The 'need for achievement' drives enterprise of all types. Sometimes, a new representational technology, like cinema, enables people to achieve success duplicating an art form which isn't about the need for achievement. It may be about spiritual or aesthetic or cultural or political values. However, when that new technology expresses its own need for achievement, there is a qualitative change. At that point, we could speak of a 'national style' in the use of that technology. Otherwise, what you have is National values being reflected in a particular representational technology. The 'style' only develops as virtuosity becomes an end in itself. Sadly, that style may be deeply boring- because National cultures tend to be a great big yawn. It ceases to be so when it takes as its subject matter the need for achievement of various National 'types'. Thus Hong Kong Cinema, benefiting from the KMT politically motivated disapproval of depictions of Kung Fu, moved beyond the limits of Peking Opera when it began to focus on protagonists belonging to different social strata who need to acquire high level fighting skills so as to overcome a tyrant or a villain. The Hong Kong style of martial arts quickly spread around the world because it came to emblemize 'need for achievement'.
Bengal, responding to the stimulus provided by British commerce and administration, did not lack 'need for achievement'. H.M Bose, a Bengali entrepreneur, was the first Indian to manufacture gramophone records. He was a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore. His son, the great director, Nitin Bose, who pioneered the use of playback singing in Indian movies, was the cinematographer on Tagore's solitary venture into film. Nitin's mother was the sister of Satyajit Ray's father and was also related to Ray's cousin, herself a playback singer and actress, who would become his wife.
Thanks to Nitin Bose, Music became Indian Cinema's USP. The quality of film song & dance sequences improved rapidly. Often, it was music sales, rather than box-office receipts, which made a film profitable. Consider 'Rajnigandha'. It had a good theme song and so the film was successful. Its producer could then afford to finance Ray's horrible 'Chess Players'. A movie which features a Nawab who was a great patron of the arts and a composer of thumris, should have had dynamite songs. The receipts on LP sales would have ensured it made a shedload of money.
It should be remembered that, even in the Silent Era, the live piano accompaniment matched the action on the screen. Cinema was already a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk- i.e. a 'total' work of art.
Yet Ray writes-
'Cinema being first and foremost a pictorial medium,
Pictures are pictorial. Cinema is kinetic. It is about action. It is theatrical. That's why we speak of a Cinema Theatre, not a Cinema Gallery. Cinema benefits from good Art Direction. But the mise en scene is merely the backdrop. There has to be drama. But for drama to develop qualitatively, the driver has to be the need for achievement of the protagonists. That is what motivates virtuosity as an end in itself in a kinetic medium.
and the integrity of atmosphere being the first essential of a good film,
the background music, or the song that is sung by the actor, must match the mood that is being evoked by the action on screen. But, once again, this does not drive qualitative improvement in the medium. Need for achievement is what matters. Where, from film to film, from decade to decade, protagonists have this need, then there is a 'Red Queen Race' such that the obstacles they face, too, have to become more complex and nuanced. A good film is only good if its genre, or the producer's oeuvre, has internalized this 'need for achievement'. Ray started quite well. But his was a need to bore the pants of the audience. For the upper-class buddhijivi, being a bigoted scold is considered the highest achievement.
the problem which faced Renoir and which his painter’s eye was able to solve with comparative ease was that of selecting the visual elements which would be pictorially effective, and at the same time truly evocative of the spirit of Bengal.
Rumer Godden's book wasn't concerned with the spirit of Bengal. Nor was Renoir's film.
And because the narrative technique of cinema admits of dawdling, these elements had to be the quintessential ones so that the director could make his points and create his atmosphere with a minimum of film footage.
If he is 'dawdling' there will be a lot of film footage. Also, Directors who are making a point are working either in advertising or in propaganda. There need be no point to either Art or Entertainment. Both are ends in themselves.
In searching for locations, therefore, Renoir was also searching for a style.
He already had a style. Sadly, it was as boring as shit.
But being an alien and a European, there is a limit to which he could probe into the complexity that is India.
Rumer Godden was very much alive. It was her complexity that required probing. Her book 'Black Narcissus' had been a big hit in 1948 probably because the American league of Decency objected to it.
The most he could do was to concentrate on the external aspect and leave the rest to his own French sensibility.
The French didn't have Ango-American hang-ups about sex. That's why Powell-Pressburger succeeded where Renoir failed. It is difficult to evoke an atmosphere of repressed sexual passion if you come from a place where everybody is having affairs with everybody and any barnyard animals they might own.
In cinema, as in any other art, the truly indigenous style can be evolved only by a director working in his own country, in the full awareness of his past heritage and present environment.
Since Indians didn't invent movies, they can't make movies. Why is it that an American- Ellis Dungan- was able to make very good Tamil movies though he did not speak Tamil?
In the days of the silent cinema, the film-makers of the world formed one large family.
No. Some- e.g. most Indian movies or Japanese movies of that time- had only a local audience. There were global stars like Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks.
Using the technique of mime, which is a more or less universally understood language, they turned the cinema into a truly international medium.
Mime is a quite separate art-form. Everybody hates that shite. What made cinema international was action, excitement, thrills and spills, slapstick and melodrama and impossibly good looking people dressed up as Arab Sheikhs or European Princes.
With the coming of sound, mime gave way to the spoken word
No. Spoken words replaced dialogue cards. Authors did not mime emotions. They 'registered' them. But, they spoke to each other in a histrionic style and then the dialogue card was flashed on the screen. Sometimes, the guy providing the piano accompaniment read out the cards for the benefit of illiterate members of the audience.
and a new technique of realistic acting was evolved to suit the requirements of the medium. Not that stylization had to go. As Chaplin has demonstrated in Monsieur Verdoux, an Englishman can make a film about a Frenchman in an American studio, and yet invest it with a basic universal appeal.
The Americans didn't like it. The French did. The plain fact is, the Second World War wasn't waged for profit. Bankers don't kill lonely widows to steal their savings. We get that some men prefer little girls and are revolted by women of their own age. But murder still is murder. It isn't an imitatio dei of the Great God of the Bourse.
But the main contribution of sound was an enormous advance towards realism, and a consequent enrichment of the medium as an expression of the ethos of a particular country.
Silent movies already did that. People understood cowboys were only found in the American West, just as skyscrapers were abundant in American, not European, cities.
For is there a truer reflection of a nation’s inner life than the American cinema? The average American film is a slick, shallow, diverting and completely inconsequential thing.
The average movie aims to entertain and earn a profit. If there is a commercial cinema, most films will be of this type. But Dictators too may want entertaining movies to be churned out to keep the Masses from thinking too much.
Its rhythm is that of jazz,
Sometimes. But the Americans enjoyed all sorts of music. Mario Lanza was a big star. Jazz musicians only began entering studio orchestras in the Fifties.
its tempo that of the automobile and the rollercoaster,
both of which existed elsewhere. Apparently they were invented in Russia.
and its streaks of nostalgia and sentimentality have their ancestry in the Blues and ‘Way down upon the Swanee river’.
Nonsense! Most Hollywood film music is descended from the great European Romantic composers.
Yet it must be reckoned with, as jazz is real and the machine is real. And because cinema has the unique property of absorbing and alchemizing the influence of inferior arts,
American cinema was able to absorb pretty much anything which worked elsewhere. This was because they had a vast and very well organized market.
some American films are good, and some more than good. The reason why some notable European directors have failed in Hollywood is their inability to effect a synthesis between jazz and their native European idioms.
Nonsense! The complaint, made by Jewish intellectuals, was that Hollywood was too Jewy. It's taste was for schmaltz.
Those who have retained the integrity of their style
like Hitchcock.
have done better.
Because there's much more to America than Jazz.
We may mention the films of Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang, and one of the very best, Renoir’s The Southerner, which is American in content but completely French in feeling.
It is faithful to the book. The cinematographer was of French origin but had worked in Hollywood for more than 30 years.
Ray was a great admirer of French cinema of the avant garde sort. The truth is, they could and can make very entertaining movies. I suppose the size of the market limited their productivity.
Possessing neither the subtlety and emotional candour of the French, nor the bravado of the American, the British cinema had to go through a particularly ignominious period until the war,
Hungarian Jews gave it a shot in the arm. The truth is Britishers were well served by the theatre and the music hall and an endless supply of American cowboy or gangster films.
and the consequent expansion of the documentary gave the needed impetus. Since then we have had films like Brief Encounter, The Way Ahead and This Happy Breed which have caught the national character admirably.
Thankfully, that wasn't the national character at all. While these films were being made, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were perfecting their art. In the latter case, this commenced with the lighting of farts in the barrack room.
But the fondness for half-shades and other genteel qualities we recognize as British is not exactly conducive to good cinema.
Hitchcock was as British as fish & chips. The problem with the British film industry was that it was underfinanced. Talent fled to Hollywood.
Hence the frequent falling on fantasy (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), on Shakespeare (Laurence Olivier), on Dickens (David Lean).
Britain had a huge acting talent pool. But British studios had very much smaller budgets and limited distribution channels. However, they could do well in particular genres- e.g. historical 'bodice rippers' or Horror movies set in the late nineteenth century. But the 'quota quickies' of an earlier period had damaged the reputation of the industry. Still, people like Carol Reed learned their craft at that time.
At present the future well-being of the British cinema lies in the hands of a handful of directors gifted enough to overcome the ethnological handicaps.
David Lean's 'Passage to India' came out at about the same time as Ray's 'Home and the World'. Both starred Victor Bannerjee who was incandescent in 'Passage'. Sadly, 'Home' was unwatchable.
But what of our own Indian cinema? Where is our national style?
There were three sources for it. Firstly an Indo-Persianate 'Indrasabha' style of musical theatre popularized by a Parsi touring company. Secondly, a Hindu 'kathakalakshepam' religious style found both in Madras and Pune. In the former instance, it developed into the politically radical cinema of the Dravidian parties which took power from Congress by the end of the Sixties. This was perhaps the first time 'Reel Society' took over 'Real Society'. Ray preferred to wholly ignore the South. He was, after all, a bigoted upper-class Bengali Hindu. Ray also ignored a third strand- that of the Progressive Theatre Association- which understood the need to entertain poorer people while seeking to guide their thinking. Consider Prithviraj Kapoor, who had got his first break in Calcutta and was a good friend of Nitin Bose. The Kapoor clan and the great Dilip Kumar (who had worked with Nitin) were part and parcel of this third trend in Indian cinema. Ray, however, stood outside all three. He was a European forced to make films in Bengal because of an accident of birth.
Where is the inspiration to transform the material of our life to the material of cinema?
I have mentioned the three types of inspiration which had already made Indian Cinema commercially viable. The constraints it faced were financial.
Still, a faithful adaptation of a good novel written by a wholly 'emic' Indian would do well. Pather Panchali did well because it was faithful. Aparajito was not faithful. It did not do well. Ray says
Apparently, even the external truth which Renoir was striving after has not bothered our film-makers.
Indians did make art movies but they bombed at the box office. I don't suppose it occurred to Ray that Renoir, in India, needed to film scenes typical of that country to establish 'external truth'. It must be said, Renoir was brave to cast an Indian lady in the 'bi-racial' role. I suppose the French had less colour prejudice than Anglo-America at that time.
Of our film-producing provinces, Bombay
and Madras
has devised a perfect formula to entice and amuse the illiterate multitude that forms the bulk of our film audiences. Bengal has no such formula, nor the technical finesse which marks the products of Bombay.
Bengal was exporting talent to Bombay. There was more entrepreneurial capital available there.
But Bengal has pretensions.
Some Bengalis were pretentious. But most were highly capable. They said goodbye to pretentions and did great work in Bombay.
And the average Bengali film is not a fumbling effort. It is something worse. It is a nameless concoction devised in the firm conviction that Great Art is being fashioned.
There were plenty of Bengali movies which were remade in other languages. Incidentally, Nitin Bose had worked on the very first 'Devdas' in 1928. Sharat & Tagore provided the stories for umpteen Bollywood movies. Come to think of it, Bibhuti's Rider Haggard style adventure stories would have made good movies. In the Apu trilogy, Apu goes off to Peru or some such place.
In it the arts have not fused and given birth to a new art.
Perhaps Ray is taking a dig at Uday Shankar's 'Kalpana'.
Rather they have remained as incongruous and clashing elements, refusing to coalesce into the stuff that is cinema.
'Pyaasa' is perfect. The theme is universal. The poet Vijay, like Christ, returns to life but is denied by the Caiaphas custodians of his own cultus.
And so painting finds its expression in backdrops, music in the spasmodic injection in ‘song numbers’,
Uncle Nitin, I hate you.
literature in the unending rhetoric of the idealist hero, theatre in the total artificiality of acting and décor.
Shakespeare is totes shit. Instead of portraying Hamlet as a Prince of Denmark, Shakespeare Sahib should have depicted him as a trainee Cost and Management Accountant who becomes amorously involved with a Japanese photocopier. He is sacked after being caught in flagrante delicto. Capitalism is very evil.
The few freakish exceptions do not make amends and do not matter. The pity is that there are few countries more filled with opportunities for film-making.
Just keep filming stuff from Kipling's Jungle Book. Everybody likes animals.
Evidently it is the imagination to exploit these opportunities that is lacking.
Money was lacking. Also, animals shit all over the place. Whatever you might think of Durga Khote, at least she was potty trained.
But there is some cause for optimism. Except in some superficial technical aspects,
Uncle Nitin's playback singing
our films have made no progress since the first silent picture was produced thirty-five years ago, which means that there is time to learn anew and begin from the beginning.
Invent photography. Then invent the movie camera.
So let us start by looking for that clump of bananas, that boat in the river and that temple on the bank. The results may be, in the words of Renoir, fantastic.
No. The results will be the same as looking out of the window of your railway carriage. Renoir wanted his audience, which was not Indian, to remember that his film was set in a far away country. Indian directors when shooting scenes in Paris are careful to include shots of the Eiffel tower. But there's nothing 'fantastic' about that. It's just routine.
The plain fact is that if a film director from a particular country hires actors from that country and uses a story from that country and shoots the movie in that country, it is inevitable that the film will have the imprint of one or more of the styles found in that Nation. Ray's films were boring and bigoted because his class thought that being boring and bigoted was a sign of high culture. Making money is vulgar. Scolding people is virtuous.
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