How I met Norman’s mother (a spot of movie tourism)

[Did this for Business Standard]

I’m not usually enthusiastic about having a camera aimed at me (though I’m not fascist about it either, like the people who believe the thing is a devil’s tool meant to suck their souls out through their eyeballs or something). Even when travelling in scenic places, I’d rather someone just took a candid shot instead of expecting me to stand in front of something and grin moronically at a lens.

Which in no way explains why, if you chanced to visit the Cinémathèque Française museum on a particular Friday afternoon last month, you would have found me squatting next to Mrs Bates’s skull and grinning moronically at a lens. And then doing it again, to get another angle; and then yet again, after checking the light settings and tut-tutting; all the while keeping an eye out for the museum police who frowned at photography in the premises. Nor does it explain why I then stood next to Maria the robot and made faux-dramatic poses in an attempt to replicate a famous scene from a 1926 film.

But these were special circumstances: Mrs Bates and Maria are important figures in my movie-watching career. The former is the shadowy protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which infected my life when I was 13, getting me thinking about films as art and sending me down a rabbit-hole of analytical literature about movies. The latter is one of the frosty legends of early film history, the automaton created by an evil scientist in Fritz Lang’s great silent film Metropolis. And so, having arrived in the city where people typically make a beeline for Notre Dame and Versailles, for Angelina’s hot chocolate and Berthillon’s ice creams, I prioritised a meeting with these two enigmatic ladies of the night. As Mrs Bates’s little boy Norman put it, “We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”

Mother Bates makes her famous appearance in the climax of Psycho, in a creaky (by today’s standards) but unsettling scene in the basement, where we discover that Norman’s mummy is not a living, domineering harridan but a long-dead, carefully preserved corpse. If I had wanted my illusions to be just as well-preserved, I would have avoided going to the museum at all, so that my only mental picture of her would be as she appears in the film. There was something both comical and poignant about seeing her in a glass cage at the Cinémathèque. Bathed in a beam of yellow light, she stood out from a distance in the darkened room; the idea was presumably to make her look spooky, but it also drew attention to her as an exhibit, something that visitors could point and chortle at (or sit down next to and smile stupidly for a camera). Besides, she was unexpectedly small. (What was I expecting? A two-foot-tall skull with shark-like teeth?)

Looking at other artefacts – the starfish in the jar from Man Ray’s 1928 film The Sea Star, costumes from such movies as Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast – was a strange experience too. Props and objects that have such immediate, vivid associations for a viewer can, when removed from their familiar contexts, become banal and smaller than life. Cocteau’s film was in gorgeous black and white, but these costumes were in “real-world” colour and they seemed garish, almost vulgar when set against the images from the film, playing on a screen above. There was a series of still photos from the Beauty and the Beast set, which showed the blandly handsome actor Jean Marais applying the layers of makeup that would transform him into the imperious, tragic Beast. For anyone who has been immersed in the otherworldly milieu of Cocteau’s film, these stills are an exercise in demystification; with a movie like that, which gives the impression of having sprung fully formed from an alternate universe, you don’t want to be reminded that it was put together by a cast and crew, who were probably doing mundane things like talking about the day’s news or taking cigarette breaks in between shots.

Yet such experiences can also bring a new, more measured respect for the creative process – the processes by which everyday things are transmuted into magic and art, with long-term effects on people’s lives and personalities. (I would almost certainly not have become a professional writer if I hadn’t watched Psycho when I did.) Returning to Ma Bates: here is a wrinkled little skull replica, not particularly authentic-looking or scary when you see it in the cold light of day. Yet someone designed it keeping in mind a film’s lighting and colour scheme, and the desired Grand Guignol-like effect of the climactic revelation. They arranged it just so, placing it in a chair that would swivel around dramatically; at the crucial moment a swinging lightbulb cast shadows over it, making the eye sockets seem alive and menacing; and Bernard Herrman’s music score with its screaming violins added to the effect of the scene.

And now here she was more than 50 years later, outside of the film, in a boringly polychrome world, staring blankly at me from her glass home. It was a little deflating, but the sense of mystery wasn’t completely gone. For a moment I fancied I could hear Norman’s voice saying "I think we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out” followed by Mother’s cackle: “They know I can't move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me."

[The earlier post with the museum photos is here. And here is "Monsters I have known", my piece about horror-movie love for The Popcorn Essayists]

Dog, giraffe, cat, bear: beastly scenes in four MAMI films

[Free-flowing post; meaning-seekers, abstain]

When watching a rush of unrelated films in a short span of time (as I did at the MAMI festival last month) and without needing to write structured things about them, I sometimes find whimsical ways of relating the films to each other, or “arranging” motifs in my head. One thing that struck me was the use of animals in some of the films I saw: animals as sentient creatures in their own right, or as symbols, or pretexts for our understanding of human characters or events; different ways of showing animal perspectives and asking us to consider if they mean anything in themselves, or if they constitute a variant on the Kuleshov experiment, where shots of a blank-expressioned actor were intercut with various objects, so that the viewer imposed his own feelings on them. Anyway, here are fragmented notes on four films:

1) In the last post, I mentioned the very sweet dog – named “Boy” by his human – in Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain. On one level Boy is a symbol, a commentary on Panahi’s real-life situation as an artist denied freedom. Much the same way as the screenwriter in the film’s first half must keep Boy shielded from the outside world – and the animal follows him around everywhere – Panahi is forbidden to air his ideas (and yet his ideas and fictional creations don’t stop pursuing him, demanding every moment of his time). 

But within the narrative, Boy is also a creature capable of feeling – intelligent and alert, and very much alive. As he tails the screenwriter around the villa, tennis ball in mouth, the bond between them is evident. And these qualities contrast with the horrible TV images shown in the film of other dogs being brutalized by the Iran authorities – animals in various stages of torture, dead or dying, barely recognisable any more as creatures that were once capable of showing and receiving love. One thing that so distinguishes dogs from most other species – and a foundation of the long and mutually beneficial hominid-canine relationship – is their eagerness to make and maintain eye contact with humans. Psychologically, it helps if there is a certain amount of visible white in a dog’s eyes, and the dog in Closed Curtain has one of the most expressive, “human-like” gazes I have ever seen in an animal. (Casting here is as important to the film’s effect as it is with the human roles, and I imagine it was as carefully done.)

2) The giraffes in the good-natured film Giraffada are another matter. Early in the story we meet a boy, Ziad, who feels a deep connect with two giraffes in a Palestinian West Bank zoo, but the affection is not reciprocated in equal terms: the film doesn’t depict the giraffes as meaningfully interacting with the humans around them (and some of this has to do with our own perceptions of these outlandish, extra-terrestrial-like creatures, which make for funny Facebook profile pictures when you get a riddle wrong: it is hard to relate to them in the manner that one might with dogs, and they certainly don’t make eye contact with us in the same way). After the male giraffe dies, we see the bereaved female wandering about her quarters, craning her neck about as she (presumably) searches for her mate. It is a touching sight, but her loss is not presented in overly sentimental terms - there is no romanticising about giraffes mating for life, like some birds and animals do. Her dead boyfriend can be replaced by another male, hence the plot of the film: Ziad’s veterinarian father must put himself and his family in danger by smuggling another male giraffe in from an Israeli zoo.

The trials of this new male giraffe (named Romeo) reminded me a little of Jose Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey – a book about another long, hazardous journey and about impossible-seeming things that may become possible. Like Saramago’s elephant, Romeo the giraffe is a blank slate that can stand for different things to different people. One basic yet effective shot catches the film’s attempt to set the wonders of daily life (and of life itself) against grand ideas about nationhood or religion. As Romeo lumbers through the West Bank in the film’s final stretch, he passes a prayer-house where a group of men are doing the Sajdah. At the precise moment that they raise their heads after bending their foreheads to the floor, the giraffe passes the window in front of them, and the sight is so astonishing that they stay frozen in place and forget to continue the rest of their prayer routine. Temporarily at least, the Grand Design has taken a backseat to the here and now, to the possibilities of the real world.

3) An early scene in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (full disclosure: I only saw half the film since I had to leave for an urgent appointment) centres on a cat, who has rather inconveniently become the responsibility of the film’s protagonist. And as Llewyn travels in an NY underground train, the cat slung over his shoulder, there is an unusual sequence: the cat is gazing out the window and we get a series of images of stations gliding past that obviously represent its perspective (Llewyn himself is facing in the other direction).

All that the camera appears to be doing here is impassively recording what the animal sees – there is no attempt to imbue the visuals with meaning, to be funny or droll or cute, or to suggest that the images mean anything to the cat. The whole thing has a touch of whimsy or randomness (and whimsy is very important to the Coen Brothers’ universe), though some incidental meaning emerges when the cat – probably dazed and panic-stricken by the rush of images – slips out of Llewyn’s hands and runs down the length of the compartment before he catches up with it again.

4) And a film where the animal in the title never appears, though humans have taken its place by the end. Denis Côté’s Vic + Flo Saw a Bear finishes with an intensely unpleasant, difficult-to-watch-and-listen-to scene where the two protagonists (former convicts and lesbian lovers) are ensnared in a pair of cruel, sharp-toothed bear-traps. Throughout the film, the line between civilisation and the jungle has been made indistinct: Vic and Flo are trying to start a new life, but we never really learn what terrible things they may have done in the past, and if redemption is a realistic possibility for them. Do they even seek it, or are they wild beasts trying to escape the trappings of human society and return to the natural world?

And by the end, that line may have been completely erased. The two women are reduced to the state of the culled dogs in Panahi’s film – their howls come to sound more like involuntary bodily reactions than as expressions of thinking, feeling personalities, with the result that even as we shudder at their fate, it becomes difficult to relate to them. A sentimental viewer might say the scene invites us to reflect on the horrors that humans routinely put animals through, but I think the film is more detached and nihilistic than that. Nature is unspeakably cruel, it says, and nature includes human beings with the traps they construct, for themselves and for others – the mechanical contraptions as well as the emotional ones.

[Related posts: on animals in Teri Meherbaniyan and Mon Oncle; on Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation. And two other posts about MAMI films: Qissa and Closed Curtain]

Short notes from the Mumbai festival: Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain

“I’m sure it’s the right address,” the woman says, “No other house looks like this one.” She is searching for her sister who, she has been told, hid in this beachside villa two nights ago. But the door has now been opened by a stout, middle-aged man (the director Jafar Panahi, playing Jafar Panahi) who knows nothing about the missing girl.

This is a scene late in Panahi’s new meta-film Closed Curtain, a work that might puzzle anyone who doesn't know the Iranian director’s back-story: the ban on his movie-making, the house arrest, his continuing fugitive attempts to practice his art, and to do so by making films that explicitly comment on his own situation. His last movie – with its poignantly ironical title This is Not a Film – was shot partly on iPhone and featured him talking to the camera about the projects he has in his head, projects he is no longer permitted to bring to cinematic life. Closed Curtain, by contrast, begins by appearing to be a narrative film (about a screenwriter and his impossibly cute dog) – for a few scenes it is as if Panahi has succeeded in realising one of the visions he discussed in This is Not a Film.

But around the halfway point we are reminded again that nothing in this director’s life and work fall within the bounds of “normalcy” any longer. The narrative is interrupted, the fourth wall is, almost literally, torn down: Panahi enters the house that has been the scene of the action so far; he takes down curtains, revealing wall-posters of his own previous films; the effect is a little reminiscent of the ruptures and interruptions in Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna. The characters we saw in the conventional-narrative section of the film – the screenwriter, his dog, two people seeking shelter from the authorities – stop functioning as elements of a coherent story and begin to move in and out of our line of vision, seeming less like real people and more like phantoms (perhaps ghostly manifestations of half-structured ideas in the mind of a writer-director who lives in chains). Other people come in and interact with Panahi, but again we are unsure whether they are “real” or visitations from another half-imagined story.

These intersecting narratives touch on similar matters: being in hiding with the things that are most important to you, trying to get your work done, or simply living your life, with the constant threat of someone bursting in and taking everything away. The writer in the “regular” narrative must cover all his windows with black curtains, because dogs are considered unclean by the regime he lives under; the writer-director Panahi in the meta-narrative doesn't have the freedom or resources to tell his story properly, or to engage with the world while telling it, which means there are metaphorical black curtains around his mind.

As Panahi and his fictional characters move in orbit around each other, other questions arise too. We often romanticise highbrow art as an essentially closed process – being principally about the relationship between the artist and his creations, like the literary writer who says “I write primarily for myself” – but does art have any value, or purpose, if it cannot (at least to a limited degree) be shared? And then, if it does reach the outside world, can the relationship be strictly one-sided? What happens when the world begins to intrude on it, deconstruct it, or even demand that it conforms to certain standards, values or rules?

All of which means that Closed Curtain is a self-conscious, self-referential film, but given its context it is also a deeply moving self-conscious film, an artist's cry of defiance. In terms of form, it is an abstract and "difficult" work, but it is also a plea for greater openness - for doors to be unbarred, for curtains to be removed. And the woman in that scene mentioned above is dead right on one front: if this secluded villa is a metaphor for Panahi’s current cinema (or for the mind striving to produce that cinema), it is true that no other house looks anything like it.

Monsters I have known

[Here is the full text of the essay I wrote for The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, about my horror-movie love. It’s been long enough since the anthology came out, so I thought I’d put it up here. While I’m at it, a reminder that the book contains excellent pieces by many fine writers. More information here]

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It’s June 1988, a summer vacation in London, and I’m sitting in a darkened room with my cousins and their friends, watching a horror film called House. Ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds huddle together, murmuring, waiting for the scary scenes. One of the adults partying in the living room outside sticks his head in, rolls his eyes dramatically and makes a deep howling sound, but we aren’t impressed; we saw Silver Bullet a few days ago, we know what a real werewolf sounds like.

So one of us gets up and bangs the door shut again, and now the only light comes from the TV set, which isn’t much to speak of, because it’s a dimly lit scene. We hold our breath as someone on the screen (the hero? Is there a “hero” in this film? Or am I thinking in the language of Hindi movies?) slowly walks up to a closet, puts his hand on the knob and turns it. Hanging in the air for a few seconds is the question: will a slimy monster leap out at him (and at us)? Or will he heave a sigh of relief (our cue to do the same), then turn around and find the fiend behind him (in which case our screams will be even louder than if the creature had been inside the closet in the first place)? Or will the jolts be postponed to the next scene? There’s a limited set of options and we know them all, but that doesn’t make the process any less frightening.

Afterwards we chase each other around the lawns, taking turns to play the film’s chief predator Ben (“Big Ben”?), a walking skeleton still grotesquely dressed in the soldier’s uniform in which he died. We were playing in the same garden a few hours earlier, but something has changed since then. The late-evening darkness is stiller than it should be, even though lights are on and the adults are just a few paces away. The rustling of the leaves in the trees and bushes seems full of strange meaning. Distant bird sounds carry portents. My senses are heightened, intensified, the world is suddenly an unfamiliar place.

More than twenty years later, as an adult movie buff with more developed and varied tastes, my favourite horror films continue to have this effect on me. Even when the films themselves are much more diverse in subject matter, style and vintage than the simple label “horror movie” could suggest.

The categories include (among many others) silent films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (a movie about a madman’s nightmare that, thanks to its brazenly Expressionist set design, looks every bit like a madman’s nightmare) and Nosferatu, the creepiest vampire film I’ve seen. Psychological horror, as in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, about a painter visited by phantoms of the mind, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, in which a young girl left alone in an apartment slowly loses her bearings. Comic-gothic horror (Polanski two years later, with Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in my Neck, about an Albert Einstein look-alike and his bumbling assistant exploring castles in Transylvania) and portmanteau ghost stories, like Masaki Kobayashi’s dazzlingly shot Kwaidan. And yes, gore films too – properly speaking, a different genre, but one that occasionally intersects with the sort of horror I love.

Not all these films achieve their ends in the same way. Many of them don’t have a single jump-out-of-your-seat scene but they have something more insidious, something that crawls back into my mind at the most unexpected times, long after I thought I’d forgotten all about the film.

It has been a long relationship. A few months after that House viewing, back in Delhi, horror films became my major entry point into the world of non-Hindi cinema. Thrills aside, there was something very accessible about them: the accents in American movies were sometimes hard to follow, but horror didn’t depend on dialogue for its effect. When Freddy Krueger leapt out at witless teens in a dark alley, chased them down Elm Street and slashed them to witless teenie-weenies, the visuals – and my senses responding to them – were all that mattered. The camera tracking in on the sinisterly glowing pumpkin (accompanied by the brilliant minimalist music score) during the opening credits of Halloween spoke more forcefully than pages of writing. This was film at its most egalitarian.

And so I rented video cassettes of the Evil Dead and Friday the 13th films, and a low-budget series called Demons, as well as slightly more sophisticated “mainstream” movies (though I knew nothing about those distinctions at the time) like Gremlins and Poltergeist. An education began.

Around the age of 13 my attitude to movie-watching began to change in subtle ways, and this was in large part due to a film that is considered a seminal horror movie, but which I’ve never really been able to think of in those terms. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho encouraged me to take cinema seriously, as an art form with its own methods and a visual language distinct from the words being spoken by the characters on the screen. It led me directly to movie literature and some of its scenes became personal reference points for my subsequent movie-watching (as you’ll see later in this essay). But I was never scared by Psycho in an immediate way. Maybe this was because I already knew all the major plot twists – I had heard jokes about “mummification” from my own mummy, and a friend in the school bus had given me a shot-by-shot description of the final revelation of the embalmed corpse of “Mrs Bates” in the fruit cellar. (Sorry if I’ve spoilt the film for you, but if you’re old enough to be reading this you ought to know these things already; it’s primary-level stuff.) Besides, my first viewing of it was on videocassette, in a well-lit room.

Or maybe it was that I was too moved by the film, that I found a deep sadness in it – “we scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other,” says Norman Bates, “and for all of it, we never budge an inch” – and surely a movie that put sad thoughts in your head had to be “more” than a “mere” horror film?

Today, of course, I know better.

Anyway, in the early 1990s the most important book in my life was a fat video guide that had nearly 20,000 capsule “reviews” packed together. The films were classified by a rating system ranging from four stars to one star, with a special “BOMB” rating reserved for the bottom-of-the-barrel movies. (The “review” for a long-forgotten Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film called Boom was the single word “Thud”. Next to the film’s title was BOMB, in all-caps. Criticism at its tersest, and a good counterpoint to the lengthy film essays I was reading around the same time.)

I carried the guide around in a polythene bag each time I went to the neighborhood video library – in a modest, five-shop community centre in south Delhi’s Saket that would, years later, become the location of India’s first multiplex theatre – and it made many important decisions for me. With one exception. Horror movies were never allowed to fall under its hegemony.

The video-parlour bhaiya looks amused when I extract the thick book from my bag with my free hand – I’m holding open his catalogue with the other – and leaf through it.

“Iss mein duniya ki sabhi movies ka naam hai?” (“Does this have the names of all the movies in the world?”) he asks.

“Haan,” I say without looking up, not wanting to get into a prolonged conversation.

“Hum isska photo-copy karaa sakte hain?” (“Can I get it photo-copied?”) he asks, but I’m not listening. The film I’m looking for is a Hollywood classic from the 1930s. The cassette cover carelessly fitted into the catalogue shows Cary Grant and Irene Dunne – two of my favourite actors – and I tell myself that I’ll take the film if the guide gives it three or more stars. But then something else in the catalogue catches my eye.

Demons 3.

Which has the dreaded “BOMB” next to it in the guide.

The Grant-Dunne film won the best director Oscar for 1937, is rated three-and-a-half stars and considered one of the classic screwball comedies – a genre that I’ve just started to relish.

Irrelevant. Demons 3 it is.

Even at that impressionable age, eager as I was to listen to what the Critics had to say, I had accepted that horror films spoke to me in ways that no film scholar could understand.

If I had to name a single quality that marks my favourite horror films, I’d point to a near-ritualistic intensity, a sense of belonging to a very different world with its own, special set of rules: a good horror film, even one that’s located in a familiar setting and has no obviously supernatural elements, feels weirder and more self-contained (to me, at least) than a science-fiction/fantasy film that really IS set on, say, Middle-Earth or Narnia or the moons of Jupiter. My child-self experienced this in the garden after that House viewing.

(“So you’re saying House was a good horror film?”, you ask, backing away slowly [and thinking to yourself, ‘What’s HE doing editing an anthology of film essays?’] Well, yes, it was. For me. At that age. If I saw it today I’d probably laugh, or worse, yawn. But how is that relevant to anything? By the way, more than 20 years after that evening in London, I turned to the Internet to confirm that bony old Ben really did exist – within the world of the film, that is; that he wasn’t just a manufactured childhood memory. I was thrilled when I discovered a photo of him on a website, looking more or less as I remembered him.)

Opening scenes are always crucial to a film’s success in pulling me into its world. Consider the first five minutes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), where an everyday setting gradually turns into something lush and fantastical. As the credits roll, a solemn voiceover tells us that Suzy Banyon, a young American, has come to Germany to join a famous dance academy. We see Suzy walking to the airport exit, and a sense of menace is created by the most ordinary elements: the neon lights in the Departure terminal, a brief glimpse of a woman dressed in red in the distance, the sudden opening of the automatic doors through which Suzy walks (and our simultaneous realisation that a storm is raging outside the airport’s sterile, orderly interiors), the howling of the wind, the water flowing into a nearby drain, the initial obtuseness of the cab driver who takes her to her destination.

Contributing immeasurably to the mood of this sequence is the pounding, punk-rock soundtrack by the band Goblin, with whispers of “witch!” regularly punctuating the score. Suspiria is not especially discreet about the mysteries of its plot: you don’t have to be a student of the genre to figure out that Suzy will find a modern-day witches’ coven at the dance school.

Actually, for the most part this isn’t a subtle film. It’s very arresting visually, and it contains at least three grisly murders filmed with such imagination that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen (isn’t this the opposite of what a horror film is supposed to do?). But unusually for a movie with a lot of gore and blood, it also has graceful scenes that only hint at something unknowable. The barest suggestion of witchcraft, for instance, in the shot where a chambermaid momentarily dazzles Suzy with the light reflected from the silverware she’s cleaning. Or the prolonged nighttime scene in a deserted public square where a blind piano teacher and his seeing-dog sense something evil around them but don’t know exactly what it is (the viewer is given the privilege of a shot of shadows flitting across a building facade – witches? On broomsticks? Or just a flock of birds or bats?). These are the setpieces that stayed with me for weeks after I saw the film. In contrast, when the supernatural is explicitly presented at the end, it’s anti-climactic.

Suspiria would be unimaginable without its lurid colours, but Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (“The Devil Woman”) (1964) is shot in what is usually described as “stark” black and white. Set in medieval Japan, this film opens with an overhead view of a windy grassland, the reeds – more than six feet high – swaying in the breeze. The camera moves closer to show us a large pit in the ground and the next shot is from deep inside this hole, looking up at the sky. The image reminds me of another iconic Japanese horror film, the much more recent Ringu – and its American remake The Ring – apart from evoking the passage in Haruki Murakami’s immense novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where a man shuts the world out by sitting at the bottom of a well.

But now Onibaba’s opening credits appear on the screen – the Japanese script is menacingly distorted at the edges – accompanied by a soundtrack that’s as mood-setting as the Suspiria score, but more drum-based and minimal, and much more disquieting. In the film’s (almost wordless) first five minutes we learn that the pit is a secret maintained by a middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law, who live in squalid conditions in this large marshland. Struggling to make ends meet (the son/husband is away fighting in an army), they murder wounded Samurai who stagger into the grassland looking for shelter, and then sell the armour in exchange for meagre rations of food. Meanwhile they also get by with killing rats, dogs and whatever other creatures they can get their hands on, and generally live like wild animals themselves.

So claustrophobic and stifling is the mise-en-scene of Onibaba that one easily forgets it’s set in the same country and roughly the same period as Akira Kurosawa’s classic Samurai movies. Superficial details of time and place scarcely matter anyway; as in so many great horror films, the setting is really the human soul, and it’s always night-time. Atmosphere is created through hand-held camerawork, eerie aural effects (such as bird sounds in the scenes where the young woman, her face rapturous, races through the grass to meet a lover), and of course the setting itself. But for me the unforgettable image is the malevolent face of the old woman, a streak of white hair in her head making her look like a deranged simulacra of the Indira Gandhi photos I remember from the newspapers of my childhood. As the story progresses, my rational mind tells me that she’s a victim – terrified by the thought that her daughter-in-law will leave her to scavenge for herself – but when her piercing eyes fill the screen, the rational mind goes AWOL.

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In a lovely essay titled “Pictures and Secrets”, Ptolemy Tompkins recalled his father’s advice to him when movie monsters gave him nightmares. “Take them out of the context of the film,” said Peter Tompkins (co-author of The Secret Life of Plants), “and place them somewhere else. Control their actions with your own mind.”

At times I try similar mental games with my personal demons. So Onibaba’s “devil woman” reluctantly leaves her grassland at my bidding. I pull Gabbar Singh (bogeymen can come from far outside the genre) out of the sunbaked landscape that was the dacoits’ hideout in Sholay, then lure the rat-like Nosferatu out of his mansion and seat them all at a tea-party together, with a few zombies from George Romero’s films thrown in as foot-servants, and invitations sent out to Michael Myers from Halloween and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The background music is the sound of Darth Vader’s raspy breathing (I can only hear, not see, him – there was nothing scary about the cheesy black suit!). Unfortunately my mind refuses to take this scenario much further; I’m not sure this lot would have much to say to each other.

However, the films I love have no trouble conversing with each other, even when they are separated by decades, different styles and languages, and an unbridgeable divide in quality. One scene frequently recalls another, setting off a chain of connections in my mind.

As an example, take a randomly selected scene from a film that isn’t strictly a horror movie but which made me shrink into the rickety seat at Delhi’s Shakuntalam Theatre when I first saw it: Fritz Lang’s M, about the hunt for a child-killer in the streets of Berlin.

Early in the film we see a pillar with a notice announcing a reward for the killer’s capture. A little girl bounces her ball against this pillar. At this point the scene is clumsy – there’s no spontaneity in the ball-bouncing, you can tell that the girl is carefully doing what the director is telling her to – but then the shadow of a man comes into the frame from the right. “What a pretty ball!” he says in a childlike voice. Shortly afterwards there’s an aerial view of him buying the girl a balloon while she titters excitedly. Cross-cut to the girl’s mother, waiting for her child to return from school, slowly coming to realise that something is wrong. The sequence ends with a pair of poetic images: the ball slowly rolling out of a hedge, into a patch of grass; the untethered balloon brushing an electric pole and floating away.

So here are three broad constituents of the scene: the girl; the man who approaches her; the ball and the balloon at the close. Whenever I think about any of these elements, other scenes from other films swarm into my head, one scene invoking another, and another, and another, building a monstrous skein of references.

The ball and the balloon adrift. A visual cue for the viewer: something terrible has happened to the little girl, we realise. But what did the man do to her, exactly? A 1930s film couldn’t plainly tell us, but in a way that makes it scarier.

“My son was torn to pieces!” screams the father in the 1980s slasher film Silver Bullet, more than fifty years after M (or five years earlier, in terms of my viewing chronology). In the scene before this, we see a young boy flying a kite late in the evening, in a deserted spot. He hears strange sounds, looks around him nervously; we already know that a ravenous werewolf is on the loose, and we half-cover our eyes. In the next shot we see a policeman carrying the kite, torn, dripping blood. And then the father’s cry.

In most ways that matter, there’s nothing to link M and Silver Bullet (well, except for the important detail that they are both made up of strips of film). Yet, for me, the dual image of the rolling ball and the unrestrained balloon are forever linked to the image of the tethered kite, and to the idea of innocence wantonly destroyed.

The man. The nervous-looking character actor Peter Lorre played the unhinged killer, the shadow on the wall, in M. Ten years later, the same Lorre – a little balder now – played the most scared character in one of my favourite dark comedies. There’s a genuinely creepy scene in Arsenic and Old Lace (assuming you watch it in the original black-and-white, not the hideous colorisation) where a runaway criminal played by Raymond Massey – made up to resemble Boris Karloff as the stitched-together Frankenstein monster – and his doctor, played by Lorre, descend the stairs to a basement. The bodies of 12 men lie buried here, which in itself is not as gross as it sounds: Arsenic and Old Lace is about a pair of sweet, well-intentioned women who do away with lonely old men to put them out of their misery. But the scene with Massey and Lorre going down the stairs, the shadows falling across their faces, the light flickering beyond the closed door they are approaching, gives me the shivers.

The girl: She’s a distant cousin of another young girl playing with a ball, in Federico Fellini’s short film “Toby Dammit”, about a depressive British actor visiting Rome for a movie shoot.

At a press conference, Toby Dammit is asked a string of banal questions. He answers them half-heartedly, crabbily; he looks like he badly needs to sleep. He turns around, seems to see images and people from his past. Dream and reality are blurred – it’s the sort of thing Fellini does so well.

A reporter asks, “Do you believe in God?” “No,” replies the actor.

“And in the Devil?”

Now, for the first time, Toby Dammit looks interested. He leans forward. “Yes. In the Devil, yes,” he says.

“How exciting,” exclaims the questioner, delighted to have hit home, “Have you seen Him? What does He look like? A black cat, a goat, a bat?”

“Oh no,” says Toby, a faraway look coming into his eyes, “To me the Devil is cheerful, agile…”

Cut to an insert of a girl, her face occupying the left half of the screen, grinning diabolically at the camera

“He looks like a little girl.”

Why the actor is haunted by this image I’ll leave you to discover for yourself. But while the little girl in M was a cherubic victim, the girl in “Toby Dammit” is Beelzebub. A role reversal, and a reminder that in horror there are no rules, no character types. Anyone can be monster or prey, or both at once.

But already the connections are overflowing, like the swollen river of blood coming through the slowly opening door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. As I finished writing the last paragraph, I remembered that the British actor Terence Stamp played the lethargic Toby Dammit, and that my first ever viewing of Stamp was as the evil General Zod in Superman II. It was a supremely entertaining movie, with the inbuilt assurance (as in any Superman film) that things would turn out all right in the end, but it contained one scene that gave me many sleepless nights as a child: Zod and his two minions land on the moon, slay a human astronaut by tearing off his oxygen mask and then kick his dying body gleefully into the distance.

My chief memory of the film today is the utter helplessness of that poor moonstruck astronaut in the face of this assault by Godlike beings. It was so unfair, so far from a fight between equals. Even today, the scene makes it impossible for me to think of Superman 2 as a feel-good movie.

Other connections aren’t so obvious, or maybe they are obvious only to me. I mentioned Psycho being a reference point for much of my other movie-watching. Well, Suzy Banyon’s journey in the taxi at the beginning of Suspiria always reminds me of Marion Crane’s car drive in Hitchcock’s film – a voyage to the netherworld, with lightning heralding the way. It ends with a similar image too: a menacing building (the Bates Motel in Psycho, the dance school here) coming into clear focus through the rain-soaked night. Welcome to Hades.

“Take off your mask,” whispers Onibaba’s old woman to the young Samurai who has just told her that he has a beautiful face underneath the demon mask he is wearing, “I’ve never seen anything really beautiful in my whole life.” The words open a window to a lifetime of struggle and squalor, reminding us of the dire straits of the two women who need to hawk the armour of dead warriors to get food. But it also makes me think about the unhappy world that lies just beneath the surface horrors of Psycho: a world where the now-psychotic Mrs Bates was once a young widow, raising a little boy all by herself, vulnerable to the charms of a smooth-talking man who was after her money; a world where being left alone is the biggest fear of all.

But Onibaba’s Samurai mask is beautiful too, in its own way. It’s just as impassively beautiful as the smooth white face-cover worn by the young girl Christine in Georges Franju’s indescribably lyrical Eyes Without a Face. In this cult classic, the monster not only has a human face, he’s a loving father – a doctor who surgically removes the skin off the faces of kidnapped young women in increasingly desperate attempts to cure his disfigured daughter. Meanwhile she wanders the lawns of the mansion alone, wearing her white mask, communing with the birds and the captive dogs her father has been conducting grisly experiments on.

****

Often, when I’m driving alone late at night, I catch myself humming a certain tune without realising it. Then I remember: it’s Maurice Jarre’s spooky score from the opening scene of Eyes Without a Face, in which a middle-aged woman drives a car through deserted streets, occasionally stopping to glance in the rear-view mirror at a shadowy figure in the back-seat. We don’t yet know that the figure in the back-seat is a dead girl whose body has to be disposed of, but the music, the camerawork, the worried but determined look on the middle-aged woman’s face, combine to tell us that something is very wrong.

Driving, I look into the rear-view mirror, half-expecting to see a body slumped in the back-seat, its face inadequately covered by a large floppy hat, but darkened by a trick of the light.

Other scenes from other horror films have similarly infected my life, so that in certain situations and settings I find myself playing out those very moments. While sightseeing, if I see something I want to photograph and reach for the camera around my shoulder, my own gesture makes me think of the split-second shot in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom where Mark Lewis – a disturbed young man whose camera is almost an extension of his personality – reflexively reaches for his shoulder, where the instrument would normally be, the one time his lady friend persuades him to leave home without it.

Or when I’m walking through a deserted car park on a Sunday afternoon, I think of the agoraphobia-inducing scene in Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis in a desolate neighborhood on a sunny day (who said a slasher movie’s scariest scenes had to be shot in the dark!), dozens of cars parked around her but not a human being in view – and the seemingly omniscient killer Mike Myers presumably watching her from somewhere. It’s a suburban setting – the old rational mind tells me there must be people around, possibly in their houses, looking out from behind the curtains or lolling on rocking-chairs on their porches – but the effect of the scene is just as vivid and intense as if this were Little Red Riding Hood walking alone through the jungle at dusk.

If I’m in a large hall with many exits and corridors, and just a few people moving in and out of the “frame” of my vision, I find myself in the glorious tracking shot from the museum scene in Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill, where a middle-aged housewife alternates between being quarry and pursuer to a handsome stranger. But then, if a flash of light – a reflection from someone’s glasses or cellphone – catches my eye, the scene quickly changes and I’m in a late scene from the same film, where another woman is momentarily blinded by the light glancing off the razor blade that a killer holds in his hand. Or there’s the chambermaid from Suspiria again, flashing her silverware at me.

Thinking about it, I realise that hardly any of my favourite scary scenes would be improved by better technology. No other genre can make such a virtue of being shot on a shoestring budget. Once in a while, even incompetence can be a useful thing. A jerky camera or careless editing can be unsettling in a certain context, and how many cases there have been – especially in zombie and vampire films – of mediocre actors unwittingly making a film more effective because their reactions seem so unnatural, so removed from regular human behaviour!

Which is not to say that good, low-budget horror films are “accidents”. Far from it. But finesse and money can spoil their effect. It’s no coincidence that the silent film was particularly well suited to this genre – horror and fantasy films from that era still hold up so well because their creakiness gives them an unmatched visceral effect. Watch the hero slaying an obviously papier-mache dragon in Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Siegfried, a smoky liquid flowing out of the creature’s ruptured sides, and you’ll know what I mean.

Improved technology can dampen the horror-movie experience in other ways, I realise, as I watch a 70-minute “Making Of” feature on my DVD of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Generally speaking, DVD Extras, with their audio commentaries and interview packages and outtakes, have been a boon to me as a movie buff. But the information overload can be deflating when it comes to films that I’d prefer to think of as belonging to a special, self-contained universe.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre exemplifies that sort of movie, and it would be so nice to be able to think of it as something that was made anonymously – perhaps by a cannibal family as a macabre home video – and then deposited into the mailbox of one of the studios, with a note asking them to distribute it. But here, 30 years later, are the crew members – respectably middle-aged, laughing and joking with each other, relating anecdotes. Director Tobe Hooper tells us he decided on the film’s title when his girlfriend at the time exclaimed, “Yuck, I’d never watch anything called that!” (Decided?! And here I was thinking that everything about that film just fell into place entirely independently of such banalities as human decisions.) One of the scriptwriters (this film needed to be scripted?) relates the story behind the dead armadillo we see as road-kill in the first shot. And here’s the actress Marilyn Burns, whom I’d have preferred to freeze into my memory-bank for all time as the screaming, blood-covered Sally trapped in a house of horrors; now she’s gazing into the camera with grandmotherly indulgence. Even Gunnar Hansen, who played the chainsaw-wielding, retarded monster Leatherface, participates in audio commentary.

And now here’s the Onibaba DVD, with colour footage (!) of the tents where the crew lived communally, cosily together during the month-long shoot. Those grasslands no longer look unfathomably creepy and alive, and the people are dressed in modern clothes, even T-shirts. Between shots, they were probably reading Manga or listening to their Sony transistors! For a fan of the film, that’s a blasphemous thought.

Of course, horror-movie DVD extras can be illuminating (as when Dario Argento relates a childhood memory of having to walk down a long dark corridor to his room every night, each half-open door on either side seeming to contain a threat) and I still watch them with enthusiasm. But when I’m alone at home and it’s dark outside and I see shadows and hear little noises (and it’s probably my years of experience in watching horror films that has made me conscious of all these things), at such times I return to the pristineness of those childhood days, the days before I started reading about cinema and discovering back-stories: sitting in a room with cringing children, watching a film that I knew nothing about beyond the images flickering the screen – images that were more real than most things in the real world.

****

“Everything means something, I guess,” says a character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Could he be talking about the tendency of film buffs to read layers and layers of meaning into a movie that means a great deal to them (especially when the film isn’t widely deemed to be worthy of analysis)? Could this be the hidden message: if a film says something to you, touches something deep within you, listen to it, open yourself to it; don’t give in to the hectoring of those who dismiss it as “cheap entertainment”, even if you’re in a minority of one.

After all, horror film are especially vulnerable to genre-snobbery, with viewers routinely putting cerebra before instinct when it comes to assessing their worth. There’s the common phenomenon of people being genuinely affected by a horror film while they are actually watching it, but then emerging from the hall and laughingly dismissing it as nothing more than escapism. I suspect that my love for these movies provided me with a conduit for a basic open-mindedness towards all kinds of films: once you’ve given your heart to a genre that many people are snobbish about, it becomes difficult to be too judgmental about others’ tastes.

There’s the popular story from the earliest days of moving pictures, about the unprepared viewers of a Lumiere Brothers short film who ran out of a Paris theatre when confronted with the image of a train seemingly coming towards them. This is probably apocryphal, but there are other similar, less dramatic stories from that period, and even common sense tells us that the first movie viewers must have experienced quite a few shocks to the system. Today, even the most casual viewers unconsciously process such aspects of film grammar as cross-cutting between unrelated scenes. But in the earliest days, even basic cutting from one image to another (let alone rapid-fire splicing) must have felt otherworldly. To some, it must have been frightening, even demoniac. (Was that puffing train the first movie monster?) Only gradually must viewers have become inured to the violence of the cuts, learnt to stop being scared and love the new medium.

Some of us, though, never stopped wanting to be scared, even as our love for the movies deepened and grew.

Bitter, sweet: Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums

Among the many talents of the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi is a skill for moving fluidly between forms and genres. A few years ago Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud co-directed a film version of her most famous book Persepolis, an autobiographical story about her childhood in Iran under the shadow of the Islamic Revolution and her eventual return as a young woman. I liked the film but I had one reservation: it was too often a straightforward cinematic presentation of the drawings Satrapi had already done for the book. Though there were a few well-chosen moments of added animation – such as an Expressionist scene where little Marjane’s features melt until she resembles the screamer in the famous Munch painting – the overall similarity to the source text made the viewing experience repetitive for a reader who was already very familiar with the book.

I was much happier with Satrapi’s decision to turn her book Chicken with Plums (original title Poulet aux Prunes) into a (mostly) live-action film. The movie, shown recently at Cinefan, is beautifully shot, cleverly structured and anchored by an extraordinary performance by French actor Mathieu Amalric as a depressed, middle-aged violinist named Nasser-Ali – based on a distant relative of Satrapi in 1950s Tehran – who decides to end his life. That doesn’t sound like an upbeat story, and indeed the film makes a point of confirming early on that Nasser-Ali does die: a shot of his funeral is followed by a series of flashbacks that take us through his final eight days, as well as flashbacks within flashbacks that recount various earlier episodes, including a tragic love affair that aided his artistic growth but also cast a black shadow over his personal life. (“The love you have lost,” says his music teacher, not channelling Rockstar, “will be in each note you play.”)

What is most notable though is the film’s consistently whimsical tone and its many quaint asides such as the “flash-forwards” to the future lives of Nasser-Ali’s children, or a scene where he is visited by Azrael, the talkative Angel of Death. Chicken with Plums is a demonstration of how a movie can begin on a farcical, even buffoonish, note but gradually reveal its secrets so that – without the viewer even realising it – a deeply moving portrait of an individual and his society emerges. And yet, the light-hearted tone is never forsaken. Certain characters – such as Nasser-Ali’s apparently sullen, shrewish wife – are presented unflatteringly at first, and only later shown in a more poignant light. There are jokes about death, as in the sequence where he mulls and rejects various suicide options (being discovered with a plastic bag over one’s head would not be very dignified, would it?).

This tenor sometimes tilts into over-the-top slapstick: one scene has vignettes from the crass American life destined for Nasser-Ali’s son Cyrus, who will marry his cheerleader girlfriend after he accidentally gets her pregnant, settle into hick domesticity and look goggle-eyed when he learns that his own (pea-brained but elephant-sized) daughter has a bun in the oven. This is broad caricature, but under it is the suggestion that Cyrus’s life may not have taken this turn if his father had been a happier, more fulfilled man. A personal tragedy involving two people echoes across time and space, affecting the lives of generations and spawning its own mini-histories.

This can be described as a bittersweet film, though I feel like that word is a little insubstantial (it has a patronising edge to it, as if saying “This isn’t really serious, but it’ll do until something deeper comes along”). Chicken with Plums allows a viewer to laugh at certain aspects of situations that are essentially tragic; at times it might even seem that we are laughing at Nasser-Ali himself. But the mirth is less specific, more inclusive than that – it recognises how the profound and the ridiculous constantly coexist in human lives. There is a running gag about Nasser-Ali being interrupted by an inappropriate sound whenever he is about to say something meaningful (and one hilarious scene imagines the philosopher Socrates’s last words being similarly interrupted) – these scenes are reminders of the many banana peels strewn on life's roads, waiting to make us look silly just as we are constructing grand narratives or making life-changing decisions. But that doesn’t make us pathetic, only human, and Satrapi's film is gently, wonderfully cognisant of this.

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard column. An old post on Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries is here]

Notes on A Separation

The Iranian film A Separation was one of the most widely acclaimed movies of the past year, but I went into it knowing very little other than that it was about a married couple on the verge of divorce because the wife wants a better life (outside Iran) for their young daughter while the husband needs to look after his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. Based on this synopsis, I expected to see a nuanced story about people trying to balance their responsibilities, feelings and circumstances. And indeed, Asghar Farhadi’s film is all of this.

But it is also (and this I wasn’t expecting) something very much like a thriller, complete with tale-altering twists; a psychological detective story where revelations aren’t just frisson-generators but flow all too naturally from the characters’ personalities and situations. Emerging from the screening at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, I found myself in a variant of the discussions one has after watching a film from the mystery genre, such as Kahaani or The Usual Suspects. ”Remember that line where she says...?” “What did that glance really mean?” “That exchange was so unobtrusive, one barely registered it at the time.” “I need to see THAT scene again.”

Two levels of suspense – inseparable from each other – exist in A Separation, and they both circle around the film’s central incident: a brief scuffle between the husband, Nader, and the lower-class woman, Razieh, whom he has employed to look after his father while he is away at work. There is, first, the mode of the conventional “whodunit” (or “what happened”) and though it feels glib to discuss a slice-of-life drama in such terms, the film itself makes nods to such suspense – as in a scene where Nader retraces the incident (which has got him into legal trouble) for the police.

But the other form of suspense – one that persists through the film – is at the level of character, where the concealment of seemingly minor information gives us a different perspective on a person's behaviour. Layers are gradually peeled away and we see the full potential (for goodness, anger, deception, understanding) of all the protagonists: Nader and (to a lesser extent) his wife Simin; their intelligent daughter Termeh; Razieh and her hot-headed husband Houjat.

Here's just one example of this understated suspense and the emotional complexity in this film’s best scenes. (Minor spoiler alert) Razieh has accused Nader of causing her miscarriage, which is a very serious matter because the foetus was over four months old and therefore technically a human being as per the local law. Much hinges on whether he knew she was pregnant when he gave her a slight push to get her out of his house.

At one point Nader confesses to his daughter that he had known Razieh was pregnant, but it had slipped his mind at that specific moment. (“But you know how the law is – they expect everything to be in black or white. According to them, either I knew or I didn’t know.”) This is borne out cinematically: the early scene where Nader (and by extension the viewer) overhears a conversation mentioning the pregnancy is shot in such a way that the information is presented almost subliminally, with other things simultaneously occupying his (and our) attention – it isn’t stressed at all. At the time of the altercation, therefore, the viewer is in the same position as Nader: so focused on the high emotion of the moment (he has just discovered that Razieh left his father alone at home, almost causing his death) that he isn’t thinking about Razieh’s condition. In other words, he knew and he didn’t know; it’s a difficult idea to express in a film, but this one manages it.

****

After watching A Separation I read two or three reviews by Western critics, and thought it interesting that they discussed it mainly in terms of the broad cultural differences between Iran and the West (therefore clubbing all the characters in this film together) while glossing over the schism between the two sets of lifestyles depicted within the story: the relatively well-off, cosmopolitan life of Nader’s family as opposed to the penury of Razieh and Houjat. But this is another important kind of separation, one that is based on privilege and education – it’s a separation between those who can (just about) afford to employ domestic staff and those who are forced to take up such positions to make ends meet (even if it means that a woman from a tradition-bound family must hide the fact that she is working). It’s a separation between people who are still rigidly devout (to the extent of staking their souls on the Holy Book) and those who have moved away from (or adopted a more relaxed attitude to) religion. And this separation has a distinct bearing on the plot arc, the actions of these people and their attitudes to one another.

The tension of the class divide is manifest in offhand little exchanges. “You think all we do is beat our wives all day” Houjat shouts at Nader in the judge’s chambers; in another context, he exclaims “These people don’t even believe in God”, to which Nader retorts sarcastically, “Yes, God is only for you people.” At one point the conservative Razieh has to take religious advice about whether she is allowed to change the old man’s trousers when he has soiled himself. And Nader tells the judge that he couldn’t make out Razieh was pregnant because “she is wearing a chador all the time”. Over the course of the story, these separations become so overwhelming that the characters can barely see or hear each other; cultural differences, secrets and misunderstandings accumulate to create a snowball effect; much is revealed about individual character and, by extension, about the workings of a society.

I thought the growing complexity of the film’s structure (wherein we come to empathise with different people in turn) was reflected in the difference between its opening and closing shots, both of which are lengthy takes. The opening shot is relatively straightforward, with the camera adopting the perspective of the judge who listens to Nader and Simin make their case for a divorce. As viewers we are put in his position, asked to listen to these two people (whom we barely know at this stage) and form opinions about them. But in the long closing shot, which takes place as the end-credits roll and Nader and Simin wait outside the judge’s room (with other people, all of whom no doubt have their own dramatic stories, moving about in the corridor near them), the camera’s eye has become “objective”. We are no longer expected to judge (and by this point, the immense difficulty of forming judgements has been made obvious). We simply watch and wait for further developments.

Putting the "act" in action: Black Friday, Sword of Doom

When we think of master-classes in film acting, we usually envision performers firing sharply written lines at each other in intense dramatic confrontations or (less often) comic setpieces. Or scenes that have little dialogue but where the silences are soaked in meaning; where each pause, each glance, is somehow significant; where “understatement” rules the moment. For a good sense of what is commonly thought of as a performance highlight, look at the short clips chosen when the acting nominations are read out at the Oscars. Watch enough of them and you'll see definite patterns emerging (and that’s without taking into account the Motion Picture Academy’s fondness for certain types of roles – physically or mentally disadvantaged characters, for instance – rather than the performances in them).

One thing that is usually not associated with acting chops is the high-voltage action sequence: fight scenes or chases are usually perceived as fillers or tempo-raisers, and that's what they often are (and in many of them, stuntmen substitute for the actors anyway). But every once in a while, an action scene does afford opportunities for fine performances as well as for character development within a narrative.

Recently I watched the Extras on a DVD of Anurag Kashyap’s masterful film Black Friday, about the investigation that followed the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. Among the movie’s highlights is the superbly choreographed and shot sequence where a group of cops pursue a suspect, Imtiaz Ghavate, through a slum area. “Anurag told me he wanted a performance from me in this chase scene,” says the actor Pranay Narayan – who plays Ghavate – in the “Making of” documentary, and a performance it certainly is. Over the course of this long scene, Imtiaz goes from being a menacing bhai figure (the first time we see him he is shot from a low camera angle, looming above us, looking blasé and in control) to a snivelling wreck being bullied around by the police; by the end it’s almost possible to feel sorry for him.

The scene begins on a purposefully energetic note, as you’d expect, but gradually becomes something of a comic routine, as the policemen and their quarry move in circles and get worn out. One hysterically funny shot has an unfit cop calling out “Imtiaz, ruk ja” as both men pant breathlessly – by this point they are lurching rather than running, and the effect is that of two quarrelling lovers trying half-heartedly to make up. It’s a fine depiction of the banality of police-work, humanising both cop and criminal – a considerable achievement given that this is a story about terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people. It’s also a significant step away from the traditional depiction of cops and robbers in Hindi cinema. And the performances help make it compulsively believable.

Good acting is even rarer in full-blooded fight sequences. In her book Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me (which I reviewed here), Jessica Hines observes that in Bombay to Goa, made before he settled into the Angry Young Man image, Amitabh Bachchan seemed awkward during much of the film and then came alive in the fight sequences at the end. I’m not sure about this specific example (the fights in Bombay to Goa aren’t so much properly worked out action scenes as vignettes of various people knocking each other about in speeded-up motion), but not many people would disagree that Bachchan was extremely convincing in his really well-staged fight sequences in films like Sholay and Kaala Patthar.

One of my favourite “action performances” in this vein is by the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai in the climactic scene of the 1966 film Sword of Doom. Nakadai plays a sadistic swordsman named Ryunosuke who spends much of the story killing and plundering. At the end, as he sits alone in a geisha-house, he is visited by the ghosts of his victims as well as by real people who want him dead; turning completely psychotic, he slashes wildly at these phantoms over the course of an extraordinary, bloody 10-minute sequence.

Jaw-dropping in its length and persistence, this scene is the perfect apocalyptic finish to a story about a cruel and violent man facing his demons - it’s almost Shakespearean in its suggestion of the past haunting the present, and Nakadai (who would play King Lear for Kurosawa years later) is outstanding in the way he seems to be simultaneously a sentient person and a zombie. At times his movements become so mechanical one gets the impression that his arm is being driven by his “evil” sword. His eyes are hollow and lifeless, he flails unthinkingly at the air, but then he comes alive again and seems briefly conscious of what is going on around him; and then again he retreats into his own private world, while his arm continues slashing away.

Nothing in this sequence (or in the Black Friday one) would make it to those smooth Oscar acting clips, but these performances are integral to the films’ effectiveness. They are reminders that some action scenes require a little more from a performer than a grunted, expressionless “I’ll be back.”

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]