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This is a transcript of the Variety Cinema Militans Lecture delivered
by director Mira Nair at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht on September
29.
I make images in my work. I don't pen words, especially not words to
be delivered from church pulpits. So I experienced great agony writing
this essay, particularly since it was also meant for publication, until
I began to see it as an opportunity to think aloud with you on what has
been possessing my mind of late, in this tumultuous past year since the
watershed date of 9/11/01.
I have been reflecting on the torrent of ceaseless images flooding our
lives: in print media, TV and of course, in our popular cinema, ultimately
asking myself the age-old questions Ter Braak raises in his still-radical
essay: what is the role of an artist in any society? What is the place
and future of cinema in the world today?
In the new "global village" of incessant images, increasingly
I see the failure of mass media to impart actual understanding. This overactive
pluralism gives one the illusion of knowing a lot about a lot when actually
you know a smattering about nothing at all, leaving in its wake an audience
so thoroughly bludgeoned by little bits of information that one is left
confused and consequently apathetic politically. Perhaps that is its intention.
As was reported in the New York Times, the fact is that while images have
become more and more international, people's lives have remained astonishingly
parochial. This ironic fact of contemporary life is especially troubling
in today's war-mongering times, when so much depends on understanding
worlds so different, and consequently totally divided, from one's own.
In this post 9/11 world, where the schisms of the world are being cemented
into huge walls between one belief and way of life and another, now more
than ever we need cinema to reveal our tiny local worlds in all their
glorious particularity. In my limited experience, it's when I've made
a film that's done full-blown justice to the truths and idiosyncracies
of the specifically local, that it crosses over to become surprisingly
universal.
Take "Monsoon Wedding," for instance. I wanted to make an intimate
family flick, something out of nothing, a love song to the city of Delhi
where I come from, to return to my old habits of guerilla film-making.
Except this time, fired by the recent empowering of the Dogme method,
I wanted to make a film in just 30 days. That was the original premise:
to prove to myself that I didn't need the juggernaut of millions of dollars,
studios, special effects and plenty of men in suits to make a good story
in the most interesting visual way possible.
I wanted to capture, first and foremost, the spirit of masti (which means
an intoxication with life) inherent in the full-bodied Punjabi community
from where I come, and then, to capture the India that I know and love,
an India which lives in several centuries at the same time. As Arundhati
Roy put it, "as Indian citizens we subsist on a regular diet of caste
massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church
burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital
revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbands who continue
to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable pile of Miss Worlds."
It couldn't be said better. Such were the fluid pillars of the India I
wanted to put on film -- 68 actors, 148 scenes, and one hot monsoon season
later, using paintings, jewellery, saris, and furniture taken from relatives
on the screen, with each member of my family acting in it, after shooting
exactly 30 days, a film was born that then had a journey so different
from any expectation (more correctly, non-expectation) that we might have
had for it during its making. People from New Delhi to Iceland to Hungary
to Brazil to America believed it was their wedding, their family, themselves
on that screen -- and if they didn't have a family, they yearned to belong
to one like the people they saw on screen.
I didn't make the film to educate anybody about "my culture and my
people" -- I believe that to be simply a cultural ambassador of one's
country is boring -- rather, if it was made for anybody beyond myself,
it was for the people of Delhi to feel and laugh and cry at our own flawed
Punjabi (also known as the Party Animals of India) selves.
Uniquely for me, "Monsoon Wedding" was the first of seven films
I'd made that was completely embraced by the mainstream Bollywood film
industry in India; producers, directors, movie stars, choreographers,
musicians alike embraced the film, and for the first time in my 20-odd
years as an independent filmmaker -- independent really from both the
Indian and the American mainstream -- I felt the possibility of my work
belonging somewhere.
Although the style and form of "Monsoon Wedding" was radical
for the Indian public (the entire film was shot with a hand-held camera,
reality-based, a host of completely unknown faces mixed in with legendary
actors, live singing, no studio shooting, using a mixture of old Indian
pop songs with new original music, dialogue that simultaneously used Hindi,
English and Punjabi), it continues to play in India almost a year after
its release. Perhaps this was because we took a familiar premise -- that
of an Indian wedding, and of the family drama that surrounds such an event
anywhere -- and made a "reality check" version of it so different
from the normal Bollywood film.
Bollywood, a term for the enormous commercial film industry in Bombay,
refers to those grand, epic and over-the-top extravaganzas replete with
musical numbers and lavish production values, designed as escapist entertainment
for the masses. It is what Ter Braak hilariously describes in his discussion
of low cinema, "born among cigarette-chewing youths and giggling
maid-servants, received with wild enthusiasm and the honest romanticism
of a proletariat yearning for deliverance."
Despite its inimitable, distinctive style and its current arty-exotic
cachet, Bollywood is nothing like cinema of the art-house, New Wave variety,
nothing like expressionism -- it does not have pretensions of purity.
It is defiantly popular, made for the masses and for profit.
Therefore, Bollywood as a cinematic form is necessarily adaptive and composite
-- a genre welcoming outside influences, not fearing them. In the first
place, the filmmakers - always aiming for the broadest possible audience
-- have had to accommodate the multiple interests of an extremely regional
and diverse country. Certain unifying elements - Mahabharata and Ramayana,
the foundational epic texts from which many stories derive, and the emphasis
in all films on family tradition and local setting - give Bollywood films
a broad resonance within India. Furthermore, Bollywood was born under
colonialism and brilliantly survives in a post-colonial world.
The Bollywood style is famously adaptive and absorbent, a sponge that
had to respond to imperialist influences to survive pre-Independence,
and willingly imitated them for profit in more recent years. A common
phenomenon in Bombay are the so-called DVD directors who pitch their stories
to moviestars using cued scenes from well known Hollywood movies -- "it
is basically a combination of "The Godfather" meets "Love
Story" meets "When Harry Meets Sally") Western stories
from "Jane Eyre" to "Dead Poets' Society" are retold
with Indian characters and production design that very often -- ingeniously
-- play into both Westerners' and Indians' idealization of India. This
shows a border around India that is both porous and protective, flagrantly
absorbing and copying all sorts of influences yet twisting them to make
it finally seem inimitably Indian -- or to put it more accurately, inimitably
Bollywood.
There is much debate on the survival of local cinemas in a global age,
and much consternation about the unstoppable wave of American culture,
often accused of alternately dulling and diluting art and aesthetic sensibilities
around the world. The French have been railing about cultural protectionism
from Hollywood for years now. In this context of trying to preserve and
cultivate local voices, it is fabulous to see the unflagging energy of
Bollywood cinema. Bollywood's vigor, its staying power and its improbable,
flexible hybridity are all results of its huge internal market. Commercially
and artistically Bollywood is supple and muscular -- much like Indian
culture itself.
The mass Indian audience for whom Bollywood films are made is ever-growing
and makes the industry hugely profitable, even without taking into account
the global reach it has attained. The first Indian film, Raja Harishchandra,
was produced in 1913. Thirty thousand films have been made since. Today,
800 films per year are made throughout India, and 12 million people within
the country's borders go to see a Hindi film daily. The booming Bollywood
market is self-sustaining and runs parallel to - and undisturbed by -
American film exhibition in India. This is before taking into account
Bollywood films' huge market abroad, both as an export to other lands
(such as Russia, the Middle East, Africa) and to the far-reaching Indian
Diaspora.
Growing up in India in the 60s and 70s in the fairly remote state of Orissa,
I was not an aficionado of Bollywood pictures. I did swoon over many of
the popular love songs from the movies, but the films themselves did little
for me. I was much more interested in stories of real people, the extraordinariness
of ordinary life. Initially inspired by "jatra" which is the
form of traditional travelling mythological theatre in the countryside,
I later became involved with political protest theatre in Calcutta. Then,
with eyes focused beyond my own country, I became preoccupied with the
Beatles and the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Western avant-garde, guerilla
theater, etc. It wasn't until I went to America for college and began
studying film that the "other" Indian movies first reached me:
Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Guru Dutt, whose emotionalism and visual
stylization was actually pure independent film making, but made from within
Bollywood. The immediacy and grandeur of these films is a pillar for me
now -- I rely on seeing one of Guru Dutt's movies every six months before
I make another one of my own.
However, I was the last person to ever imagine that the commercial cinema
of the Indian mainstream would have anything whatsoever to do with my
own work. Yet, the opportunity to give this lecture has given me a chance
to reflect on my own trajectory and I am surprised to find that my home
cinema has had a strong influence on my body of work indeed, regardless
of my exploration of increasingly motley and disparate cultures.
And in reflecting, I've seen that the Indian films' influence - specifically
that unabashed emotional directness, the freewheeling use of music, that
emphasis on elemental motivations and values - is a thread running consistently
through every one of my films; even when exploring foreign worlds, I have
taken the bones and flesh of those societies and tried to infuse them
with the spirit of where I'm from. Much of post-imperial scholarship focuses
on the Western gaze - and Bollywood itself, as I've said, had to adapt
to and be constantly aware of the colonialist point of view. I find myself
applying an Eastern gaze to Western contexts now, and enjoying the reversal.
Historically, Hollywood has always been open to foreign directors, so
long as we have the competence, craft and flair needed to make money.
From Erich von Stroheim to Billy Wilder to Ang Lee to Paul Verhoeven to
Shekhar Kapur, the doors have opened for us, so long as we understand
the bottom line.
In my most recent film, "Hysterical Blindness," a working-class
drama set in New Jersey in the 80s, I found that even in the drab and
loveless confines of these bar-hopping girls' world, the Bollywood approach
was just as useful. Half-jokingly, I refer to the style of the film as
"American Bleak, Bollywood Style." Within the frame of "American
bleak," understatement and mundane circumstances notwithstanding,
the full-blown emotion was there, waiting to be made overt. People are
people, after all, and no matter if we're trying to portray a loveless
reality where desperate women comb neighbourhood bars looking for love,
only to find heartbreak, audiences must feel their neuroses as if it is
their own.
And now, looking at pre-Victorian London to adapt Thackeray's gloriously
entertaining saga, "Vanity Fair," I find an enormous panorama
of themes familiar to us steeped in Bollywood: a woman who defies her
poverty-stricken background to clamber up the social ladder, unrequited
love, seduction through song, a mother's sacrifice for her child, a true
gentleman in a corrupt world.....the catalog of human stories remains
the same. Moreover, it is a story that comes down to basic human ambition,
asking a spiritual, even yogic question: Which of us is happy in this
world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied? The bold
strokes of Indian cinema are ideal for this canvas, too.
Culture-combining does not have to yield the soulless "Euro-gateau"
lamented by Istvan Szabo in Zanussi's 1993 lecture here. Because, as Zanussi
explained, those are films without a center, stories that take place in
nameless, unrecognizable cities with a host of European actors desperately
attempting a neutral American/English accent, afraid of any eccentricities
or distinctiveness that would distract from the mongrelization of the
piece.
The Bollywood form, itself an ever-growing collage of cultural influences,
is making its way around the world, but retaining its soul. In fact, my
only fear as Bollywood seems to cross over into Western commercial screens
is that it doesn't water itself down to suit the Western palate. Lately,
Western culture has taken Bollywood styles and incorporated them into
the mainstream Hollywood vocabulary: smash-hit movies and plays imitate
Bollywood's musical form and ultra-theatrical style, adapting them to
Western contexts (Moulin Rouge, Bombay Dreams). Think of Thora Birch in
"Ghost World," watching a 1950s Hindi dance number and dancing
around her room gleefully. She sees a freshness and lustiness totally
absent from her Anytown, USA existence. The crazy dance number is delightfully
foreign to her, yet through it we also see her small world with new, sharp
clarity.
Bollywood's pure emotional thrust and distinctive vocabulary has authenticity
in itself, however manufactured and molded the form has been over the
years. In this era of international misunderstanding, as the threat of
a global divide-- culturally and politically -- is more dire than ever,
this distinctiveness is to be celebrated. I have always repeated to myself
and to my students -- "if we don't tell our stories, no one else
will." The "we" and "our" in the best films is
both local and universal. Cinema can mirror an individual's tiny world,
yet reveal infinite other worlds in all their particularity. Film should
not behave. It cannot. Cinema is too democratic to be lobotomized into
a single way or style.
I always say, There are no rules in making cinema - there is only good
cinema or soulless cinema. And as long as there are films made like "In
The Mood For Love," "Angel At My Table," "Pyaasa,"
"Battle Of Algiers," "Decalogue" and "Time Of
The Gypsies," we're doing all right. What is happening to the world
lies, at the moment, just outside the realm of common understanding. The
only revenge is to work, to make cinema that illuminates this common understanding,
that destabilizes the dull competence of most of what is produced, that
infuses life with idiosyncracy, whimsy, brutality, and like life, that
captures the rare but fabulous energy that sometimes emerges from the
juxtaposition of tragic and comic.
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