Film As A Contemporary Art

Social Scientist
Film as a Contemporary Art Author(s): Kumar Shahani Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Mar., 1990), pp. 33-48 Published by: Social Scientist Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3517424 . Accessed: 11/04/2014 03:55
Your use 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 not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Social Scientist is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Scientist.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 14.139.242.50 on Fri, 11 Apr 2014 03:55:35 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
KUMAR SHAHANI*
Art** Film as a Contemporary
From the mute to the articulate,that is how I see my presence amongst you. At its origin my metier is one of seizing shadows and reflections. Yours is that of grasping the very substance of that flux that the world is made of: the world that we together interpret and, sometimes, change. The heracliteanparadox, after all, can only be overcome by an active intervention in that world which we may know only as we ourselves transform it by an infinite series of acts. Each of our individuated beings is a creation of that very process of interaction. The world shapes us as we change it. You have taught us to recogniseit; to name epochs and events, to grasp what lies underneaththem. Is that perhaps the reason why we respond with palpitating hearts when we look at the banal event of a train chugging on to a platform, amongst the very first moving pictures taken by the Lumiere Brothers? I rememberwatching these and other equally mundane happenings with Ritwik Ghatak at a film festival here in a package of the Lumiere films. We smiled, as if to reaffirm our faith in that magic that could be wrought from these mute, banal, mechanicallyreproducedimages. The history of cinema, viewed both materially-from the time of the invention of the cinematographand mentally-ever since the time we wished to hold togetherour perceptionsand acts, whether in sounds fashioned with frequencyand stress to become vessels of meaning, or in tones, colours and lines to contain a fleeting glimpse of eternity in our desire-has the same movement in time that I experiencehere in space. From the mute to the articulate. Indeed, it is a necessary condition for every single work of art that it proceed from an insight unknown to the artist himself: an insight of which the artist has a suggestion or a feeling, unnamed and yet unnameable,constantlypresent. The presence of a thought that he cannot recognise.The gratuitousnessof sensationsthat grow from self-evolving forms. Like cells in the body, each made like the other,yeteach
Filmmakerbased in Bombay ** The Damodaran Memorial Lecture, delivered at Jawaharlal Nehru University Campus.
*
34
SOCIALSCIENTIST
gaining its own quality, becoming bone or liver and, what is more, ova and sperm. Later, perhaps, we can decode their progression through simple mathematical formulae of logarithmic spirals. Quality may be explained by quantity. And organs of function may perhaps thus be reproduced. But the nature of individuation in art from both the mechanical and organic viewpoints requires what would amount to an error,be it rational,anthromorphic,even aesthetic. A work of art has to take from disorder to disorder (of the world from which its own particularorder is created). The most succinct statement of art's relationship to natural and social order is perhaps that it is unfettered by laws prescribed by Destiny or nature, that it transcends them. (Mammata'sopening of the Kavyaprakash). It is, perhaps, for this reason that art seems forever to fluctuate from the didactic to the sensate, sometimes containing the one in the other, in fickle and yet versatile agitation, violating its own aesthetic norms, destroying the craft that makes its realisation possible, considering its states of equilibrium states of death. Forever, threatening death with life. I should think that the spirit of modernity consists in this-and yet it's origins, as we have seen, lie in centuries of tradition; not in something fixed but as something fickle, versatile, trembling with its own desire to change, to disturb the state of entropy. The particular fault in man freed his epistemological instinct from that fate that he considered organic to his being. The swollen foot of fate (Oedipus) did not impel him to a destructive knowledge. It was something rotten in the state, that he acted out his tragedy against, man against the disease engendered by him. At the cost of self-destruction, with the benefit of redeeming that spirit which was until then his fault. It is not truth, with its axioms or its evidence, its homes alternating between the mental and the physical, its transformations and conclusions sanctified by religion or science, that by itself constitutes the content of art. It is the tension between the axiom and the evidence, the very process that produces the generative error, that makes our actions emanate from our being (itself not essential, static, axiomatic or evident) from moment to moment that forms the epistemology of beauty. It is the praxis of truth, not its descriptions, definitions, nor its realisations. We may all disagree with a work of art, and yet acknowledge it as if great; as providing us with insights every time we approach it -even established in it be removed from us space, time, ideology, knowledge and its structures,the ethics of our life and times. We may distance ourselves from the political logic and the consequences of Gandhi's action, but we can only go into raptures over its poetry.
FILM ASA CONTEMPORARY ART 35
We can acknowledge in him, what we would rarely do with anyone else, his claim that 'there is truly sufficient Art in my life, though you might not see what you can call works of art about me.. .'. For, as he says, and rightly so, 'Jesuswas to my mind a supreme artist because he saw and expressed Truth'.And so was Mohammad... They strove for truth, the grace of expression naturallycame in. Lest we forget these are the extensions of art in life, where beauty and truth are simultaneous with socialised virtue. From practice, we returnto practice. Art can make this possible only if we allow it to be free of the diagnosis and prescription of practice. Even for someone who identified himself with the prophets, it was necessary to say that 'it would be a different'. This, from a man who has shaped our crooked destinies, and to whom writers from Gujarataccordthe mastery of simple discourse, in a language seeking to be close to speech and experience. In the tradition of the Bible. Of Jesus and Mohammad. The prophet is of necessity a poet. The poet, however, is often frightened of the future (with good reason) that he foresees. If we, following Lenin, would defend Tolstoy, in spite of his aristocratic ideology, his blissful ignoranceof the sciences of psychology and society, it is because he was able to contain the contradiction of his times in his own subjectivity,finding his truthful objective practice in literature. Strangely, the very sciences that he ignored have acknowledged him as the great master, giving birth to an ethics diametrically opposed to it. Simone de Beauvoir,the doyenne of feminist writing, sees in Natasha's growth the truth of feminine being, as she examines herself before the mirror, revealing and hiding the 'second' sex as it bursts forth in the life of every young girl througha subtle subterfugeof etiquette,sensations and emotions. We who share the belief that we can live in dignity only if we know and act upon the historical process, have to embrace that very work that rejects meaning in history; to find significance, both individual and collective (for the absence in the other ensures the absence in one) where apparentlyno purpose exists. It is for these reasons that art which proposes itself either as purely can neither achieve its own purpolitical or as 'mass-communication' pose, declared or otherwise, nor perform that function which it has acquired (through history) by its autonomy, its judgement upon itself inherent in the individual work of art. To give back to those people what we have learnt from them requires an internalisation whereby their spiritual aspirations become social habit and customs, open-ended forms that contain ever-changing thought and feeling, so that we may truly speak of a tradition.Culturecannot be put to use by intention, except for short-termgoals, either of an immediate practicalnature (as in ritual-basedmythology) or in such configurationsas arise out of an epic
impertinence on my part to hold forth on Art. . my functions are
36
SOCIALSCIENTIST
context. All myths are totalitarian in their neat and absolute oppositions, where the concrete replaces the abstract, and where it is divorced from its historical narrativeunderstanding. The concreteness of the myth has to dissolve itself in the practice of history, where it becomes an instance of the many metonymies that it suggests. Not a confusion of the container for the contained. Nor its opposites. A myth that saturates the mind with heavy concreteness of its parts cannot give us an indication of the whole. Its wholeness often hides the volatile possible relationships between itself and its parts as it juxtaposes, superposes and opposes them against each other. Yet, when the mythical enters the epic, it releases the epic of its own fatalism, as it frees itself from its own aesthetic and habitual prison. In Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak), Durga, whom we should have propitiated with our sacrifice, is herself fragmented. Her visarjanis not that of an idol sent back into the waters to be re-created, but consumed by the fires of industrialdisease. Durga is sacrificedto us. Will she return, forever to be thus consumed, or will we celebrate her re-creationas she stumblesupon us? In The Trialof Joanof Arc (Robert Bresson), Joan of Arc pleads that she not be consigned to fire because she is not impure. Yet, she has cut her hair, worn men's clothes, driven them to battle against the wishes of the Church, liberated her people, and claims to have spoken with God's angels. The myth of purity, the reality of history, the questionof freedom. In the miraculous film from Prabhat Studio, Sant Tukaram (Fathelal/Damle), it is not the division of the material and the spiritual as the opposition between the female and the male principle (upon which its mythology and theology is based), but its interpretation which brings to it the spiritual force of the saint poet's life and song. is merely crudely The direct access to God through the deux ex machina decorative compared to the freedom that he gives to the other, the maternal concern for suffering that he can only alleviate by words, the feminine helplessness, even his dance-like poise that may eventually be learnt from and acquired by the prostitute. If there is spiritual poignance in the film, it is when things go against his intention, the persecution becomes sharper,nature responds with hunger or, when rewarded, he has.to undress his women of ornaments. In my own Tarang, I have taken the ritual myth of Urvashi and Pururavas, tragic in man's search for immortality, to speak of the potential future that has yet to manifest itself in our reality. To apply a reductionist approach to myths, and to saturate their meanings-as is done more often in analysis than in practice-is again to find in them a concreteness that can only become exploitative. It is thus imperative both to maintain the ambivalence of their terms, their poetry, and to place them alongside history, fact and facts, their relationship, the epic. Not the concrete. But its immanence.
FILM AS A CONTEMPORARY ART 37
Itihasa. Thus it was. 'Thus', because the manner often contains the matter, the relationships of facts that change and call for a new mode of action. 'It' includes all that is in the world, including that which may be its potential. 'Was' the past tense is necessary so that you may actually judge the process of the event; not get involved in the illusion, the event itself. Narrative theatre, as Brecht saw it, also breaks of that cathartic process which, instead of making you recognise your condition, purges you of its consciousness. Sequence, as we have been approaching it through history, frees the myths (consequently our axioms, scientific or moral) of the spatial rigidity of their terms and meaning. To an idealist, as often to those who deal in ideas, artists, scholars, intellectuals, sequence may initially seem to be a form of corruption. A vague regret is often found in the loss of purity, of aestheticist confirmation. A return to the origins can make us either see the whole historical process to enrich us or breed a nostalgia for the past, to seek an unreal home for spiritual life. As against this, the epic may go to the origins: the archetypes of thought, emotion and spiritual desire, and dissolve them in the present. The sensuous, contemporary life, seen from the perspective of both past and future-film. Like music, the cinema is experienced as a continuous, live, process of energies. It is conceived and best remembered in a flash, a composite whole. Bresson: 'Your film must resemble what you see on shutting your eyes. (You must be capable, at any instant, of seeing and hearing it entirely)'. Unlike novels, it does not describe, it makes us see and hear (Griffith). Unlike theatre, drama, it cannot bear the language or space of metaphor. It can precede it, reveal it, mock at it, bring together the metaphor's elements that are absent with the present; the word and action; man and nature; the crafted and the crude. The dramatic will always have to yield to the epic in cinema. It inevitably frees us from anthropocentricism. If there is drama in cinema, it is that of all nature. Remember The Condemned of Altona where the cold outdoors, the nape of the heroine's neck, her overcoat, expressed more than the wonderful dialogues of Sartre; words for a moral action manque. In Solaris and The Stalker the drama is conventional to the point of having symbolic characters, near-unities of time and place and action within the characters are brought together to play out an allegory of something happening beyond the unified time, place and action, even if it be in outer Space or the mysterious Zone. It is his Cinema, the content that emerges from the activising of nature that breaks through the conventionality of his thought. I contend that this degree of activising of nature is a gift to him, not only from the present evolution of our re-thinking on the issue of Subject and Object but also and first, a gift of cinema to its author. The re-discovery of the epic in modern times has often been the re-discovery of these
38 SOCIALSCIENTIST
Oriental forms of culture that have given importance to the multifaceted nature of our experience. Practiceis not limited by the rational; nor its opposite. The cinema cannot imitate reality. The camera and tape-recorder certainly do. Nor does 'nature imitate art', as has been claimed, in the
cinema.
'Yourgenius is not in the counterfeitingof nature... but in your own way of choosing and co-ordinating bits taken directly from it by machines'-Bresson. Akbar Padamsee, while watching some films with us had remarked: 'The cinema is condemned to be cubist'. I would like to refer you to Eisenstein's quotations in The Film Sense (of Rene Guillere, in 'Synchronisationof Senses') which bring these statements out as being perfectly true in a certain openly significant tradition in the cinema. Bresson appoverises the image. Luis Bunuel enriches it by the unexpected. Rememberthat the only visual he could rememberof Bresson's was that of the nun's foot being kissed in LesAnges du Peche.Eisenstein constructsit. Even Rossellini, who was so often quoted as saying 'Things are. Why change them?', discovered another gift of the cinema to our culture: Things are, discover their process of being, give it the name that cinema alone can give it, teach people with these things what these things are. This respect for reality ultimately led him to the didactic, not the formless poetic impressionism that was fashionably thought of by the Cahiers du Cinema group and later by structuralists like Christian Metz who denied the possibility of an articulated discourse to the cinema. I wonder what they would have made of the didactic in the later Rossellini. Repeated the subtle subterfuges of Bazin in describing Bresson as a realist, where the 'reality' of literature (the text) is said to have been juxtaposed against the realism of the image (which we know to have been appoverised)? Among our spiritual formalists, I would place the poet Bal Sitaram Mardhekarvery high. For at no point did he confuse techniques with form, nor mistake the material used for the medium. The impetus that he has given to modernity in Marathipoetry is well-known. But for us to fully internalisehis contribution,we need to elaborateupon his quite original practice and theory of aesthetics of the fine arts (in which he includes literature);to finally oppose it, having learnt from him. This theory of aesthetic organisationdoes not deprive us of the content;even as it militates against sentimentality, it reaffirms beauty and truth. While it denies-wrongly-the presence of ideological matter, it attacks the reactionary for not seeing that his demand for converting an aesthetic organisation into a moral or ennobling organisation is also a demand for propaganda, for art as use-object. Indeed, it may expose sentimentality in progressive art as well. The greatest tragedy for works of art in our times has been to treat them as use-objects.
FILM AS A CONTEMPORARY ART 39
Where the Left seems to let itself down, again and again, is that in the field of culture it refuses to take up a position arising from its own understanding of history. As we free ourselves from craft, we should free our consciousness:that is the history of art. A greater degree of organisation of the collective should produce a greater degree of individuation. Christopher Caudwell knew this. It can work as an aesthetic principle too. The more one structures one's forms and thoughts, the more one can improvise. We have perhaps one of the greatest traditions of improvisation. In classical Indian music, where perhaps the most dramatic changes took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lies a great source of movement in art which defies all notions of the symptoms of the Asiatic Mode. The ability to improvise and yet present a sure sense of form is at the centre of the practiceand enjoymentof our musical development, i.e., raga-basedmusic. To me it seems a worthwhile conjecture that a civilisation best expresses its construction of time through its music. For Ritwik Ghatak, film form was essentially musical. Satyajit Ray has said that the looseness of narrative construction in Indian cinema can partly be attributed to our musical tradition. In comparison, he feels that the Western musical tradition builds up narrative in much the same way that Western cinema and its related performingarts do. It would seem to me that a certain period in Western classical music beginning from the Renaissancedefinitely corresponds to the evolution of the descriptive narrative, culminating in the novel. But as the novel reached its fulfilment,andits crises, in the work of JamesJoyce (referEisenstein),so did that tradition in the early part of this century. When it did reach this point of crisis, it not only began to look for dissonances, but also at the possibility of extending the scale. Indian music has a continuous scale (Pt. SharadchandraArolkar). The search for fixing it into 22 rigidly marked points between two shadjasthereforeseems problematic.If they are looked upon as an approximation, with notes tending towards an adjacentascendant or descendant, and as the notes that have a hint of a third, a fourth, or a fifth, then alone will the naming or mathematicalfixing of these notes have value in practice. Recognisably, the internalisation of the inter-relationship of the srutis (ansha,the proportion)would lead us to the forms that we would develop in movement,between one static step and the next, between the arrangement of compositional elements in the static step itself. The proportions would, for example, certainly tend towards a greater nuancing than a broader clash of interweaving melodies would. Moreover,concepts of editing would themselves include fractionalproportions and not merely those of broad displacements in fixed and unshaded ratios. The scenic division, the shot-to-shot transition, indeed, the disposition of movement whether physical or that of the eye, may
40 SOCIALSCIENTIST
for all we know be guided by the basis of raga-construction: graha, ansha, nyasa. The beginning of each segment, its home, is with a quality-not so much at a fixed or symmetricbeat but around one of the sub-divisions. The development through a play of proportions, of the notes in tension with the syllables (akshara/sahitya) and the tala. The very poverty of the sahitya gives it musical strength: like mother and child themes in painting and sculpture. In the cinema, the development of specific quality is in tension with the thematic-and by all elements will manifest themselves as objective data, where inter-relationships jell only after the whole work is perceived as developing. The end of development is a point of rest (nyasa).We tend to work on time and space, those of us who have internalised Indian music around cyclic grids of this nature. Looking at the Mughal miniature paintings of Akbar's period suggested to me the hypothesis that our sense of musical construction may extend to space or its temporalisation. Since Indian classical music embodies all relations, including those of space, into time-relations, it is of particular significance in the cinema, an art which necessarily converts space into time. It seems to me that Western music, on the other hand, converts time relations into space. Again, a necessity in the construction of sound(time) in the cinema. Western music not only uses timbre,silence and 'vertical'layers to a greater degree than we do, but its basic metaphor has always been that of architecture.In Indian music, the metaphor is that of sculpting, more in its process than the finished object, with aspects of the finished object shown in time. The answer to one melodic phrase is given by another that follows in sequence, immediately or after a lapse. Harmony itself is sequentialised, is not simultaneous, except in the ever-presentdrone. Now, in cinema, we do use sound vertically, taking it from space, using time as space and in space. Whereas the picture is made either to flow or jump;positions in space become positions in time. For instance, a film made entirely of the most stacatto images will have the most static rhythm. Evidently then, Indian music-itself devoid of spatial construction-can, nevertheless, become the basis of space construction in cinema. Not that of time, because the cinema demands the complete transposition of space into time relations. But where Indian music is itself used as an element in film, it has to evolve an accoustic, which will make up for the absence of space in its inherent form; silence, reverberations, the simultaneous presence of harmonics in the tones (timbre).Of course, by the very fact of necessary fragmentationof music when used in films, it acquiressome of these elements. On the other hand, the principles of Western music, in that they create the architecture of sound, are inevitably a part of cinematic construction.
ART 41 FILM ASA CONTEMPORARY The cinema, like many other convulsions in contemporary thinking, forces us to give up colonial modes of thought based as they are on the Eurocentric idea of development; and move to one of contract and of generative conflict between systems which have developed one or another aspect of forms, of thinking and of action, achieved obviously at some cost. The pioneers of geometry, and those who have held it at the centre of its civilisation, are beginning to acknowledge the limits of their systems. It is up to us who have internalised number, sequence, to either encourage ourselves and then to overcome these limits of our separate traditions, or to hide behind our linguistic sophistication. It is up to us to transform the conditions of our being or to retreat into nativism which sees contact as valid only when restricted to a discrete group claiming our identity primarily through closed systems: of language, skin colour, habit. It is up to us to reject that image of ourselves that the terms of colonialism/feudalism have imposed upon us. For, nativism is clearly formed as a reflection of what the colonial/feudal held himself to be, as he did the other. Contrary to nativism, the programme of self-determination can only be transformative of the present condition-whether economic, social or cultural, or spiritual, whether of oneself or the other. The cosmopolite, at the other extreme not able to internalise the context of his own experience, falls into the same state of inability to transform the present. It is only by recognising the tension between available forms that one can achieve any transformation. This applies even to systems available within the culture-like margi or desi in ours. I am led to believe that the remarkable achievements of our poets in creating or infusing our languages with vitality from the period of the Saint Poets has been in the recognition of such tensions at both a societal and linguistic level. The development of the khayal into what has been aptly termed a classico-romantic form, owes its efflorescence to precisely the tensions generated between the margi and the desi; the temple and court; the court and the people; the nomadic and the settled. The moment one starts working with two formal systems concerning the arrangements and conceptualisations of the same experience, not only does an open-ness enter into our relationships, but there is also a greater broadening of content. 'Culture-specific' universalisation-if it were possible at all-is so narrow in its application, so dependent on the idea of authority, rather than the historicity of tradition, that it can mislead the greatest among us to blind themselves to what is happening in front of our eyes. I am thinking of Aristotle, whose theory of politics was unable to include the Empire that his own pupil Alexander was building. One is thinking too of Karl Marx, who is today quoted, revised, discussed as much as the ancient philosopher. He went against his own understanding of the history of civilisation-probably because he had imbibed the myth of 'Western' culture as against our 'Eastern' one-to propose the dubious theory of the Asiatic mode of production. I am thinking of the novelists, the filmakers, who accepts the notion of a
42
SOCIALSCIENTIST
beginning, a middle and an end without questioning the secular teleological functions of such forms that embracethe entire content. To what practice of 'nativism' does its critical-realist function belong? The novel itself destroys, giving values by explaining, examining reality in such detail that its own purposive action is questioned. Jean-Luc Godard has said that, of course his films have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. Rauschenberghad designed a machine that destroyed itself. The novel form, as indeed other kinetic forms of our times, are in a certain tension with forms that either organise experience in cyclic manner, or reveal themselves in the
cyclic experience.
Inevitably, this cyclic manner of organising will express itself in our music, our writing, our films and our painting. We cannot wish it away with a nativist or cosmopolite ideology. Such inter-system tensions give rise to the contemporary in art; not through a radical uprooting since they are squarely based on traditions (however eclectic they may be, as our foremost art-criticGeeta Kapur has repeatedly pointed out). To shape the contemporary necessarily involves an alienation into consciousness, a distancing from convention, that would make it a transformativeact. I think that this state of consciousness/alienation-which has been widely accepted as the human condition by various schools of modernism-fromwhich the human action arises, is deeply embedded in our culture as well; perhaps elsewhere too, for realising the moment of truth. Arjuna's conscious questioning of his dharmais his moment of self-realisation. The legends of Gautam Buddha's renunciation, of the Mauryan Ashoka's embracing of Buddhism, the subsequently revolutionary ideology and practice of these two greatest men of our history, demonstrate its necessity. In Yudhishthira, son of Dharma, himself born of sudra yoni, higher than any Brahmin in the pursuit of truth, having mastered anger, arrogance and desire, his constant alienation from his own place in the world, his reticence in living up to the Kshatriyacode, so much so that Kunti had to tell Krishna of one who resembled her eldest child, who was told by his mother that she gave him birth from her vagina, not the anus, that Yudhishthira,world-weary, who saw in his compassion life assert itself in a dog, not in his kin, could accomplish all the aims of man. The Mahabharata is full of arguments-and events-against the custom, through comparison with other customs. It seeks the universal from amongst great dissimilarities, thereby illuminating the particular of the here and now. I think only such tentatives can make a culture resilient. It has been observed by educationists that those who are extremely adept at observing differences without the ability to observe similarities, are unable to develop mental functions. Needless to say, they are also the most prone to exploitation and physically deprived.
AS A CONTEMPORARY FILM ART 43
Even realism, at its peaks, refuses to imitate reality. Instead it systematises it-achieving universality, synthesis, relations. Leonardo's sketches of rock and water are based on the study of action of one on the other, demonstrating inadvertently the principles of Chinese painting. If you want to depict the female principle, know the male, and vice versa. Leonardo'srealism proceeded from natural scientific synthesis, systematisation;Courbet'sfrom the great foundations of the sciences of society being laid along the cobbled streets of Paris. Realism in the cinema has its own peculiar problems. How quickly it breeds the touristic, the propaganda through illusion, and the sentimental, we have seen already: particularly in the post-war years where the delight in being is transferred to ethnic ornament when revolution is packaged for 'target'audiences. Reachout for Lenin as you reach out for chocolates, brute realities for consumption both, and our children are asked at school who played Gandhi with such verisimilitude, not what Gandhi stood for! The demand for art-in-use has inextricably linked itself with illusions and entertainment. Inevitably, even our classical arts are subjectedto this pressure;the evidence of our shastras is also put to the purposeof such consumerism:
W: 1^^ ' A -3Ti,K JUW fl T PIF: Wfl I
It is, however, forgotten that before this hedonistic aesthetic, entertainment was already seen to be subjectivist, as seen in the Sangeetasar compiled by Pratapsinghof Jaipur:
I would not be surprised if this truth were realised earlier, and has been in fact paraphrasedin this nineteenth-centurytext. The special and the specific in relations is what needs to be emphasised, through which individuation takes place. In teaching of the khayal often the internalisation of a bandish, its specificity, is revealed to you. Such as the light touching of a varjit swara,pancham,or the sama itself in the Malkauns cheez: Peed na jaani. The specific becomes the particularnot through imitation,but through the development of individual treatment,achieved through the enmeshing of proportions. Film, while proceeding further from the phenomenology of the novel, its realism of time, also individuates through its tapestry of proportions. When it states relationships, like the novel, it is reduced to the mechanical function of its tools. When it overcomes the transparency of the camera and taperecorder,it goes beyond statement, to evoke. Thus, the statementitself becomes one of the thematicelements, not its content.But when you juxtaposethe statementin idea, as for instance in literature, with the physical/social process underlying the statement, their incongruity leads to new perceptions and relationships.
44 SOCIALSCIENTIST
The geometry of relationships poses special problems for us: since it is present not only in space but also in time; since its magical metaphysical import co-exists with what we designate in the modern world as rational. I would like to stress here that the rational has, by social realists and others, often been either opposed or confused with the real, arising out of philosophic thrusts, of idealism and materialism. While speaking to Naum Klieman of the Eisenstein Musuem, he disclosed a thought of the great film maker: in neo-realism Eisenstein had seen the restoration of the magical in art. Just as talismans, real bones, untransformed,or other parts of the body, teeth, fetishes to keep us alive against natural or social oppression-the return to nature of post-war European cinema(with the exception of a few) became fetishistic in redeeming the physical reality, although its first tentatives were socially activist. The same fate has fallen on naturalism practiced here and elsewhere in the mid-seventies. Starting as protest and affirming the dignity of our own being, it now thrives on formlessness and nativism. In Europe itself, it was only when the anarchyof consumerism examined itself-e.g. in the work of Jean-Luc Godard or the painter R.B. Kitaj-that,with a sense of irony, the poems of Mayakovsky stood out against the picture-postcard idea of a world over and above the The fetishism became parrotted quotations of Lenin (Les Carabiniers). the content of the fetishistic form. It is not formalistic for art to draw attention to its form. It is, on the contrary, laying content open-as Brecht, Le Corbusier, Eisenstein, Bresson, Kitaj,Ritwik Ghatak (before Godard, in fact) have all shown us. The problem with European cinema has been its inability to get out of the collage presented by its materialism. Whereas artists in our country, as perhaps elsewhere among the oppressed-compare Ghatak with Godard, of Vivan Sundaram with Kitaj-can transform the given sources of reality since there exists in our mental and material reality a hierarchy of values. Thus we return to the question of the geometry of relationships. Geometrymust concernwith more than two points in space, since even a line can be interpretedin a pure time sequence. The geometricalmode of thinking, with its forms embodying simultaneous time graphs, extends to relationships inherent in sequences seen as whole and completed; as well as those existing between two forms. The planes thus formed are verbal, textual, musical, tonal, chromatic,etc., whenever simultaneous. Yet, if the cinema is not to degenerate into multi-media bombardment of the senses (as it often does, in our new culture, inspired by theories of 'target' audiences), it has to come to terms with the significance of these forms , for they contain human experience, human imagination leading men to transformativechange, and not merely ritual change. Now, rational and transformative acts are hardly ever separated at the origins of any civilisation. How are we to reconcile the refinements of all our arts based on the centrifugalimpulse of movement from a still centre, as practiced here with the rational derivations of geometry,
AS A CONTEMPORARY FILM ART 45
the scientific perspective in its physical and figurative sense, the representational, the inward with the outward movement? The still centre with the shifting centre, both derived from the mental-physical space continuum? I do not think that what we are confrontinghere is merely a reiteration of the subject-object opposition; not merely the alternating of the abstractand the realist in moder art. These tendencies seem both to be different aspects of the representational. Ritual, drama, theatre, remain at the centre of the representational in art: the metaphor, the present standing for the absent. Without a doubt, the art of any civilisation begins there, as magical or cosmic representation.But it may be that the Asiatic and other older cultures that had a continuous evolutionary development, while maintaininga link between the arts, began to consider poetry, with its evocative rather than representational characteras the highest of arts, giving it an autonomy from ritual significance.Music may be consideredas a furtherextension of poetry as it so clearly evolves from the manner of vocalisation, the intoning of words assuming a greater significance than what the words literally signified. Dance: beginning as expressive metaphor, progressively moving towards an achievement with the body similar to what music achieved with the voice. On the other hand, the aesthetic formalisation of the epic is completely given up, itihasaperhaps being seen more as ethical, enlarging significance from the momentary ritual to all of life. In the West too, for a long time, and perhaps even today, the epic is seen by the dominant culture as preceding and, therefore, more primitive than the dramatic; while the lyric, and its further evolution, music, the most evolved of the forms. It is now that we are faced with the total loss of significance in Europeafter the war, in the colonised nations after the disruption of its cultural values, that the restorationof the epic has become a pressing need. Ethics was the aesthetics of a remote past. Ethics will be the aesthetics of the future. But the terms are often so neatly reversed by political expediency that the internalised motif of change(ethics) is projectedinto the eternal abstractState or Party. Instead of the still centre becoming the shifting centre and building its own haimonies (giving life to dissonances, abandoning the idea of simultaneity since the centres are never at one place and therefore not of the idealism engendered by harmony), instead of that, an aesthetic derived from dead laws of the immediatepast is anonymously imposed by the market and the State-the two most manifest sores-of commodity production and commodity exchange, of which contemporary art is one of the many symptoms (trying to cure itself of the infection that caused it to appear). Art cannot accept that the relationship between things is the relationship between people. It has to restore qualitative relationships where the generalised language of exchange has become that of quantifying man's intervention in the world. Yet, on the other hand,
46 SOCIALSCIENTIST
the potential of abstracting the particular, of internalising the senses and of transforming,speaking to another far removed in geographical, linguistic, ethnic terms was never as great as it is today. Already Rabindranath Tagore has said in 1926, 'There was a time when human races lived in comparative segregation and therefore the art-adventurers had their experience within a narrow range of limits, along the deeply cut grooves of certain common characteristics. But today that range has vastly widened, claiming from us a much greater power of receptivity than what we were compelled to cultivate in former ages... Even then our own art is sure to have a quality which is Indian. When in the name of Indian Art we cultivate with deliberate aggressiveness a certain bigotry born of the habit of a past generation, & Aesthetics) The specific realism of commodity exchange which devalues the message and the significanceof the work, was noticed some decades ago by Premchand. Speaking of the short story, he derides that tendency in fiction which prefers the faithful rendering of gossip and rejects Nor would he have accepted the mere reaction to commodity production which has characteriseda great amount of work in film, painting and fiction, since the war; the reaction being either in the acceptance of reification,enforcing voyeurism and a quantifying of human experience, or in the rejectionof abstractionto reaffirmnature in its own state.
significance. we sooth our soul under idiosyncracies. . .' (RabindranathTagore on Art
t 4 Xr t1
^fW ^ fUt
t, X"
pl
ef e
la
!,
5w
t TTT q
dq gC 9rlc
^{t -^ mq^ ^R^T ?t
gt t T1 . . .t. .
i HS XrXre
T f f X1 Mi ^ S d1 ?? ^41^1
?)
The mediation of man is seen as essential to restore the cognition of his own selfness, precisely what commodity exchange deprives us of at the same time as it releases us from the fetishism of religion and the fantastic. Muktibodh rejected the idea of translating experience into poetry, since experience had to be mediated by the imagination, which works with its own momentumbeforeit entersthe momentumof language. The need to re-invent the language of the painter, poet, musician, or filmmaker should be seen not as it often is, as a return to nature (phenomenological time and imitation of space), but precisely because are being reduced to objects, carrying human labour as its relationships abstraction. quantified The modern Indian artist, confronted by apparently antagonistic traditions in his daily life, is in a natural state to evolve new forms unless he programmaticallybecomes subservient to a cosmopolite or a nativist ideology. Amrita Sher-Gil, whose troubled life gave birth to the present-day effervescence of Indian painting, rejected the paltry
ART 47 AS A CONTEMPORARY FILM
academicism of the one, imported from the West, as much as the weak imitation of earlierIndian art. Her need was to find significant form; in this she could align herself with Ajanta as much as she did with Van Goghor Gauguin. How does the re-invention of language-along with our imagination, and the experience that it mediates into freedom: internally, the commodity that is a work of art, therefore labour and man, as externally, by producing a commodity which is different from all the others and thereforenot seen as the same-how does this provoke us out of a passive and into an active state? Marx has already clarified how such a work of art stands in relation to societiesbased on commodityproduction: 'Thesame kind of labourmay be productiveor unproductive. 'For example, Milton, who wrote ParadiseLostfor five pounds, was labourer. an unproductive On the other hand, the writer who turns out stuff for his publishers factory-style, is a productive labourer. Milton produced ParadiseLostfor the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature. Later he sold the product for five pounds. But the literary proletarian of Leipzig, who fabricates books under the direction of his publisher, is a productive labourer; for his productis from the outset subsumedunder capital,and comes into being only for the purpose of increasingthat capital.' Internally,the objectthat refuses to subsume itself under capital, yet uses the enormous potential of forms released by the greater abstraction, the socialisation of its systems, to metamorphosefrom a silkwork into the equal of angels of paradise, has not only to dismantle the relations contained in post-capitalist forms, but to re-integrate them, through the medium of imagination(not just experience)and the re-invention of language. Ritwik Ghatak, acknowledging his debt to Brecht, clearly saw the need for the epic (becausethat alone would show how a performanceor a work of art is made), developed it further to inject the archetype as the vibrating membrane between the contemporaryand the eternal in man. Simultaneously, he showed the fetishism that attached to objects of use, going to its historical origins (Ajantrik).Bresson opposed the cinematography to the cinema: 'Because you do not have to imitate, like painters, sculptors,novelists, the appearanceof persons and objects (machines do that for you), your creationor invention confines itself to the ties you knot between the various bits of reality caught. There is also the choice of bits...' 'With the centuries, the theatre has bourgeoisiefied...Photographed theatre shows how far...!' With television, one feels that it is lumpenised. We have to work towards the re-establishment of these bonds, 'bonds that beings and things are waiting for, in order to live'. For this, Bressonreplaces the actor with the model, snatching moments of being and not impersonation.
48
SOCIALSCIENTIST
For Amrita Sher-Gil to proceed away from academicist-realism of models as things she inherited from the tradition that evolved together with the commodity, through a realisation of her projected subjectivity in her early Indian work, to the Woman Resting on Charpoywhere the living subjectivity of her object reaches us with all its languor, was to set an example to all contemporary artists. In her earlier work, the 'emotion she characterisesin her subjects flows from sources in herself rather than from the subjects' (Geeta Kapur). In her later work, these sources themselves get more illuminated; melancholy becomes languor, palpable, because she has now overcome the alienation of people as things, re-discovered them in her imagination, found her stylisation, affirmed both our own suppressed sensuality and awareness simultaneously with hers. 'We are made to feel a shocking intimacy with the woman by her erotically suggestive pose and the titled charpoy which puts us immediately above her. Yet though she seem to lie passively, there is a restless movement in the woman which suggests the painful birth of an awareness. A consciousness of the restraintsimposed on by her social environment'(Vivan Sundaram). The images of dismemberment that Adil Jussawalla has found permeating Indian writing are necessary to the evolution of our language as the re-integrating elan of our new figuration. Our speech and writing evolves the forms and vocabulary of critical realism, which no longer rest in the cradle of mechanical causation-the volatile nature of our language seems to lead a splintering of consciousness. The only way that literature can begin to contain it, is to first acknowledge the process. While darkness sorrounds us, as in Nirmal Verma's world, the diaphanous surface of his language makes us see the arched longing of shifting subjectivities. If the intellectual has to split off the good from the bad, the true from the false, to recognise the invariant dualities in nature and culture, so long as it does not turn upon itself and become guilty as in this last century of European art, the body can throw up a flame that will coil in union, as in M. Govindan's serpant(W ). The fragmentation of human subjectivityand its projectioninto objectsof consumptionis countered by the celebration of the body in today's Indian narrative painting. Even the mathematical mind (Akbar Padamsee) has found its epiphanous song (as characterisedby Geeta Kapur),restoring nature to the imagination. Our music, which has always abhorred the readymade polished concreteness that makes the individual anonymous, takes us back into direct contact with our self-ness, otherwise atomised in unimprovised relationships. For, now we have to keep in touch and we must do it with our entire self-ness intact. Let there be commercebetween us, with full knowledge of our contract,so that the metaphorsexpressing our thought and emotions, neither hide nor fully reveal their meaning, allowing us to finally annihilate them in silence, to discover that which is, our being.

Film As A Contemporary Art

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Film As A Contemporary Art

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Social Scientist

Art** Film as a Contemporary

FILM ASA CONTEMPORARY ART 35

FILM AS A CONTEMPORARY ART 37

FILM AS A CONTEMPORARY ART 39

AS A CONTEMPORARY FILM ART 43

AS A CONTEMPORARY FILM ART 45

^{t -^ mq^ ^R^T ?t

ART 47 AS A CONTEMPORARY FILM

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen