The movie star as auteur

[From my Business Standard column]

Anyone who studies cinema – or reads film literature at a level beyond magazine gossip – must sooner or later stub his toes on the Auteur Theory. The debates around it are too many to properly discuss in this space, but here’s a condensation: in the 1950s, a group of French critics – who championed popular American cinema and drew attention to the high levels of artistry in many genre films – proposed that some directors brought a unified artistic vision to their movies, even while working within the constraints of the studio system or under the watchful eye of a money-minded producer. Thus, though filmmaking is a messy, collaborative process – with specialists in different fields working with and against each other – certain movies could be seen as bearing the stamp of a single distinct personality. Cinema, even commercial cinema, could be a deeply personal art form.

Though the theory initially helped reassess the worth of popular films, it has seeped into the tradition of academic criticism, with the result that it seems almost intimidating today. In movie-related discussions with friends, I sometimes try to imagine how it might be applied to popular Hindi cinema. For instance, can it be used to understand the themes of role-playing and subterfuge that ran through Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s large body of work? (Or the startling similarities between the protagonists of two of his most austere films, Satyakam and Alaap, which are on the face of it based on very different types of stories.) How about Vijay Anand’s interest in elegant long takes? Or the oeuvre of a full-blown mainstream director like Manmohan Desai, whose best work was built around rosy ideas about national integration? More importantly, does the theory help us to meaningfully assess the work of these directors and their creative development over a period of time? (As that famously self-positioned anti-auteurist Pauline Kael suggested in her snarky essay “Circles and Squares”, obsessively searching for motifs in a director’s body of work can sometimes amount to a parlour game, an exercise in self-indulgence that doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the quality of a particular film.)

In a commercial movie culture founded on the star system, actors can sometimes be the real auteurs – their personalities shaping not just a film but in some cases an entire filmic movement. A classic example is Amitabh Bachchan as Vijay, the outsider-vigilante of the 1970s. In Deewaar and Trishul (to name just two key films that are closely related), Bachchan played a Vijay constantly haunted by an injustice-ridden past. Both narratives are built on the theme of a son trying to erase his mother’s sufferings by rising in the world, even literally (to the extent that he can sign deed papers for new skyscrapers, the sort of constructions she might have once worked on as a labourer). Both were directed by Yash Chopra, but few people I know would think of Chopra as their chief creative force. Their mood – which also became the dominant mood of mainstream Hindi cinema in that decade – was created by the writing of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar in conjunction with the many tangible and intangible aspects of Bachchan’s personality; the two things came together in a way that became a fine expression for the societal and political frustrations of the time, proving cathartic for lakhs of viewers. ***


Equally, there are cases where a forceful star personality can work against a writer’s vision. Take Salim Khan’s son Salman as the policeman Chulbul Pandey in the hugely popular Dabangg last year. Dabangg is a startlingly dual-natured film: Chulbul is a super-hero out of a cartoon and his action scenes are like parodies of the dhishoom-dhishoom cinema of an earlier time, revamped for an age of computer effects (scenes like the one where he casually shoots a fellow cop in the shoulder are played for laughs, but I cringed, because my mind hadn’t yet made the full switch to the Tom and Jerry viewing mode). But in its quieter scenes, and especially the moments where Salman isn’t winking at the camera, it comes across as a grounded, character-driven movie – the sort that might have been categorised as “Middle Cinema” in the 1970s - with a real understanding of its milieu and people.

I wasn’t at all surprised to learn (from sources who must remain unnamed) that writer Abhinav Kashyap’s screenplay was originally darker and more consistently understated: it involved the policeman committing an underhanded murder to get the hand of the girl he loves, and having to face the repercussions. A residue of that vision has survived in the final work, as in the scene where Chulbul quietly tells Rabbo that he hopes, for her sake, that her wastrel father dies soon. But when Khan and his brother Arbaaz – who co-produced the film – became involved with the project, Chulbul became the latest in a line of indestructible, wisecracking heroes played by Salman in recent years, and this altered the very texture of the character and the movie. It’s the sort of back-story that helps explain why unified visions – and evenness of tone – are sometimes hard to find in our mainstream films.

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*** Susmita Dasgupta’s book Amitabh: The Making of a Superstar has some interesting thoughts on Bachchan as the “author” of his roles, and on the complex ways in which the star system functions. Also see this post by Vinay Lal – author of the Harper Collins Deewaar book – on “the dialectic of the footpath and the skyscraper” in that film.

[Notes on auteurism and on the star system are scattered throughout the archives of this blog, but here are some related posts: Izz all well; two David Fincher films; story and storytelling]