This skinny blue dog is me: a caste metaphor in Pariyerum Perumal

[No intention of preparing year-end lists of books or films, but my final column for Mint Lounge just happens to be about one of the most stirring films I saw in 2018, Pariyerum Perumal]
----------------------

A young man lies across a railway track, wounded, unconscious, about to be run over by a train. As the soundtrack reprises a familiar song – with a chorus that mimics a dog’s howling – a skinny mongrel, bright blue, unreal, approaches. It licks the man’s face until he is awake, then slowly dissolves into the air.

This scene, from the Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal, written and directed by Mari Selvaraj, reminded me of Arthur C Clarke’s beautiful short story “Dog Star”, in which another dog-lover is saved by a triggered memory of a beloved animal. (Or is this a supernatural visitation? You can interpret it either way.) The protagonist of that tale was an astronaut working on a space station far from Earth, but the eponymous hero of Pariyerum Perumal is forced by circumstances not just to stay grounded but to think of himself as a lowly creature – a slithering snake, a crawling scorpion. Or a black dog.

Pariyan (played by Kathir) is a lower-caste boy who wants to study law and dreams of becoming another Ambedkar, but is persecuted at every turn: whether he is trying to understand classes held in English, or romancing a classmate. Throughout all this, he carries the memory of his beloved dog Karuppi, with whom he used to go hunting, but who was brutally killed – another way of putting the subaltern “in his place”.

I should admit to a minor annoyance I felt during the first few scenes of this film. With some of the most important “people” in my life having been of the canine ilk, I’m not pleased to see a dog used as a metaphor or MacGuffin in a story (even when the story is about something important like caste oppression), rather than depicted on its own terms as a sentient, sensitive creature. And Karuppi is very much a symbol. If the dog in Samuel Fuller’s 1982 White Dog stood for an incurable strain of racism (the film centres on a dog that has been conditioned to attack black people), Karuppi – glowing blue in her apparitional state – stands for the oppressed. She is a version of the hounded Pariyan, and both are in danger of meeting the same fate. (“In the wilderness without you, how will I find my way?" he sings “Your paw scrapes are my trail. You are not just a dog. Aren’t you ME?”)

And yet, there is something so honest and immediate about Pariyerum Perumal that my reservations fell away. In any case, Karuppi apart, this is a symbol-laden story. Which also raises a question: can a film that deals seriously with caste tyranny avoid being angry and allegorical?

In recent times, the question has been answered with a firm “No” by, among others, the work of Nagraj Manjule: Fandry, which has a languid tone for the most part but moves towards a distressing climax and a Fourth Wall-shattering final shot that turns the gaze on the audience; and Sairat, with its indelibly pessimistic last scene. In an earlier age, during the 1980s, there were sting-in-the-tail works like Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh and Ketan Mehta’s Bhavni Bhavai, which suggested that things might never meaningfully improve for society’s most downtrodden – or that if change has to come, it must be swift and anarchic; there is no room for incremental, compromised progress.

Pariyerum Perumal is in some ways gentler and more sanguine than those films. It combines many tones, shifting from angry protest music (accompanied by visuals that play like avant-garde music videos) to lilting romance (the weakest segments in my view) to droll comedy provided by Pariyan’s friend Anand. (If you’re a Hindi-film viewer unfamiliar with contemporary Tamil cinema, the affable Yogi Babu, who plays this part, looks like someone took Johnny Lever and inflated him with an air-pump like they used to do in Tom and Jerry cartoons.) There are disturbing sequences such as the one when Pariyan’s effeminate father visits the law college, and interludes featuring an old hitman who impassively murders people in the name of “honour” (and whose features and stoical expression reminded me a little of Narendra Modi). But equally, there is an unforced warmth running through the film, which manages somehow to percolate till the end.

It bears mentioning that Pa. Ranjith, who produced Pariyerum Perumal, helmed another of the year’s most vibrant films, Kaala, and filled it with hard-hitting observations about caste even as he was working with the superstar persona of Rajinikanth. At the end of that film, the protagonist dies, but also stays alive in a larger, more effective sense as a movement for equality continues in his name.

Without giving too much away, the ending of Pariyerum Perumal is composed and quiet compared to the showy, percussive triumphalism of Kaala’s last sequence – or the despair of Sairat or Fandry. The last scene here features a genial conversation between two people from opposite ends of the caste divide, romantic music, and another of those symbolic images: two near-empty glasses of tea with a delicate flower between them. And yet, given everything that has gone before, there is still some tension below this placid surface – you feel so much could still could go wrong, and other black dogs could turn blue.
----------------------

[Related pieces: Sairat and the importance of a good poem; Fandry; Bhavni Bhavai; Kaala]

“These poems are a travelogue — of short, everyday journeys within the larger city, but also through time”

[Did this interview with the poets Sampurna Chattarji and Karthika Naïr for Scroll – this is about their new collaborative book, Over and Under Ground in Paris & Mumbai. A little over a year ago, I moderated a session at the Times lit-fest featuring Chattarji, Naïr and the book's illustrators Roshni Vyam and Joëlle Jolivet. It was still a work in progress then, but below this is a photo from that session. The interview follows]
-----------------------------

(L to R: Roshni Vyam, Karthika Nair, Sampurna Chattarji, Joëlle Jolivet)

Introduction: Over and Under Ground in Paris & Mumbai is a feat of collaborative art on more than one level. It began life with the poets Karthika Naïr and Sampurna Chattarji deciding to do a series of poems – a dialogue in verse – set around the train systems in the cities they lived in (Paris and Mumbai respectively). As the writing took shape, the authors then added another, visual dimension through the artwork of the Gond artist Roshni Vyam and the French illustrator Joëlle Jolivet – further, they reversed the gaze by having Jolivet draw vignettes around the Mumbai Suburban Railway while Vyam illustrated the Paris metro.

The result is a gorgeous-looking publication that creates the sense of a wide-ranging conversation not just between the two writers but also between the two artists – who work in very different styles – and, eventually, between two mediums, text and drawing; you might find that this book requires more than a single reading to fully appreciate. There is lots of formal playfulness here, both in the conception of the poems (for instance, the last line of one writer’s poem is reprised in the first line of the other writer’s response, and vice versa – though the meaning and context of the words naturally changes) and in the ways that the drawings weave through the text.

It all adds up to poignant and humorous commentaries on many sorts of journeys and how they transform us, or are transformed by us: from the reassuring unpredictability of a daily commute to a disquietingly new encounter along a less familiar route; or from a trip that allows one to stay in the moment, casually observing other passengers, to one that becomes a channel for memories or reflections on life as it goes on elsewhere.

----------------

Tell us something about the origin of this project. How do two experienced authors, each with a history of writing something as personal and intimate as poetry in their own distinctive styles, collaborate on something like this?

Karthika Naïr: Yes, poetry has always been – and remains – personal and intimate. Even more so, I guess, since most of my other writing is intrinsically collaborative: I write librettos and dance scripts; stage productions are hinged on a constant back-and-forth with the rest of the creative team: the choreographer, the composer, the set and lighting designers...

The difference was that this time, the collaboration extended to poetry—which, until then, I'd zealously kept as "my" space, the only unshared turf. But we didn't change anything about our distinctive styles, approach or obsessions. This was much more a correspondence than an attempt to blend or homogenise our writing. We just drew up a specific matrix as our “playground”.

And it happened naturally: Sampurna and I met at the Kala Ghoda Festival in February 2016. She broached the idea of collaborating over poems. And, suddenly, the idea of a to-and-fro felt highly appealing: I had just emerged from five years of my book Until the Lions [a collection of poems about characters in the Mahabharata], which had been an imperious and all-consuming altar; Sampurna had had a similar solitary experience over her last book. Also, there was an ache to return to the quotidian, the messiness and magic of everyday life after so much of apocalyptic war and “epic” emotion. So, I, in turn, asked if Sampurna would like to work around the local train networks because I was keen on writing about the metro in Paris (I already had, in Bearings, and intended to disinter that). She liked that option, and once we had the theme, all we needed was the connective thread, which lay in the structure I'd suggested for the correspondence: that we'd reprise the other's last/first line to take the dialogue forward.

Sampurna Chattarji: For me, it was a huge act of trust. I am, by nature, quite paranoid and secretive and can hardly bear to let the world (or even close friends and family) know that I am writing anything at all! Until the book is “out” – at which point I confess to being guilty. At that point in time when I asked Karthika if she’d like to collaborate with me on a poetry project, I was actively looking for ways to step out of what sometimes felt like a crippling (self-imposed) solitude. I had done a couple of collaborative poetry projects before (with the Welsh poet, Eurig Salisbury, for example, with whom I co-authored the tri-lingual book Elsewhere Where Else / Lle Arall Ble Arall, which came out earlier this year) but those felt different because they were part of larger projects, involving literary organisations and cultural exchanges. This one was self-impelled and urgent: I needed to open my mind in a new way. I had reviewed Karthika’s Bearings long before I met her – albeit sporadically – at lit-fests, with no real time for conversation. My admiration and respect for her poetry made me ask her whether she might be interested in a collaborative project. When she agreed so readily and with such warmth (and excellent ideas) it was sheer joy.

Once you had committed to doing this, did either of you have any misgivings? Or any missteps during the process?

KN: No misgivings. I had many active twinges of conscience during a long bout when I overshot the deadline by at least three months (we had given ourselves a three-week-timeframe to respond to the other each time). But I suspect there were no misgivings because it grew into a book, and, gradually, into this specific book: we hadn't given ourselves anything other than the joy and focus of writing as an end, initially. As for missteps, I reckon that would be for the editors, reviewers and readers to say. The book’s eventual title still feels new, but that's because even before we started, the very adventure had been inscribed as Metro Lands in my subconscious, without any thought of semantics. So it's more a case of mental allusions.

SC: Not one misgiving about the writing project (which doesn’t mean that there weren’t many moments of self-doubt about one’s own poems!). I’ve never shared poems-in-progress as freely as I did over the last two years. I recall how getting a poem from Karthika often galvanised me out of whatever stupor I was in, and filled me with energy to write mine. It has been wonderful. To get feedback, to receive from my poetry-partner the gift of attentive reading; and from audiences a sense of active participation.
Once the production began, there were many challenges and hurdles and heartaches – because of the sheer complexity of the illustrations and the format (with two covers). I was also worried about the working title Metro Lands, as the bulk of my poems were about the Mumbai Suburban Trains (the locals) and only two about the Metro (one of which is a meditation on the future metro). At one point, I was consumed with consternation about key images going missing! All of these issues was resolved by (a) the patience of the publishing team and (b) the sheer brilliance of my art-partner, Joëlle, who solved problems overnight!

What has the train system in your respective cities meant to each of you? How has it informed or altered your experience of the city? Has your relationship with train travel changed (for better or worse) over time?

KN: Like I tend to repeat, perhaps boringly, the metro is integral to my life as inhabitant, as writer, also as citizen. And local trains are very much (again, something of my refrain by now!) the arterial system that binds disparate organs (neighbourhoods, districts, populations) into a whole, into a body with a soul. Like the old fable about the brain and limbs and stomach claiming primacy, various neighbourhoods may pride themselves on being the nerve-centre of a metropolis but they'd just be disconnected parts if untethered to the rest.

I also have a theory that cities where people from all quarters and backgrounds and destinations take public transport together (Mumbai, for instance, Antwerp, Paris, Seoul) have a different vibe to ones where people move in self-contained bubbles from Point A to Point B. Whether you like it or not, the metro is a great leveller, though an inevitably ephemeral one—I don't claim that it extends an egalitarian light over all of our lives! But sharing space, limited space, even for a short time, does lead to some grasp of the need for (and benefits of) coexistence, even as one may carp and curse about the smells, the crowd, the discomfort...

SC: When I came to Bombay from Kolkata as a dewy-eyed youngster of 24, I travelled every day from my PG in Juhu to my office in Fort. I still recall that first recoil when I found myself on Churchgate Station, in an impossible upheaval of moving bodies! I learnt quickly how to negotiate that and it became second nature to travel by train. I loved the city anyway, but the trains made me love it even more. Nobody cared what you wore, how strange you might be, everyone made room, there was shoving and pushing and swearing, yes, but oh my goodness – there was something glorious and alive as well, of which I was part. After Kolkata’s melancholia, inquisitiveness and apathy, Bombay was everything I needed – spirited, liberating and charged. I worked in advertising those days, and it was such a wonder to travel so freely and safely at all hours of the day (and night), among people from all classes and cultures. I travelled in the men’s compartment at rush hour with my colleagues; if it was very late I would choose to climb into the general compartment rather than the Ladies’ as those were deserted and felt oddly unsafe. The crowds protected and healed me.

Later, after I moved to Thane, I got used to the Central Line, and still later, as the pressures of daily travel eased, I could think more about the trains – as opposed to merely leaping in and hanging on. Recently, riding on Line 1 of the Mumbai Metro, I found myself longing to get out, back into the swarm and sweat of the locals: my poem ‘Ghatkopar to Versova and back’ deals with that strange disconnect. The Mumbai Metro still feels (to me) too cool, too swanky, too new – not real enough – yet! I take a kind of perverse delight in discomfort, I guess. I know it’s a boon, and yet I wish… (Is it because I am not a daily passenger anymore? Very likely.)

In Delhi – a salad bowl of a city – the types of passengers one encounters often change markedly from one Metro line to another, and as each line moves further north or south or east or west: the conversations (and the tone, and language) you might overhear on the Yellow Line will alter from Hauz Khas to Rajiv Chowk and then further north to the old Delhi stations like Chandni Chowk, and then again as you get to Delhi University. Does it work similarly in Paris and Mumbai?

KN: Paris – definitely. Line 4, for instance, bisects the city from north to south and one can see the change in demographics, sometimes as abruptly as one station to the next. It can also be a lot more gradual, like on Line 2, which circumnavigates the northern half of the city from east to west, going from Nation - with a healthy mix of tongues and colours and wallet-sizes - to Porte Dauphine, and its posh suburbs, via a station like Ternes, populated by affluent classical music aficionados and another, like La Chapelle, where Tamil and Arabic are as prevalent as French. On the other hand, Line 1, which I often call the sightseers' line, will always be thronging with tourists because from one end to the other, there are a slew of iconic Parisian monuments, from Château de Vincennes, to the Louvre, to Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe.

SC: I had always thought that all our locals carried the same kind of passengers – a mix of languages, and types, and professionals: that’s their beauty (amidst the grottiness and grittiness of the compartments themselves). First Class compartments had the “swankier” types, of course, and the First Class Ladies’ Compartment a more aggressive non-accommodating type of entitled female. I did not see much of a difference between the commuters on Western and Central. Differences in the college students taking the train would be indicated by language – English and Marathi/Hindi (on the Central Line to Mira Road, for example, vis-à-vis a Western Line to Bandra). However, I had never taken the Harbour Line until the project began! And that made me notice a different kind of passenger – less affluent (as indicated by gadgetry and clothes); even the landscapes we passed through felt less urban, more pastoral… It felt sadder and slower, somehow, a dereliction of the spirit, concomitant with the invidious spread of ugliness (in rampant urban construction). I chronicle some of these observations and emotions in my poem ‘Harbour Line’.

How did the illustrators come in? And what was the thinking behind the decision to have the French artist Joëlle Jolivet do the Mumbai drawings, and the Indian artist Roshni Vyam do the Paris-metro drawings?

KN: While Sampurna and I were idly doodling on our metaphorical sketchbook after having defined theme and structure, we did speak of the possibility of having our respective “worlds” illustrated. Joëlle and I had loved working together on The Honey Hunter, and had planned to collaborate again. But it was an idea, and like I said, we steered away from being too concrete about anything, even a book, for the first year: this was writing for writing's sake, an escape in many ways from more earthbound projects. Later, in early 2017, I met Nicolas Idier and Dorothée Gieux from the Book Office of the French Embassy, which has always been wonderfully supportive of my writing, and mentioned our epistolary poetry. They were then drawing up the programme of the biennial Bonjour India - a platform to foster bilateral exchange between France and India in a variety of fields and disciplines, from trade to science to literature - and decided to help us take it forward.
And Sampurna had this brainwave, she suggested we reverse the gaze: that illustrators should be visitors to the cities that the poets – inhabitants – had written about. It was such a brilliant way of complementing and contrasting the familiar with the new, of delving into how differently we look at, or experience, the same things. So we invited Joëlle and Roshni to join us, and luckily, they were game! And the French Book Office organised residencies – for Joëlle in Mumbai, and for Roshni in Paris – so that the illustrators would have time to plunge into the subject, to explore the rail lines and stations and journeys.

These poems are about journeys – about the actual experience of being in the trains and the stations – but they are also about the memories evoked by the journeys, with one recollection leading to another. And even projecting forward into the future: for instance, in “Mahim to Goregaon”, Sampurna refers to a future meeting. And the ending of “Western Line” isn’t about being on a train at all but about not being on the train when the terror attack happened in July 2006. And from there, you link to other terror attacks in other places, and other absences. In the writing, did these train journeys become a metaphor for life’s journey, or is that too trite and obvious a way of looking at it?

KN: I don't think anything is too trite or obvious a way for a reader to connect to, or interpret from a book. That's the beauty of, well, art in the larger sense, isn't it: the freedom for the recipient to absorb, or assign meaning? In my case, these poems are a travelogue—of short, everyday journeys within the larger city, but also through time. So much changed in the near-three years that these poems primarily chronicle. My first poem outlines my memory of the last live broadcast by Bernard Maris, whom I adored (it is still difficult to speak of him in the past tense), the great alter-globalisation economist killed in the Charlie Hebdo massacres. And life changed, inexorably – through events, disasters, political mistakes, personal epiphanies, global phenomena – through that time. Shards of those changes are palpable (sharp edges, glimmers, the works) even in our daily rides: I think that is something the book does reflect.

And both Sampurna's Western Line poem (which delves on the 2006 attacks) and my Lines: Before and After revolve around absence and presence/danger and safety/disaster and its aftermath. But in very different ways. She was away from the city, and chronicles reports meticulously, honouring the people she saw/heard/ read about later. I was very much in my city, but oblivious to what was happening – safe, in a cinema hall; safe, thanks to a metro ride – while a dear friend barely escaped with his life; and mine is a blow-by-blow account of the evening: ours together, then mine, then his. I think both Sampurna and I deal with guilt, but different types of guilt, in those mirror-poems: she with the guilt of absence, I with that of unknowing, forgetting.

SC: You’re absolutely right. The poems are as much about ourselves as they are about the journeys themselves. In ‘Mahim to Goregaon’ I do a time-warp, where a future-possibility is invoked from a place where it has already become a past-and-present-fact. The doubling back from here to there and back happens more than once. ‘Western Line’, as you mention, is about being away, and the subsequent guilt of survival that makes me re-imagine and re-construct what happened. In ‘Shuntings and Sidings’ I look at past statistics alongside present disaster (the Elphinstone stampede had happened days before I wrote it). From documenting the visual epiphanies that emerge from amidst the “daily carnage” to documenting time itself. These poems are about my time in this city as much as they are about the difficult times the city has been through.

In ‘Harbour Line’ I even go very personal – something I normally eschew – allowing my obsession with blindness to enter the poem, inspired by the “public dreaming” that off-peak train travel seems to make room for. In ‘Ongoing and Underway’ I think of loss, the loss of the familiar and much-loved topographies that I have chronicled earlier, in Dirty Love, my short story collection about Bombay. I think of deluge and drowning, those situations we’ve been in so many times before, and which have preoccupied me for years, over books (my first novel, Rupture, begins with the line “The city has been drowning since dawn”). I think my sorrow about the incredible pressures on the people of my city, the fraying infrastructure, neglect and negligence, fractures and fractiousness – all of it is somehow present in my train poems. Safety is no longer assured, and yet one must hope. One lives, and hopes and surges forward. It’s the daily commuters who give me this hope (and strength). I think that’s why our book is dedicated to them.

I must add that in ‘Central Line: swaying between left and right’ I also wanted to chronicle – albeit in the spirit of irreverent speculation and wordsmithery – the histories and legends associated with some of the stations I pass through. What the names suggest, the layers of language, the possibilities they offer a poet.

You have a format where the last line of Sampurna’s poem becomes the first line of Karthika’s poem, and so on – much like a link between the compartments of a train. How hard is it to pull off something like this? Were there situations where one of you had a poem ready in her head but had to wait for the other to complete hers first? Did each of you have access to the full preceding poem, or only the line you had to begin with?

KN: The regular renga-format – where the last line of an existing poem becomes the first line of the subsequent poem (by the other writer) – is great fun, but also simpler: you are building the next floor of the house, to take an analogy from architecture. We did that for a year, and then tried to add another layer of complexity, to reverse the process. So, the line to be reprised became the first line of the previous poem. In other words, if Sampurna had written a poem, I would have to write my next poem in such a way that my last line reprised the first line of her existing poem. For instance, my Landscape on Line 3 Reviewed begins with "Hinged between symmetric hips" - Sampurna's next poem had to end with that. That's like building the roof first, then the rafters, then the walls, and lastly the foundation.

Frustrating, not for me! It was a pretty muscular challenge but such an interesting exercise (and there are other, solo, forms where you would have to do the same, anyway, like the glosa, where you don't have the advantage of being in a dialogue with your associate-poet!). There were times - two poems towards the end - where we told each other the first lines of our next poems, so that the other could already begin work on hers while each worked her way towards the existing last line. Otherwise, we read the previous poem in its entirety before beginning our own (about 80% of the time).

SC: The format was not frustrating for me, either. What I discovered, though, was that beginning a poem with a given line was easier than ending a poem with a given line. So, for example, “One day there will be no blood” was so easy to kick-start my own poem with, while “cover your sight with moonless, feathery heaven” was so much harder to move towards! In hindsight, I realise what a salutary experience it was. I may never have come up with a phrase like that! And so it sent me off on a parallel track, where I moved from looking so intently at others to closing my eyes and looking within, confronting unsaid, unspoken fears. This one, of all the poems, was the one which made me travel internally in a way I may not have been able to if I hadn’t been “forced” (as it were) to end in a pre-determined place. Fairy tale, fantastic birds, dream, doubt – all of it entered on account of that last line given to me by Karthika.

When I had a first line, I could run with it in any direction I chose (creatively that is, while the physical direction was bound by my specific train ride). When I had a last line given to me, I had to slow down, switch tracks, and eventually halt at precisely the given ending. It was very challenging and I loved it! It reminds me of an experience I had in the Metro Simulator where the “pilots” (as their drivers are called) are trained. I have zero motor skills and cannot drive, but it was such a high, being in the driver’s cabin, working the controls and seeing myself glide towards a station, and then terrifyingly have the emergency lights come on, as I was going too fast, hurtling towards a potential accident! After three attempts, I finally managed to halt the virtual train exactly where virtual passengers patiently awaited. From accelerating to over-shooting, from yanking back to zooming ahead to slowly easing in and arriving where you were meant to – all of it was akin to the writing.

What is the ideal way for a reader to experience these poems?

KN: Readers can dive in whichever way they'd like to: the poems are free-standing though linked to each other every single time through words, and there is often a thematic mirroring they'll pick up. As for an ideal way, well, perhaps the way we wrote them. So, with one half of the book (the one that begins with Line 5 and ends with Shuntings and Sidings), just open it on the first page and read till the middle. With the other, if the reader would like to follow the chronology of writing it, the very first poem is the last of the section (Landscape on Line 3 Reviewed) and the one s/he finds on opening the book (Ongoing and Underway) is the last one written!

SC: I love it when readers read poetry in sequence, chronologically, as if it were a novel. Especially if the poems were meant to be read in sequence, as ours are. The pleasures are multiple that way.

--------------------------------
[My other Scroll interviews and reviews are here -- including a very long conversation with Karthika Nair about her superb book Until the Lions]

The Other Side of the Camera

[my latest Mint Lounge column, about directors in major acting roles – such as John Huston in the “new” Orson Welles film]
----------------------

Even for film buffs who weren’t weaned on the Auteur Theory, this past month has offered reason to reflect on the pet themes and personal styles of renowned directors. For instance, the deaths of Nicholas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci, a few days apart, reminded me of how startling it was to discover their work as an embassy-frequenting teen in the early 1990s: from the haunting, lingering eroticism of Roeg’s Bad Timing and Walkabout (and that’s before even mentioning the famous lovemaking scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now) to the gorgeous young Gerard Depardieu and Robert De Niro nude together in a very explicit, X-rating-worthy scene in the long version of Bertolucci’s epic 1900. Some of my ideas about the casual boldness of 1970s European cinema were shaped by the work of these directors. ***

More poignant than all this, though, was watching a resurrection – or an exhumation, depending on your perspective. November saw the release of a film thought to be long-dead. It was started (and left unfinished) in the 1970s by an all-time great director, and starred another great director in the central role of a fictitious filmmaker. As if that weren’t enough, other parts – a major one, as well as several cameos – were played by other real-life directors of the period.

Yes, we are firmly in meta-film terrain now, and this is Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, with John Huston in the lead. Unlike Roeg and Bertolucci, Welles and Huston died more than three decades ago – but here they are, so much of their vitality still showing, in a film that is technically a 2018 release, and which many film buffs never expected to see. (Some still argue it was meant to be left incomplete – possibly Welles’s last, knowing jab at an industry that doesn’t let artists fully realise their visions.)

Watching this film (which also stars director Peter Bogdanovich, playing a version of his own 1970s self), I thought of other instances of directors glimpsed on screen, even if briefly – as in the 1951 Baazi, which has Guru Dutt at the edge of the frame in an early scene. Hrishikesh Mukherjee does something similar in Guddi, playing “himself’ on a movie set, and also appears for a few seconds in Biwi aur Makaan. In these cases, the directors are seen only from behind, as if affirming that they are meant to be guiding spirits, not active participants. A few others weren’t so coy: a favourite childhood memory is Subhash Ghai in Hero, deadpanning the lines “Ding Dong, Sing a Song” as the main characters zip past him on their motorbikes.

But internationally, there has been a tradition of notable performances by directors. And to clarify, I’m not talking about the famous Hitchcock cameos, or the work of actor-directors like Chaplin or Jacques Tati (or Raj Kapoor) – I’m speaking of directors, who were not especially known as actors, taking on substantial parts in other people’s films.

Often, this involves a tribute by a younger filmmaker to an idol. Consider Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, in which the lead part – a septuagenarian professor – is played by Victor Seastrom, the silent-era filmmaker whose work had a big impact on Bergman. Or Jean-Luc Godard casting Fritz Lang (as himself, with references to actual films like M) in a substantial role in Le Mepris. Or the wonderfully moving use of the legendary Erich von Stroheim in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Von Stroheim plays Max, faithful manservant to a once-legendary silent-screen actress (played by Gloria Swanson), and in a scene where he screens one of her old films on a home projector, what we see are shots from the 1928 movie Queen Kelly, which was really directed by von Stroheim and starred the young Swanson. (“We didn’t need words, we had faces then,” she boasts, and the lined faces of von Stroheim and Swanson in this scene are a moving commentary on faded careers and the film industry’s treatment of its stars.)

In other cases, the casting of a director can offer a witty contrast to the cinema he is typically associated with. Vittorio de Sica’s performance as a baron in Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame De places the director of hard-hitting neo-realist films like Bicycle Thieves in a beautifully shot, glossy tale about the romances and indulgences of high-society fops. Something comparable happened when Karan Johar played himself in a party scene in Zoya Akhtar’s excellent Luck by Chance – Johar, so associated (at the time) with cheery, bubble-gum films, looks sinister and Dracula-like here as he remarks on the darker side of the film industry.

To return to The Other Side of the Wind, though. The film, much of which is presented as “found footage” – shot partly in colour, partly in monochrome, by video cameras at a party – alludes to its own director’s life and working methods. (“I’ve been over-schedule before. Let’s drink to that,” the protagonist says, sounding much like Welles, who famously cobbled together films over years, shooting part of a scene in one location and then completing it years later in another part of the world. Or like Huston, who also faced problems in Hollywood, and spent his career moving between deeply personal pet projects and films that were made largely to please producers.) It also has directors like Henry Jaglom and Paul Mazursky as party guests, squabbling about the nature of film, art vs commerce, the workings of the system – it feels like we are eavesdropping on a very private, insiders’ gathering. (And meanwhile, some of the actual actors are literally dummies sprawled around on rocks, or getting shot at – watch the film to see what I mean!)

“Our revels now are ended” – a line from The Tempest – is wearily used here to say something about the difficulty of realising a personal artistic vision, and the fear of seeing that vision become complete and unalterable. It has been suggested that Welles subconsciously didn’t want his films to be finished, because the creative process, infinitely stretched out, was more stimulating for him than a final product could be. Whether or not that’s true, The Other Side of the Wind often feels like a record of directors talking passionately about films instead of making them.
----------------------------------


***Incidentally, the real-life sexual exploitation of actress Maria Schneider during the Last Tango in Paris shoot was only one of many possible instances where Bertolucci set ethical concerns aside to maintain authorial dominance; 1900, for instance, has a scene where an 11-year-old boy is shown with an erection.
 
[More on Welles here. And an earlier piece about a documentary about the making of this film is here]

The wind that caresses: Orson Welles as breeze and tempest

[The latest of my “moments” columns for The Hindu – this one about the documentary that accompanies Orson Welles’s last, just-released film]
-----------------------

Here’s a strange admission to begin a movie column with. Despite being a huge Orson Welles fan, I haven’t yet steeled myself to watch the “new” Welles work, The Other Side of the Wind – a film that began shooting in the early 1970s, was doomed by lack of funds (and possibly by the great director’s own whimsies and crippling sense of persecution), and has now been cobbled into some shape by other men, more than thirty years after Welles’s passing.

It’s probably a combination of fear (“What if the film is terrible?”), another sort of fear (“What if it’s brilliant? How does one process it then, or write about it? And either way, how can one know if this is what HE would have made?”) and some fan-fatigue. Welles’s career was so thwarted and fragmented after the success of Citizen Kane – as his need for artistic control and appreciation came up against commercial dictates, driving him from Hollywood to Europe and beyond – that it can be exhausting to see his real-life predicaments implied in his cinema; something that frequently happens even when he is adapting the work of famous writers like Shakespeare (Othello, Chimes at Midnight) or Kafka (The Trial).

What I did watch was They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, a documentary directed by Morgan Neville, which breathlessly tells the story of the making (and unmaking) of The Other Side of the Wind, and has been released on Netflix as a companion piece. But even experiencing this documentary is to fall into a vortex of Wellesian images and motifs – much like the dazed hero in the amusement-park climax of The Lady from Shanghai, tumbling helplessly down an enormous winding slide.

This column is usually about a specific vignette in a film, but I’m making an exception here, since Welles’s body of work is so packed with moments that reflect each other (like the “Magic Mirror Maze” in that celebrated Lady from Shanghai scene). So much of it is about the intangibles and contradictions in a life, and how potentially great people can be undone by a combination of circumstance and personality.

What makes They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead riveting and depressing at the same time is that Welles himself – through footage of him in his films, or in interviews and other public appearances – is a big part of it. “With his cape, he was a personification of the wind itself,” we hear his partner, the actress Oja Kodar, say, in what sounds like an effort to “explain” the odd title of his unfinished film, “But I knew the other side of this wind. Because Orson was the wind that was capable of caressing you, lifting you, making you dance.”

So here is Orson, huffing and puffing, blowing hot and cold, going from being a gentle breeze to a dark tempest, all at once. In one scene, he discusses the “film within a film” in The Other Side of the Wind – an atmospheric, abstract European art-movie made by the protagonist, who is also a director (and played by another great director-actor, John Huston). “This gave me the freedom to make a film that wasn’t by Orson Welles,” Welles says. Amusingly, he is talking with Jeanne Moreau, the French actress who really had appeared in some of those arthouse films he was parodying.

These playful inside references and meta-allusions continue. The documentary itself mimics the style of Citizen Kane or Mister Arkadin in using a multiplicity of perspectives to try and get to the “truth”, always with no success. People offer contrary views of Welles and the shoot. “[Cinematographer] Gary Graver was like the son Orson never had,” one voice says. “No,” says another, “Orson wasn’t very paternal.” On why the comedian and impersonator Rich Little left the shoot after three weeks, “He missed his wife and was tired of working” is immediately followed by “He was having a relationship with Orson’s secretary.”

And as it tells the sad story of Welles running out of funding, the documentary gives us shots of his dramatic death scenes in films like The Third Man and Touch of Evil, as well as the exploding Death Star at the end of Star Wars (a film that was a huge blockbuster around the same time that Welles was struggling to get money for his very personal vision) and a scene where a vault door is closed in Citizen Kane.

It’s all beautiful, and painful, and fetishistic – like a drug that pulls you back into the Welles world with its many slanted images, shadows on walls, and reflections on the nature of truth and artifice, as well as an artist’s ambivalent relationship with both things.

I probably will see The Other Side of the Wind after all.

--------------------
[Earlier Hindu columns here. And here are some earlier posts about Welles, including his quotes from the Peter Bogdanovich interviews]