bollywood dreams

2 Comments:

At Tuesday, August 22, 2006 ,  Anonymous said...

It will be really great to have such a site on the maestro genius of Indian cinema who spread the name of Indian cinema all over world.

 

At Wednesday, August 23, 2006 ,  Anonymous said...

Film narration has another unique quality. The French critic Lucien Seve once said that a film shot offers scarcely more explanations than reality itself and from this arises its enigmatic power to “cling to the surface of things”. André Bazin wrote: “Cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real”. Even as wait to be transported elsewhere, we are held fascinated by the presence of what has come towards us out of the sky.
The most familiar sights – a child sleeping, a man climbing a staircase – become mysterious when filmed. The mystery derives from our closeness to the event and from the fact that the filmed event still retains a multiplicity of possible meanings. What we are being shown has at once and the same time, something of the focus, the intentionality of art, and the unpredictability of reality.
Directors such as Satyajit ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Bunuel, Forman, Scorcese, Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except for the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.
Films which are null and void are so not because of their trivial stories, but because there is nothing else but story. All the events they show have been tailor-made for the story and have no recalcitrant body to them. There are no real surfaces to cling to. Paradoxically, the more familiar the event, the more it can surprise us. The surprise is that of re-discovering the world (a child asleep, a man, a staircase) after an absence elsewhere. The absence may have been very brief, but in the sky we lose our sense of time. Nobody has used this surprise more crucially than Tarkovsky. With him we come back to the world with the love and caring of ghosts who left it.
No other narrative art can get as close as the cinema does to the variety, the texture, the skin of daily life. But it’s unfolding, its coming into being, its marriage with the elsewhere, remind us of a longing, or a prayer.
Fellini asks: “What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. Before this metaphysical reality we are all of us provincial. Who are the true citizens of transcendence? The Saints. But it’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one – which is really the realm of the artist.”
Ingmar Bergman says : “ Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings deep down into the dark rooms of the soul.”
From the beginning, the cinema’s talent for inventing dreams was seized upon. This faculty of the medium is why cinema industries have often become dream factories, in the most pejorative sense of the term, producing soporifics.
Nevertheless there is no film that does not partake of dream. And the great films are dreams which reveal. The Gold Rush is very different from Pather Panchali . Nevertheless I want to ask the question: what is the longing that film expresses and, at its best, satisfies? What is the nature of this filmic revelation?
Film stories, as we have seen, inevitably place us in an elsewhere, where we cannot be at home. Once again the contrast with television is revealing. TV focuses on its audience being at home. Its serials and soap operas are all based on the idea of a home from home.
In the cinema, by contrast, we are travelers. The protagonists are strangers to us. It may be hard to believe this, since we often see these strangers at their most intimate moments, and since we may be profoundly moved by their story. Yet no individual character do we know – as we know, say, Julien Sorel, or Macbeth, Natasha Rostova, or Tristram Shandy. We cannot get to know them, for the cinema’s narrative method means that we can only encounter them, not live with them. We meet in a sky where nobody can stay.
How then does cinema overcome this limitation to attain its special power? It does so by celebrating what we have in common, what we share. The cinema longs to go beyond individuality.
Think of Citizen Kane, the story of an arch individualist. At the beginning of the story he dies, and the film tries to put together the puzzle of who he really was. It turns out that he was multiple. If we are eventually moved by him, it is because the film reveals that somewhere Kane might have been a man like any other. As the film develops, it dissolves his individuality. Citizen Kane becomes a co-citizen with us.
The same is not true of the hero of Ibsen’s play The Master Builder or of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s novel. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach dies discreetly, privately; Visconti’s Aschenbach dies publicly and theatrically, and the difference is not merely the result of Visconti’s choices but of the medium’s narrative need. In the written version we follow Aschenbach, who retires like an animal to die in hiding. In the film version Bogarde comes towards us and dies in close-up. In his death he approaches us.
When reading a novel we often identify ourselves with a given character. In poetry we identify ourselves with the language itself. Cinema works in yet another way. Its alchemy is such that characters come to identify themselves with us. It is the only art in which this can happen.
Take the old- age pensioner, Umberto D, in De Sica’s masterpiece of that name. He has been made anonymous by age, indifference, poverty, homelessness. He has nothing to live for and he wants to kill himself. At the end of the story, only the thought of what will happen to his dog prevents him from doing do. But by now this nameless man has, for us, come to represent life. Consequently, his dog becomes and obscure hope for the world. As the film unfolds, Umberto D begins to abide in us. The biblical term defines with surprising precision how De Sica’s film- and any successful narrative film- has to work. Heroes and heroines, defeated or triumphant, come out of the sky to abide in us. At that moment elsewhere becomes everywhere.
Umberto D comes to abide in us because the film reminds us of all the reality that we potentially share with him, and because it discards the reality which distinguishes him from us, which has made him separate and alone. The film shows what happened to the old man in life and, in the showing opposes it. This is why film- when it achieves art- becomes like a human prayer. Simultaneously, a plea and an attempt to redeem.
The star system too, in a paradoxical way, is dependant upon sharing. We know very well that s star is not just the actor. The latter merely serves the star- often tragically. The star always has a different and mythic name. The star is a figure accepted by the public as an archetype. This is why the public enjoys and recognizes a star playing, relatively undisguised, many different roles in different films. The overlapping is an advantage, not a hindrance. Each time the star pulls the role, pulls the character in the film story, towards her or his archetype.
The difficulty of being labeling the archetypes should not encourage us to underestimate their importance. Take Laurel and Hardy. They form a couple. Because they do so, women are marginal in their stories. Laurel quite often dresses up as a woman. Both of them- in their sublime comic moments- have certain habitual gestures which are distinctly ‘effeminate’. So why is it that they do not register in the public imagination as homosexual? It is because, archetypally, Laurel and Hardy are kids- somewhere between the ages of seven and eleven. The public imagination perceives them as kid wreckers of an adult world order. And therefore, given their archetype age, they are not yet sexual beings. It is thanks to their archetype that they are not sexually labelled.


Finally, let’s return to the fact that film pulls us into the visible world: the one into which we are thrown at birth and which we all share. Painting does not do this; it interrogates the visible. Nor does still photography- for all still photographers are about the past. Only movies pull us into the present and the visible, the visible which surrounds us all. Film doesn’t have to say tree: It can show a tree. It doesn’t have to describe a crowd: it can be in one. It doesn’t have to find an adjective for mud; it can be up to the wheels in it. It doesn’t have to analyse a face, it can approach one. It doesn’t have to lament, it can show tears.
Here is Whitman, prophetically imagining the screen image as it addresses the public:
Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
Shaded Ledges and rests its hall be you!
Firm masculine colter it shall be you!
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
You my rich blood! Your milky stream pale strippings of my life!

 

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