Cinema of India and Irish Pages

Irish Pages LTD Glorious particularity Author(s) Mira Nair Reviewed work(s) Source Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 103-108 Published by Irish Pages LTD Stable URL http//www. jstor. org/stable/30057428 . Accessed 09/11/2012 0627 Your social function of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http//www. jstor. org/page/ info/about/policies/terms. jsp . JSTOR is a non-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discoer, use, and build upon a wide grade of content in a trusted digital archive.We use breeding technology and besidesls to increase productivity and facilitate new fleshs of experience. For more(prenominal)(prenominal) nurture about JSTOR, please contact emailprotected org. . Irish Pages LTD is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend accession to Irish Pages. http//www. jstor. org GLORIOUS PARTICULARITY MiraNalr Illumining the actual. I run images in my work. I dont pen words, e particular(a)ly not words to be delivered from church pulpits.So I experienced great agony writing this essay, particularlysince it was also meant for publication, until I began to mind it as an opportunity to think aloud with you on what has been possessing my mind of late, in this tumultuous past year since the watershed of 9/11/01. I bear been reflecting on the torrent of ceaseless images flooding our lives in the publish media, TV and of course, in our popular cinema, ultimately asking myself the age- emeritus questionsTer Braakraises in his still-radicalessaywhat is the role of an artist in any society? What is the place and prospective of cinema in the serviceman today?In the new sphericvillageof unending images, increasinglyI happen the failure of mass media to impart actual understanding. This overactive pluralism proves adept the illusion of roll in the haying a jackpot about a lot when actually you know a smattering about nothing at all, leaving in its wake an audience so thoroughly bludgeoned by little bits of information that one is left confused and hence unbiassed politically. Perhapsthat is its intention. The fact is that while images mother become more and more international, batchs lives vex remained astonishingly parochial.This ironic truth of contemporary life is especially lamentable in todays war-mongering times, when so more than depends on understanding worlds so different, and consequently totally divided, from ones avouch. In this post-9/11 world, where the schisms of the globe argon being cemented into massive walls between one belief and way of life and another, now more than ever we need cinema to reveal our tiny topical anesthetic worlds in all their glorious particularity. In my limited experience, its when Ive thrust a pick out thats done full-blown justice to the truths and idiosyncraciesof the specifically local, that it crosses over to become surprisinglyuniversal. institu te Monsoon edding,or instance. I wanted to influence an intimate family W out of nothing, a love song to the city of Delhi where I come flick, something from, to return to my old habits of guerilla sprout-making. Except this time, fired m by the recent empowering of the Dogme ethod, I wanted to make a contain in just 30 days. That was the original premise to prove to myself that I didnt need the juggernaut of millions of dollars, studios, special effects and plenty of men in suits to make a dear story in the close to interesting opthalmic way possible. I wanted 103 Irish PAGES o capture, first and foremost, the spirit of masti(meaning an intoxication with life) built-in in the full-bodied Punjabi community from where I come, and then, to capture the Indiathat I know and love, an India which lives in several centuries at the same time. As Arundhati Roy put it, as Indian citizens we subsist on a regular diet of rank massacresand nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion show s, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labour and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbandswho continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable pile of MissWorlds. It couldnt be said better. Such were the fluid pillars of the India I wanted to put on film 68 actors, 148 scenes, and one hot monsoon season later, using paintings,jewellery, saris and piece of furniture interpreted from relatives on the screen, with each member of my family acting in it, subsequently shooting exactly 30 days, a film was born that then had a journey so different from any expectation (more correctly, non-expectation) that we competency have had for it during its making. mint from radical Delhi to Iceland to Hungary to Brazil to the States believed it was their wedding, their family,themselves on that screen and if they didnt have a family,they yearned to be farseeing to one equal the people they saw on screen. I didnt make the film to e ducate any automobile trunk about my culture and my people- I believe that to be simply a cultural ambassadorof ones soil is boring rather, if it was made for anybody beyond myself, it was made for the people of Delhi to feel and joke and cry at our own flawed Punjabi(a. k. a the PartyAnimals of India) selves. Uniquely for me, Monsoon edding as the first of s scour films Id made that W was completely embraced by the mainstreamBollywood film industryin India producers, directors, movie stars, choreographers, musicians alike embraced the film, and for the first time in my 20-odd years as an independent film maker independent really from both the Indianand the Americanmainstream I felt the possibility of my work belonging somewhere. Although the style and form of Monsoon edding as radical for the Indianpublic (the entire film was w W hot with a hand-held camera,was reality-based, with a host of completely unknown faces mixed in with legendary actors, live singing, no studio shooti ng, using a mix of old Indianpop songs with new original music, and dialogue simultaneouslyin Hindu, English and Punjabi),it continues to tend in Indiaalmost a year after its release. Perhapsthis was because we took a familiar premise that of an Indian wedding, and of the family drama that surrounds such an notwithstandingt anywhere and made a realitycheck variant of it so different from the normal Bollywood film.Bollywood, a term for the enormous commercialised film industryin Bombay, hangs to those grand, epic and over-the-top extravaganzas eplete with musical r 104 IRISH PAGES poem and lavish production values, designed as escapist entertainment for the masses. It is what Ter Braak uproariously describes in his discussion of low cinema born among cig atomic number 18tte-chewing youths and giggling maid-servants, received with crackers enthusiasm and the honest romanticism of a proletariat yearning for deliverance. disdain its inimitable, distinctive style and its curr ent arty-exotic cache, Bollywood is nothing like cinema of the art-house, New Wave variety, nothing like expressionism it does not have pretensions of purity. It is defiantly popular, made for the masses and for profit. Therefore, Bollywood as a cinematic form is necessarily adaptational and composite a genre welcoming outside influences, not fearing them. In the first place, the filmmakers always aiming for the broadest possible audience have had to accommodate the tenfold interests of an extremely regional and diverse country.Certain unifying elements Mahabharata and Ramayana, the foundational epic texts from which many stories derive, and the wildness in all films on family tradition and local setting give Bollywood films a broad resonance at bottom Furthermore, Bollywood was born under colonialism and brightly survives in a post-colonial world. The Bollywood style is famously adaptive and absorbent, a schnorr that had to respond to imperialist influences to survive pr e-Independence, and willingly imitated them for profit in more recent years. A common phenomenon in Bombay are the so-called videodisk India. irectors who pitch their stories to moviestars using cued scenes from wellknown Hollywood movies (e. g. , it is basically a combination of Godfather meets cognise Story meets When Harry Met Sally). horse opera stories from Jane E re to late(prenominal) PoetsSocietyare retold with Indian characters and production design that very often ingeniously play into both horse operaers and Indians idealization of India. This suggests a border around India that is both holey and protective, flagrantly absorbing and copying all sorts of influences yet twisting them to make it finally seem unreproducibly Indian or, to put it more accurately, inimitably Bollywood.There is much debate on the survival of local cinemas in a global age, and much consternation about the unstoppable wave of American culture, often accused of alternately dulling and dilut ing art and aesthetic sensibilities around the world. The cut have been railing about cultural protectionism from Hollywood for years now. In this context of trying to preserve and cultivate local voices, it is fabulous to see the unflagging energy of Bollywood cinema. Bollywoods vigor, its staying power and its improbable, flexible hybridity, are all results of its ample internal trade.Commercially and artistically much like Indian culture itself. Bollywood is lithe and muscular 105 IRISH PAGES The mass Indian audience for whom Bollywood films are made is evergrowing and makes the industry hugely profitable, even without taking into account the global reach it has attained. The first Indian film, Rala w Harishchandra, as produced in 1913. cardinal thousand films have been made since. Today,800 films per year are made passim India, and 12 million people within the countrys borders go to see a Hindi film daily.The booming Bollywood market is self-sustainingand runs parallel to and undisturbedby American film exhibition in India. This is before taking into account Bollywoods huge market abroad, both as an export to other lands (such as Russia, the Middle East, Africa) and to the far-reachingIndian Diaspora. outgrowth up in India in the sixties and seventies in the jolly remote state of Orissa, I was not an aficionadoof Bollywood pictures. I did swoon over many of the popular love songs from the movies, moreover the films themselves did little for me. I was much more interested in stories of real people, the extraordinarinessof ordinary life.Initiallyinspired by jatra which is the form of traditionaltravellingmythological theatre in the countryside, I later became involved with political complain theatre in Calcutta. Then, with eyes focused beyond my own country, I became preoccupied with the Beatles and the antiVietnam War movement, the Western avant-garde, guerilla theater, etc. It wasnt until I went to America for college and began studying film th at the otherIndian movies first reached me SatyajitRay, Ritwik Ghatakand Guru Dutt, whose emotionalism and visual stylization were actually pure independent film-making, but made from within Bollywood.The immediacy and grandeurof these films is a pillar for me now I rely on seeing one of Guru Dutts movies every six months before I make another one of my own. However, I was the last person to ever suppose that the commercial cinema of the Indian mainstream would have anything whatsoever to do with my own work. Yet the opportunity to give this lecture has given me a pass to reflect on my own trajectory, and I am surprised to gravel that my home cinema has had a strong influence on my body of work indeed, regardlessof my exploration of increasingly motley and disparatecultures.And in reflecting, Ive seen that the influence of Indian films specifically that unabashed emotional directness, the freewheeling use of music, that emphasis on elemental motivations and values is a thread running consistently with every one of my films even when exploring foreign worlds, I have interpreted the bones and flesh of those societies and tried to infuse them with the spirit of where Im from. Much of post-imperial scholarship focuses on the Western gaze and Bollywood itself, as Ive said, had to adapt to and be perpetually aware of the colonialist point of view. I recollect myself applying an Eastern gaze 06 IRISH PAGES to Western contexts now, and enjoying the reversal. Historically,Hollywood has alwaysbeen open to foreign directors, so long as we have the competence, craft and flair needed to make money. From Erich von Stroheim to BillyWilder to Ang Lee to PaulVerhoevento ShekharKapur, the doors have receptive for us, so long as we understand the bottom line. In my most recent film, Hysterical lindness, working-class drama set in a B New Jersey in the eighties, I found that even in the drab and loveless confines of these bar-hopping girls world, the Bollywood approach was just as useful.Half-jokingly,I refer to the style of the film as AmericanBleak, Bollywoodstyle. Within the frame of American Bleak,understatement and sublunary circumstances notwithstanding, the full-blown emotion was thither, waiting to be made overt. People are people, after all, and no matter if were trying to portray a loveless reality where desperate women comb neighbourhood bars smell for love, only to find heartbreak,audiences must feel their neuroses as if they are their own.And now, expression at pre-Victorian London to adapt Thackerays gloriously entertaining saga, VanityFair, I find an enormous panorama of themes familiar to those of us steeped in Bollywood a char who defies her poverty-stricken background to clamber up the social ladder, unrequited love, conquering through song, a mothers sacrifice for her child, a true gentleman in a corrupt world . .. the catalog of human stories remains the same. Moreover, it is a story that comes down to basic human ambition , asking a spiritual, even yogic questionWhich of us is happy in this orld? Which of us has his zest? Or, having it, is satisfied? The bold strokes of Indian cinema are ideal for this canvas,too. Culture-combining does not have to yield the soulless Euro-gateau lamented by Istvan Szabo in Zanussis 1993 lecture here. Because, as Zanussi explained, those are films without a center, stories that take place in nameless, unrecognizable cities with a host of European actors desperately attempting a neutralAmerican/English accent, afraidof any eccentricities or distinctiveness that would distract from the mongrelization of the piece.The Bollywood form, itself an ever-growing collage of culturalinfluences, is making its way around the world, but retaining its soul. In fact, my only fear as Bollywood seems to cross over into Western commercial screens is that it waters itself down to suit the Western palate. Lately,Western culture has taken Bollywood styles and incorporated them into the ma instream Hollywood vocabularysmash-hit movies and plays imitate Bollywoods musical form and ultra-theatricalstyle, adaptingthem to Western contexts (MoulinRouge, ombay B Dreams). Think of Thora Birch in GhostWorld, atching a 1950s Hindi dance w umber and dancing around her room gleefully. She sees a freshness and 107 IRISH PAGES lustiness totally absent from her Anytown, USA existence. The dotty dance number is delightfullyforeign to her, yet throughit we also see her small world with new, sharp clarity. Bollywoods pure emotional thrust and distinctive vocabulary has legitimacy in itself, however manufactured and molded the form has been over the years. In this era of internationalmisunderstanding,as the threat of a global divide culturally and politically is more dire than ever, this distinctiveness is to be celebrated.I have always reiterate to myself and to my students that if we dont tell our stories, no one else will. The weand our in the best films is both local and unive rsal. movie can mirror an individuals tiny world, yet reveal limitless other worlds in all their particularity. Film should not behave. It cannot. Cinema is too democratic to be lobotomized into a single way or style. I always say,There are no rules in making cinema there is only good cinema or soulless cinema.And as long as there are films made like In the desire or Love,Angel at My Table,Pyaasa,Battle of Algiers,Dekalog, Timeof the f Gypsies,were doing all right. What is happening to the world lies, at the moment, just outside the realm of common understanding. The only revenge is to work, to make cinema that illuminates this common understanding,that destabilizes the dull competence of most of what is produced, that infuses life with idiosyncracy, whimsy, brutality, and like life, that captures the rare but fabulous energy that sometimes emerges from the juxtaposition of the tragical and comic. a F M L U Thisessaywasdelivered s the Cinema 2i1tans ecture t the Netherlands ilm Festival, trecht, in September002 It is published ereor the irst time. 2 hf f adept of the worldsleadingfilmakers,Mira Nair has directedeightfeaturefilms since her celebrated ebutwith SalaamBombay in 1988. Bornin 1957, shegrew up in Orissa, ndia d I and attendedHavardUniversity. Her mostrecentilms are Vanity Fair (2004), Hysterical f Blindness (2002) and Monsoon Wedding (2001) Hernextfilm, he Namesake, basedon a T i novelbyjhumpa Lahiri,will be releasedn the springof 2007 108