Blogical Conclusion

BELIEVING IN SEEING

JUNE 29, 2008 – CHIDANANDA DAS GUPTA HAS BEEN WRITING ABOUT FILMS since 1946, and Seeing is Believing: Selected Writings on Cinema, as the title suggests, is the result of a representational, cherry-picking exercise from scores of these “highly informed and thought-provoking essays.” (As Das Gupta writes in his introduction, “[Six decades] is a long time, and an active scribe can turn out a considerable amount of writing during this period.) The puffery on a book blurb, all too often, is little more than wishful thinking on the part of a PR person, but Das Gupta’s writing lends itself easily to either descriptor: each one of these essays is “highly informed” by a profound empathy for what makes India India, and is therefore “thought-provoking” in entirely unexpected ways.

Writing about why our films sing, for instance, Das Gupta reaches for a conflation of the popular and the mythical that appears to hark back to the early days of calendar art. “A beard on Valmiki in the Ramayana is not a photographic record of a real beard on a real man; it is a photograph, but of the beard symbol of someone who is supposed, by tacit agreement between film-maker and audience, to be a traditional sage.” Thus, says Das Gupta, the camera is made to record a symbol instead of a fact, and “the instrument which achieves this turning of fact into fiction, of the present tense of the camera eye into the past and the future, is the song.”

This isn’t just dry, academic observation, as he demonstrates further on in a stretch that made me recall a conversation I once had with a prominent filmmaker, who wrinkled his nose with disgust at Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s melodramatic Black. “It’s not cinema,” he sneered. “It’s Jatra.” He was referring, of course, to the decibel level of the moviemaking, convinced that folk art had its place, but most certainly not within the confines of the cinema screen. I tried to argue that he had recognised correctly the style of the filmmaking, and that his problem was perhaps more along the lines of granting this style legitimacy – and if I’d had a copy of Das Gupta’s book at the time, I would have pointed the filmmaker to these lines, where the author, while conceding that “folk theatre, such as Jatra in Bengal… has traditionally relied on lung power,” at least finds it interesting that these styles have been appropriated by a medium that “provides its own amplification of both the aural and the visual dimensions.”

This open mind, attuned more to the joys of inquest and discovery than the hollow pleasures of instant, instinctive, critical judgment, can be sensed in each one of the essays. In Woman, Non-violence and Indian Cinema, Das Gupta wonders, “Why is it so rarely that we come across evidence of independent thinking women in our late ancient and medieval literature?” And in Precursors of Unpopular Cinema (what a marvellous phrase: unpopular cinema), he chalks out the link between realism and regional cinema through an observation that appears blindingly obvious, yet rarely articulated in popular discourse about cinema. “[Unlike the all-India film] the regional film expresses the cultural specificities important to the highly pluralistic mindset of the country as well as the particular anxieties and ambitions of the regions.”

The essay that intrigued me the most was, unsurprisingly, The Crisis in Film Studies, where Das Gupta sets up a fascinating conflict between the heart and the head, the sensory (with respect to perceiving art) and the intellectual (with respect to processing it). He bemoans “critics of the PhD variety,” who want to take the sensory experience for granted and build superstructures of meaning on it and thereafter inhabit a world of meanings alone. And funnily enough, in his crusade against intellectualism for its own sake, the ally that Das Gupta recruits is Susan Sontag, one of the foremost (and most frightening) intellectuals in the popular landscape of her time. “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon the art,” she fumes. “Even more, it is the intellect’s revenge on the world.”

And yet, Das Gupta admits, a few passages later, that “recognition of the subjectivity of art also opens the door for subjectivity in criticism.” This grey area, I presume, is the eternal damnation of the critic – for if there is subjectivity, how can there not be selective interpretation, and if there is interpretation, how can intellect not be involved? Another train of thought worth boarding, in the same essay, is Das Gupta’s contention that many of our critics/scholars do not even have “Indian language skills of a respectable order,” and that discourses and judgments are mostly in English. I’ve seen reviews and interviews in the vernacular press, but not much by way of film analysis. Is it sad, or merely inevitable in a country with so much diversity, that English has more or less become the de facto language of intelligent film conversation?

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