This is part of an occasional series I'll be doing about little connections between films – scenes that echo each other in some way, even if it's a couple of fleeting shots that may have been conceived as a tribute (and even if it's all only in my head!). Apologies if this sounds film-schoolish – that isn't the intention. Just being self-indulgent really, and sharing an aspect of movie-watching that I personally find rewarding.
There’s a playful scene in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, which reminded me of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. (As mentioned in this post, Scorsese admits to being a big fan of Godard's movie.) The Contempt sequence, quite a famous one, has a nude Brigitte Bardot lying on her stomach – she plays Camille, the wife of the film's protagonist Paul, and they are in bed together. As they talk, she asks him to look at various parts of her body and assess them. “Do you like my ankles? My knees?” “What do you think of my behind?”
The back-story is that Godard was instructed by his producer to include a few nude shots of Bardot (what's the point of having Bardot in your film if she's covered up?) – something he was reluctant to do because it was such an obvious sop for the 
mass audience. Eventually, he retained some of his integrity by coming up with a scene where the sex symbol deconstructs herself (or her screen image) by explicitly drawing the viewer’s attention to parts of her body. The idea was to de-eroticise Bardot, though I'm not really sure that happened: I think the scene is still quite sexy in its own way, partly because of how it suggests the relaxed intimacy between a married couple who are very familiar with each other's bodies – it just isn't sexy in the way that more typical Brigitte Bardot films tended to be.
Now for a scene in Mean Streets, made a decade later. Charlie (Harvey Keitel) is in a post-coital moment with Teresa (Amy Robinson). They banter, he gets defensive about something, she gets annoyed, jumps out of bed and stands at the window naked. They fool around some more, and Scorsese fools around too; when Charlie forms a gun with his hands, points it at Teresa and pulls the “trigger”, we hear a real gunshot on the soundtrack.
Then she starts to get dressed and tells him not to look. Charlie obeys, but after putting his fingers over his eyes he splays them so he can see her. He moves the hand covering his right eye from a vertical to a horizontal position and spreads his fingers out again – it's like a film’s clapboard opening and closing. Effectively, he's changing the angles, like a camera shifting perspective. (It reminds me of Godard's use of colour filters while photographing Bardot in that scene in Contempt.)
Finally there comes a moment where Charlie, still looking through his fingers, contemplates Teresa's bare bottom (partly covered by her shirt) from an unusual side-angle – there's nothing erotic about this image, in fact it's faintly ridiculous, and Charlie can't stop himself from giggling at the sight.
But the undercurrent to this lighthearted scene is that Charlie knows he’ll never be able to marry Teresa (his family has warned him not to get involved with her, and he’s an obedient, partly repressed Catholic boy). Being aware of the barrier between them, he keeps trying to distance himself from this girl. In this scene, I think the detachment takes the form of his “fragmenting” Teresa, so that he can view her as a set of dissociated parts rather than as a whole woman, a person with feelings. And it’s typical of Scorsese that he pays homage to a favourite film in such a way that he enriches his own movie in the process. There’s nothing gimmicky or derivative about this scene – it’s an echo, but it works perfectly well on its own terms.
My latest Persistence of Vision column for Yahoo! India is about why I think of Martin Scorsese as a kindred spirit first and a great director second. Here goes.
Update: here's the full piece
The great director as permanent student
A long, long time ago, I got my hands on The Variety Book of Movie Lists, a collection of "best-of" listings in numerous categories. The contributors included critics, authors and directors, and most of their lists, as you'd expect, were restricted to ten or fewer films. Neatly selected and pruned, a single list rarely took up more than half a page. But there was one notable exception. Martin Scorsese - designated as "director and film history expert extraordinaire" - blithely named dozens of movies in each category that he contributed to.
His personal selection of noir titles ran to over 60 films, including many B-movies I hadn't even heard of. His list of "Best Colour Films" included nearly 80 movies, spread over three pages. (I soon realised that "best colour films" didn't mean best films that happened to be in colour - in that case, Scorsese's list might have been book-length! - but films that, in his view, made the best use of colour photography.)
Going through these lists told me a few things about the man who had drawn them up. They told me, first, that Scorsese had watched a LOT of films and that he wasn't obsessed with proclaiming favourites or ranking movies "in order of preference" (his lists were alphabetical). Also that he had very wide-ranging tastes and was unapologetic about it: he would put a brassy, big-budget Hollywood studio epic on the same page as an artistically high-minded European avant-garde movie; his choice of horror films from the Hammer Studios included movies that many respectable critics wouldn't even deign to watch.
At the time, the only Scorsese-directed films I had seen were Mean Streets and Taxi Driver (I was into Old Hollywood then, not all this new-fangled - meaning post-1960s - stuff). Both films feature a cameo by the director: in Mean Streets, he plays a hitman who gleefully kisses his gun before shooting Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy in the neck in the violent climax; in Taxi Driver he appears, bearded, sinister, looking vaguely Satanic, as a passenger who makes De Niro's cab-driver stop outside an apartment where (he claims) his wife is cheating on him.
These two roles were my first glimpses of Scorsese on screen, and they fixed him in my mind as a tough guy who made gritty, violent urban movies about gangsters and psychotic loners (and who presumably wouldn't have much time for the gentler films of an earlier age). But the Scorsese I subsequently discovered - through his interviews and the video introductions he did for various films - was the antithesis of those cameo roles, a kindly, middle-aged man with a seemingly boundless knowledge of film history.
Interestingly, many of the movies that Scorsese loves are movies that most viewers would think of as very un-Scorsese-like. Take Jean Renoir's The River, a beautifully photographed tale about an English girl coming of age, learning about love and loss, in Bengal in the early 1950s. I love the look of this film - particularly its poetic use of dissolves - and I also appreciate that though the main characters are British, it isn't patronizing towards India and Indians (quite an achievement for a foreign film made in that era). But The River is also static in places, heavily dependent on voiceover, and the acting is very uneven. I'm perplexed by Scorsese's unqualified adoration for it.
On my DVD there's a video introduction by Scorsese, who was instrumental in the restoration of the print. He first saw this film at age nine, he tells us, and it was one of his formative experiences as a child. "It was my first experience of a very different culture," he says, adding self-deprecatingly, "My family wasn't well-educated, I didn't know much about other places, but despite my own very different Italian-American background, I identified with these people on the screen, I felt for them."
****
Watching Martin Scorsese speak about a favourite movie is a good way to get excited about the medium. He waves his hands about, talks in the rapid-fire style one associates with gangster films of the 1930s; he's an excitable child, but he's incredibly eloquent and perceptive at the same time. You see the master technician take over when he discusses Renoir's careful framing of the lush tropical landscape in The River, the role of colour as a character in the film, and how the rich, intense photography reminded him of the Impressionist paintings of Renoir's father Auguste (whose work Scorsese had also seen as a child without knowing anything about the connection between the two men).
Many of us, after entering adulthood's prison, tend to be wary of the films that held us in thrall when we were children or adolescents; we are afraid that revisiting them might reveal them to be quaint and embarrassing, and destroy our idealised memories. But here's Scorsese, director of groundbreaking modern movies like Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, saying in the most matter-of-fact way that he still watches The River at least three or four times every year, he loves it that much.
Of course, it's one among hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of movies that he cares about. I've read his views on many films and I've rarely if ever found him saying something strongly critical - he comes across as the archetype of the open-minded movie-lover whose first (and often only) instinct is to see something good or useful in a film. I find this quality fascinating in a man who is himself a very exacting, particular filmmaker. Surely you'd expect Martin Scorsese to be more discerning, even snobbish?
When he does mention a film that didn't appeal to him too much, he's almost apologetic about it; he dissects his own response. Discussing another Renoir movie, Rules of the Game (in an interview in the book Projections 7), he says that he couldn't personally relate to it because he didn't understand the aristocratic world and the class divide that it depicted. When he says he prefers Godard's Contempt and My Life to Live to his later work, he adds, "It grabs me when his films tell stories; I'm not hip enough to get into the other stuff." (Italics mine.)
After I became more familiar with Scorsese's own cinema, I came to appreciate how often and how generously he pays tribute to the films that influenced him. The opening credits of Mean Streets (still my personal favourite Scorsese movie) include a shot of a motion-picture camera coming to life, which is reminiscent of the opening credits of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (another film Scorsese helped restore). In a pivotal emotional scene near the end of Casino, Scorsese uses a few notes from Georges Delerue's lovely, mournful score for Contempt. Unlike most other great directors, he unselfconsciously remakes films made by other people: films like the workmanlike 1960s thriller Cape Fear (which, again to my surprise, Scorsese referred to as a "gem" in one of his interviews; sorry Marty, but it ain't anything of the sort!).
Audacious as this will sound, much as I admire Scorsese's own body of work, I still think of him primarily as a film buff and permanent student - and therefore, a kindred spirit. If I had to name a single director, from any period or any country, with whom I'd want to spend a week discussing and arguing about movies, he would get my vote hands down.
P.S. For some of Scorsese's typically enthusiastic mini-reviews of old Hollywood films, visit this site and check the archives.
[From a column I did for Business Standard]
I recently realised that this month marks 10 years since I first got an Internet connection at home. (I was a Net user for a year or so before that, but only sporadically, at a tech-savvy friend’s house – it took me a long time to overcome my diffidence about being alone with the monster.) This led to speculation about the role the WWW played in my development as a movie-lover – even to the point where it helped me transfer a personal obsession to a professional sphere.
For a youngster living in Delhi, the early 1990s was a lonely time if you were interested in something other than mainstream Hindi cinema – for me, it was marked by solitary treks to the video libraries of embassies, a copy of my thick movie guide in a polythene bag. As a teenage Indian who became inexplicably and unreasonably passionate about (for example) Hollywood films of the 1930s, it was unthinkable that I would ever be able to discuss these interests with anyone else; it had to remain a privately pursued hobby and there was certainly no future in it (assuming of course that I wasn’t going to move to the US and become a film historian).
When I got my first personal computer in late 1995, a precious side-purchase was a CD-ROM titled Cinemania '96, a collection of film reviews, essays, movie stills, biographical details and – most fascinatingly – short clips from around 25 seminal American and British films. Articles on the CD were “hyperlinked”, which meant that clicking on an actor’s name in a cast list took you straight to his biography page – it was a wondrous discovery and my first (relatively primitive) experience of something that I today take for granted on the Internet. Back then, being able to watch short clips from films like Taxi Driver (the tense two-minute scene with Martin Scorsese in a cameo appearance as a paranoid husband who makes Travis Bickle park outside his wife’s apartment) on a PC, without having to go out and rent a videocassette, seemed like the apotheosis of technology’s marvels.
But after the Net made its advent, the parameters changed forever. In the months and years that followed, I spent a large amount of time on movie websites, sometimes contributing short pieces to them. My first paying assignment as a film writer came not for a print publication but as a moonlighter for the now-long-defunct website Cafedilli, which – the nature of the Internet being what it is – had no problem with a Delhi-based writer doing articles on international cinema. And though I was never too keen on online forums, it could be a stress-buster to occasionally log on to a site run by people with similar interests and take part in a short, intense discussion about Cary Grant or Preston Sturges – if only to remind myself that the world did contain other nutcases obsessive about the same things (some of whom, it turned out, were actually Indians, based in my city) **. All this, incidentally, was before blogs became popular and the real explosion of opinion pornography began.
Even knowing how the Net has mollycoddled our generation – turning what used to be arduous, hard-won research into a matter of a few well-chosen search words and mouse-clicks – one never ceases to be surprised by how much is available online. Recently, while writing a piece on Hitchcock's Vertigo, I decided to see if YouTube had any material – interviews, commentary - on the film. Among the goodies I found was an alternate ending that had been shot for European audiences (and which I had never seen before, even though my DVD of the film has a good collection of special features) as well as valuable information about the restoration of the film’s negative. Each time I make serendipitous discoveries like these, I marvel at my naiveté in thinking that the Cinemania CD-ROM was the best that it could get. On the Net, I’ve watched documentaries and behind-the-scenes footage that there would be little chance of getting hold of anywhere else; all of it contributes in an ongoing way to my movie-love and helps me grow as a writer too. And who can even begin to guess what the future will bring?
** It turns out that the nutcase factor works both ways. One of the recent pleasures of Net-surfing has been the discovery of excellent Bollywood blogs created by non-Indians who have a fascination for Hindi cinema – such as such as Beth Loves Bollywood, Filmiholic and the Post-Punk Cinema Club blog, a treasure-trove of posts about Shashi Kapoor films of the 1960s and 1970s (even a Bollywood historian would be astonished by some of the detail). More on these in a later column.
[Related nostalgia posts here, here and here.]
Of all things, I found myself thinking about V S Naipaul while watching the Martin Scorsese-directed rockumentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan on DVD the other day. It’s been instructive to see the gleeful reactions from media and public after the publication of excerpts from the new Naipaul biography. “Naipaul admits to torturing wife!” screamed reductive headlines, making it seem like an ancient crime demanding immediate and merciless prosecution had come to light. You had to read the reports more closely for the less dramatic picture to emerge: that of a man describing a marriage gone wrong, expressing the guilt he still feels for his part in it, and acknowledging that he was a very bad husband.
Human nature being what it is, it’s inevitable that such revelations about a public figure should be followed by smug, self-righteous outrage, even from those (dare one say, especially from those?) who are different from Naipaul only in that they lack awareness of their own faults. (By the way, here’s one of my favourites among the long line of uneducated comments on the good old Rediff.com messageboard: “We should take away his Noble and throw him out of India!!!”) But what's interesting is the way people have gloated over the supposed contrast between the greatness of Naipaul’s work and his failures as a man, in a private relationship. Accusations of hypocrisy have been bandied about: this writer who so masterfully held the light up to our foibles, how dare he have any human shortcomings himself?
I thought there were small parallels in No Direction Home, a wonderful two-part documentary that covers five of the defining years in Bob Dylan’s career: between 1961, when he came to New York City, a gawky, aspiring folk singer doing covers of musicians he admired and throwing together a few of his own tunes, and 1966, by which time he had taken up the electric guitar, adopted a (possibly ironic) mainstream rock-star persona and in the process alienated many fans of his early work. By the mid-1960s, Dylan had come to represent the counter-culture: some of his early songs had become anthems for the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war feeling that was spreading across America because of the developments in Vietnam; they gave a voice to disaffected youngsters and captured the zeitgeist of a fascinatingly turbulent period. Given all this, it isn’t hard to understand why there were cries of anguish when he went electric and began playing with a loud back-up band. His folk-music followers claimed that the “real” Dylan, the “pure” Dylan, was the shy troubadour who strummed an acoustic guitar, wrote and sang straightforward lyrics like “Masters of War”, “With God on Our Side” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” – earnest, easy-to-label topical songs. They couldn’t reconcile themselves to the pouting rock star who penned surreal, allusive lyrics about Ezra Pound and T S Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower while calypso singers laughed at them and fishermen threw flowers, and Ma Raney and Beethoven unwrapping a bed roll where tuba players now rehearse around a flagpole.
What No Direction Home makes clear is that by 1966, Dylan was very, very tired of all the attention, the constant scrutiny, the second-guessing of his motives and the fact that people didn’t understand his need to take new artistic directions rather than remain pigeonholed by others’ expectations. My favourite bits of the documentary are his interactions with reporters. At press conferences, over-earnest journalists ask him about the “subtle messages” in his songs. He pays them little heed, looking at them in a glassy-eyed way, occasionally working up just enough interest to mock their questions. (Question: “How many protest singers would you say there are today, who use their music, and use the songs to protest the social state in which we live today?” Answer: “I think there’s about one hundred and thirty-six. Either that or one hundred and forty-two.” Question: “What do you have to say about the recurring motorcycle imagery in your songs?” Answer: “Um, I think we all like motorcycles to some degree.”) They get angry. They insist that he acknowledge the effect his work has had on people, define his own impact and importance as an artist. “What do you want me to say, man?” he whines back. They ask him to explain the significance of the T-shirt he wears in the photograph on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, and he laughs. They ask him if he thinks of himself as a musician or a lyricist. “I’m a song-and-dance man,” he replies.
Interspersed with all this is footage of distressed fans at his England concerts, claiming that he had “sold out” or “gone commercial”. (The frequent cries of “it’s all roobish” made me wonder if a young Geoffrey Boycott was at Albert Hall in 1966.) Later, there’s a brilliant moment where a reporter asks him, “Would you agree that your earlier songs were much better than the recent work?” and Dylan, after discovering that the reporter is a Frenchman, deadpans, “You’re French? See, that’s probably why you think the earlier songs are better.” (I read this as Dylan’s wry commentary on the tendency to impute convenient motives to everything, e.g. “You went electric because you’ve sold out to the Establishment.")
Over the past four decades, people have analysed Dylan’s lyrics ad infinitum, especially the stream-of-consciousness ones on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, but Dylan himself has reserved the right not to have to explain his work – an attitude that has often served as a defence mechanism for artists across fields. (I think of Hitchcock confounding his defenders by dismissing Psycho as “a fun picture, made mainly with the objective of earning lots of money around the world”.) Dylan also reserved the right to be selfish and self-absorbed; to not personally take part in the rallies and causes that his songs had become so closely associated with. 
In the documentary, Joan Baez, nearing 70 and lovely as ever, admits being greatly disappointed – as a friend and fan – by his refusal to show a political conscience. But she also admits that it was foolish to expect anything of him beyond the songs themselves. (Incidentally Baez also recounts Dylan’s amusement when she told him her interpretation of one of his songs: “They’ll be discussing those lyrics for decades,” he replied, “and I don’t even know why I wrote it.”)
No Direction Home is notable for its exploration of the enigmatic relationship between an artist and his audience; how certain people can become symbols for other people’s hopes and dreams, and how thin the line can be between worshiping someone and feeling betrayed by them. (A cry of “Judas!”, one of the strongest denunciations you can find in the Christian world, rang out at a Manchester concert.) This is something that even viewers who aren’t particularly fans of Dylan, or don’t know about his career trajectory, should be able to appreciate. But the film is also very enjoyable for fans of the music of the period, with glimpses of the work of Dylan’s idols and contemporaries, including Hank Williams, John Jacob Niles, Odetta (who appears much too briefly), Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, as well as interviews with Liam Clancy, John Cohen, Dave Van Ronk, and of course Baez (who is introduced in a haunting, blurry black-and-white shot, the camera moving in on her as she performs “Virgin Mary” – here’s the video, taken from the documentary). There are nice anecdotes such as the one where Allen Ginsberg recalls being in a room with Dylan and the Beatles, and marveling at how “these spiritual leaders were so young, so unsure of themselves”, and some superbly quirky scenes like the one where a touring Dylan reads a few random signs outside a shop and then goes berserk twisting the words around to make crazy half-sentences and phrases.
The interludes of Dylan performing are mostly from the Manchester concert, and I enjoyed them greatly too – I’m in the tiny minority that thinks Dylan’s songs are best performed by Dylan himself (exceptions include Lou Reed’s version of “Foot of Pride”, The Clancy Brothers’ “When the Ship Comes In” and Eddie Vedder’s intense, grunge-ish “Masters of War”). And though Blonde on Blonde is my favourite among his albums, I like his acoustic work nearly as much as the three masterpieces of 1965-66. So it was all good.
P.S. Parts of the documentary – especially the bits where an aging Dylan, circa 2000, expresses disinterest in analysis and explanation – reminded me of a passage from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost. It’s a letter-within-the-book, written by a very bitter old woman, the widow of a long-dead writer whose personal life is being scrutinised by a wannabe biographer:
If I had something like Stalin’s power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I’d forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines and scholarly periodicals. I’d forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college and university in the country. I’d outlaw reading groups and internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to make sure that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare speak to each other. I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own.
P.P.S. Here’s an old, righteous post about Naipaul that I’m very embarrassed about today. (Ah, I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.) And here’s Nilanjana on the Naipaul controversy.