Harud

What is true evil? The trouble I had with the post-Dark Knight tom-toming of the Joker as a representation of True Evil is this vision of villainy as something larger-than-life, the work of a single man terrorising a whole city. Schindler's List ends with with Oskar Schindler delivering an impassioned speech to Nazi soldiers to go back home to their families. As with everything Spielberg, it promotes a sugarcoated vision of benevolent humanity - slightly led astray by the provocations of that epitome of True Evil, Herr Hitler. And yet, evil as I and most of us know it is banal and mundane - mostly a result of being trapped in the status quo - the evil of conformity and unquestioning acceptance.

There are several reasons why I think that Harud (trailer) might be the best political film to come out of India in quite some time. But the one reason on the top of my mind is this - it gets the nature of villainy right. In its repeated shots of rifle butts ominously hovering over Kashmir's everyday life it captures the humiliation that every Kashmiri must face without relief.

There are other things Harud gets right - its deliberate eschewing of historical explanations, and equally its safe distance from Bollywood's hyper-real aesthetic. The strength of Harud is in its lack of melodrama, its aesthetic restraint that mirrors the interiority of the characters - so that when the father breaks down mid-prayer or the mother grieves her dead son, it strikes home with an intensity that those long bouts of suppressed emotion withheld. It equally draws power from a carefully constructed sound design - the crackle of police radios, the wail of a siren, the clanging of a bicycle, and that final cathartic burst of music (which left me silent).

The film is in theatres for at least a week - if you're lucky enough to be in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore or Ahmedabad - so catch it while there's still time.

Harud (2010)

Dir.: Aamir Bashir

Prod.: Aamir Bashir, Shanker Raman

Screenplay: Aamir Bashir, Shanker Raman, Mahmood Farooqui

Shot by: Shanker Raman

Edit: Shan Mohammed

Sound: Nakul Kamte

Cast: Shahnawaz Bhat, Reza Naji, Shamim Basharat, Salma Ashai, Umar Bhat, Showkat Magray

Demystifying Aantlami: or, How I Learnt To Get Over Limiting Reservations and Love Cinema

For those not familiar with the second word in the title, a brief explanation. Aantlami is derived from aantel: a Jadavpur University catchword that is popular throughout Bengal (and wherever else Bengalis live). Its etymological root is a corruption of the French way of pronouncing "intellectual". Usage varies from knee-jerk putdown to friendly jab, but in all shades of meaning it spells pseudo-intellectual(-ism).

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The present post is to debunk some myths about "art cinema" - which is supposedly the only sort of films I watch, or so my friends believe. The boundaries of "art film" are very broad and accommodating. Anything outside recent mainstream American, British and Indian cinemas falls in that huge set.

The problem with this classification is that a significant part of the films considered so were made in Hollywood or British studios with big budgets and bankable stars, and made sufficient profits back in the day (except perhaps a few Poverty Row classics like Detour). Yet the fact that they're sometimes in black-and-white (colour films were already in vogue by the 1950s) and not contemporary to us drives people away. So here's mental roadblock #1: black-and-white. We'll come to the demystification part later. For now, let us enumerate the problems.

The second big chunk in that very accommodating box called "art cinema" is foreign language films. The funny thing about this tag is that it represents the POV of an Anglophone audience. To them, even a mainstream Bollywood film would be foreign language (assuming it is not in English). And yet we have inherited both their broad definition as well as their prejudices. So here is mental roadblock #2.

The third chunk is possibly the most ignored form even amongst reasonably serious film-viewers - documentary film. The funny thing about viewing attitudes regarding documentaries is that most of us have grown up watching TV documentaries on Discovery, Nat Geo and suchlike. And while their usefulness as learning tools for children cannot be denied, the formal and thematic stagnation and sensationalistic tone (specifically when dealing with history) virtually render them no more than passable infotainment. Mental roadblock #3.

If you consider the vast amount of cinema made throughout the world, the viewing window that remains open because of these reservations and roadblocks is so narrow it merits thinking. The average guy who says he loves watching movies has therefore kept his mind open to only about 5-10% (and that's an optimistic estimate) of the choices he has. And yet he would bravely venture to say that The Godfather or The Shawshank Redemption or The Dark Knight is the greatest film in the world. Isn't that funny?

The principal problem with these reservations is the refusal to consider cinema as a separate language. For most film-goers, even some of the serious ones, a film is meaningless if it does not tell a story. More pointedly, if it does not tell a story in the way they are used to hearing. This explains the inability to look beyond plots, simple join-the-dots sort-of explanations, answers and "messages". This also explains the outrage when some critic gives away spoilers to make comprehensive analyses.

So here is a broadly counter-balancing rule #1: cinema is not all about stories, least of all easily understandable ones, though there are several good films that tell them the straight way. If you can't have cinema any other way, Classical Hollywood and its bastard offspring, the New American Cinema (of which The Godfather is only the most famous example), should meet your expectations. Along with Italian neo-realism and its spiritual successor, New Iranian Cinema - if you're not averse to watching subtitled films. But try to look beyond just that.

One of the greatest losses in moviemaking craft is that new studio directors have largely forgotten or given up long and medium-long shots. Even the most workmanlike director of old Hollywood knew how to block a scene (i.e. direct actors on how to move with respect to the camera) in an interior space. New directors simply have the actors followed around with a Steadicam. The difference between the old and new ways is the amount of trust the filmmaker puts in the audience. Whereas a Hollywood director trusted the audience to look for the relevant detail in an intricately composed frame till about the '70s, one just assumes that today's moviegoers have such short attention-spans that they have to be fed everything the fast food way (for all my lukewarm love for Darren Aronofsky, one of the better studio directors in Hollywood today, his strategy is all close-ups). This assumption about a deteriorating audience might be true to an extent, but the larger part of the blame falls on the studios and filmmakers themselves - as Jonathan Rosenbaum has convincingly argued in Movie Wars. To put it in another way, YOU WOULD NOT WANT TO READ A BOOK WHERE EVERY LINE IS IN UPPER CAPS, BOLD AND UNDERLINED BUT YOU WATCH FILMS MADE WITH THE SAME AMOUNT OF TRUST IN THE AUDIENCE'S ABILITIES (on second thoughts, even one where this strategy is employed intermittently).

The same with editing - preliminary calculations show how average shot length has reduced to something around 2 to 5 seconds now. What possibly started as an amalgamation of Soviet montage and New Wave jump cuts into traditional continuity cutting has degenerated badly into spoon-feeding. To take an example, the old way of highlighting, say, 5 things within the same physical space would be to set up a camera and within the frame (which may be altered by panning, zooming, tracking etc.) achieve an interplay between the elements: say, one of the things to be highlighted moves suddenly in an otherwise still background. The new way to do it is just taking a close-up and cutting to the next thing to be shot. Less confidence in the viewer, in other words.

On to some of the mental reservations. #1: Black-and-white. This one I find hard to understand, given the reasonable popularity of hi-definition monochrome still photography. Several of my friends dabbling in amateur photography love black-and-white stills; yet it seldom translates into love for black-and-white films. To be completely frank, I have counter-reservations about the use of colour in mainstream films. Many directors and cinematographers have no idea how to use colour judiciously so you have movies colour-coded by genre. Laziness in thought, laziness in action. At the very least, monochrome saves us from this monotony of colour. A decently lit b&w frame does not hurt the eyes and something from John Alton makes your jaw drop.

#2: Foreign languages and subtitles. Hostility towards foreign language films is also quite baffling to me. I can think of a few reasons why one might not want to see them:

• The sound of a foreign language is distracting/funny. This is not so uncommon though I would assume most educated people to not burst into fits of laughter hearing strings of unintelligible syllables. The only psychological reason I can assume is insularity regarding one's own origins and language. Anything outre is funny for no good reason.
• The problem with subtitles. This is a somewhat serious problem since many have earnestly complained that they find it difficult to follow the visuals while their eyeballs keep darting to the bottom of the screen to read the dialogue. Takes some practice. Once you achieve the ability to move your focus quickly all around the screen in fractions of a second, it does not impede the enjoyment of seeing the film too much. Again, longer camera takes help - so look out for directors who make films that way. I'd hate to see a frenetically-paced rapidly-cut thriller while trying to understand which direction the narrative is heading to.
• Are their concerns really valid to us? Yes they are. Maybe not in the immediate sense. Settings may be regional and local, but human issues (social, cultural, political) are always universal. In fact, as some have noted, the more rooted in local details a film is, the more universal its reach.
• Will we get their cultural references? This is, by far, the most serious of the reservations. Even the most serious of film-viewers have at some time or the other been confused about their opinions of a "difficult" foreign film. So I will admit at once that some of the imagery in Bunuel is lost on me since I am not familiar with Catholic theology. Or that the Persian poets Kiarostami often quotes are to me somewhat impenetrable. Yet no one but the impatient can escape the wicked sense of humour that permeates everything Bunuel did - if you have protested against authority, conformity and organised religion at some point of your life, your greatest spokesman in cinema is probably this guy. And if you have a palate for the gentle humour and deep profundity that underlies our everyday existence, you cannot ignore Kiarostami.

Which brings me to the major stereotype - preconception, rather - which stops people from exploring cinema more freely. The complaint that "art films" are slow, ponderous, hard to watch. As the preceding points explain, not every "art film" qualifies. Classical Hollywood and New American Cinema are largely well-paced and narrative-driven. A recent conversation with a friend who has seen a few Hitchcock thrillers throws light on what I mean by well-paced. I'm recalling a part of it:

Friend: I liked Rear Window, though it started slowly for me.
Me: No way, I can agree if you say, for example, that Vertigo starts a bit slowly. But Rear Window is captivating from scene one.

The only reason why his notions of instantly arresting material differs from mine is that he possibly has Hitchcock's popular conception as a master of thrills in mind and is therefore expecting something major to happen in the first few minutes itself. (North By Northwest would probably satisfy him.) In Rear Window, the murder (SPOILER!) happens late into the film and is moreover implicit. But does nothing of interest happen at all? Only if we're looking for an instant thrill and not enjoying the little pleasures. Hitchcock is gently inviting us to be voyeurs - looking into the lives of Jimmy Stewart's neighbours even before Jimmy himself starts doing so. We get an idea of what his neigbourhood is like and develop an interest in what might happen to each of these neighbours as the film progresses. We're also wondering which of these individual stories will later get involved with the story of our protagonist - wheelchair and plaster-cast bound Jimmy. It is the classic ploy of raising questions (in the viewer's mind) and gradually resolving them. But if our only investment is in murder and intrigue, we'll miss it. And Rear Window will seem "slow".

Of course, there are films where the pace is slow - i.e. something eventful rarely happens. Antonioni is a typical example, though in his case, he has full justification for doing so - most of his characters are upper-class high-society types with unfulfilled emotional and/or intellectual lives. I will easily admit that I take time to warm up to Antonioni, reasonably seasoned cinephile that I am. Nonetheless, in some cases, I realise (on repeat viewings) that even difficult directors of this sort have a sense of humour - Blowup is pretty much a laugh on the face of the disinterested viewer who finds the film boring. It has also to be understood that a lot of modern arthouse directors (the genuinely "art film" directors, in my definition) employ extraordinarily long takes, sparse soundtracks and visual designs (Tsai Ming-Liang, Bela Tarr, etc.) as a reaction to the oversaturation - all hyper-intensive close-ups and rapid cuts - that the mainstream cinema forces on us. Their films may be something of an acquired taste but the others are quite easily accessible. Nonetheless, I believe in Bresson's dictum that it is more preferable that a viewer feels a film first and understands it later, if at all. It is only the most facile director who assumes that the world is no enigma, that every question has easily digestible answers. Patience helps.

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Lastly, why cinema? Tough question, one I can't objectively answer. I'm guessing, if you have actually read uptil this point, you already have your own answer, right?

***

A junior had asked me to write something long time back. I'd written a draft of this down some three months before. Never had the nerve to publish then because it is preachy and explicatory to a degree. Re-read it today and found that there were useful things in there. So putting it out. Whatever you have to say is welcome. 

P.S.: The target readership is someone who's interested in knowing cinema, but unsure about the hows and whys.

Thoughts on film comedy

 Eventually all of my thoughts on comedy come back to Old Charlie and his spiritual successor Jacques Tati. Charlie's birthday gives me the perfect opportunity to write about comedy, via his ideas.

Anecdotes:

Chaplin had a gift for expressing his vision of comedy with superb economy. I found two anecdotes in his autobiography that seem relevant.

Charlie in his non-Tramp persona.

The first is a hypothetical scenario: a man goes to a funeral. Everyone is standing. The man keeps his hat on a chair beside him. When everyone sits down, the fellow next to our man sits on his hat without noticing it. No one else has paid any attention to this little incident, but between the two of them the sombreness has been lost. I have no idea if Tati ever read Chaplin's autobiography but there's a reenactment of this in M. Hulot's Holiday. The ever-bumbling M. Hulot happens upon a funeral when his car breaks down. Dry leaves stick to one of the spare tyre-tubes in his jalopy. One of the attendants at the funeral takes it for a wreath and places it by the corpse's side. As upper-class mock-sombre people pass by the deceased in a file, air leaks from the tube and the "wreath" droops. The spell of seriousness has been broken.

The second is one of Chaplin's childhood memories: a flock of sheep are crossing by his house. This delights the kid to no end, until he realises that they are being led to the neighbourhood slaughterhouse. Comedy and tragedy often live with each other in an uneasy space.

Statement:

Tati!

Which bring us to Chaplin's most memorable quote: "Life is a tragedy in close-up, a comedy in long shot." Virtually all comedy - and not just the distinctively visual comedy practised by the likes of Charlie and Tati - has its essence in that one line. In a strictly visual interpretation it is probably best summarised in Tati's Playtime - a film of magnificent ambition where every frame has multiple gags being played out in various planes in the foreground and background, often contrasting each other, sometimes creating a sort of magical symphony. Needless to say everything is in long-shot - most of the film's situational humour is derived from the fact that the players are lost in their own internal worlds, unaware of the other players in the frame, whereas we can see all of them at once. A classic example is the scene where Tati's M. Hulot goes to an old army friend's house - an glass-walled apartment building where every movement can be seen from the streets. While the army buddy undresses, we can also see his female neighbour watching TV. The resulting visual gag suggests that the lady is seeing the man strip!

Visual interpretations aside, all black humour also relies on the same principle of the larger picture undercutting the smaller one. Consider Dr. Strangelove. In the scene where Bat Guano is sent to Burpelson Air Base to get to Jack D. Ripper, he's confronted with Mandrake. Mandrake assures Guano that he knows that Ripper's commands mean nuclear annihilation, and only he can stop it if he can put a call through to the US President. The phone booth requires loose change - and since no one has the required amount to place a call to the President - Mandrake suggests Guano blast the Coca Cola machine and get some. Which prompts Guano's much-quoted rebuttal, "That's private property. You'll have to answer to the Coca Cola company!" As in Tati, our previous knowledge of imminent nuclear disaster provides this banter-driven scene the darkly comic tone it is remembered for.

Dashboard confessional

Part-confession, part-rationalization. How are your cultural preferences formed?

My gateway to 'artsy' Indian cinema was Satyajit Ray (like most people) - and now having travelled across the cinematic landscape of the country to some extent, and having seen some of the other world-class Indian directors - I'm still fixated with the man. If I were to name one Indian film that is the closest to me, it's Ray's Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1971). But why - are there not more quintessentially "Indian" directors? (Mani Kaul?) Or even "Bengali" ones - like Ritwik Ghatak? Kaul's films draw upon all sorts of Indian arts in a way Ray's straight-faced realism does not. Ghatak's preferred style of acting is closer to jatra - or popular Bengali theatre - than the naturalism favoured by Ray. As is his use of grand melodrama - territory which Ray avoids as much as he can, his preferred tone being one of subdued emotion.

The answer which I've arrived at with much exploration and rationalization is this: the preference is simply a projection of my own personality (intuitive in retrospect, but... you know!). Avidly listening to Western Classical Music from a very young age, rejecting traditional religion, having an initial distaste for the sentimental aspects of the quintessential Bengali character - Ray made an outward journey from his home. He soaked in Western culture without feeling threatened by it, no doubt a result of an urban cosmopolitan upbringing. And then he sort of made the journey back home once he started with his painting course at Shantiniketan: discovering the rhythm of rural life, seeing traditional Indian art with new eyes.

Compare this with Ghatak's journey: born into pre-Partition Bangladesh with agriculture still not in decline, spending his childhood in a land of plenty, only to be ripped apart by a harsh reality and thrown into an urban maelstrom called Kolkata. A journey away from home, here too, but one undertaken without will. All of Ghatak's films - with the possible exception of Ajantrik - is therefore a pining for the home he'd never get back.

These trajectories matter because everyone - except those who are superhuman - looks for personal resonance in whatever they see, read, listen to, argue about et al. My own journey goes something like: ordinary pop culture devouring for about the first 17 years of my life, then a slowly growing appreciation of foreign cinema and rock music (Western!) and finally a search for roots - discovering and appreciating homegrown culture, primarily through artists like Ray (in cinema), Indian Ocean and Prasanna (in music) who have a foot each in both the home and the world (ghare-baaire).

Why do I feel the closest to Pratidwandi? In Siddhartha lies the closest portrayal of my own self in cinema - idealist, dreamer, pragmatist and someone doomed by character to see both sides of any question.

So the next time you're wondering aloud why I prefer the insider-outsider instead of the more authentic "Indian", you know it's a result of my own limitations. Only someone who has ventured outside and returned home with some ambiguity about rootlessness resonates with another in the same spot.

P.S.: Objectively speaking, if that can mean anything at all, there are directors, musicians, authors etc. whom I admire more from a somewhat neutral, detached vantage-point. But if you're talking about personal resonance, it is what it is.

P.P.S.: The Blogger GUI is called a dashboard, hence the title. No allusions to the band.

Flights (of fancy) in chroma key

Malegaon Ka Superman with his heroine, dancing.

A novice in the world of filmmaking wonders how an essentially collaborative art succeeds in projecting a single vision - the director's. Not a cine-hippie with some reading of the auteur theory. A cloth-store owner, living in a remote town of Maharashtra, whose dreams are the stuff of cinema. Nasir Shaikh. Director of Malegaon Ka Sholay - the comedy remake of India's biggest blockbuster which became a runaway hit in its own targeted market. Having conquered the peak of India's commercial film industry in his own way the next step in his evolution is, of course, making a Hollywood-derived film. Malegaon Ka Superman.

Boasting the biggest budget ever Shaikh has worked with (about a hundred thousand rupees), he has decided to upgrade the "technique" in this film. Superman will fly - a feat which will be achieved by chroma keying. Played by an undernourished hand in a power loom (weaving is Malegaon's primary industry) called Shafique, Malegaonwale Superman seems earnestly determined to move onto bigger roles. His daredevil feats involve painfully balancing his body on bits of wood and bullock carts, jumping into cold water inspite of not knowing swimming (the kids he's meant to save somehow haul him up on land) and performing stunts that usually end up hurting him a lot more than the villains he's beating up (all of them have better physique). Production problems dog the filmmakers at every step - actresses are rare because Malegaon's conservative society does not permit girls to step out of their houses, the camera falls into water and nearly goes dead and Superman-ji is married off in between the shooting. Falling behind schedule means cost overruns - now here's something that connects the most frugal of film industries with the bulkiest and most moneyed. And yet Nasir is egged on by his love of cinema and the sheer joy of filmmaking to overcome these and stay cool.

Superman and I'm-in-trouble-man fly together. And yes, Superman wears uber-cool Hawaii chappals.

The insights are many. One of the screenwriters, Akram Khan, confesses how he started out thinking he'd write with his heart and yet how the final product is mathematical (to use his own word): coldly calculated bits of comedy, anti-climax, climax, action, songs, the works. In other words, the story of almost every commercial filmmaker who had set out with personal visions and slowly gave them up for success (there are echoes of this sentiment in a Dibakar Banerjee interview where he says how he too has been corrupted by the money-making machinery). And then the equally candid confession that only 20% of the original script and vision remains in the final product - in this Akrambhai only differs with Nicholas Ray, a far more rebellious and adamant fellow, in the numbers (Ray said 50%).

There are revelations which quietly seep through the cracks - the heroine of Shaikh's film talks about the strict restrictions on the womenfolk of Malegaon, how girls from outside town (like her) have to be hired at high rates ( she takes 1000 a day whereas the hero takes about a 100) to do the dances, love scenes and climaxes. In the midst of her interview, her phone rings - we deduce it's her boyfriend from the hushed tone, a confirmation comes when we hear several covert mwahs. A village elder comes to the shooting location, sees hero and heroine hoisted on wooden planks (they're shooting the couple-flying-together scene) and turns his eyes away from the blasphemous sight.

Then there's the near-ubiquitous talk of moving on to the bigger game - Bollywood. Everyone in Mollywood (for that is the name of Malegaon's direct-to-video film industry) has upwardly mobile dreams. Except Nasir Shaikh, whose dedication to family matters is absolute - the reason why he dissuades his younger (and equally cinema-crazy) brother from venturing into filmmaking. Someone needs to earn for the family. If one brother is indulging in his passions and losing money, the other must make up. The business is exhausting and unrewarding. An echo of Billy Wilder telling his audience that he'd prefer his son not to be a filmmaker - "it's too goddamn painful."

The film is completed and Shaikh re-opens his long-dead video parlour (where he learnt by watching the greats, as he says - Chaplin, whose Modern Times and City Light [sic] are in his collection; Arnold Schwarznegger, Jackie Chan, et al.) for a screening. Initial reactions are encouraging. Luck favouring the brave, Nasirbhai will probably move on to bigger projects. In Malegaon. Even if his crew moves to Mumbai.

Supermen of Malegaon (documentary), dir. Faiza Ahmad Khan, 2008.

P.S.: The film will have a second screening at Rabindra Sadan, 6 PM, 27th December '11 as part of the Kolkata International Children's Film Festival. Catch it if you can. More than a few guffaws guaranteed!

In praise of a loser

I've been meaning to write a big, fat Indian Democracy post after recently finishing Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, four years too late. Thankfully, that initial enthusiasm has subsided - thereby saving every one of my readers (?) from that familiar know-it-all (or at least, know-it-enough) feeling.

The present post relates in, some sense at least, to democracy. It concerns a subversive musical-comedy that grabbed attention some months back with a couple of provocative trailers (NSFW).

The director of Gandu - Q - made an interesting documentary called Love in India (trailer) a couple of years back, which dealt with India's attitude towards love and sexuality. Love in India showed how Hinduism's mythical past is rife with innuendo, at ease accepting sexuality, even worshipping it - a practise which seems to have been shunned or sanitised by mainstream religion (though it survives in several folk, pagan and tribal customs). In the course of making his film, Q interviews an interesting cross-section of people - Nabanita Dev Sen (who tells us that our simultaneous acceptance of Radha-Krishna's illicit affair and the sanctity of marriage reveals a dichotomy - most hilariously manifest in what many of my college friends do: watch porn while maintaining a conservative stand on women having multiple relationships), several of Q's friends and relatives, married couples, folk singers, artistes and a distributor of B-grade films. The last gives one of the film's joyous, most cheerful testimonials. He describes how he sees many middle-aged women in seedy theatres, finding the cheap sleaze revolting, doing "chhee-chhee" and facepalms; but still stealing glances. That, he says, is definite proof of the elemental appeal of sex - even as we are ashamed of it, we just love it.

This provides us with a starting point in understanding Q's follow-up to Love in India. Kanti Shah - India's Ed Wood, our greatest peddler of lo-fi sleaze - makes films whose thematic concerns are trivial, but absolutely essential if we want to understand India's attitude towards sexuality. The Kanti Shah Woman is a prototype - who dresses vulgarly, usually beds all of the male characters in the film and ultimately pays for her sins with death (usually at the hands of some virtuous male character who was swayed and seduced by the vamp's charms). Film after film, this prototype is repeated, as is the plot. However, there is no explicit sex - the most daring bed scenes involve obese males unnaturally fondling young women accompanied by lots of panting. Most notably these films are never denied a CBFC (Censor Board) certificate.

But Gandu has been denied one. Q has been adamant about not bypassing the censor board and releasing the film directly onto the net because he wants to take the system head-on (there are repeated requests for downloads on Gandu's Facebook fanpage which have been denied by Q). I think he's still hoping and fighting for a mainstream release. When the Naya Cinema festival of Mumbai wanted to screen Gandu, they expected trouble from conservative political factions and applied for police protection. They were denied.

This selective pattern of denial recalls the sanitisation of our myths pointed out in Love in India. Sex is okay for public consumption when it is couched in vulgarity (lesson: "promiscuous girls are vulgar as well") and chastised by a twisted morality (the vamp dies, the moral universe remains untouched); but not when it is direct, naked, celebratory.

Meanwhile Gandu has been released on torrent in a Preview Copy stage (basically, without the sharpness and colour density of the original). My guess is that the makers released it themselves, just to keep the over-eager audience placated. The reaction from my peers, generally speaking, has not been good. Those whose interests were piqued by the trailers were disappointed by the film's lack of a clear narrative arc (usually expressed as "where is the story?") and its irredeemable protagonist.

It is worth recapitulating our mainstream A-grade cinema's attitude towards sexuality and transgression for a change. Bengali cinema has had its fair share of "grittiness" recently, but in 9 out 10 cases where degenerate behaviour has been shown - the character has been given some sort of a victim motive. Sexuality has been touched, but mostly safely - the recent Baishey Srabon showed a couple living in, but their love was all about rolling around aesthetically wrapped in bedsheets and (then a direct cut to) a post-coital smoke.

The real departure Gandu makes from its precedents is not so much in what taboos it has broken, but in the way it has. Contrary to allegations, the film does have a story  - young boy doesn't like his fucked-up existence, finds a friend in a rickshaw-wallah, and escapes in drug-trips - but its protagonists are far removed from any of the cushioning comforts usually offered by mainstream cinema. True, Gandu - the protagonist - suffers from a victim complex, but his actions far exceed any justified reaction to his environment. The extended full frontal sex scene is not a wimp trying to forget his sorrows in lovemaking, just a sexually liberated guy trying to top his trip. The film's numerous rap numbers are wickedly humourous - personally speaking, they were more than enough compensation for the occasional indie film hipness - and work excellently as subversive critiques of our socio-cultural values. The very lack of dramatic narrative works as subversion of our demand of a "story".

The Indian Constitution gives us the right to freedom of speech, but qualifies it with the clause that one cannot cause offence to anybody. This, in effect, nullifies the right. (I am offended that people take their right to be offended as the right to ban the offensive.) Gandu is just the sort of litmus test India must pass if it is to remain a democracy.

P.S.: An interview with Q which throws good light on the sort of films he believes in. Also, I hope some people will go ahead and check out Love In India. Punk art is awesome, alright, but it's better to see things in a calmer state of mind.

A shout out for internet pirates!

A new bill called the E-PARASITE act is being debated in the US House which will give governments, courts and corporate biggies the power to shut down any website which is infringing on their copyrights (of course, according to their own decisions). This is even worse than the existing legislation that allowed websites to take down content deemed copyright-infringing and save itself from legal action. In effect, anything the overlords want us to pay for, we have to - if we really want to use it.

I'm going to argue against this mainly from my vantage point: i.e. as someone in a modest Indian town with a deep interest in matters of the world, and especially, cinema. It is no big secret that Indians don't have even middling-decent DVD rentals or arthouses where one can pay agreeable money to watch a decent variety of cinema. The local DVD rentals in my place keep only safe bets: blockbusters from Tolly, Bolly and Hollywood, a huge stock of b-grade Hindi and Bengali cinema (which, surprisingly, has a steady market), a nominal amount of "art cinema" (the big names in Bengali would be something like: S Ray, Aparna Sen, Goutam Ghose etc.) and large stocks of porn. Kolkata is somewhat better off than Durgapur, of course, but one only gets the theatre experience when the odd film festival comes to Nandan (not counting private screenings). The stores in Kolkata are also somewhat better off - I frequent the Music World on Park Street just to check out what titles they have on the shelves - though they usually keep the Certified Classics only. Thankfully, they're getting somewhat brave and bringing some rarer stuff - besides the usual Kurosawa, Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini et al - I've spotted the odd Olmis and the Dardennes. The gist is this: for a young, impressionable student in Durgapur/Kolkata interested in cinema, the options of getting a steady and healthy supply are still underdeveloped.

Now, let's do some preliminary mathematics to show why the internet saves me from film-ic ignorance. Due to the recent boom in telecommunications, even a mofussil like Durgapur has excellent broadband connectivity. And for around 800 to 1000 rupees, one can get a connection with no limits on data transfer. Basically, a 'free' ticket to share whatever files you want to. Thanks to a very well-developed file sharing web on the internet, I have access to whatever cinema I want. Everything from 1920s German horror to the latest film playing on the festival circuit is within reach if you have found your way around the net. So whereas I can only get three or four DVDs at most with a 1000 per month, I can (and do) download somewhere around 20 to 25 films with the same outlay.

Does this mean I won't buy DVDs at all? I will, but only a few I have already seen and loved - and when I have the money to spare. The way I see it, I'm not cutting down on the business of the corporations at all: it's a choice between not being able to buy and not buying it. My question is - why should an artiste mind if he's reaching out to a wider audience? As far as I know, corporations take the major chunk of sales profits anyway. For the artiste it's a choice between a little more money from royalties and sales profits (and that too is debatable: most filesharing proponents won't buy stuff as heavily as they share) and a huge, well-distributed audience. It's not without reason many bands are releasing their albums for free on their websites - they have already realised that their earning from sales amount to only about 10% (the rest coming from shows).

The internet is also more egalitarian, free from censorship. In one notable example, Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi released his 2009 film on censorship within his country - No One Knows About Persian Cats - on the internet as it could not shown in theatres. (Many similar underground artistes thrive because of the internet.) Now if a site like Pirate Bay - which hosted a copy of Ghobadi's film - were to be shut down because some bigwig corp in USA decided that it had also hosted one of its copyrighted films, then Ghobadi would be shut out of circulation. This is one reason why this new act, if it were to be passed, would be disastrous for democracy. To put it succinctly: for the First World with its various alternatives to showcase art, the internet may be a nefarious parasite eating up business (a claim which is debatable as I've pointed out). For us Third World citizens with no decent DVD rentals and arthouses, it means the death of culture altogether.

YouTube has already been taking down videos that attracted notices from corporations for copyright violation. As someone pointed out, their filtering mechanism is very random. Mashups, parodies or video essays featuring snippets of copyrighted material are often taken down, whereas whole scenes from those very films/music videos survive the treatment sometimes. This has already resulted in people shifting from YouTube to Vimeo (which has a somewhat more sensible stand towards copyright violation), but the implications are bad. As it stands now, you have to pay corporations big money even if you want a snippet (which should ideally be allowable for free as per Fair Use policy) in your work. This is just strangling of creativity; financial arm-twisting. I hope sense prevails and the internet - the only place where we can speak of global culture and cross-breeding with some amount of truth - remains truly free.