For the upcoming art show this Friday at Hibbleton Gallery, my friend Steve Elkins and I are collaborating on the creation of two new zines. One of them is called "An Introduction to Indian Cinema." Here's the excellent introduction to the zine, written by Steve...
One of my aims in
curating the Hibbleton Film Series is not only to
bring underappreciated films from around the world to Fullerton,
but to examine how cinema is used as a mirror in various cultures to
cultivate a sense of national identity. What does it mean to be
American? What does it mean to be Slovakian, or Iranian? Over 100
years of global experiments in cinema have shown precisely how complex this
is. Especially in India. How does a nation with over 1600
languages, and tens of thousands of religions, see itself through the lens of
cinema? How does it utilize its tremendous machinery to freeze-frame a
sense of self and community that can arguably be called “we.”*
I decided to program
a month of films about India by foreigners, followed by a month of
non-Bollywood cinema from India. My hope was that this would provide a
multi-layered perspective from the outside looking in and the inside looking
out. We began with "Phantom India" (1969), an epic 6-hour
masterpiece by Louis Malle, whose work was one of the major inspirations for
the French New Wave. Malle wrestles with the major difficulties of
understanding India through Western logic or languages. “Only 2% of
Indians speak English, the official language after colonization,” Malle says at
the opening of the film. “This 2% talks a lot, in the name of all the
rest…In learning English, they also learned to think as our civilization
does. Their words about their country were ordered by Western symbols and
logic. I’d heard them all before. I recognized them as my
own. Tattered ideas, worn-out phrases, like Nietzsche’s birds, so exhausted
from flying that one can catch them in one’s hand.” Attempting
to explore India's complex social fabric without preconceived ideas or
conscious efforts to organize reality, Malle uncovers India as a place that has
completely reimagined what it means to be human, who we are, what we once were,
and the expanded possibilities of what we could be in the future.
"Words are useless between us. The image is our only
connection," Malle continues. "We may not understand these
people, but we’re instinctively connected to them, sharing their link with
nature. Letting ourselves go in their presence, we feel as if we’ve
rediscovered something we’d lost.”
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| Still frame from Louis Malle's Phantom India. |
For example, Malle
tracks down the closest living examples of ancient humanity left on the planet
(including the Bondo tribe of Orissa and the Toda in the mountains of Tamil
Nadu) whose languages have nothing to do with other Indian languages, who
have never waged war or made laws, living instead in an egalitarian society
without leaders, that is vegetarian despite never taking up agriculture. Malle
also examines why Christianity never made much progress in India, despite the
fact the Church dates its history in India back to the visit of the apostle
Thomas in 52 AD, and why India is the only country in the world that has never
persecuted its Jewish population. In my mind, "Phantom India"
is not only one of the greatest films ever made on the subject of culture, but
also a profound philosophical investigation into the nature of perception, the
cinema, and the most accurate portrayal I've seen of what India is actually
like.
Thanks to a friend at
the National Film Board of Canada, I was able to show the documentary
"SHIPBREAKERS" (2004, never before available in the US), about Alang,
India, where most of the world's largest ships are run into the shore and torn
apart by human ant colonies of 35,000 men with little more than their bare
hands. At least one worker dies a day (sometimes hundreds at a time) from
explosions, falling steel, asbestos, malaria, or plummeting into the ocean.
The Red Cross (which set up a clinic here) cannot find doctors or nurses
willing to go. This is where most of the US Navy's ships are sent to die,
to deliberately avoid the laws of the Environmental Protection Agency at home
which "provides an opportunity for the Department of Defense to maximize
the return to the U.S. Treasury" (according to a written statement by the
Navy).
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| Shipbreakers in Alang, India. |
Another night was
devoted to the documentary "Born Into Brothels," in which Zana
Briski, a New York City photographer, moves into the red light district of
Calcutta to document the lives of the women there. She decides to put
cameras in the hands of the children who are born and raised in the brothels
and give them photography workshops, not only to see that world through their
eyes, but to give them the chance to find beauty in their own
perceptions. When she discovers how powerfully it transforms their view
of themselves and the world around them, Briski goes on to develop photography
workshops in marginalized communities around the world, working with Israeli
and Palestinian children to better understand each other's lives in Jerusalem's
Old City, Haitian child domestic servants, and children living in
garbage-collecting communities in Cairo.
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| Born into Brothels. |
We closed the first
month with "Gandhi" (1982), Richard Attenborough's dramatization of
the life of Mohandas Gandhi (played by Ben Kingsley), who overthrew the world's
largest empire through radical commitment to non-violence. The film provided
context for the following week's presentation of films from the silent and
early "sound" eras of Indian cinema, many of which were engaged in an
ambitious project: the possibility of locating national identity in
establishing peace between India's proliferation of religious groups,
especially Hindus and Muslims. This enormity of this task (which was
taken quite seriously), was described well by poet Octavio Paz, who became
Mexico’s ambassador to India in 1962: "The presence of the strictest and most
extreme form of monotheism alongside the richest and most varied polytheism is,
more than a historical paradox, a deep wound. Between Islam and
Hinduism there is not only an opposition, but an incompatibility... Music
was one of the things that united the two communities. Exactly the
opposite occurred with architecture and painting. Compare Ellora
with the Taj Mahal, or the frescoes of Ajanta with Mughal
miniatures. These are not distinct artistic styles, but rather two
different visions of the world.”
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| Gandhi. |
Finding common ground
through cinema was compounded by the fact that Hindus and Muslims have a very
different relationship to viewing images. Hindu cinema, largely defined
by visualizing the stories of its gods, becomes a sacred space for those
watching it because of the Hindu notion of “darshan”: that seeing a depiction
of a deity is virtually the same as making actual contact with that
deity. India is perhaps the only place in the world where religious
ceremonies are performed around cinema screens and television sets as if the
deities themselves are present on screen. Major movie stars to have
temples built for them, where they are worshipped as though they were the gods
they played in a film. For Muslims, on the other hand, there are absolute
prohibitions on the depiction of God and his Prophets, which led to a
completely new genre of “Islamicate” films seeking to depict the presence of
the divine through and social and cultural life, as in the work of the great
Muslim director Mehboob Khan (1906 - 64). Here cinema becomes sacred for
an opposing reason, along the lines of Jean-Luc Godard’s observation that
cinema is the miracle that enables us to “watch what one can’t see.”
Interestingly, both Hindu and Muslim cinema developed through the
Zoroastrians in India. Parsi theater had long developed special effects
that was augmented by trick photography to evoke the presence of the divine in
the cinema of both faiths.
India’s film industry
is the largest in the world, yet aside from the work of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik
Ghatak, even its most commercial films are virtually unknown in the
Americas. Even less is known here about the world’s second largest film
industry, which is not Hollywood as many believe, but “Nollywood,” the cinema
of Nigeria. Hopefully this zine will give you a good place to start.
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| Director Satyajit Ray. |
[Footnote to the
first paragraph]
*In his book Mourning
The Nation: Indian Cinema In The Wake Of Partition, Bhaskar
Sarkar puts it this way: "Scholars have sought to wean us off the
mythopoesis of the nation as primordial, essential, natural. As a
result, we now know that the nation is a cultural artifact: an
'imagined community' that rests on the myth of “horizontal comradeship” among
its members; an 'ideological form' that presupposes the continuity of a
national subject across centuries; one of many 'invented traditions' that
political elites have deployed to legitimize their power in the face of
revolutionary and democratic challenges. Nationhood leads to the
inevitable erasure of difference.”
