When silent films speak of a lost past

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The discovery of a treasure trove of forgotten nitrate films from the early 1900s is the inspiration for a magical documentary

Sometimes a film feels like an epiphany. Watching Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on an international film platform, had that sort of effect on me. It tells the strange and wondrous tale of how nearly 400 silent films from the early 1900s, managed to survive in the permafrost of what had once been a small-town swimming pool -- emerging from the ground in the 1970s, to finally find their place in the history of humanity.

Technically a documentary, Morrison's film is an exquisite assemblage of facts and footage so artfully and lovingly crafted that it feels like an epic. That epic quality comes from two historic elements – the Canadian gold rush, which originally brought Dawson City into being, and the invention of cinema, which created these thousands of feet worth of early film images, only to abandon them. What Morrison captures, without ever spelling it out explicitly, is the way the treasure trove -- known as the Dawson City Film Find -- offers up a conjoined history of these two lost worlds: A forgotten town and a forgotten technology.

And yet both the town and the technology were, a century and a quarter ago, part of the crucible of modernity. Morrison begins with the fact that film originated in an explosive, nitrate cellulose. The Kodak company turned it into nitrate film by adding camphor to it and then coating it with plastic emulsion. But nitrate film, on which all early cinema was stored, remained highly inflammable, and the documentary shows, over and over again, that the history of early cinema is also a history of fire. From Thomas Alva Edison's film manufacturing plant exploding, to the Solax Film Company Fire in 1919, from the repeated burning down of Dawson City's film theatres, down to the 1967 warehouse fire in which the National Film Board of Canada lost its entire nitrate film collection, the sense of tragic loss comes to be replaced by a sense of inevitability.

The film is also a deep dive into Dawson: Now a small town with a tiny population of 1300-odd people (as of 2011), but once the site of a remarkable moment in world history. Gold was discovered near here on August 17, 1896, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers near the boundary with the US state of Alaska. Over the next three years, thousands of prospectors made the extremely difficult journey to this freezing-cold terrain, often crossing snow-covered passes on foot, hoping, literally, to strike gold. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson City’s population exceeded 30,000.

Naturally, entrepreneurs of all sorts arrived, hoping to ‘mine the miners’, as Morrison puts it. Fred Trump opened a brothel called the Arctic Hotel and Restaurant in the nearby town of Whitehorse -- the origin, says Morrison, of the Trump family fortune. Casinos were the other gig in town, as you might expect from a place full of men on the make. An athletics association building came up, with boxing matches organised for a largely male audience. Soon, there were not one but three theatres screening films.

But as the more accessible mines began to be exhausted, and gold was discovered some distance away in Nome, Alaska, the city of Dawson emptied out, becoming a quarter of its size in a year. Films continued to come to Dawson, but they often took two or three years after their first release, to arrive. The town was at the end of a film distribution line, and the distributors didn't want to pay for their passage back. The films were already old news. So they ended up being stored in Dawson. As the years passed, and the town's buildings started running out of space, thousands of old silent film reels were burnt, or simply disposed of in the Yukon river. A small section remained -- and the rest is history: A history whose incredible details you should watch the film for.

Yet Morrison's film is no mere history book on screen. What he does is a marvel in terms of film form. He uses still images -- including photographs taken during the Gold Rush by a photographer called Eric Hegg, which have their own magical history of survival and recovery -- as well as newspaper articles, printed posters and archival letters. He uses newsreels from Pathe and Fox. And he combs all of this archival visual material for Dawson history, from an early instance of baseball match fixing to a real-life Hollywood murder with a Dawson connection. And of course, Dawson's connections with early cinema. But he goes far beyond using the footage as factual archive; he uses the reels from the Dawson Film Find, their edges marked by decades of water damage, to craft a magical visual history of their time. A sentence like “The years and decades passed Dawson by” is illustrated with shots of silent film heroines sleeping, as if waiting to be awakened by the kiss of some fairytale prince. We watch entranced as a series of unidentified film characters gamble, or wrestle with their lovers, or wait outside doors, eavesdropping. It feels like we're eavesdropping too, on history.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Mar 2021

Picture This: Days and Nights in the City

My Picture This column in BL Ink this month:

Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s ambitiously wordless debut feature, Labour of Love, displays a striking grasp of sound and image

A still from Labour of Love, which won the National Awards for Best First Film and Best Audiography

At first you see nothing. The screen is dark, and all you have is the voice of a TV newsreader announcing in Bangla that “in the last week, approximately 1,200 people have lost their jobs in West Bengal. In a state of fear, panic and rage, people are taking to the streets to rally and protest”. The broadcast is followed by the titling, with the camera travelling slowly down a dirty yellow wall to the rising notes of the shehnai. When the titling ends, the music does too, and it is in the hush of early morning that we see a young woman in a printed yellow sari, walking purposefully away from us. The only sound is that of little children singing, perhaps from a nearby school. The camera follows the woman as she moves briskly through a narrow lane, allowing us to look at her red half-sleeved blouse, her batik tote bag, a thick plait hanging down her back, before she boards a tram. We see her change to a bus, and finally arrive at her destination, almost running up the stairs as a bell goes off to declare the working day open.

Meanwhile, in a room somewhere, a young man drinks his morning cup of tea. He emerges from his bath with a few washed clothes, and we see a cotton sari and a maroon petticoat. A little while later, when he heads out on a bicycle to buy groceries, we hear the children singing again.

Of such little clues is Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s debut film made, weaving the most undramatic actions into an intriguingly wordless tapestry of everyday life. The Bangla title, Asha Jaoar Maajhe, would translate literally to ‘between coming and going’, and it becomes clear that the woman and man we see departing and arriving are a couple. One works in a bag factory during the day, the other in a printing press at night.

In both workplaces, the cinematography (by Sengupta and Mahendra Shetty) and sound design (by Anish John) come together to produce a tangible sense of the repetition, even boredom of labour. The woman tallies boxes full of bags against a list. She has a solitary lunch from her tiffin box, and returns to the desk with not much to do except daydream until the bell announces end of the day. The man watches over the rumble and clatter of the press as it spews out a steady stream of newspapers. He, too, has a solitary dinner. Sengupta alternates between the lonely silences of the home and the mechanical noises outside. But noise can be political, and quiet isn’t always melancholy. After the night-long rattle of machinery, the pre-dawn street is deliciously still, and the tinkling bells from a passing herd of goats positively bucolic — though they’re likely heading to the butcher’s.

Released in some Indian cities last week, Labour of Love comes with the recommendation of Best Debut Director prize at Venice Days, held alongside the Venice International Film Festival and modelled on the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. It also won National Awards for Best First Film and Best Audiography.

Sengupta certainly has a gift for visual and aural detail, and his remarkable refusal of both plot and dialogue focuses our attention successfully on each sound, each image he places before us. A fish still breathing heavily as it awaits death by boti (a cutting instrument used by Bengali fishmonger and traditional housewife alike), coins slipped into an earthen piggy bank, a perfect crescent of moon in the night sky — the last, with rueful irony, accompanied by Geeta Dutt singing Nishi raat banka chaand akashe, when the only sign of the beloved is his crushed kurta.

Some sequences seem metaphorical: are our protagonists like the goats, going peacefully to slaughter? Or are they like the water in the pan, which must sizzle and disappear before the oil is poured in: one must vanish before the other appears. For each, the house is haunted by the other, and the film shows this playfully. The man, looking into the mirror, suddenly sees the woman’s face behind her stick-on bindi; the woman, entering the bedroom at night, is alarmed by the man’s trousers hanging from the bed rail.

Sengupta has mentioned being influenced by Satyajit Ray, and one visual of a tramcar cable certainly brings to mind Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), which famously opened with a staccato titling sequence with shots of just such a cable, and ended with the husband and wife melting into the big city, buoyed by the belief that they could both get jobs. By cutting his shots of the cable to the sound of a workers’ rally against job cutbacks, Sengupta marks the distance we have travelled from that optimistic moment.

But the economic backdrop is also the film’s weakest link: surely India, and particularly West Bengal were relatively insulated from the effects of the recent global recession? A revealing subtitling error translates the newsreader’s moddhobitto — middle income — as ‘working class’. The film can also seem contrived in its deliberate old-world feel, and in having both protagonists refrain from calling each other, even refusing to pick up the mobile phone when the other calls from work.. There is a similarity here to The Lunchbox (2013) where, too, the premise of separate spheres for the protagonists required the artificial absence of phone contact.

The tribute to youthful coupledom recalls more traditional tales, like O Henry’s The Gift of the Magi. But there is no neat resolution, tragic or comic, to Asha Jaoar Majhe. What it achieves with quiet beauty is the feeling of nights and days, stacked up in a ceaseless queue — all that time spent waiting for the one moment when the solitariness of routine might be ruptured.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, Sat, 3 July, 2015.

A Star is Born: Thoughts on Shamitabh

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Balki's film is about the creation of a superstar from one man's body and another man's voice. It is disappointingly simplistic, but perhaps the cliches will eventually birth better films on the subject.

All star personas are manufactured, and all of them are, to a greater or lesser degree, distant from the flesh-and-blood human beings who strain to fill their shoes. But Shamitabh takes that fact and stretches it to the farthest point possible - the film's eponymous Bollywood superstar is actually the amalgam of two different men. 'Shamitabh' is born when the voice of Amitabh (Bachchan) is grafted on to the face and body of Daanish (Dhanush). 

The film, and the performances, are a very mixed bag. Dhanush is wonderfully persuasive as the Igatpuri-born-and-brought-up mute with a passionate fillum fetish. Meanwhile, as the bitter alcoholic layabout who also confesses to youthful ambition as an actor, Bachchan hams madly. 

As he seems to do in all his 'serious' roles in the last decade: if you've watched Black and The Last Lear, you know what to expect from his performance here. He gets to alternate his khadoos cynical act with drunken monologues in the now-classic Amitabh tradition, addressing a Mrs Gomes on a gravestone one time, and Robert De Niro on a poster the second. But they fall flat. Squashed between these two 'look-at-me' performers is poor debutante Akshara Haasan -- light-eyed and fleet-footed like her mother Sarika -- but a terribly clunky speaker. As the enthu young assistant director who decides Daanish has talent and brings her doctor father on board to help with the voice technology, Haasan has the dubious privilege of playing midwife at the birth of Shamitabh. 

Dhanush, being mute, doesn't get to speak except in the transmitted voice of Amitabh. The gadget fitted in Daanish's throat is connected to a microphone worn by Amitabh. When Amitabh speaks, if Daanish opens his mouth, the words seem to emerge from him -- in Bachchan's baritone. This is classic Hindi movie technology, with the usual need for suspension of disbelief -- such as how Amitabh can correctly predict what Daanish wants to say in unscripted conversations with others, especially when he's in another room and can't even see his face. He's only a voice artiste, not a mind-reader, after all! 

There are many other hilariously filmi things going on in this film: Daanish may need to gesticulate and speak slowly, but why does Haasan also speak like she's just learning to talk - to match him? And why does Amitabh Sinha hang out in a dirty white suit in a Christian cemetery, have a Christian grave reserved for him, and receive the nickname Robert -- is it because that's what Hindi movie drunks must do? 

But all this is clearly beside the point. This film is intended as a homage to cinema, and more specifically, to our national obsession with cinema. And so it's right that it's as filmi as they come. The first half-hour is a breezy musical tour of Daanish's film-fanatic childhood, complete with him pulling heropanti moves on his hapless teacher, and his long-suffering Hindi-movie mother feigning illness to keep the boy from running off to Mumbai. When his mother dies, he finally arrives in Mumbai, and it's time for the requisite rounds of film industry studios. With a difference -- Daanish cannot speak. As a mute, he can't even plead his case to the guards. 

But his silence, the film seems to suggest, also works like a cloak of invisibility. He enters the film industry by the back door, but right at the top -- by making himself at home in a star's vanity van. He showers and sleeps in luxury while the star isn't around, and cocks a snook at the guards by being driven into studios in secret comfort. This a sign of things to come: there is to be no struggle as a junior artiste for our hero - as soon as he has transformed himself into Shamitabh, he gets a main role straight off. Like many recent films (Happy Ending and Sulemani Keeda as recently as December 2014), Shamitabh tries to make fun of the film industry, though far too gently. There are producers producing dud star vehicles for their sons, acclaimed directors waiting for Ranbir and Hrithik's dates, and even our protagonists' "classy" movie idea -- of course, it's a love story between two mutes -- needs to draw in the "massy" elements with a dhinchak song. 

But the main idea behind Shamitabh is to make you think about how acting - and thus cinema itself - is a composite of the visual and the aural. Bachchan's character has a little rant about how "jab audio ke vajah se video chalta hai, toh usko picture kaise bol sakte hain?" "It is not picture, it is mixture!" he insists drunkenly. 

This tussle between the image and the voice, of course, had its great historical moment when film technology first moved from silent to talkies. Shamitabh doesn't go into it, and perhaps it is not the film for the job. But if the other cinemas of the world have immortalised that great moment of transformation - think of Singing in the Rain, or more recently The Artist - couldn't we have a film about the decline of the silent stars and the necessary rise of those who could enunciate Hindi dialogue? Or a film about the very real, complicated relationship between a playback singer and a star who has ridden to success on his songs? One hopes Shamitabh, clunky as it is, is only the first in a series of more such exciting explorations.

Post Facto -- Celluloid Man: PK Nair & the future of our cinematic past

My Sunday Guardian column:

At one point in Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's affecting documentary — released on 3rd May to coincide with the centenary of Indian cinema — the octogenarian PK Nair stands in front of one of those old-fashioned weighing machines that you could find at every Indian railway station even until a decade ago. He inserts a coin into the slot, and receives in return the little rectangular piece of cardboard with his weight printed on one side, and a grainy B&W image of Aishwarya Rai on the other. Nair smiles, a smile of pure pleasure. He inserts a fresh coin, and the machine releases another card. As new cards (and actresses) tumble out of the machine, a voiceover has Nair reminiscing about collecting these cards as a boy. He collected cinema ticket stubs, too, he confesses happily. It's one of the moments of Celluloid Man that illuminate just how well-suited India's premier film archivist was to the job that consumed him for 30 years.

Paramesh Krishnan Nair, better known as PK Nair, is the man responsible for founding and managing the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Having joined the Film and Television Institute in Pune as a Research Assistant in 1961, he did much of the spade work for an autonomous NFAI, which began in 1964. From 1965, when he was appointed Assistant Curator, till 1991, when he retired after nearly a decade as its Director, Nair acquired 12,000 films — 8000 Indian, the rest foreign. The numbers are impressive in themselves, especially for a government archive in a country where government institutions are notorious for their inefficiency and corruption. But if there is a single thing that Celluloid Man manages to convey, it is that that Nair's accomplishments cannot be measured in quantitative terms.

This is a man who lived his work: who legendarily screened and watched films from the late to the wee hours, and was never to be found in the theatre without his small torch and a notebook in which he meticulously recorded, reel by reel, the content and condition of every single film print. He didn't let his personal taste influence his collecting and he wasn't above making quick overnight copies of loaned international prints to serve the larger cause: as he says with a twinkle in his eye, "a true archivist should have the immunity to overcome such legalities". 

Nair combined this indefatigable, almost childlike enthusiasm for the cinema with a seriousness that daunted the frivolous student and unfailingly encouraged the genuinely interested. Jaya Bhaduri, for instance, proudly remembers being the only girl at Nair Saab's late-night screenings because he had told the hostel matron she wasn't using them as an excuse to "gallivant" around an almost-wholly male campus. Vidhu Vinod Chopra recounts the thrilling privilege of being allowed a few hours' access to the institute's print of Breathless so as to figure out how Godard achieved the "smoothness" of his cuts. Then there's the tale of how John Abraham — the late Malayali filmmaker — walked into Mr. Nair's house at 3 am and demanded to watch Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Mathew, and how Nair not just agreed but watched it with him. They then discussed John's plans for Amma Ariyan (it was to be his most remembered film), had breakfast together, and only then parted company.

These anecdotes craft a portrait of a man so in love with the cinema that he could imagine nothing better than to be able to share that love with young people just starting to discover its treasures, as well as with various different publics: the areca nut farmers and peons of Heggodu's Ninasam, and Pune residents whom Nair drew to his weekly NFAI public screenings by mailing invitations to addresses picked at random from the directory. But Dungarpur's film is also a portrait of an era. Perhaps PK Nair's life would be much more solitary if he were an archivist now, when students have digital access to classics that an earlier generation could only watch by Nair's grace.

The other set of stories tell of Nair's memorable acquisitions, with filmmakers and ex-students acting as his eyes and ears all across India. Mrinal Sen describes stumbling upon the reels of Kalipada Das's silent Jamai Babu while shooting Akaler Sandhane; Adoor Gopalakrishnan remembers how the second Malayali film made, Marthanda Varma, was discovered; Nair himself tells us about finding Dadasaheb Phalke's Kalia Mardan, even as he stands outside the unattractive shopping centre that has replaced Phalke's house. The nine Indian silent films now extant were singlehandedly salvaged by him. In a country where 1,700 silents were made in 36 years, nine may seem like nothing. But without Nair Saab, we might not have even those.

The film's best part is when Nair walks through the NFAI vault, glancing at the shelves and listing, with casual ease, his favourite scenes and songs from each — with precise reel numbers. The saddest is that it took Dungarpur eleven attempts to be allowed to shoot with Nair in the archive: the institution he built up "brick by brick", as Shyam Benegal puts it, now refuses him entry. Nair has done more than his due — and received less than it. Perhaps there can never be another PK Nair. But we don't even seem to understand how much we need one.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, May 2013.

The Artist: When tragedy imitates silent farce

The Artist, as most of us know by now, is a French film set in Hollywood’s silent movie era. Nominated for ten Oscars, the film tells the story of a silent movie star called George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) who is suddenly pushed off his pedestal by the arrival of the talkies. Director Michael Hazanivicius’s brilliant innovation is to marry content to form. “The Artist is not just about black-and-white silent pictures. It is a black-and-white silent picture,” Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker last November, when Hazanivicius’s charming gamble of a film hit US theatres. But as you watch the movie, it begins to feel like a carefully calibrated gamble.

The Artist is a black-and-white silent picture, sure – but it is a black-and-white silent picture made in 2011. It takes the sound and the look of silent pictures, but stops short of trying to recreate the feel of those films. The great films of the silent era – GW Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, FW Murnau’s Sunrise, or even the great Chaplin films – had depth, atmosphere, grandeur, and pain. Even when funny, they were not cute. The Artist is. Yet, here’s the odd thing: the story it tells – of a man’s unstoppable fall from the heights of fame into the abyss of depression and self-pity – is the undeniable stuff of tragedy. And like all true tragedies, it is not just the story of one man, but a universal account of a star’s fall from public favour; an irreversible change of popular mood that seems capricious and inexplicable. One moment, our moustachioed hero is the darling of audiences, mobbed by people in the street, and the next moment, no one even recognizes him. The historical context makes the tragedy irreversible – no-one wants to see silent films any more. Running parallel to Valentin’s decline is the meteoric rise to stardom of Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo). The unknown girl – who earns her first five minutes of fame by giving Valentin a chaste peck on the cheek, much to the delight of press photographers – is catapulted to fame and fortune by the rise of the very talkies that drag him down.

Hazanivicius takes this unhappy tale and makes of it a light, fluffy confection of a film, where the terrible things that happen are never quite explained, and never allowed to weigh us down. This quixotic artistic choice is most striking in his depiction of Valentin’s crumbling marriage to Doris (Penelope Ann Miller). We first see Doris without quite seeing her: her face is hidden behind a newspaper which carries the photograph of Peppy kissing George’s cheek. And her character remains that way throughout the movie, as invisible to us as she clearly is to her husband. We’re never told why their relationship is the way it is.

Peppy’s love for George is also ineffable, especially as he sinks deeper into a self-aggrandising self-pity. Berenice Bejo’s fresh-faced, incandescent performance manages to almost make us believe in her lasting attraction to the actor she had once worshipped on-screen. But even her sincere tears, as she watches Valentin’s silent movie swansong Tears of Love in a near-empty cinema hall, cannot make that film’s supposedly tragic climax feel anything but funny.

In fact, none of the snatches of the silent films we’re shown in The Artist can be taken seriously. The world of silent cinema is reduced to a string of ridiculously theatrical costume capers. It is as if The Artist is saying to contemporary audiences, silent films were darling little things, sure, but we’ve come a long way since then. And that is a pity. The pleasures of watching Hazanivicius’s film lie in the sly gags about sound and silence: inter-titles in silent pictures in which tortured men say “I won’t speak”; George’s dreams in which he finds he can no longer speak at all: silent picture as a nightmare world. And there is the undeniable, unexpected reward of watching virtuoso old-style physical acting. The scene where George places his dog (the marvellous canine actor Uggie) on the breakfast table and imitates his gestures; another where he adopts a deliberately stiffened gait and theatrically raised eyebrow to shoot a scene with Peppy – these draw brilliantly on traditions of mime and vaudeville. Both Dujardin and Bejo fully inhabit their roles, often in a heartfelt fashion that transcends this frothy, clever spoof of a movie. Perhaps we should not ask for more.

Published in Firstpost.