Indian Movies Thread IV

[ramana]

Book Review from Telegraph, kolkota 15 Dec 2006
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->RING OF TRUTH
- Ray unpacked and re-assembled 


Apu and After: Re-visiting Ray’s Cinema
Edited by Moinak Biswas
Seagull, Rs 495

“Now, erudition is something I singularly lack.” Coming at the very beginning of Satyajit Ray’s Amal Bhattacharjee Memorial Lecture, delivered in 1982, never has scholarly diffidence been so magnificent, yet so sparely and elegantly expressed. And that is the problem with Ray today. Very few of the inheritors and explicators of his legacy in Bengal — film-makers, reviewers and academicians alike — would be able to pull off the casual stylishness of that ‘singularly’, and the impeccably sly pseudo-humility of that initial ‘now’. This has kept alive a monumentalism (or its obverse, iconoclasm) that comes in the way of proper critical and creative engagements with his work which are of comparable distinction. One is left, therefore, with such things as the horrific effrontery of Gautam Ghosh’s Abar Aranye, or equally deadening ritual affirmations of the family line.

This anthology of critical essays brings together some of academic India’s most formidable minds (and prose styles) in order to redress that imbalance. Inevitably, there is a great deal of erudition informing this book, not only of the kind that Ray would have been grateful for, but also the sort from which he would have distanced himself humorously. Yet, the possibilities of reading opened out in the editor’s finely-honed introduction were already there in Ray’s 1982 lecture, especially in Ray’s masterly translation of the first seven minutes of Charulata into descriptive-analytical prose. <b>The relationship of his films to earlier and contemporary Indian and European cinema, and to a cosmopolitan medley of literary, graphic, pictorial and musical traditions was one of the themes elaborated in Ray’s brilliantly lucid lecture, as it had been earlier in Our Films, Their Films.</b>

Biswas’s introduction takes as a real achievement the peculiar “elegance and nobility” of Ray’s best work, its “distinctive restraint” and “quiet dignity”. The critical project, then, is “a kind of dispersal of the iconic work”, the “unpacking and re-assembling” of the historical convergences that make up its rich weave of “cultural composition” and “tonal calibration”. But the elegance and reticence of Art are founded on problematic “imperatives of exclusion”. Hence the question binding the essays together becomes, “What is it that is kept out of the frame so that Ray is able to say what he seems to say?” This is ultimately “the question of realism”. <b>How does Ray’s cinema negotiate — by creating spaces of exchange and of interrogation — the pressure of the “contemporary”, the aesthetic and political demands of Modernism as well as modernity? History and experience, nationhood, personhood and the market, the presence in time and space of bodies, things, places and money, together with the perceptual, mimetic and ideological universes in which they exist, are what make up the pressures of the Real. How do Ray’s films represent these pressures, while forging their “internal distance” from them? What is the nature of his cinematic modernity’s break with the past?</b>

Biswas’s own essay addresses these questions in a nuanced and detailed reading of Bibhutibhushan’s Pather Panchali and Aparajito, alongside Ray’s Apu Trilogy. For Biswas, the trilogy becomes a re-description of “a world touched and transformed by a literary tradition”, creating a “sensate space…imbued with intelligence and feeling”. “Life in a poor village does ramble,” Ray had realized while preparing to shoot Pather Panchali, and for his film to have the “ring of truth”, the director, in Biswas’s words, had to “reach out to a life and its rhythm, life perceived as rhythm”. <b>The “truth” of the films thus encompasses not only a “sociological perception of poverty from ‘inside’”, but also such human nuances as the mother-son relationship: “Ray is unsparing in exposing the basic cruelty of the situation, a cruelty for which there is no visible person to blame.”</b>

Suman Ghosh’s reading of the Kanchenjungha screenplay shows Ray perceiving Life and Art not so much as rhythm, as in terms of musical structure, especially the sonata form as developed by Mozart and Beethoven. A properly documented, rather than randomly impressionistic, study of what Adi Gazdar had called “Manik and his Music” is long overdue. Ghosh’s analysis will have to reach beyond the plot-structure of the films, their literary-textual skeleton, to look at how their visual and aural matter, their cinematic essence, is informed by a sensibility steeped in the musical and intellectual structures of Indian as well as Western classical music. In fact, there is a crucial tension within Ray’s entire corpus, and in some individual films, between the structures and principles of Indian music and those of Western music.

This is not confined to their background scores, but in the way the films visualize space and sequence, situation and story, and order their internal conflicts, connections and resolutions. Also, it is not just the sonata form of Mozart and Haydn, but also the counterpoint of Bach, the two traditions coming together in Beethoven (Ray played the Grosse Fuge in his radio talk, “What Beethoven Means to Me”), that is essential to Ray’s musical sensibility (as it was to Bergman’s), and determines his arrangement of the spaces and sequences of cinema. The sonata, fugue and rondo (and, at a somewhat different level, the concerto), and the temporal and ornamental elaboration of the raga, become distinct narrative and structural principles — “ideas of order” — in Ray’s cinema. It is also worth thinking through the complex relationship between Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The analysis of the carnivalesque “peasant gaze” in Mihir Bhattacharya’s reading of Ray’s musical, through the dialectic of classical and folk music, would be reinforced by such a comparison.

Both Supriya Chaudhuri and Sibaji Bandopadhyay are enthralled by cinema’s strange relationship with memory, and with the disorienting “bad faith” of history as experienced by bodied selves in urban and sylvan spaces. “Isn’t it very very difficult (if not impossible) to deal with the phenomena of memory in cinema?” asks Bandopadhyay in his reading of the Memory Game sequence from Aranyer Din Ratri. “In what sense is a film a record of anything?” asks Chaudhuri in her beautifully personal, intellectually rigorous, and Proustian revisiting of Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya. (The horizons glimpsed in the essays by Biswas and Chaudhuri, leaving Film Studies quite a way behind, remind one of such experiments in interpretation as William Arrowsmith’s book on Antonioni or Enzo Siciliano’s celebrated biography of Pasolini.)

The tart and mischievous core of Bandopadhyay’s Marxian-Freudian-Derridean critique — that the Memory Game is a game of “unwitting self-betrayal” — is placed within a daunting, bravura feat of over-interpretation. One finds oneself wanting to read it like a vengeful parody of its own unstoppable copiousness. For Bandopadhyay, from the very first shot of the film, Ray is preparing us for “the enactment of a prank”. This lovely phrase is then expanded as “a sudden eruption that blurs the distinction between ‘travel’ and ‘tourism’ and a consequent involution of the principle of assignment upon which are predicated the norms of knowing and aesthetic evaluation of the ‘other’ in both the discourses of (colonial or para-colonial) travelling and (postcolonial) tourism”.

One remembers Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak telling her Columbia University audience last year, with evident glee, that what she realized while writing her memoirs is “how much I really liked to write my obscure and terrible things.”

AVEEK SEN
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