high” modernity, specifically a vernacular “high” modernity, that the world has had to deal with.
High modernity means 'unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world'. Ray wasn't making films about robots or super-computers which plan to obliterate the human race. Perhaps Amit's wife got him to watch Shahrukh in Ra.One by telling him it was a Satyajit Ray movie.
The “world”, in this instance, refers to places in Europe and America where film festivals were hosted,
plenty of Turd World shitholes host film festivals.
the great metropolitan centres in which debates to do with “culture” were decided, and even sections of the Indian intelligentsia.
that sentence is incomplete. What happened to those sections of the Indian intelligentsia? Were they sodomized by robots? That's something I might pay to watch.
Ray’s humanism was noted in his heyday, but the encounter with Indian modernity that watching his films constituted was hardly mentioned, or only inadvertently experienced by the viewer.
I think the Western audience already knew that modern India was a shithole. Ray was part of Nehru's begging bowl diplomacy. Still, it was nice to be reminded that Atlee had managed to get the Brits out of the most boring and beggarly place on the planet.
And yet Ray’s work did occupy the consciousness of the second half of the twentieth century,
No it didn't. Nobody watched his movies. Some pretended to have done so but they became evasive when you asked them about the scene where the starving leper quotes Goethe to the callous Cost and Management Accountant.
and, to be understood, must have required a different set of rules from those applying to the paradigmatic, “authentic” India of either the Orient or, later, of post-coloniality – the India of chaos, crowds, empire, resistance, voices, irresistible self-generation, and colour.
How could 'post colonial' India have 'empire'? Still, so long as Sharmila was on the screen, one could put up with Ray boring the shit out of us.
Ray’s India, or Bengal, was not, in this sense, paradigmatic – but, as with Apu’s room overlooking a terrace and railway tracks in Apur Sansar, it was strangely recognisable and true.
Because Ray shot movies in real places in Calcutta. But real places in Calcutta are very boring which is why it is a good idea to emigrate.
Were we being shown, then, that, it was, after all, “recognisability”, rather than cultural “authenticity”, that was a feature of modernity?
Modern stuff is contemporary stuff. When we look out of the window, we are looking at modern, not medieval, stuff.
Still, Amit may be on to something here. Ray is a genius because when he shoots a scene where a cat enters the room, we can recognize that it is a cat and not a walrus. But the credit for this must go to the clever White people who invented cameras and motion pictures.
And how aware was the audience, as they discovered Apu’s world, of that distinction?
There is no distinction. The reason we recognize a cat on the movie screen because it genuinely is a fucking cat. It isn't a walrus wearing make-up.
Let us go back at this point to Ray’s own record of his encounter with Japanese cinema in the form of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Ray wrote about this in 1963, probably a little more than twelve years after its release – for Kurosawa’s film went to the Venice Film Festival in 1951, winning the Golden Lion there, and Ray said, “I saw Rashomon in Calcutta soon after its triumph in Venice.”
How was he able to recognize it was a film? The answer is- 'because Ray was the figurehead of high modernity'. To further elucidate, Ray had a head. It was able to figure out that a film was a film because 'recognizability' is deeply imbricated in the dialectic of High Modernity, not in a hegemonic, Gramscian sense, but in a truly Indian sense which recognizes that Modi is Hitler and has turned into a cat and is now ILLEGALLY subjecting me to a Foucauldian bio-political regime of SURVEILLANCE!
He added – for Japan seems as far away from Bengal as it is from Venice, and Venice probably closer to his Calcutta – “This is the point where I should confess that my knowledge of the Far East is derived largely from Waley and Lafcadio Hearn and that while I know my Shakespeare and Schopenhauer, I have yet to know Murasaki and the precepts of Lao-tzu.”
Late eighteenth century Bengal knew plenty about Japan thanks to Dutch merchants like Isaac Titsingh. That's why Dwarkanath had a Japanese pavilion in his garden.
What is odd is that Ray doesn't mention relatives of his who were interested in revolutionary politics and who admired Rash Behari Bose who had settled in Japan.
This is not just the prototype of the colonised subject airily declaiming his allegiances.
Ray was the citizen of an independent country. He was merely saying that unlike some other Bengalis, he had not read Lin Yutang or Suzuki or translations of any Chinese or Japanese texts. Perhaps this was because he studied economics. Also, during the War, perhaps it was safer to stay away from anything Japanese. However, China was an ally and there was a great Chinese scholar at Shantiniketan.
It is the modern as revisionist, impatiently estranging himself from a fundamental constituent of his identity: that is, the Orient as a point of origin.
It isn't a point of origin for Indians. On the contrary, Buddhism and Sanskrit went from India to China and Japan both of which are to its East.
Incidentally, the 'modernists' in Amit's own subject were deeply appreciative of China and Japan. Think of Yeats's interest in Noh drama or TE Hulme's Imagism or Ezra Pound's crazy Confucianism. Tagore's Shantiniketan school of art was directly influenced by Okakura- Fenelossa's student.
For Ray, I think, the prism of this revisionism is his particular understanding of “Bengaliness’:
for the buddhijivi this involves being a boring, bigoted, blathershite who accuses everybody else of Islamophobia.
Ray once offended readers of the Illustrated Weekly of India – and I speak from living memory – by saying that he did not think of himself as a Hindu, but as a Bengali.
Nobody thought of him as a Hindu. However, if Suhrawardy's Direct Action Day had succeeded, Ray and his family would have had to run away from Calcutta. They may have remained culturally Bengali but they wouldn't have been domiciled there.
This revisionist view of Bengaliness
It isn't revisionist. We all have a particular provincial identity. I iz a Sarf Lundon Curry & Chips Tamil.
is not so much a sub-nationalism, or even just a residue of his father’s Brahmoism, as an opposition to cultural identity as we understand it today.
No. We understand 'Bengaliness' to mean speaking Bengali and, in Ray's case, writing Bengali books and making Bengali films while living in Bengal.
It is an opening out onto a secular, local, even regional sense of the everyday, cohabiting, at once, with a constant premonition of the international, which defines the “Bengaliness” of the first half of the twentieth century.
A definition gives you a 'bright line' way of distinguishing members of a set or a class from non-members. What Amit has written is as true of 'Tamilness' or 'Cockney Lesbianism' as it is of 'Bengaliness'. What did change in 1947- which was still part of the first half of the century- was that Bengal was partitioned. But Curzon had previously partitioned it at the beginning of the century. That partition was reversed only to be reversed again.
In the same essay on Japanese cinema from which I have just quoted, Calm Without, Fire Within, Ray, still discussing Rashomon, makes a shrewd observation, to do with the culture of filmmaking certainly, but also the sort of questions that the sudden appearance of a compelling cultural artefact raises.
The 'Arabian Nights' were a compelling cultural artefact. The only question it raised on being translated into European languages, was how do we write something as entertaining? Initially, you may be imitative. You have Beckford's Vathek- which features Sultans and harems. By the time of Potocki- who believed he himself was a werewolf- you have something yet more rich and strange but which stretches to your door.
“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”.
This is bleeding obvious. To be fair, Ray may not have known that Japan had a rich history of film making which in turn owed a big debt to Japan's rich theatrical heritage. Like Ray, Kurosawa was a painter, but he had two super-hits before he made Rashomon.
Those first two statements are among the cleverest statements I have read on the reception of the product of one culture into another,
It is stupid. It's like me saying, after watching 'Aida', that the Italians must have had quite a long and rich musical tradition.
a cautionary reminder of how the critical language of reception simplifies and caricatures,
reception may simplify and caricature, that's true enough. But 'critical language' tries to shit higher than its arsehole.
even while occasionally applauding, the encounter with the foreign artwork or phenomenon, and ignores certain blindingly obvious problems.
The blindingly obvious problem is that we think critics are stupid cunts. If we see a long queue outside a movie-hall, we decide to watch the movie even if it has sub-titles. Chances are naked ladies will appear on the screen. I'm not saying all them furriners aint evil bastards but I don't mind looking at their women if they take their clothes off.
Remember that Ray is not speaking here of the classic encounter with “otherness”, with the savage or the peasant,
Every country had peasants some of whom might be pretty fucking savage. Watch 'Deliverance' sometime.
the staple archetypes of post-coloniality,
Colonialism, maybe. Post-coloniality is about guys descended from peasants or savages dressed in Saville Row suits making speeches at the UN.
but of something – in this case, Rashomon – that only occurs in the economy and theatre of modernity,
because films were invented in modern times.
of a moment of dislocation, of revaluation, taking place within that terrain of film festivals, film societies, and educated (maybe even cinematically educated) middle-class audiences.
The terrain of film festivals- at least in the India of my youth- was about queuing up for films where pretty girls took their clothes off. You might have to sit through boring Scandinavian shite, but at some point a hot chick would get nekkid. 'Paisa vasool' we'd say to ourselves- we got value for our money.
For the rest of Amit's essay click here.
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