Odd Obsession

Branded to Kill (1967) / Seijun Suzuki

Everything in Branded to Kill is fetishised to the point of odd whimsicality – characters obsess over the smell of boiled rice, assassin-ranking systems, butterflies, dead birds, sniper-scopes, gun-barrels, naked female bodies and the director himself creates one super-collage of dedicated fetish-imagery by shooting everything either in long telephoto lenses or front-on – thereby either creating ‘pretty pictures’ out of every goddamn object or reducing it to its most fundamental, as-it-is form. There is nothing that exists if not to serve purely surface-level pleasure; there are no great ideas about imperialism as in Gate of Flesh or genre-reflection like Tokyo Drifter, but as pop-objects go, it is one helluva film.

The Image Deluge

 

Deccani Souls (2012) / Kaz Rahman

The first ten minutes of Kaz Rahman's 2012 film, Deccani Souls, have a distinct feeling of impending disintegration that pervades through them - it is as if the image is constantly coming apart at its seams, a faucet about to burst because of the contents that occupy it. As a result, Rahman must act as the editor-gatekeeper, allowing at a maximum only two or perhaps three disjointed images into the frame, but not more. Finally, as all of them jostle for space with each other, they seem to arrive at a reasonable reconciliation, an uncomfortable compromise: the superimposition. The superimposition is a often enough a cutesy pictorial tool - wu-xia epics would use it to establish looming presences and to indicate the oncoming of a major event - Rahman's film tells us that the superimposition is also the tool to depict a midwinter fever-dream or memories - because as memories go, when they rain, it's a downpour.

Seven Times Over

As we recover from the Lang post, allow me to present to you the seventh issue of the online film journal I run with Sudarshan Ramani/Suraj Prasad (both of 'em being unclickable). It is called Projectorhead and the seventh issue carries as its center-piece a roundtable on Martin Scorsese's Hugo and how it belongs to the larger, four-decade long Scorsese filmography. I participated in that and wrote an essay on the films of the Indian mainstream director, Dibakar Banerjee.

Here is the link to the issue: www.projectorhead.in/seven (check also: past issues, www.projectorhead.in/archive.html)

Below, an excerpt from the piece I wrote:

'A good detail (of the production design, or a character tic or the way a line is spoken) does not have an existence of and by itself – left alone, devoid of a larger universe of which it is merely a byproduct of, the detail is merely an annoyance – a contrived vehicle for the director to show-off his ‘eye’. In that, it is perhaps slightly tragic that people do detail-spotting with Banerjee’s films – because if anything, a detail exists only as an engine to propel larger ideas that permeate through the film, like the walls in Fuller’s Shock Corridor or the gun barrels in Aldrich’s World for Ransom. A detail for detail’s sake is never the marquee event in a film. If the discussion of a film, any film, remains restricted only to its most visible and exterior surface, i.e., the details or performances - as opposed to the embedded theme or a subdued subtext or centrally, softly-stated truths that dwell at a micro-level within the film – it is either the failure of the film or of the discussion.'

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

In an interview to William Friedkin in 1976(this), Lang admitted to the interviewer that films like Dr.Mabuse: The Gambler, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis and Spione had tired him out by the end of the ‘20s and that what he really wanted to do was a ‘personal film about one or two characters.’ Of course, he tried it with M, but M is nothing if not about the problematic notion of a mob-mentality and the very idea of a shared belief. Perhaps, Lang got the sort of independence (a filmmaker euphemism for ‘just let me be, sucker!’) he sought when he finally got around to making films for/in Hollywood – even if a lot of his 30s English features are marked for their admonishment of the mob and of a resolute belief that a person can only ever take right decisions in private, and never while influenced by a collective(this idea is manifest in Fury but also in You Live Only Once; mob-paranoia is also something that can be thought of as a direct yield of Lang’s political preference). As such, crowds/mobs in Lang are always looked with a distinct suspicion – they are capable, as is shown in a number of films, of incidents of great violence, absolute thoughtlessness and misguided sentiment. As a precursor to these, they are also easily misled (the ‘Sandor Weltemann’ sequence in Dr. Mabuse Part II – Inferno: A Game for the People of our Age, where Mabuse en-disguise hypnotises a whole auditorium of people that outside of the film screen, includes us) and influenced (bad-girl Maria in Metropolis) or just plain irrational (M). For all his distrust, therefore, of the mob, however, Lang could shoot crowds bloody well – better perhaps than most, notable contenders include Lean, Niblo, Gance, Monty Python, K.Asif. He knew a thing or two about how to let massive hordes of people populate his geometrical compositions/austere frames, but his real skill lay in actually providing them with a real personality as opposed to just impressive, but shallow presence. This, I believe, was an ability that rose out of a genuine intrigue for human sentiment/impulse as opposed to an ultimately empty fascination for scale/magnitude. As such, Lang could insert close-ups, long-lens shots and ‘faces’ where others would satisfy themselves with wide-shots filled pictorically with dots of varying intent and sizes. 

Below, some Lang crowds:

The Sneak

Bigger than Life (1956) / Nicholas Ray

When Ed Avery (James Mason, tremendous ol' fashioned craftiness), only recently informed of an illness and disturbed, therefore, by the prospect of how it will disrupt his middle-class American life, goes to the bathroom and looks at himself in the mirror - he decides after a few moments of private contemplation to take the 'miracle drug' (the McGuffin in the film) that may cure him. When he causes the mirror cabinet to open, thereby causing the reflecting surface to swivel, one may catch a quarter-second glimpse of an intruder, a trespasser of Eddie's solitude, another occupant of the bathroom - half-crouched but very alert, it is the director of the film, Nicholas Ray, dressed in what seems to be a off-white (more white than off) overcoat. This is a very curious incident - one that momentarily interrupts the sustained poetic realism of the film up till the point but also, at the same time, enforces Mason's performance of Avery as a normal everyman desperate to live up to someone else's standards.

Notes on Gangs of Wasseypur - I

Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) / Anurag Kashyap

• The film has been praised for being a sincere depiction of rustic life – the lower-class villagers are no longer weak or noble, but are vicious and self-serving within the universe of the film – as such, Kashyap has revised the filmic representation of the villager in Indian film, or even better, empowered them via-film. This is all hogwash – firstly, Wasseypur only rarely deals with the 'underprivileged' villagers that the film is assumed to revise – his characters are political leaders, gang leaders, the sons of gang leaders and owners of slaughterhouses/butcheries. Kashyap merely replaces social poverty with moral poverty - where they were poor and therefore, inhabitants of a land the middle-class didn't really understand earlier; now they are seen with an even more sinister eye: as people who can murder and mutilate you in a second. It isn't as if Kashyap gave them any real personalities/ambitions – they merely exist as vessels of different modes of violence. This is not empowerment; this is misrepresentation.
• One may argue that the film has a genuine class-based unrest – but actually, the initial promise it makes of social/economic upheaval through a scene where a first generation criminal discloses his secret desire to usurp power (and is found out through the most convenient contrivance of Hindi films: a passing bystander who happens to overhear this disclosure) is soon replaced by personal vendetta and mano-a-mano upmanship. The son of the aforementioned criminal does not wish to climb up the social ladder (scenes depicting his ascent are done very tardily and lazily; unlike the picaresque dexterity that Goodfellas or even Deewar bring to the fold) because of a deep-rooted social ambition, but his life, as he states, has only a single motive – revenge. As such, he exists not as a social object (or symptomatic of a larger town, as Kashyap would have us believe), but as an isolated case – a person who has devoted his entire life to picking a historical bone.
• The whole publicity of the film and the manner of the film itself sells Wasseypur as distant exotica – even worse than the likes of Boyle or Lang at their worst, because in their cases, atleast the director admits to not-knowing. The characters in the film are always bragging about the eccentricities that prevail in Wasseypur - so that us city-dwellers can laugh  and snicker at them without ever having to face the real danger of actually being in such a gangland because well, Kashyap, ever the documentarist of ‘real life’ - has ventured into that territory and shot footage, the rad-director that he is. The truth is, the film is merely 'replacing the urban cool with a rural cool' – as such, it is, at best, an ‘artsy’ Dabangg.
• The Wasseypur of the film is as a mythical land that exists only to become a pop-culture object. So what if there really is no real geographical location of the town or it seems almost as if historically/politically severed from the rest of the country (the final sequence of the film that this film takes its name from, Gangs of New York, in which the skyline makes multiple-transitions to finally take the shape of the present, situates the place specifically within a historical context – and it is done with the simple precision that great directors always possess) – the publicity of the film tells you that if you are a fan of the film, you too can become a ‘Wasseypuri’. This sort of identification or syndrome of allowing the audience to place themselves in ‘someone else’s shoes’ is symptomatic of a comics convention (where fans step into the attires of their icons), but not of a film that claims to offer a kaleidoscopic-view of a real, existent social situation somewhere.
• The directorial voice is perpetually amiss throughout the film – there is no texture that Kashyap as an artist lends to the film, there are no signs of a conscious intelligence behind a tale that runs throughout on autopilot mode. The truth is, even if your story is ‘solid’, ‘sprawling’ or ‘epic’, someone’s still gotta direct it. If, as Perkins said, cinema as an art that is a yield of a number of clear decisions made by the director – then Wasseypur has very few. In order for a film, any film, to exist as a real, tenable object – it must be something (good, bad, anything), but the problem with Wasseypur is that it exists as a nothing-object, it exists in some sort of a peculiar vacuum – as a result of which, you cannot call the film good, or bad, or anything else. It is strange to watch a film so terribly devoid of a(any) personality – yes, the film has all the crude sexual humour that you may associate with a Kashyap film, but it is critical to remove the script from its direction and see them as two separate functions. While there is former, which is why there is a film, there is no latter at all. If there are directorial decisions, however, they are ones like the following,
• In showing a character who lusts after women and looks at them merely as sex-objects, Kashyap actually shows us all the women in the film from the character's point-of-view, thereby letting us, the members of the audience, share in the lust-show, instead of allowing us to merely look at a strange lustful eccentric from a distance and then, perhaps, putting him under the scanner, where he can exist both as an eccentric, a comic object or someone worthy of our disgust.
• The huge myth that Kashyap has created around himself, a huge bubble of appreciators that follow his every move very dangerous - because while what someone else does is not my business, but I feel a lot of earnest cinephile interest is investing itself in the pursuit of an ordinary director - and such a large collective can make such mistakes only in the age of the internet. Earlier, if a large group of people would like one guy, you could be damn sure he is bloody good, but now, it could just be hype.

The Resurrection-Loop

Sunnyside (1919) / Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin is less a person and more a notion, and there really isn’t anything new anyone is saying when anyone says that. It wasn’t as if he was ever viewed as a real human being at any rate. Two years into his career, he inspired merchandise (itself pop-culture’s way of facilitating ownership/domestication of an otherwise inaccessible ‘star’ or ‘myth’ or ‘notion’), cinephilia consistently thinks of him as a cinema-deity and when they gave him that Honorary Oscar, they correctly, and trivially, discussed the possibility of his immortality (again, people are never immortal, symbols are) when they stated that he will survive as long as there is a screen and a projector. The idea that a Chaplin film may someday become a relic (like Leaud in Tsai-Ming Liang’s Face) is not entirely ridiculous. If an apocalypse hit and if intergalactic invaders had to carry home certain proof that we did exist, a Chaplin film would suffice – in that, the idea that his work from the past will transmit to the future is one in which the quality of eternal sustenance is present. Yes, Chaplin is permanent – but his permanence is not of the forever-sort i.e. to say, he is not always relevant – Chaplin, or the notion of him, has to resurface, regain importance, re-emerge or resurrect – like the feeling of fear that will leave once to return again, Chaplin will go away, but never to never return again. He is the comeback-sort: whether in his career – first as the evolved Tramp (the Tramp in Mabel’s Strange Predicament, considered the character’s debut, is rowdy, mean and a prick – he also has a complete moustache), then as an actor who can speak, and then as an apolitical nostalgist – or as a symbol that stands in different times for different things, the qualities of resurrection or at worst, redefinition must always attach themselves with Chaplin.

That is why Sunnyside is Chaplin’s shorts-era masterpiece – while A Dog’s Life is great (and a heady introduction to Chaplin’s Miyazaki-type insistence that modern life has reduced man to an animal existence) and Shoulder Arms is where the notion that ‘even in the middle of a great tragedy the human heart will beat’ is most visibly manifest – Sunnyside is where Chaplin’s skill at spiritual resurrection after complete personal erasure comes through most solidly. The mysterious penultimate scene of the film, where Chaplin crouches in front of an oncoming vehicle (even in the 20s, vehicles were already considered apt for the carrying out of a suicide) and braces himself for certain death – as you expect a sudden gag, the film quick-dissolves into a scene where Chaplin’s character is reunited with his love, and together, both of them bid goodbye to the urbane-love-rival. This could be the dying character’s fantasy (he has a similar fantasy in the middle of the film) or merely a technical snag that caused the erasure of the gag that follows the action of crouching-down in front of the car – whatever it is, in both cases, it is resurrection.

Sunnyside is also excellent for another reason – Chaplin made silent films, which apart from an occasional whimsical contribution from the overlaid soundtrack, did not feature any diegetic or ambient noises. As such, most of his gags are based on visual hysterics – things you can see. Therefore, the broader, funnier strokes in a Chaplin film are often the most easily appreciable only through looking at them (this is a quality that is inherent in the Indian Chaplin-homage, Pushpak, where most of the thrill is through entirely ‘visible’ gestures: an illusionist, a knife made of ice and such). But the narrower ones, the unobvious routine-actions aren’t necessarily dependent only on the audience’s sight, but also in their ability to imagine a sound. When Chaplin’s employer in the film walks in from the other room (this geography or understanding of the spatial arrangement of the space is crucial to the comedy of Chaplin, even more to that of the Marx Brothers) one early morning to wake Chaplin up to get him to work, Chaplin responds by sitting up almost immediately. Satisfied, the employer walks back to his own room – the sly Chaplin, assured that his master can only hear him from across the wall and not see him, plays a feign-game that entirely involves sounds: he rattles his shoes on the floor, causes an object by his bedside to clink and creates other sounds so as to suggest a departure to the listening employer in the other room. In that, Chaplin’s silent film is full of sound and noise.