PoV 7: the cutter's edge

In today's film column, a few thoughts about the relationship between editing and performance, via Raavan, Dr Strangelove and Jaane bhi do Yaaro.

[Earlier Persistence of Vision entries here]

DVD report: The Godfather Restoration and other goodies

A quick listing of some of the discs I’ve got my hands on in the last month or so; I’ll be doing posts on a few of these films in the near future (or writing about them as part of a larger column).

- My love affair with Criterion Collection DVDs (illegally procured from Palika Bazaar, of course) continues. They have a surprisingly large number of Japanese films from the 1950s and 1960s, and the additions to my collection include Nobuo Nakagawa’s gory Jigoku (good in places though I was ultimately a bit disappointed), Ozu’s Good Morning, Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (a wonderful companion piece to Ichikawa’s fine anti-war film Fires on the Plain, which I also have), and best of all a sharp, carefully restored print of Masaki Kobayashi’s Hara-Kiri, which I’ll write about soon. Also a real cult classic – Seijun Suzuki’s 1967 film Branded to Kill (watch it and you’ll know why it was such an inspiration to Quentin Tarantino, among other directors).

- Again on Criterion, Ingmar Bergman’s faith trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence. I had the first and the third on badly scratched DVDs already (The Silence is a personal favourite) but these are better prints and they include fine video essays by Peter Cowie. I love the menu designs on all three films: lovely, sensual close-ups of great Bergman actors like Gunnar Björnstrand, Harriet Andersson and Max von Sydow. And while on faith, I also picked up a really good transfer of Dreyer’s Ordet.

- A disc of Hitchcock’s Notorious with two audio-commentary tracks, including a fascinatingly detailed one by film scholar Marian Keane, who examines many of the film’s key scenes on an almost shot-by-shot basis. This meticulous visual reading of one of my all-time favourite movies was a real treat.

- I was gifted the box-set of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration (all three films plus two discs of supplemental materials) but in hindsight I would happily have paid for it, even at the inflated prices demanded by the legit-market mafia. The first two movies look sumptuous, much better than on the video-cassettes I used to own; the restorers have achieved a very high-definition print without mucking about with the lushness of Gordon Willis’ cinematography. Had a marvelous time watching the three films back to back over a recent weekend and developed a deeper appreciation of the magnificently, deliberately melodramatic finale of Part III, culminating in Michael Corleone’s silent scream on the steps. (The last 20 minutes of that film is pure opera, and even while I’m conscious of Francis Ford Coppola’s straining for an end that is Profound and Shakespearean and full of Tragic Grandeur, I still can’t help admiring it.)

The main-menu page of each disc sets the mood, using quietly ominous scenes from the movies. (The scene on Part II menu is the chilling long-shot of Michael watching from behind the glass windows of his lakeside house as his brother Fredo goes on the last fishing trip of his life.) The director's commentary by Coppola manages somehow to be understated and florid at the same time, much like some of the most famous sequences in these films. The level of his identification with Michael is a bit scary though, especially when he points out that his daughter Sofia Coppola (who was lambasted for her performance as Mary Corleone in the third film) was the recipient of much of the negative criticism that was really intended for him, in much the same way that Mary takes the bullet meant for Michael!

The viewing also whetted my appetite for some Godfather-related literature, notably Pauline Kael’s famous review of Part II (not available online, as far as I can tell), and this piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the few major movie critics who wasn’t a big fan of the first two movies. Do also read this excellent essay, in which Rosenbaum praises Al Pacino’s performance in the third film as an example of “a termite performance in a white-elephant part” (the reference is to Manny Farber’s famous distinction between white-elephant art and termite art).

Inception: I worry about the kids

I hesitate to add my little voice to the worldwide clamour that Christopher Nolan's Inception has generated (with all the hype, I didn't even want to see the film until at least two years had elapsed), but here's a stray thought about the ending. (Spoiler alert etc)

With reference to the teasing final shot, if we assume that the spinning top eventually falls over (and I propose it does), that apparently makes for a nice, heartwarming finish, with Dom Cobb cleared of murder charges and reunited with his kids. But is it really so sweet and fulfilling? Are we supposed to overlook the little fact that this fond daddy has spent the movie's climactic scene having an intense, expository conversation with a long-dead woman who exists nowhere other than in his warped mind? (The main reason she no longer exists? He drove her to her death - in the real world - by planting a bad idea in her head, after spending 50 dream-years with her in a manufactured dream-world.) Dementia is a laughably weak word for this condition, and I wonder what those two children will grow up to be under his loving, droopy-eyed care.

In most other respects, of course, the film is moderately good.

Fathers, sons, flight and flightiness: thoughts on Udaan

“He’s my son,” Bhairav Singh tells his factory workers as he introduces 17-year-old Rohan to them, “but that’s only at home. Not here. If he makes a mistake, don’t go easy on him.” This is a remark laden with irony, for Rohan is much more likely to get a curt word of appreciation – or a half-smile – from his father at the workplace than at home. Calling their relationship awkward would be an understatement; in fact, they barely even knew each other until Rohan was sent home to Jamshedpur from his boarding school in Shimla. He wants to be a writer, but Bhairav – a grim-faced disciplinarian given to bouts of violent rage – wants him to study engineering and work in his steel factory. “Yeh udhne ke sapne bandh karo aur pair zameen par utaaro,” (“Keep your feet on the ground and stop dreaming of flying away”) he snaps.

Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan begins with another scene that connotes flight and escape in a slightly different context: four friends sneak out of their hostel late in the evening and visit a shady cinema hall to watch bikini babes in the edifyingly titled film “Kanti Shah ke Angoor”. In this early sequence, the camera treats the four boys as equals – if you don’t know anything about Udaan beforehand, you won’t identify any one of them as its protagonist. But by the time they are caught and expelled from school, Rohan is the clear focal point. From the reactions of his principal and his friends we can tell there’s something special about his situation, and soon enough we learn that he hasn’t seen his father in eight years. Once back home, he discovers he has a six-year-old half-brother named Arjun, intelligent and alert but clearly cowed down. Meanwhile, Bhairav’s idea of being a dad is to impersonally show Rohan the “sights” of Jamshedpur (mainly statues of the overachieving entrepreneurs of the Tata dynasty - inspirational figures from the only world Bhairav really knows) during a regimented daily jog, and to punch the dreams out of his head. "Mujhe aankh mat dikhao," he commands whenever Rohan looks at him with anything other than meek compliance.

“Small-town fathers are like that,” one of Rohan’s new friends says during a drinking session, “Family business – very good. Dream business – very bad.” No doubt this town, and countless others like it, are full of young men whose lives are being straitjacketed by their dads (who were similarly the victims of family expectations when they were young).

Udaan is a beautiful, economically made film full of brief but evocative shots such as the one where Rohan sits on a lawn, writing his poetry, while smoke billows out of factory chimneys in the distant background – a nice visualisation of the contrast between the life he wants to lead and the career that seems to be waiting for him. Most of the key sequences are tightly constructed, though I got a bit impatient with a couple of scenes in the second half that seemed self-consciously Cinema Verite (with extreme close-ups of characters talking in the pause-filled style that sometimes passes for “naturalism”). That’s a small quibble, though - it doesn’t weaken the film’s considerable emotional impact, which comes from the main characters being written and performed as multi-dimensional people.

From the first scene Rohan is established as a street-smart boy rather than as an innocent, naïve victim. He composes thoughtful poems and reads them with feeling, but he’s also good-humoured enough to tell a listening friend “Samajh nahin aaya, na?” with a gleam in his eye, and to leave it at that. He plays pranks, watches sleazy films, gets drunk and takes his father’s car out late at night. He’s even capable of hitting Bhairav back when things go too far. In portraying him, the film doesn’t trade in clichés about over-sensitive “writer types” who spend all their time moping around dreamily, and young Rajat Barmecha's performance in the role couldn't be any better (incidentally, with his full lips and smooth features, Barmecha looks like a dead ringer for the actor Imran Khan from certain angles).

Bhairav (played by Ronit Roy - an intriguing bit of casting because of the association with stern patriarchs in regressive TV soaps) is somewhat closer to being a caricature – the monstrous, overbearing parent – but we get the impression that as a businessman at least he’s a genuinely disciplined person who holds himself to the same (or higher) standards as he expects from others. And there are suggestions that still waters run deep. In one scene during a family picnic, when Rohan’s kindhearted uncle encourages him to recite a poem, there’s a flicker of a moment where Bhairav looks at his son as if he’s seeing him with new eyes – but then he puts his mask on again and the moment passes.

Watching that scene and others like it, I had a scary thought: it’s easy to see Arjun, Rohan and Bhairav as stages in the life of a single person. Wholly unlikable as Bhairav is in his current state, he was probably a cute, sensitive kid like Arjun once – and possibly a rebellious adolescent like Rohan, until he had it beaten out of him. At one point he tells Rohan that if he had ever back-answered his own dad, his bones would have been pounded along with the steel in the family factory. We are never told what dreams he may have had as a youngster (and I’m glad about that – a forced attempt to humanise Bhairav by giving us his back-story would have diluted the film’s focus), but there's little doubting that much of his personal frustration and bitterness comes from his own childhood experiences.

At one, obvious level Udaan is a "follow your heart" tale about a young boy refusing to tread the path his authoritarian father has mapped out for him. But at another, deeper level it’s about having the freedom to be young, exuberant and irresponsible – and after that having the freedom to find your own path towards responsibility and maturity, rather than slip into pre-determined roles that won’t allow you to be either a fulfilled youngster or a fulfilled adult. In this context, Rohan’s final decision is particularly significant. It shows that while he’s ready to udo, to “take flight”, he isn’t going to be flighty; he’s prepared for the responsibilities that come with living his own life. The film takes its time arriving at this ending, but when it does it’s a thematically apt and satisfying one.

PoV 6: Memories of Master Mayur

On misremembering a scene from Yaadon ki Baaraat, and the tragic fate of the 1970s Bollywood child actor - here's my new Persistence of Vision column for Yahoo India.

(Earlier columns here)


Update: the full piece

The human mind is a worryingly unreliable thing. For years, I had the most vivid memory of an early scene from the 1973 film Yaadon ki Baaraat. Boy steals something from a shop, escapes pursuers, leaps off a bridge onto a train chugging below. When his feet hit the top of the coach, he is all grown up. Better yet, he is Dharmendra. In a Bollywood quiz conducted by Satan, with my soul at stake, I would have sworn that this was exactly what happened.

But it turns out my reptile brain was giving me the goli all this time. The other day I saw bits of the film again on TV and the scene was very different from what I'd remembered. The boy, having (naturally) been separated from his siblings, is leaning on the bridge, staring into the distance. The camera now begins a complicated movement: first it pans down to his legs and feet, and then, without cutting, it swivels through 360 degrees (in the process giving us a glimpse of a train moving slowly nearby). When it returns to its starting point, the shorts-clad legs have been replaced by dark blue trousers. The camera moves up to reveal the gloom-stricken mien of Dharam paaji.

And he doesn't even jump off the bridge! Not in this scene anyway.

Actually, as Bollywood representations of children morphing into adults go, this is quite a complex and artistic sequence - better crafted than all those standard-issue shots of a boy's running legs dissolving into the man's. One might even call it cinematically ambitious. After all, a dissolve or a cut is the accepted way of marking a shift in time; movies use these techniques all the time. For example, a little later in Yaadon ki Baaraat, a scene where another boy runs behind a train, losing the race as it enters a tunnel, segues into a shot of the grown-up version of the character riding his bike out of a similar tunnel (except that he now has Zeenat Aman driving a very stylish car - or is it a small plane? - behind him, honking impatiently as the spoilt rich girls of 1970s Hindi cinema are wont to do).

Now that's what I'd call a conventional time-shift scene (by Hindi-movie standards). But when 20 years rush by within the span of a single, unbroken shot, it really makes you sit up and take notice.

Watching the 360-degree shot on the bridge also made me wonder about the fate of the kid playing the young Dharmendra. Imagine being the focal point of the action at the beginning of a shot and being completely forgotten by the time the shot ends. One of the crew-members probably yanked him away as soon as his feet were out of the camera's line of vision, so that the real star could come and stand in the exact same place.

But then, such was the lot of child actors in those days - there was little or no appreciation for their very presence, much less their thespian skills. And being an avid watcher of those movies, I plead guilty: as a child I often fantasised about being Amitabh Bachchan but never, not once, did I fantasise about being Master Mayur.

You remember Master Mayur. For most Hindi film buffs he is frozen in time as the sad-faced, snot-nosed urchin with ridiculous sideburns, holding a piece of stolen bread in his hand and wishing desperately that he were all grown up already so he could brood like Amitabh, wear a leather jacket and sing in Kishore Kumar's voice. Mayur played the young Amitabh in a number of films, and the first requirement for such a role was to swallow all your self-esteem and to learn to move and speak like a member of the Keystone Kops, the slapstick-comedy policemen from Hollywood's earliest years.

During Amitabh's superstar phase, the first 10-15 minutes of many of his films played on fast-forward, as if the projectionist was screening at thirty-six frames a second instead of the customary twenty-four. This was because most of the stories were founded on an obligatory tragic childhood incident, which formed a necessary but low-investment "prologue". (Often the opening credits would appear only after this was over.) Watching these scenes today, one gets the impression that the child actors were asked to speed things up - to say the dialogue as fast as possible and walk hurriedly - so that the establishing sequences could be got out of the way and the superstar could come on. I can just picture directors prodding Master Mayur or Master Raju from off-camera: "Arre, lines jaldi bol, audience Amitabh ko dekhne aa rahi hai, tujhe nahin".

In one of my favourite 1970s films Muqaddar ka Sikandar, there's a scene where the intrepid orphan played by Mayur fights a thief (his own age) and recovers a woman's purse. Being grateful, kind-hearted and Nirupa Roy, the woman expresses a wish to be the mother he never had.

"Beta, ab se main tumhari maa hoon," she says quickly.

"Sach, ma? Tum bahut achi ho, ma," says Master Mayur, speaking his lines just as fast, glancing about nervously for the director's cattle prod.

Tears flow at double-speed, like the Rishikesh rapids in spate. Arm in arm, they scuttle away in the jerky Kops style. The whole sequence - including the fight scene and the establishment of a key, sentimental relationship - has taken up less than two minutes of screen time.

And shortly afterwards, Amitabh makes his first appearance on a motorbike, singing the film's title song. "Rote huay aate hain sab," he croons, "Hansta hua jo jaayega, Woh Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Jaaneman kehlaayega." Translation: "Child actors come wailing into the studios. But the adult stars who laugh heartily, they will be the kings of their own destiny." Or something like that.

****

However, I'm happy to report that the tale of the perpetually stricken Master Mayur had a short but pleasing sequel: more than a decade after Muqaddar ka Sikandar, he played the valiant Abhimanyu in B R Chopra's TV serial of the Mahabharat. If the show had been made 10 years earlier, Mayur would have been a shoo-in for the little Arjuna, telling his guru (in speeded-up sound) that he could see only the eye of the wooden bird. But as things turned out, he got to sport a moustache and be an (almost) adult hero in the Kurukshetra war's most intense battle sequence. Playing one of the most luminous cameo roles in all of ancient literature, Mayur had, much like his character, entered the inner circle at last. He went out in style, holding his own - at least briefly - against grown men.

Snippets: Sarpanch Sahib / Samit does Leo / Twitterature / Known Turf

For a few months now I’ve been doing a books column made up of short, 200-300 word items (mini-reviews, observations about publishing trends and so on) for the new Sunday Guardian paper. Haven’t put up most of that material here because I’m used to having long, indepth stuff on Jabberwock (and regular readers of this blog will know I’ve never been a fan of the 200-word “review”, to put it mildly!). But short pieces can serve their own purpose and in any case it’s impossible to write a long review for every book I read; if I did, the volume of my reading would automatically be halved. So I’ll occasionally collect some of those pieces and put them up as “compilation” posts. Here’s one.

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“The history of women in south Asian politics is beset with contradictions,” writes Manjima Bhattacharjya, editor of Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of India, pointing out that while the region has had strong female prime ministers and presidents, the participation of women in grassroots politics has still been meagre. The book, sponsored by The Hunger Project, is a collection of encounters with brave women who are trying to make a difference; writers and journalists like Manju Kapur and Sonia Faleiro traveled to remote villages to speak with these ladies about their career as panchayat members, and the result is a sometimes depressing but often inspiring insight into how social change slowly, painfully comes about in even the most backward areas and societies. [Full disclosure: my wife Abhilasha was one of the contributors.]

The book launch of Sarpanch Sahib was one of the most poignant events of its kind I’ve seen. All seven of the lady politicians had traveled to Delhi, and since most of them didn’t understand English, the panel discussion was (somewhat awkwardly) bilingual. It was another reminder of how removed the world of mainstream publishing is from the distant reaches of this country. Right now this well-intentioned book is available only in English, which is a pity; I hope it gets translated into languages that its subjects can understand, and I also hope there’s a market for a follow-up.

****

Imagine how much better James Cameron’s grandly mushy film Titanic would have been if the Leonardo Dicaprio character Jack had secretly turned out to be...a scaly, monstrous alien with extra limbs sticking out of his back in the “King of the World” scene at the ship’s prow.

I can think of a few writers who would have spun a whole book around this idea, but the prolific Samit Basu is content to make it a throwaway sub-plot in his hugely entertaining Young Adults title for Scholastic, Terror on the Titanic. Billed as the first of the “Morningstar Agency Adventures”, this is the story of a young, jungle-reared Anglo-Indian, Nathaniel Brown (Nathu for short – he also happens to be the son of the man whose story Rudyard Kipling leeched for The Jungle Book), hired to track down a stolen jewel making its way across the Atlantic on the famous ship. Basu brings his trademark wit and expansive imagination to this unusual historical fantasy, and even manages to get in a few philosophical observations about what “aliens” really are and how they get treated by “regular” folk.

****

My mixed feelings about Twitterature, a Penguin title “written” by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, begin with the packaging. The book has a minimalist cover: no image, just the familiar Penguin orange and white colours that one normally associates with their austere “Classics” series. This is something of an inside joke, no doubt, for the cover blurb says “The classics are so last century” and the back-jacket includes the following tweets. From Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “WTF is Polonius doing behind the curtain???” And from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “OH MY GOD I’M IN HELL.”

You get the idea - this is a collection of the world’s greatest literary works, retold Twitter style. From Alice in Wonderland (“At a tea-party with a crack-head hat man. He’s a schizoid”) to Frankenstein (“It’s alive! I’d better beat it over the head repeatedly with a fire extinguisher”) to Crime and Punishment (“Will try to keep the long, introspective monologues to a minimum”), you’ll find it all here. The question, as ever, is: do we really need to pay to read a collection of tweets, especially when equally funny material is readily available on the Net? When people routinely complain about blogs being turned into books, how do you justify this? Penguin should have started an official Twitter page for this idea, rather than publishing it.

****

One of the best “blogger” books of the last few months is Annie Zaidi’s Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales. I’ve known Zaidi for some time through her blog and have long admired her work as a journalist as well as the quality of her writing. Over the years, she has traveled to far-flung places across India, meeting and writing about people who have been victims of discrimination in one way or the other – people for whom constant hunger, injustice and helplessness is a way of life. Her best work has a humbling effect: it reminds me of how much I take for granted.

The most notable thing about her book is how adeptly it balances meaningful, informative reportage with personal experience – something that narrative non-fiction writing in India often struggles to do. (Tilt too far in one direction and you’re in danger of navel-gazing; go to the other extreme and you have a litany of facts and figures without any real sense of the human face behind it.) Zaidi writes about bandits in the Chambal, continuing casteism in the Punjab, and the impoverished weavers of Benares; about malnourished children, covert sex-selection methods, religious and communal identity; and she makes these subjects immediate and compelling. Known Turf is pleasingly free-flowing. Sure, there is an attempt at structure – it’s divided into sections that deal with specific subjects – but at the same time it makes place for the casual aside, the detour into personal anecdote...or even just a chapter-long reflection on the vital role that tea plays in the life of an itinerant reporter.

Of eggs and sperms and misunderstood worms

I’ve been reading quite a few popular science and narrative history books lately, with some rewarding results. A while ago I finished Matthew Cobb’s very engrossing The Egg & Sperm Race, about the 16th and 17th century European biologists who gradually unraveled the secrets of birth, including facts about sexual organs and reproduction that we today take for granted.

It isn’t easy to relive and then recreate the worlds inhabited by people who existed four hundred years ago, and I was amused by Cobb’s own approach to understanding his characters: he states that he tried to picture them by imagining which Hollywood actor would portray them best. (Cary Grant gets a prominent role, which automatically gave this book a gold star in my book, even before I had reached the Prologue.) But that lightweight remark aside, The Egg & Sperm Race really does make a dense subject interesting for the layperson, bringing alive such figures as Francesco Redi (whose careful experiments with putrefying matter showed that insects were bred from other, similar-looking insects – now there’s an idea!), Athanasius Kircher (an earnest but very credulous man who wrote carefully detailed books describing mythical beast and subterranean humans), Reinier de Graaf and Jan Swammerdam (who made pioneering contributions to the understanding of the human egg, though they also spent much time bickering with each other over who discovered what first). Their stories add up to a narrative comparable to that of a sharply plotted thriller. The passage where a Dutch draper named Antoni Leeuwenhoek uses his microscope to examine his own semen (less than “six beats of the pulse” after ejaculation), and discovers “a vast number of living animalcules...moving about with a snake-like motion of the tail”, reads like a mystery heading towards its resolution, even though the present-day reader knows beforehand what he’s going to see.

With the benefit of hindsight, some of the hypotheses made by these men, and some of their experiments, seem ludicrous. They were often badly mistaken on important matters, and in some cases the mistakes created scientific bottlenecks that took decades or even centuries to clear. But one shouldn’t underestimate their achievements: they worked in the face of enormous odds, including primitive technology, theological opposition, widespread superstition and misunderstanding. To put this in context, consider that even the most brilliant thinkers of the time genuinely believed that insects, and some small animals, came into being through “spontaneous generation”. There were proposed “recipes” for creating toads (they could be fashioned from the corpses of ducks placed on a dung heap!) and snakes (put a woman’s hair in a damp but sunny place). In an earlier age, even Leonardo da Vinci – a genius with a very scientific bent of mind, known for conducting dissections of cadavers – thought that semen originated in the male brain and traveled via the spinal cord, and that there was a vessel linking a woman’s nipples to her uterus (da Vinci's depiction of copulation is on the left: "I expose to men the origin of their first, and perhaps second, reason for existing," he wrote on the side of the drawing in his mirror script).

Reading The Egg & Sperm Race, it occurred to me that there’s often a big gap between the psychological acuity of the great fiction writers of yore and the relative underdevelopment of human knowledge in their era. Here’s an example. William Shakespeare is rightly considered one of the finest chroniclers of the human condition, a writer with extraordinary insight into the hearts and minds of men; his words still call out to us across the centuries, giving us a language to express complex thoughts in. Yet, from the perspective of scientific understanding, the world was a relatively backward place during Shakespeare’s lifetime, as many of the anecdotes in Cobb’s book make plain. When I think of the lines “Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots”, what now strikes me is that the playwright who wrote it had absolutely no idea where worms came from; if he ever gave the matter a thought, he probably believed – like everyone else in his time – that they simply grew out of mud-heaps!

But it’s equally true that great writers, by virtue of intuitive, unschooled wisdom, can sometimes provide cues for subsequent generations of thinkers. There’s a wonderful anecdote in The Egg & Sperm Race where a biologist derives inspiration from an episode in Homer’s Iliad – the passage where Achilles voices his fear that flies would breed worms in the wounds of the dead Patrocles. Homer’s lines, written over 2,500 years earlier, seemed to contradict the conventional wisdom that new flies simply “arose” from decaying matter, but the spark they lit in the scientist's mind indirectly hastened an important discovery. It’s an example of a brief meeting of minds between classical poetry and modern biology. Who would have thought it.

[Matthew Cobb's blog is here. Images of places/things mentioned in the book here]

When the rationalist played Satan: a silent-film study of witches

When you’re a big fan of silent films – including those in the horror and fantasy genres – you learn to expect the unexpected; so many little-known treasures are constantly being restored and made available to contemporary viewers. But Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film Häxan (also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, or simply The Witches) was a genuine surprise, one of the most enigmatic and unusual movies I’ve seen in a long time. It made me want to rush out and tell people to watch it, even if they aren’t particularly interested in silent films, or in the dark subject matter of this one.

Apart from the obvious research and care that went into its making (the set design in particular is excellent), what makes Häxan so distinctive is its constantly changing tone – it shifts from an educational, documentary-style presentation to a fictional (but realist) narrative to outright fantasy, and I think this may reflect the dynamic personality of its writer-director.

Christensen comes across as an auteur long before the term was coined. In the film’s inter-titles he refers to himself in the first person, in the style of an author writing a narrative non-fiction book – he even “acknowledges” his research sources and the contributions of his technicians. As storyteller-director, his perspective is that of the rationalist, deeply sympathetic towards the millions of unfortunate women who were persecuted by medieval witch-hunts. In the titles as well as in a brief 1941 video introduction (included on the Criterion DVD), he discusses the categories of "witches", offers explanations for why witch-hunts took place and links occasional cases of mental illness (which could result in a woman being branded a witch) to “the modern, treatable ailment of hysteria”. (That the “modern” in this case refers to psychiatric theories and treatments that held sway in 1922 adds another layer for a viewer watching this film in the year 2010, but that’s a different discussion.)

But at the same time, Christensen’s contribution to Häxan as an actor is a deliciously over-the-top performance as Satan. Unlike many later movie depictions (examples: Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster, Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick), there’s nothing smooth or mannered about this Devil. He’s pure satyr, repulsive to look at, bare-chested, pot-bellied and lumpy, impatiently knocking on boudoir doors and enticing young women into his hairy arms even as they lie next to their dozing husbands, or tempting nuns to desecrate statues of the infant Jesus. And he waggles his forked tongue better than Amitabh Bachchan playing Babban in RGV ki Aag.

Now you may well ask, what is old Beelzebub doing prancing about thus in a movie dedicated to the debunking of superstitions? The answer lies in the free-flowing structure of Häxan. Christensen maintains the analytical, inquiring tone throughout, but he also gives us sequences where we are made privy to people’s delusions or fantasies (such as when an old woman, under extreme torture, “recalls” her career in witchery, including riding on broomsticks through the night and participating in a devil’s feast), and the film usually – though not always – makes clear which scenes are meant to be objective reality and which ones are fevered dreams. Satan belongs to the fantasy sequences, and just before he makes his superb first appearance, leaping out at a fat monk who’s studying the Holy Book, there is a telling inter-title:

“Such were the Middle Ages, when witchcraft and the Devil’s work were sought everywhere. And that is why unusual things were believed to be true. So it happens with witchcraft as with the Devil; people’s belief in him was so strong that he became real.”

It’s almost as if Christensen is wryly saying that primitive beliefs in devilry were so compelling that they forced him to change the nature of his film, because the only way to present those beliefs was to dive headlong into fantasy. However, I suspect he also worked the Devil in because he wanted to have some fun playing him!

The first 10-15 minutes of Häxan are made up of stills, including wood-cut drawings taken from medieval books. The film initially seems less concerned with witchcraft than with primitive beliefs in general: the notion that the earth was the centre of the universe, with an outer layer made up of fire, and the Almighty and his angels seated beyond; the Egyptian view of the world’s topography, with stars hanging down by cords from a sky made of iron; and finally, medieval notions of Hell, with pictures and mechanised depictions of demons energetically stoking flames beneath cauldrons.

The narrative section – and the first shift in tone – begins with a scene set in the “underground home of a sorceress, 1488”, and then moves on to other little vignettes: a woman seeking a “love potion” with which to seduce a fat monk; the “reading” of a chunk of lead to determine if a patient is the victim of sorcery; wizened old women being branded witches because they were “ugly or deformed”; pretty young women being branded witches because they had an inappropriate effect on young monks; the use of varied torture techniques and instruments.

For all the potential sensationalism in this material (and there are many shocking or gruesome scenes) and despite the farcical portrayal of Satan, Häxan is ultimately a mature, dignified film. The prevailing tone is that of pity for the victims of medieval prejudice. One gets a very strong sense of how the powerful prey on the weak, often using religious authority as an excuse for the playing out of baser instincts - and of course it would be silly to believe that such exploitation doesn't take place in our own time. “Let’s not believe the Devil exists solely in the past,” says a title towards the end of the film, “Isn’t superstition still rampant among us?” (A clever dissolve connects a medieval “witch” handing out love potions with modern-day card-readers and crystal-ball readers selling prophecies to their customers.) At a time when many directors were using films either as overt propaganda or to confirm existing prejudices (as in D W Griffith’s landmark The Birth of a Nation, which cast the Ku Klux Klan as heroes), Häxan is an example of a movie that managed to be serious and enlightening even as it played about with the possibilities of film narrative.

DVD Extras

Apart from Christensen’s 1941 introduction, which I mentioned above, the Criterion DVD includes a shortened 1968 version of Häxan titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, set to a jazz score (!) and with narration by none other than William Burroughs, who tells us in his brilliantly deadpan, gravelly voice, that “belief in the Devil was so steadfast that many people declared they had seen and touched him in person, giving incredible descriptions of this horrid individual”. And that all the witches had to show their respect for Satan “by kissing his ass”. (The film’s original title has the more restrained “kissing his behind”.)

[A few earlier posts on silent films: The Passion of Joan of Arc (which, of course, covers similar ground to Häxan, though from a very different perspective), Nanook of the North, Tartuffe, Greed, Mizoguchi and the benshi, Robert Bloch and Lon Chaney]

Mockingbird revisited

Reading Sanjay Sipahimalani’s Yahoo! column about rereading, I thought about my second encounter with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I was under the impression that I remembered the book quite well from my first reading of it at age 13 or 14, but I was wrong. Adolescent memory had turned it into a sweet, simply written, somewhat romanticised slice-of-life about two children growing up in a small town in the 1930s and very briefly having to deal with the harshness of the world when their lawyer father defends a black man accused of rape. I remember thinking at the time that Atticus Finch was a somewhat boring, preachy character, with his repeated patter about the need to understand another person – by “getting into their shoes and walking around in them for a while” – rather than judge them. (Note: I didn’t disagree with this idea, I just thought it was much too obvious.)

What a difference a second visit to the town of Maycomb made. For starters, I realised that my first reading couldn’t have been all that careful. The opening page of the book touches on aspects of American history (North-and-South politics, the history of the Methodists and the liberals) that I wasn’t much interested in as a youngster, and such allusions run through the story. I had probably skimmed over all those bits and focused mainly on the adventures of little Scout Finch (the narrator), her brother Jem and their friend Dill. Also, while it’s true that the book reads like an intimate dedication in places (as if it were written by someone who didn’t so much want to launch a career as a professional author as share the experiences that shaped her perspective on life), Lee’s writing has more precision than I remembered. From Scout’s voice, you can tell that she is the precocious daughter of a man who has educated himself by reading variedly and wisely (one of Atticus’s neighbours snarkily says that all he does with his time is read).

But most of all, I see now that Atticus isn’t a sanctimonious old bore. His wisdom is hard-won - it’s implied that he has seen sad days himself, faced moral dilemmas and come out of them with his integrity intact - and he doesn’t force it down his children’s throats. Though he does make mini-speeches once in a while, he lets Scout and Jem figure out most of life’s sterner truths for themselves. He also has a sense of humour, an irreverence for sacred cows (within limits, of course, given the very conservative world he comes from), and in this sense he reminds me just a little of Calvin’s awesome dad in Calvin and Hobbes. With Atticus as its anchor, To Kill a Mockingbird is a mature story about the fears and uncertainties of an intelligent, broad-minded child (as well as the fears and uncertainties of parochial, narrow-minded adults). But you probably need to be a grown-up reader to best appreciate this.

What I did remember very vividly (and this is probably responsible for my illusion that I remembered the whole book well) were the last few pages, including the shiver-causing passage where little Scout realises that the unfamiliar countryman leaning timidly against the wall – the man who saved her life – is Boo Radley, the children’s favourite bogeyman. (The revelation of Boo as something very different from the malevolent phantom of Scout and Jem’s nightmares is a literalisation of Atticus’ line “Most people are real nice when you can finally see them.”) And the lovely passage where Scout escorts Boo back to his house and then turns around at the door, viewing her town from an angle she has never been privy to before; the angle that Boo himself must have so often assumed in the past, hiding behind his window curtains, gazing out fearfully at the world.

It’s the perfect summing up for the book: the familiar made unfamiliar, the challenge of looking at things from a perspective that you’ve never had to (or been willing to) consider. It’s a challenge that thinking people will always have to face – for every battle won against a particular form of prejudice, new battles and new contexts will always arise – and that’s probably why To Kill a Mockingbird is such a timeless book even though the specifics of its narrative (the black man judged and condemned by an entire prejudiced town) appear dated today.

PoV 5: the distorting mirror in Cabaret

Willkommen! Here's my latest "Persistence of Vision" column, this time on a favourite opening sequence - from Bob Fosse's Cabaret.

Update: the full piece (slightly extended)

When a film is based on a popular Broadway musical – full of loud and flamboyant production numbers – you expect it to begin with panache, or at least with a little light music. Instead, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret opens with white titles on a black background, in the bland style of a made-for-TV docudrama. As the seconds crawl by you might wonder if there’s a problem with the sound, but then you hear gentle murmurs and the image on the screen slowly, very slowly, resolves itself into a distorting mirror: we see reflections of people seated at tables, a waiter passing with a tray in his hand, a woman wearing a bright red dress. Finally there’s a roll of drumbeats, the words “Berlin 1931” appear on the screen, and a man’s face – rouged, heavily made up – fills the mirror.

Meet the Master of Ceremonies.


Cut to a scene from a few years ago: one of those Oscar discussions that are so pointless and silly but also so much fun. “I know you like defending Oscar’s choices,” a friend (quite inaccurately) tells me, “but what possible justification can there be for Al Pacino not winning best supporting actor for The Godfather? Bad enough that he wasn’t nominated as LEAD actor, but to snub him altogether...”

Actually I’m not into the business of “justifying” competitive-award decisions at all, but in this instance I was tempted to ask a counter-question: “Do you know who actually won the supporting-actor award that year?” I’m fairly sure he didn’t.

Back to the film. The emcee turns around, raises his eyebrows, beams in the exaggerated, ingratiating style one associates with a certain type of music-hall performance – it’s his show-business face. And then he starts to sing, in three languages at once.

“Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!
Fremder, Etranger, Stranger,
Glücklich zu sehen, Je suis enchanté, Happy to see you,
Bleibe, reste, stay.
Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!
Im Cabaret, Au Cabaret, To Cabaret!”

To return to the Oscar question, Joel Grey won the 1972 supporting actor award for this role, over that other “MC”, Pacino’s Michael Corleone. Pitting two very different types of great performances against each other and proclaiming one of them the “winner” makes no sense to me, but I’ll say this much: Grey’s Master of Ceremonies is the most fascinating character in Cabaret. He isn’t on screen for much time – the story proper is about a spirited American singer named Sally Bowles who works at the dance-hall, and her romance with a reticent British writer – but he anchors the film. He’s a I>sutradhar, and possibly a symbol as well.

A symbol of what, though? Cabaret isn’t an overtly political movie, but it’s set against the backdrop of the rise of the National Socialist Party. So could the MC be a Hitler stand-in, a despot who controls the decadent theatre of 1930s Germany? But how would that account for his telling his audience, “Leef your troubles outside! In here, life is beeyootiful”, as if to suggest that the music-hall is a refuge from nightmares raging in the real world? Then again, there’s the ambiguity of the song “If you could see her through my eyes”, which he performs with a girl wearing a gorilla costume. It moves between tenderness (the lyrics seem to be a plea for inclusiveness, for accepting people who are different) and possible sarcasm (the show-clinching words “...she wouldn’t look Jewish at all!” have a chilling effect, and the sight gag of the MC putting a wedding band on the gorilla’s nose evokes control and enslavement).

What is the person behind the grease-paint really like? We never know, because we only ever see him when he is on the stage, performing. He isn’t part of the film’s narrative, we don’t witness his personal development over the course of the story. (In this sense, could he be any more different from Michael Corleone, whose terrible, tragic degeneration we see over the course of three films and three decades?) Perhaps he lies comatose behind the curtains during non-working hours like a ventriloquist’s dummy, coming to gleeful life at the start of each new show? Perhaps he’s all surface, with nothing underneath – but if so, what a magnificent surface!

*****

Mesmerising as Grey is, there’s another reason I find Cabaret’s opening sequence so powerful: it shows how a familiar, oft-performed scene from a popular play can be transformed through the use of cinematic techniques. For starters, the use of sound. I’ve heard CDs of two theatrical versions of the musical, and in each case “Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome” sounds lusher, more orchestral than in the film. In the film it’s tinny and menacing – the overall effect is more intimate, and that fits perfectly with the way the scene is composed. After all, we are right up there with the MC, just a few inches from his face.

A theatre audience is at a more-or-less fixed distance from the action: the whole canvas would be spread out in front of our eyes at once, we would be free to look where we please. But the movie camera can create a very particular mood, starting with that extreme close-up of the distorting mirror, all the more unsettling because we initially don’t know what we’re looking at. The camera can draw back as the MC turns around to greet us, then draw further back to show him in full costume. It can cut to the nightclub audience and cut back to show us the MC again, now in long-shot, twirling his cane as he introduces the dancing girls. When he pointedly looks down into the cleavage of one of the girls (while singing the line “Happy to SEE you!”), we get a close-up of his faux-scandalised expression. At that moment, we aren’t allowed to see anything else.

Then there’s the cross-cutting. In the film, as the song’s lyrics welcome the audience to the show, we see glimpses of Brian Roberts, the story’s leading man, disembarking at the Berlin train station. The cuts make a direct visual connection between “arrival” in the cabaret and “arrival” in the country, neatly setting up the allegorical side of the story (also note the symmetry between the shot of Brian looking out of the train window and the one of the emcee peering at his audience a couple of seconds later); the stage version would have had to find another way to make this connection.

I’m not trying to chauvinistically exalt the merits of cinema over those of theatre: a skillfully produced play has its own strengths, as well as an immediacy that no movie can compete with. (It’s another matter that some lavish stage productions can be just as extravagant as big-budget movies – at London’s Palladium theatre I saw a performance of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where the prop car containing the main characters raced out of the stage area and, borne aloft by wires, whizzed about in mid-air right above our gaping heads!) But Cabaret’s opening sequence shows how a well-made film can use precise and interrelated imagery to sharpen a viewer’s focus, to aid our understanding of a character’s function both within and beyond the narrative.

Incidentally, that distorting mirror – a brilliant innovation – is used just as effectively in the film’s last shot, which gives us a hazy, now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t view of Swastikas on the uniforms of Nazi officers. By the story’s end they have infiltrated the nightclub, they are sitting quietly with the rest of the audience watching the show. It’s no longer possible to “leef your troubles outside”.

P.S. Here’s an old post with a reference to another venerated stage musical, Fiddler on the Roof, transformed through the use of cinematic techniques: such as the scene where the peasant Tevye feels the growing distance between him and his daughters as they make their own choices of husband.