Dept. of Laborless Monday

Two-thirds through the Harold Pinter/Joseph Losey film collaboration, & about to lose him with The Go-Between, I’m giving over my small corner of Labor Day to the languorous Dirk Bogarde.

The Oud Stays in the Picture

Silent movies are like poems trapped in novels. Certain frames and gestures—shifting hands, a grin, a skein of smoke—stand out with the clarity of a sharp line of verse, but they hurry on to narratives that never keep my interest. Come to think of it, a lot of novels are like poems trapped in novels.

Nada Gordon’s new video “Glory” sucks the narrative fat out of the silents and lets the dream fur fly so you don’t have to. Twice the chrome with half the chassis.

The New Talkies this Friday, 9/11: San Francisco, de Young Museum

I’ll be in San Francisco this Friday, 9/11 to perform my neo-benshi piece for Paul Wegener’s German silent, “Der Golem.” Jen Hofer, Douglas Kearney & Nicole McJamerson, and Andrew Choate will be up from L.A. to debut new pieces, along with local hero Jaime Cortez, who killed with his election-era Obama-ization of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” last year. If the Bay’s in your radius, hope you’ll come out. You can find some background on the movie, a troublesome gem, here, here, and here.

The De Young Poetry Series presents
An Evening of the New Talkies with ANDREW CHOATE, JEN HOFER, DOUGLAS KEARNEY and NICOLE McJAMERSON, RODNEY KOENEKE, & JAIME CORTEZ
de Young Museum, Koret Auditorium
Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco
7:00–8:30 p.m., $5 (no ticket for museum entry required)

In the past six years a new application of live poetic art has emerged in San Francisco and other cities. Neo-benshi is the art of re-narrating scenes to films with the sound muted. For this event, six poet-performers have written scripts to re-narrate scenes from well-known films. Without their original audio tracks, the images from the films are freed to reveal hidden meanings, which these writers draw to the surface or forge anew. Poets appearing tonight include Andrew Choate, Jen Hofer, Douglas Kearney & Nicole McJamerson, Rodney Koeneke, and Jaime Cortez. Local filmmaker, curator, and writer Konrad Steiner introduces the program.

"Dark Brandon" on YouTube

If you haven’t spent time inside the structured intensities of Brandon Downing’s incomparable film collages, do yourself a favor this Fourth and see how much America has to be thankful for. Start with “The Ship (I)” and cruise into the sun from there.

Chiriakhana (The Zoo)

The received wisdom about Satyajit Ray’s eccentric 1967 detective pic, Chiriakhana, is that he never intended to make it. He secured the project for the benefit of his long-time assistants; he had no say in selecting the story or in the casting; he didn’t relish working again with box-office superstar Uttam Kumar, who’d contributed little to the creative process while filming Nayak the year before. Once shooting started though, the producers insisted on Ray’s involvement, and out of loyalty to his crew he agreed.

But this story doesn’t entirely square with how Ray-like the film turned out to be. Uttam Kumar plays Byomkesh Bakshi, a bespectacled, scholarly detective who spends his unemployed days drinking tea with his Watson, Ajit Chakravorty, in a shabby Kolkata office. An armchair philosopher and polymath who can discourse on everything from herpetology to Shakespearean drama—not unlike Ray himself, and the urban Bengali professional classes he so often dissects in his films—Bakshi lives surrounded by the paraphernalia of scientific rationalism: an anatomy skeleton, a pet snake, a deck of cards for practicing sleight-of-hand, a corkboard stuck with random bits of English and Bengali that promise to add up to some kind of sense just beyond the viewer’s reach. In the opening dialog, Chakravorty—an author who, exactly like the genre writer Lalmohan Ganguly in Ray’s 1978 Joi Baba Felunath, hangs out with Bakshi in the hopes of collecting material for a story that presumably culminates in the film we’re watching—complains that if business doesn’t pick up soon, he’ll be reduced to making his fortune writing “romance novels.”

This opening contrast between romance and rationalism, which evokes the familiar divide between Bollywood convention and the more naturalistic “parallel cinema” favored by Ray, sparks a short but significant discussion within the film on the art of narrative. Bakshi, citing Shakespeare as his example, points out that there’s no play without a murder, just as there’s no romance novel without illicit love. Both these essential generic features clash with society’s everyday strictures, where murder and “illicit” passion entail serious reprisals. “Illegal affairs,” he tells Ajit, “may be illegal in society, but it is very necessary in literature.”

Having put the rules of the genre we’re watching into conflict with the laws of society, Ray goes on to tease out the implications of convention, in stories and society alike. The film’s opening shot tracks from a remote documentary capture of Kolkata street life to the four-walled, artfully chosen clutter of Bakshi’s office. Likewise, the plot takes us from Bakshi’s heterogeneous interior world to a groomed, tightly controlled reform colony run for the benefit of social outcasts and criminals. The mystery centers on a retired judge who decides to atone for the innocents he may have mistakenly sent to prison by recruiting the morally suspect to work in his rose business. (Allusions to roses and thorns are an ongoing source of play in the film.) Bakshi’s hired to investigate the disappearance of one of the colony’s members, a woman who once starred in a Bengali film, “The Poison Tree,” featuring a song “sung by the actress herself” called (generically enough) “What Do You Know of Love?” The song was a popular hit, but the woman disappeared soon after, having been accused of murdering one of the film’s producers, who was also her lover.

Bakshi visits the rose colony disguised as a Japanese businessman, and discovers his client’s carefully curated “zoo” of criminal types to be as artificial as the elements of any romantic plot. Far from cultivating his miscreants into model citizens, Bakshi’s client has unknowingly created an artful façade for deceit, violence, and—when our ex-judge is killed while delivering an urgent message to Bakshi over the phone—the generically required murder.

The rest of the film pivots on a deaf-mute witness to the crime, who himself gets murdered, but not before writing down the information Bakshi needs to find the culprit on a slip of paper. The clue in the note involves a pun in Bengali that doesn’t translate to English, and the deaf-mute witness idea, while conceptually interesting for a film, doesn’t add much to the themes Ray’s put into motion. Ray later dismissed the film as

“a whodunit, and whodunits just don’t make good films. I prefer the thriller form where you more or less know the villain from the beginning. The whodunit always has this ritual concluding scene where the detective goes into a rigmarole of how everything happened, and how he found the clues which led him to the criminal. It's a form that doesn’t interest me very much.”

Maybe because of his antipathy to the material, Ray manages to turn Chiriakhana into a sly meditation on form, generic artifice, and the social realities to which they’re accountable. Bakshi’s detachment from the crime he’s out to solve mirrors Ray’s disinterest in the “whodunit” form whose conventions he dutifully fulfills while at the same time pointing to why it is they fail—the thorns, it turns out, are more compelling than the roses, and reality keeps exceeding the moral and artistic conventions we devise to contain it.

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha)

Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is wondrous and dull in the way The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine is wondrous and dull. Both came out in 1968; both pit hapless, child-like musicians against evil expansionist regimes; both celebrate the power of music to knit people together across political and cultural divides.

Both are also essentially translations from one medium to another, and suffer a little in leaving their home genres. Where Yellow Submarine tries to plump up a few Beatles hits into a single story, Ray takes his grandfather’s original tale—itself a sort of redaction of various folk tales—and stretches it over 132 minutes of continuous, stuck-in-your-seat movie action. The result’s a sequence of loosely woven, cleverly realized episodes that don’t quite add up to a plot.

Threading through the movie is a persistent concern with the touchy relationship between artists and their audience, and the tissue of entitlement and expectation that connects them. Goopy and Bagha start the film as Beatles in reverse: awful musicians belittled and banished by their local rajas for their clumsy din. Playing together in a forest, they manage to gratify the upside-down aesthetics of the King of Ghosts, who grants them three wishes. Being working artists, they want first of all to eat; secondly, to travel; and only finally to impress people with their music. When night arrives, Bagha realizes they’ve forgotten to wish for a place to live. So they determine to win the singing contest in the Kingdom of Shundi, where every inhabitant but the king is struck dumb, making all the musicians imports. Goopy and Bagha sing; Goopy and Bagha win; Goopy and Bagha foil an attack from the king’s evil twin, urged to war by a sinister prime minister and his wizard; Goopy and Bagha marry the kings’ daughters and end at the credits as princes.

Ray made the film in the Rajasthani desert, and the movie revels in long, deep-focus shots that frame the actors against wide, flat, empty expanses.* The effect is to accentuate the fundamental loneliness of Bagha and Goopy, who trade the hierarchical bonds of village life for the vagaries of audience approval. At the beginning of the movie, Goopy shakes his new tampura at a ploughman and shouts: “Ploughing for you, singing for me!” Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is in one sense an extended meditation on what this assertion might mean. Goopy and Bagha live exclusively by and for their art, free from the pressures of workaday labor. But they’re also subject to whimsical rajas, in steady competition with other singers, unmoored from family and home. (Bagha tells Goopy at one point that he has no family, he’s completely alone in the world.) The musicians’ own alliance is practical rather than feelingful; the mercenary, tobacco-smoking, id-driven Bagha sticks with Goopy’s Gilligan mostly because they can’t get their wishes unless they slap hands with each other.

Against Bagha and Goopy’s magical sounds are a number of silent or “nonstandard Bengali-speaking” characters: the subjects of Shundi, made dumb by a plague; the evil wizard, who speaks a made-up language of his own; the King of Ghosts, who talks in speedy Martian rhyme; his ghost dancers, who pantomime a sort of allegory of India's history; the soldiers who freeze, unspeaking, whenever Goopy and Bagha play. In their key competition number, Goopy himself apologizes for singing in a foreign language (Bengali is apparently non-native to the imaginary Shundi). A magic powder at the end of the movie restores the power of proper speech—and song—to everyone in the kingdom. With Goopy and Bagha married off into the royal family, all wishes fulfilled, this democratic spell could be read as a passing of the creative baton from the "enchanted" artist to society as a whole: the folk song given back, at last, to the folk.

*Just the opposite of the cramped interior spaces of Mahanagar.

Mahanagar (The Big City)

Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963) opens with a closeup of a streetcar’s electric arm sliding along its cable, and the story moves forward with the same mechanical inevitability. Subrata & Arati Mazumdar are a young couple trying to support an extended family on the mean streets of Kolkata. When Arati decides to take an office job to make ends meet, her transformation from standard-issue village hausfrau to confident, lipsticked urban woman is easy to foresee. Ray made no secret of his debt to Vittorio De Sica, and the movie shows Ray at his Bicycle Thiefiest, crafting a neorealist class weeper with economy and skill.

Anil Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee are appealing leads, but the movement of their story didn’t interest me as much as its geometry. There’s no recurring “Charu’s theme” or dream sequences to let us inside these characters, and except for one or two bravura shots—Subrata smoking in bed behind gauze, Arati tracked with a handheld down a busy Kolkata street—the cinematography takes a back seat to the “face music” Ray relies on to carry the story. (Ray claimed the cramped set he created for the Mazumdar’s apartment limited his ability to do long shots.)

Flanking the couple on either side are two conflicting pairs, who define the edges of possibility in the big city. One is Subrata’s parents, who exercise their traditional privilege of living with their son, but protest Arati’s working outside the home to help support them. Subrata’s father is a retired schoolteacher who’s watched his students prosper in post-Independence India while his own son can’t afford to buy him a new pair of glasses to read with. Stubbornness and caste pride won’t let him tolerate a daughter-in-law working for wages, so he begins looking up his former students on the sly, scrounging for rupees and health care by pretending to lament Subrata’s neglect.

Ray takes a stab at rounding out the picture of the elderly father, who’s pretty much a stand-in for the dead hand of tradition, especially as it’s transmitted through schoolrooms and books. Ray stresses the old man’s frailty, and takes time to show us he’s short on other options. He may also have a point about the debt his students owe him, and all of them—even the grumbler who remembers how quick with the cane he’d been—pony up. But as a long-term solution to the Mazumdar’s dilemma, it’s clear that his isn’t, as they say here in Portland, very sustainable.

On Arati’s side, there’s an opposite pair beckoning the family to modernity. Edith is a smart young Anglo-Indian woman who’s hired at the same office where Arati begins to work. Their boss, Himangshu Mukherjee, is the genial pipe-puffing head of a knitting machine concern. Mukherjee and Edith both represent the thrill (and threat) of mixing that urban life extends. Mukherjee offers his all-female staff rides home in his car, gives lifts to the city poor despite his wife’s worries about their germs, sends his sales team door-to-door in the wealthiest sections of the city, where strange men often answer the bell, and relies on his best women employees to act as his managers. Over the four months of the story, he becomes a sort of “third way” between Arati’s traditional father-in-law and her underemployed husband. He’s “Himangshu,” not “Mr. Mukherjee”; his pipe contrasts with Subrata’s cheap bidis; and his office, with its expansive view of the city, is the aspirational counterpoint to the Mazumdar’s tiny home.

Edith is a more radical product of urban mixing, and lives her life almost entirely in the in-between: half-English, half-Indian; engaged, but not married; speaking English but understanding Bengali. Edith initiates Arati into the mysteries of lipstick and sunglasses, and quickly negotiates a higher commission for the sales team. It’s Edith who also unwittingly exposes the limits of Mukherjee’s broad urban tolerance. When Arati discovers that he’s fired Edith because she’s Anglo-Indian—a reminder of “our ex-rulers” and a threat to the native Bengali talent—she demands that Mukherjee apologize. Earlier, Mukherjee had promoted Arati over Edith because of her softer, more traditional manners; now that same code (the movie implies that Mukherjee insulted Edith’s sexual behavior) gives Arati the courage to resign on the spot.*

At the bottom of the stairs, Arati meets Subrata, who was on his way to see Mukherjee about a new job. Subrata supports Arati's decision, and in an instant the whole movie flips. The future doesn't belong to the Ediths and Mukherjees, who move so effortlessly through the urban milieu, but to couples like the Mazumdars, riding the tension between traditional Indian values and the freedoms of the big city.

*Both Edith and Mukherjee are hard to read, for Arati and for us.The movie holds out the possibility that Mukherjee may be right, or at least half-right, about Edith. Her fiancee never materializes, and when she's home sick from work, Arati finds her dressed and listening to records. Mukherjee claims he would have given everyone a higher commission anyway after a trial period, without Edith's demands in the first week. Edith's presented as a little self-centered and spoiled; it's a fair guess that Mukherjee's right in pointing out she wouldn't have stood up for Arati in the same way.

Likewise, we don't know if Mukherjee really does give rides to the poor as he claims to. His merit-based promotions, while not exactly a sham, are complicated by his prejudice against Anglo-Indians, his preference for Bengalis, and his soft spot for applicants like Subrata who happen to come from his region. At the same time, he has a point when he tells Arati that she's overstepped her bounds as an employee (if not as a woman of principle and compassion). What both Edith and Mukherjee are meant to show, I think, is that this looser urban life has limits and mores of its own: the restrictions aren't all on the side of tradition.

Rabindranath Tagore

If you were going to produce a documentary on Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray would seem like the perfect director. He knew the poet as a student at Shantiniketan, the experimental open-air college to which Tagore devoted his later years. His father and grandfather were intimates of the Tagore circle, through their work as artists and printers and as members of the progressive Brahmo Samaj movement, which was led by Tagore’s father, Debendranath. The Rays and the Tagores occupied the same artsy, cosmopolitan, business-saavy strata of Kolkata high society for whom Shakespeare and Dickens were as Indian as the Upanishads.

So it’s surprising to see Ray turn out such a workmanlike newsreel of Tagore’s career. That any Bengali director could dispense with the reverence in 1961, just twenty years after the Nobel Prize-winner’s death, is hard to imagine. But it’s especially hobbling for Ray, whose movies rely on detachment and a wry critical remove for their emotional effects. Ray mixes historical footage with newly shot scenes in a skillful way, and he moves through an eventful 80 years in a swift 54 minutes. But Tagore never comes to life, except as a stately emblem of Bengal’s history over those tumultuous decades. Pace (sort of) Drew Gardner, good emblems make bad bios.

The film was a centenary commission from the Indian Government, and Ray didn’t make large claims for it. He cautiously offered that “ten or twelve minutes of it are among the most moving and powerful things that I have produced,” and it’s fun to guess which twelve he had in mind. My money’s on the shots with the young Tagore, the last of fourteen talented children, moving down the portico of his family home while his siblings practice their various arts in different rooms. The actor resembles the wide-eyed Subir Banerjee from Pather Panchali, and the clash of musics and genres—tabla through one doorway, Shakespeare recitations from the other—could be an image, even the emblem, of Ray’s eclectic aesthetic as well.

Kapurush (The Coward)

Satyajit Ray’s noirish Kapurush (1965) concerns a screenwriter who discovers his former love married to a boorish planter on a remote Bengali tea estate. The moralizing title refers to his cowardice in refusing to marry her years ago, before his success. But Ray implies that his facility with conventional narrative—“boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl,” as he explains to his host—is part of his failing as well. That Kapurush could be the double of the story its protagonist is writing in the movie opens up the possibility that we're watching the film made from his script.

Soumitra Chatterjee’s tense, expressive Amitabha Roy is in a line with Ray’s artist anti-heroes Nawab Wajid Ali Shah and (especially) Uttam Kumar’s sell-out celebrity in Nayak. Like them, Roy begins the movie at a superior remove from the persons around him, but through the course of the plot a flaw’s exposed that puts him at the mercy of the “ordinary” characters, a favorite Ray device. By framing the love triangle within a story about a writer seeking “local color” for his script, Ray's able to explore his pet theme of the artist’s conflicted relationship to society.

The plot turns on Roy’s history with his old flame Karuna (Madhabi Mukherjee), which we get in fragments through a series of moody flashbacks. But it’s the connection between Roy and Karuna’s husband, Gupta, that seems closer to the film’s real interests. Gupta is a balding, pot-bellied, hard-drinking businessman, set up at first as toad to Roy’s prince. Isolated by caste and distance from regular company, Gupta badly needs someone to talk to, while Roy wants (or Gupta assumes he wants) ideas and regional touches for his next script. Gupta quickly offers himself up as a subject for Roy’s film, sharing his troubles and dreams partly out of boredom, partly from drink, but also with the understanding that his life might end up in a movie.

The privileged distance that the artist enjoys from his subject, even a subject as willing as Gupta, quickly begins to vanish. We learn that both studied Economics in college; make money at jobs they find unsatisfying; accept convention—from “boy meets girl” hack work to caste distinctions*—because it makes their lives easier; and feel themselves above the milieu they’re stuck in within the film.

Both are also connected through Karuna, who removes herself from them by a punctilious fulfillment of her role as a prosperous manager's wife. Where Roy and Gupta feel hobbled by the conventions that circumstances have forced them to accept, Karuna gains power by retreating into a type. Consequently, she’s the only character in the film whose inner life we don’t have access to. While this plays into a long tradition of figuring woman as the unknowable Other, it also highlights Ray’s concern with the power in detachment. Like Sharmila Tagore in Nayak, Karuna enjoys a role in the story not unlike that of the director behind the camera. While Roy writes other people's stories for the screen, it's Karuna who gets the final edit over his own.

If we imagine that Kapurush is the film Roy eventually writes, it would mean not so much that he's broken away from from the "boy meets girl" formula of his earlier scripts, but that he's learned how scripted and formulaic his own life has been. His youthful gripes against social norms that he never really found the courage to defy end in the recognition of how much he shares with a vulgar businessman like Gupta, whose own story deserves more sympathy and nuance than Roy's stereotypes allow for. ("You can't know him in a day," chides Karuna, though 24 hours is all the film gives us.)

If Kapurush is Roy's film, it would also mean that the movie doesn’t end with the final scene, but spills off the screen to include our experience of watching it, extending the recursive loop (a film about a screenwriter writing a film) to include us: audience, society, stereotype, and unknowable other all in one.

*which, Gupta tells Roy, aren't Indian, but were left behind by the British.

Mahapurush (The Holy Man)

The protagonist of Satyajit Ray’s Mahapurush (1965) isn’t really a person but a class: the talksy, urban, skeptical, pseudo-intellectual, down-at-the-heels professionals of Kolkata’s middling strata. The paper-thin plot concerns a bogus guru and the comic band of armchair Einsteins who set out to expose him. But the story takes a back seat to the social milieu, which Ray depicts with a loving, lightly mocking eye.

The movie’s especially attentive to interiors, where sloping stacks of books, dusty lithographs, porcelain hula girls, cuckoo clocks, barometers, telescopes, and hanging laundry express the big dreams and small means of the persons who live inside them. Ray’s insurance agents and ledger keepers, chess enthusiasts and crackpot professors have their noses pressed against the glass of a wider world that’s not quite theirs to enter, assembling a secondhand modernity out of snatches of technical English, faulty reel-to-reel tape machines, loud synthetic shirts, and an eclectic worldview that rolls Jesus and Tulsidas, the Buddha and E=MC2, into one catch-all philosophy.

Ray comes up with a neat visual trick for depicting the guru’s teachings: time forward moves in a clockwise circle with one index finger, time past moves counterclockwise in the other. It sounds simple, but no one in the movie can do it till the end, except for Babuji, and Lesley and I are having a hard time with it here. Babuji claims to be over 2,000 years old, and wows his followers with stories of his days instructing Jesus, Einstein, Plato, and Siddhartha on the illusory nature of time present. His syncretic spirituality resembles the jumble in Ray’s apartments, and Babuji fits into these characters’ lives as naturally as cigarettes and telephones.

In one of the film’s best scenes, Babuji skeptic Nibaran (Somen Bose) and his relative Nani (Santosh Dutta) discuss the guru’s claims. They don’t do anything but talk—nobody in the film’s Kolkata does anything but talk—yet in a few short minutes Ray celebrates the humor, curiosity, optimism, and warmth of the type in Dutta’s Nani, busy infusing grass with music from a hand organ to “oxidize” the proteins so the rice yield improves. The farcical, throwaway plot lets Ray show his range (a quality his fan Wes Anderson could learn from) while sketching a wry portrait of Beatlemania-era India and its ironies.

Charulata

Thanks to lousy subtitles, I spent most of Charulata—Satyajit Ray’s favorite of his films—thinking that two points in the love triangle at its center were sister and brother, not brother-in-law. So instead of seeing Charu, the brilliant and lonely wife of a preoccupied newspaper editor, gradually fall in love with his carefree younger brother, I saw the coming of age of a writer against the backdrop of the 19th-century Bengal Renaissance.

One advantage of the mistake is that I shared exactly her husband’s sense of surprise and betrayal when he discovers Charu’s feelings for his brother. But it made me read Ray’s delicate portrayal of Charu’s dilemma as a story primarily about the labor of writing. Part of the movie’s genius is that it can sustain a reading like that; that the one interpretation folds so easily into the other.

The movie opens with a pair of hands (Charu’s) embroidering the English letter ‘B’ onto a handkerchief for her husband. Near the end, we see the same hands beginning to write a story in Bengali. Ray frames that change—from 'B' to Bengali—within two larger off-screen developments in the world of the film. The first is the dawning political consciousness of Bengalis like Charu’s husband, Bhupati, who protests British taxes to support a new war in Afghanistan (the film's set in 1879). Bhupati’s principled and single-minded efforts to waken Bengali resistance lead to his deepening involvement with Western politics; whether Gladstone beats ‘Dizzy’ back in London weighs more in his hopes for India’s future than what happens behind the shutters of his own house.

The second is the Bengal Renaissance, which, through the work of writers like Bankim (one of Charu’s literary idols in the film), aimed to modernize Bangla literature by departing from Sanskrit models and attending more closely to everyday life. Charulata is based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore, the most famous figure in the movement, and Ray, whose father and grandfather were friends of Tagore’s, studied at Tagore’s experimental school at Santiniketan. So Ray’s own scrupulous attention to the details of Charu’s life—her opera glasses and kaleidoscope, her feet hitting the ground as she swings in the garden, the particular way she plays cards with her sister-in-law on the bed—both argues for and enacts the values of the Bengal Renaissance. (One might even read Charulata as Ray’s case for film—his film—as the apotheosis of the movement.)*

The Bengal Renaissance appears inside the movie mostly in the form of a teasing debate between Bhupati’s younger brother, Amal, and Charu. Soumitra Chatterjee’s Amal is a charming, easygoing poetaster of no fixed politics whose tastes run to stock celebrations of transcendence, the beauties of nature, and the cosmic cycle of life. Charu has a sharp eye for Amal’s literary failings, but he’s also her point of entry to a wider world of literature to which her husband’s indifferent. In one of the film’s key scenes, Charu looks from a swing through her opera glasses first at a woman on a veranda with a baby, then at Amal writing. This is supposed to be the ‘recognition scene’ where Charu, who’s not able to have a child, first realizes her longing for Amal. But since I thought she was looking at her brother, I understood her to be choosing between two forms of labor, and deciding she’d rather make books than babies.

Labor is a central question throughout the movie. Early on, we hear Bhupati tell Amal that his problem isn’t with the British governing Bengal, but with their refusal to give Bengalis any significant work to do. This throws Charu’s own enforced leisure into a political light, so that when she begins writing—working—she’s a stand-in of sorts for Bengal itself casting off imperial rule. Likewise, Amal’s rearguard tastes in poetry twin with his unwillingness to marry or grab the chance to travel and become a barrister; the last we hear of him, he’s hanging out at dreamy poetry recitals with friends in Madras. One irony of Charu’s situation is that her husband can’t see how his wife’s aesthetics connect to his own progressive politics. Literature for him is a kind of embroidery, and while he worries about Bengal losing its culture to the modernizers, it's not till the end of the film that he learns how a new form of writing could advance his political claims for independence.

Charu gets a story published in a major paper, and the sequence where she reaches back into her memories, instead of turning to 'correct' literary models, to write it is one of the strongest in all of Ray's movies. Meanwhile, her husband's bankrupted by a manager who cheats him. (Ironically, Bhupati had put his own politics into practice by entrusting the man, who was listless and bored in his work, with more responsibility for the finances.) Determined to start a new paper, he takes Charu's suggestion that it cover politics and literature, in Bengali, Hindi, and English, with Charu herself as literary editor: a synthesis of all the disparate elements in India's evolving national consciousness.

Tagore's story is supposed to be much harder on Bhupati than Ray is, and the ending more tragic. In the film, Charu extends her hand in the famous final scene and invites Bhupati to "come in," an open-ended command that might stand, among other things, for Bengal's entry onto the world stage through the medium of Ray's film.

*Ray’s 1961 documentary of Tagore’s life, made three years before Charulata, is available in 5 Parts on YouTube.

Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God)

One of the most charming things about Joi Baba Felunath is that Satyajit Ray made it at all. Ray invented the master detective Feluda—a sort of Bengali, subcontinent-trotting Sherlock Holmes—for a children’s magazine story in 1965.* When Feluda’s fans started writing him to ask for a movie, Ray complied, first with Sonar Kella (1971), then Joi Baba Felunath (1978). (Sandip Ray continued the series after his father’s death; the latest Feluda picture, Kailashey Kelenkari, appeared last year.)

If you’re new to Feluda, like I was, Joi Baba Felunath takes some time to get into. The movie assumes you’re familiar with Feluda, his young Watson, Topshe, and Lalmohan Ganguly (pen name “Jayatu”), the bumbling detective novelist who accompanies the pair on their adventures. All three are famous inside the world of the film, which gets a lot of self-reflexive mileage out of the blur between fiction and reality. The plot’s a generic whodunnit involving a stolen Ganesh statuette, nabbed in the bustle of the Durga Puja in Kashi (Benares). (One of the film’s pleasures is watching Ray revisit scenes from the Benares portion of Aparajito, shot over twenty years before.)

But the movie isn’t so much about the story as it is about the nature of stories, especially the way they’re passed on. The film opens with an old man telling legends of the gods to a child. Later, Ganguly discovers that one of his stories has inspired the child—who plays at being “Captain Spark” with his grandfather as his trusty Watson, “Ruxit”—to invent a story of his own, which the mystery ultimately turns on.** Ganguly himself is sort of a triple fiction: an invention of Ray’s who invents fictions under an invented name, played by an actor bringing the fictional Ganguly to life. (According to Wikipedia, Santosh Dutta’s depiction of Ganguly “fed back” into Ray’s later Feluda stories, as he changed the character to fit Dutta’s performance.)

In probably the cleverest twist of the film, Feluda’s client (the same grandfather who plays Ruxit in his grandson’s stories) turns out to be a huge mystery fan, who measures the team at each turn against their literary antecedents, especially Holmes. There’s in fact a strong suggestion that the entire movie is really a story the grandfather’s put into motion to bring his favorite fictions to life, just as he plays his old songs over and over on an antique gramophone.

A friend of mine is writing a book on the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon as a benchmark of modernity. Holmes was the first fictional character to be taken as real, or at least as a collective fiction that readers agreed to treat as real, as the letters that poured in to “221 B Baker Street” attest.*** In Joi Baba Felunath, Ray explores this aspect of modern popular culture in an especially acute way. By setting the story during a religious holiday in Kashi, he’s able to suggest the Feludas and Holmeses of our rational, mystery-solving age as successors to the gods of myth and legend. In both cases, Ray seems to be saying that what’s most important about these tales isn’t how "true" they are, but how it is they’re transmitted and put to use; how they become mirrors that help us organize and improvise our own identities in an era where gurus and Ganeshes have made way for Miss Marples and Mr. Spocks (and where oral tradition cedes to film.)

The cross-cultural borrowing, as Ray openly and lovingly "Bangla-izes" Holmes, is part of the point, too: the Feluda phenomenon is a case study in how we make stories real, and really "ours." (I wonder if Lalmohan Ganguly, student and second-hand teller of Feluda's adventures—and Ray's most original addition to the Holmes/Watson dyad—is meant as a comic self-portrait: Ray's watermark on the story he's handing on.)

At the end of the movie, Feluda of course manages to restore the god to its rightful owner, who’s free again to pass it on to “Captain Spark,” and into futurity.

*The magazine, Sandesh, was started by Ray's grandfather, edited by his father, and revived by Ray in 1961. It's still running (though barely) today.
**To complicate matters, Ganguly also has a fictional arch-rival who writes fiction, parts of whose stories it turns out the boy’s borrowed from as well. Their literary rivalry's acted out through the parts of their tales the boy's chosen to lift from to invent his own.
***Art imitates art: here's an (untranslated) clip of a journalist seeking Feluda's "real" address in Kolkata.

Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players)

Satyajit Ray's scrupulous period piece, a deft study of two chess-crazed zamindars on the eve of British annexation, is as meaningful for what it leaves out as what it includes. Set in 1856, the film centers on the East India Company’s heavy-handed ousting of Wajid Ali Shah, Nawab of Oudh, a loyal client state of the British since the 18th century. Amjad Khan’s portrayal hews closely to the history: the Nawab was known for the quality of his poetry, the size of his harem, the depth of his passion for thumri singing and kathak dancing, and the strength of his (Muslim) piety.

Ray treats the players in Britain’s great game evenly and dispassionately. The Nawab is accomplished, intelligent, and conscious of his own unfitness for rule. His zamindars are lost in dreams of their ancestors' military glory, comfortably adjusted to their reduced place in Britain’s India. The British are brash but not totally craven: the Company’s man in Lucknow, Sir James Outram (Richard Attenborough), is troubled by the injustice of Britain’s claims to Oudh, while his adjutant and translator has swatches of the Nawab’s Urdu by heart. The overall mood of the film is resigned and bittersweet; it’s clear from the start that couplets won’t stop any bullets, and Ray wastes no time trying to convince us otherwise.

What intrigued me most about the movie was its case for the power of resignation. The Nawab’s finest political moment comes when he agrees against all justice to step down, realizing how bloody a revolt would be for his people. Likewise the chess players, whose friendship weathers marital storms, cuckoldry, bald cowardice, and finally the British Annexation, show nobility of a kind in accepting their fate with a “this too must pass” insouciance that throws their caste in a better light than the earlier sabre rattling and obsession with pedigrees. But Ray’s politics speak most loudly in what he chooses to leave out of the movie: that the grab for Oudh sparked the great Indian Mutiny, or Rebellion, of 1857—the most successful act of resistance to British rule until Gandhi. (It was the events of 1857 that provoked the British to end the East India Company and inaugurate the Raj.)

According to his website, Ray may have intended the film as a comment on Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency from 1975-1977, which I guess would mean putting the indolent but principled Wajid Ali Shah in contrast to the draconian, power-hungry Gandhi of those years. But I think Ray’s making a larger point about the nature of art and politics by questioning the efficacy of action—any action—in a world made up of transient shades of gray. What the chess players and the artist seem to share in the movie is a radical detachment from their immediate circumstances that allows them to see a bigger picture. The poet-king, even more so than the amateur enthusiasts of the movie’s title, doesn’t think in terms of this or that move so much as the game as a whole, where a skilled player often sees the end in the opening moves. Wajid Ali Shah quickly perceives the British are going to win—and, beyond that, that India (or at least his poetry) will survive their intrusion*—just as Ray, from his perch behind the camera, sees the birth of the Raj, or the Mutiny, or the State of Emergency, as moves in a game whose outcome shows itself most clearly to the artist, whose job it becomes to remember, condense and record with as much sympathy and dimension as possible.**

If the story has a hero, it's not a person but a poem: Wajid Ali Shah's own thumri, "Babul mora Naihar chhooto jaay" ("As we leave our beloved city of Lucknow/see what we have to go through ..."), for which the movie acts as commentary and gloss.

*Which it did; Wajid Ali's "Babul mora Chhooto jaay" was a hit in 1938's Street Singer and is still sung today.
**See, for instance, this exchange between Ray and a critic of his "effete and effeminate" portrayal of Wajid Ali Shah.

Nayak (The Hero)

Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar was known to his fans as Mahanayak—Great Hero—and Satyajit Ray’s 1966 primer on the psychology of stardom was written so closely to the details of Kumar’s career that it’s hard not to read the film as his autobiography. In the process of dissecting Kumar’s celebrity, Ray takes gentle swipes at both popular Indian cinema and the censorious, would-be cosmopolitan business class that’s quick to condemn it, believing “nothing good” comes out of India. The upshot is an intriguing catch-all of Ray’s reflections on the relationship between art and society held together mostly by the strength of Kumar’s magnetic performance.

The film’s central conceit is Kumar’s trip by train from Kolkata to Delhi to receive an award. His latest film is shaping up to be his first flop, and in putting off the decision to accept the honor he misses the chance to fly. The trip requires him to mix with his fellow Bengalis—a successful businessman traveling with his sick daughter; an ambitious ad exec and his pretty young wife, with her own dreams of starring in films; an ambiguous guru of the World Wide Will Workers (WWWW) organization; and a bespectacled young journalist (Sharmila Tagore) traveling to Delhi to peddle copies of her highbrow women’s literary quarterly.

The train trip becomes a deft enough metaphor for Kumar’s journey into his past on the brink of his first failure, but it also acts as an interesting structural constraint that must have inspired Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. Unable to sleep, worried about his waning market appeal, and troubled by an affair with a married actress that’s just hit the papers, Kumar strikes up a relationship with Tagore, who becomes his confessor and conscience during the course of an impromptu interview for her magazine. Tagore's indifference to his celebrity reminds Kumar of the artistic ideals he abandoned when he left theater for film, and as he opens up to her he begins to realize how shallow his subsequent life has been. Left-wing politics, his early drive to inject new realism into Indian film, and the chance to help old friends and colleagues have given way to boozy nights and casting-couch affairs fueled by an obsessive concern for his popularity with his “market.”

Ray’s script probes the split between popular cinema and “real” art, but his own efforts at psychological realism tend to flounder. Kumar’s dilemma is clear in the first fifteen minutes and never really deepens beyond cliché. That leaves the rest of the film without much to do but moodily elaborate his crisis: there’s a drunken stagger through the train played beautifully by Kumar, and a couple of Freudian dream sequences that tip a hand, but don’t really hold a candle to Raj Kapoor’s famous dream scene in Awaara. The film is also hampered by its claustrophobic “film about a film” structure, where a celebrity playing a celebrity comments on movies while inside a movie (though this also creates some of the film's finest moments: in one of Nayak's most powerful scenes, Kumar tutors Tagore on how to act normal as a crush of fans presses against the train window during a stop, sandwiching the couple between the mute crowd on one side of the glass and the unseen theater audience, us, on the other.)

But I think a larger problem in Nayak is Ray’s equation of “real” art with naturalism, and naturalism with psychological ‘inwardness.’ Where the Bollywood movies assign stock roles to their characters to get on with the business of zipping them horizontally through plot, Nayak slows down the rate of incident for the sake of the vertical, taking us down through the layers of Kumar’s subconscious to his hidden core (his love/hate relationship with Tagore, scribbling down his memories and dreams for her interview, resembles nothing so much as analysis.) Ironically, despite Kumar’s subtle performance, what we find once we’re down there is a tried-and-true Bollywood stereotype: the troubled, sensitive hero who drinks to escape a cruel world. Just like you end up sort of rooting for Kumar, despite his shortcomings, by the end of the movie I was cheering for Bollywood, with all its superficial movement, over Parallel Cinema’s naturalistic pretensions. It's a fun trip, but I was glad to step off the train.

Uttam Kumar died on set of a massive heart attack in 1980, at 54.

Frampton Comes Alive

Mini-reviews of four Hollis Frampton films screened at Cinema Project last week (thanks to David Abel for the recommendation):

NOCTILUCA (MAGELLAN'S TOYS) (1974) Meditations on the aperture (Galileo's Magellan's, the Lumieres'), with uncanny resolve into MasterCard logo.

OTHERWISE UNEXPLAINED FIRES (1976) If you're going to San Francisco, wear those sad trees that lean into the wind above the Sutro Baths, chrome clockwork horse in Musee Mechanique (still there), & birds from Brakhage's Colorado chicken ranch in your hair. (Come from the east, so movement is against the eye's home syntax.)

WINTER SOLSTICE (SOLARIUMAGELANI) (1974) Primordial fire porn.

MINDFALL PARTS I & VI (BIRTH OF MAGELLAN) (1980) Spanish handhelds taxonomize plant life outside the mission walls.

The Darjeeling Limited (Fin)

Faces and noses and color and music imploring relief from plot.

The Darjeeling Limited (2)

Whites moving between decorated vehicles.

The Darjeeling Limited

Oodles of mood.

Man O Manmohan

O.K., I liked Chhalia, Amar Akhbhar Anthony's one for the ages, but this weekend I saw Coolie and my world will never be the same. "Late Desai" is a period unto itself, like pre-crash Dylan or the English Auden. Cultish and divisive (they're love-or-hate kind of affairs), Manmohan Desai's last three or four movies before his suicide chart the way to a self-awareness that's too gargantuan to be reduced to irony; too gleefully shambolic to suffer plot, except as an unrelenting pullulation of subplots; and escapist to the point of breaking off from any physics known or heretofore imagined to become its own cosmology. The absurd hits a temperature where movie set melts back into ritual, cameras almost an afterthought, cinema colors that move with people sometimes inside.

"Soybeean!"

Kasey's got Jacques Tourneur's "Canyon Passage" so exactly right that it only remains for me to say that Tourneur's take on the Old West is so disdainful of the provincial groupthink, frontier thuggery, and sexual capitalism gussied up as "family values" that none of his leads can finally live in the world the film pretends to celebrate: Manifest Destiny as covert boho suburban flight.