Locating World Cinema: Interpretations of film as culture [!st ed.] 9789389714210

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Locating World Cinema

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Locating World Cinema Interpretations of Film as Culture M.K. Raghavendra

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BLOOMSBURY INDIA Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd Second Floor, LSC Building No. 4, DDA Complex, Pocket C – 6 & 7, Vasant Kunj New Delhi 110070 BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC INDIA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in India 2020 This edition published 2020 Copyright © M.K. Raghavendra, 2020 M K Raghavendra has asserted his right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as Author of this work Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes ISBN: HB: 978-93-89714-21-0; eBook: to be confirmed 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset in Minion Pro by Manipal Technologies Limited Printed and bound in India Bloomsbury Publishing Plc makes every effort to ensure that the papers used in the manufacture of our books are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. Our manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

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To the Saturday Film Group, the ideas generated in it, and its members, past and present: V. Narasimhan, S. Sridhar, Nausheer Hameed, Jaidev Raja, Babu Subramanian, Aninidita Biswas, Aditi Machado, Aditya Gowtham, Suhas Chavan, Margot Cohen, Sharang Dev, Sarvam and Hemanth among others

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‘As all politics, however consequential, is local, so, however ambitious, is all understanding.’ —Clifford Geertz

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Between Meaning and Significance

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The Engineered Look: The Film Festival Circuit and the Aesthetics of the Global Art Film A Fallible Tradition: Kenji Mizoguchi and the Post-War Transformation of Japan World and Text: Interpreting Jacques Rivette Unattainable Women: Sexual Anxiety and Location— Scorsese, Rohmer and Kiarostami Beyond Religion: The Spiritual Cinema of Robert Bresson Nation and Transgression: Ideology and the Horror Film in India and Pakistan A Trajectory of Form: The Development of Soviet/Russian Cinema (1910–2010) History as Polyphony: Understanding Aleksei German Utopia and the Patriarchal Order: Zhang Yimou as a Chinese National Artist

1 35 65 93 113 147 165 211 239

Bibliography

283

Index

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About the Author

293

vii

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Acknowledgements This book owes partly to the ideas on film generated through discussions over the years with Hans Mathews and S. Sridhar. It would not have been possible without the Homi Bhabha Fellowships Council, which granted me a film fellowship in 2000 and got me deeper into films. Abram I. Reitblat of NLO (New Literary Observer), Moscow, who edited the Russian translations of two of my books and took a look at this effort, should also be acknowledged. It also owes to my wife, Usha K.R., who edits my books and helps in validating my arguments.

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Introduction Between Meaning and Significance Evaluation and Interpretation This book is a critical exploration of film in which the thrust is interpretive, but with evaluation still in the agenda. This is not to say that ‘interpretation’ and ‘evaluation’ are patently different processes, because one implies the other. One judges a film partly on the basis of what it ‘means’, and in some sense interprets it only after judging its validity. Judgement implies the cultivation of taste and it has been argued that even our most basic and animal-like sense—the gustatory one—contains the beginning of the intellectual differentiation we make while judging things.1 ‘Taste’ is not a private but a social phenomenon; therefore, the mark of good taste is not to yield to our private preferences but to stand back from them, because one can actually ‘like’ something that one’s cultivated taste has rejected. Taste counters the private inclinations of individuals ‘like a court of law, in the name of a universality that it intends and represents.’2 Evaluation and judging a film as art/expression cannot but ride on the interpretation one gives to it; however, every kind of interpretation cannot support judgement. David Bordwell proposes3 that when spectators construct meaning out of a narrative film, it can be one of only four possible types: They would begin by constructing a concrete world and an ongoing story, and they would then go about attributing a ‘point’ or abstract/conceptual meaning to it, assuming that the film is directing the spectator on how it is to be read. The spectator could also assume that the film is speaking indirectly and she/he may construct covert or implicit meanings sometimes, either as part of the xi

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exercise reconciling anomalous elements within the filmic text or by invoking the symbolic impulse. The implicit/symbolic/covert meaning could be compared with the most apparent meaning (the ‘referential’ meaning) with which it might either be in consonance or disagreement. Attributing irony to a filmmaker might be a way of dealing with any detected dissonance. Very often the covert meaning is the one that furthers ‘appreciation’ of a film. The three kinds of meanings just described all point to the film ‘knowing’ what it is doing, but the film may also yield a repressed or symptomatic meaning that it divulges involuntarily, which could point to some latent prejudice or fear on the filmmaker's part and might even contradict the film’s rhetoric. Regarded as individual communication, the symptomatic meaning owes to the artist’s obsessions, but if seen as part of a social dynamic, it can be traced to economic, social or ideological processes. To use an appropriate analogy, the first two kinds of meanings together (explicit meanings) correspond to speech and the third (implicit meaning) corresponds to body language/gesture that registers nuances that speech itself is unable to express. The symptomatic meaning, regarded thus, could correspond to a stammer or a nervous tic that a person might try to suppress, but which nonetheless appears and is read. An inability to control habits of speech could also yield symptomatic meanings although speech itself can be regarded as the originator or source of explicit meaning. While the first three kinds of reading are characterised as leading to ‘comprehension’, the last is seen as corresponding to ‘interpretation’. Since the distinction between ‘symbolic’ and ‘symptomatic’ meanings can sometimes become nebulous, I have consciously used the term ‘interpretation’ to include all four kinds of reading.4 The excavation of the symptomatic meaning corresponds to ‘deep reading’ as against ‘surface readings’ allowed by the other three. The ‘depth’ in deep interpretation has little to do with profundity, but—while surface interpretations presume that authors as agents are still in a

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privileged position with regard to what the representations are—deep interpretations presume that they have no such privilege.5 Surface interpretations, unlike deep interpretations, refer to the way a film’s intended audience might understand a film. It can also be proposed that while surface interpretation constructs ‘meaning’ retroactively, deep interpretation corresponds to determining ‘significance’, since ‘significance’ implies the assigning of meaning to a text rather than discovering/identifying meanings intrinsic to it. As already suggested, the task of distinguishing between the two is not always an easy one. Since pronouncing judgement is rendered difficult, one could rely on interpretation to do it. What is a less problematic path to judging something than to speculate on what it ‘means’—since that might also effectively suppress one’s ‘likes’? Academic writing on cinema tends to be wary of the valorisation of individual filmmakers, perhaps because it is considered retrograde after Roland Barthes announced the ‘death of the author’6. But after looking at some of the examples of cinema provided in this book, the announcement seems premature, although an ‘authorial vision’ alone is not as aesthetically determining as the contextual circumstances in which the author’s approach originates. The location of an authorial vision often determines its importance. The chapters in this book are circumspect about pronouncing judgement on filmmakers, but they nonetheless distinguish between the kind of cinema that reacts to a sociopolitical process or a new technology, and that which responds to it through a deliberate aesthetic/formal approach, implying a historically engendered worldview.

Interpretive Options Before going on to delineate the approach taken in this book it may be necessary to say what are some approaches not taken. A method favoured in interpretation is the theory-down method, one which is doctrine driven; that is, it depends on procedures like psychoanalysis

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and/or subscribes to schools usually dedicated to the psychoanalytical method or post-structuralism, and the critic assumes his/her central task is to prove a theoretical position. The actual film becomes an example to illustrate a universal truth. This approach owes to the inductive method, which is useful in the natural sciences, but it has been pointed out that the experience of the sociohistorical world cannot be raised to a science by the inductive procedure of the natural sciences: The experience of the sociohistorical world cannot be raised to a science by the inductive procedure of the natural sciences. Whatever “science” may mean here, and even if all historical knowledge includes the application of experiential universals to the particular object of investigation, historical research does not endeavor to grasp the concrete phenomenon as an instance of a universal rule. The individual case does not serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. Its ideal is rather to understand the phenomenon itself in its unique and historical concreteness. However much experiential universals are involved, the aim is not to confirm and extend these universalized experiences in order to attain knowledge of a law—e.g., how men, peoples, and states evolve—but to understand how this man, this people, or this state is what it has become or, more generally, how it happened that it is so.7

What ‘this film’ means cannot always be derived rigorously from what films broadly identified as similar are regarded as meaning. As has also been argued, a critic drawn by a particular film has no obligation to prove a theory right, because film theory speaks of the general case whereas film interpretation deals with the puzzling or highly distinctive cases of cinematic masterworks. Film theory tracks the regularity and the norm while film interpretation naturally deals with deviation and the exceeding of the norm.8 In principle, film theory should treat all films equally as ‘texts’, but theory-down interpretation is effective only when it is charting the norm—usually dealing with generic material—and not when interpreting distinctive works or exceptions. Much of the writing on film has tended to believe

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that a foundationalist theory of film is needed to interpret cinema— for example, Film Theory rather than local film theories dealing with instances of cinema piecemeal—and this has been enlisted to serve the partisan causes of certain kinds of cinema.9 The chapters in this book are more modest in their claims for theorising because the generalities that are arrived at are local in their import. There is an effort in the arguments to convey the sense that an observed cinematic phenomenon could not have emerged in another society with another history. Even seemingly universal values like love are conveyed differently in various cinemas of the world and their universality needs to be investigated. Moreover, ‘how’ something means should be given more emphasis than ‘what’ it means, since the first line of enquiry allows the object to retain its mystery when the world itself is mysterious. Interpretations of films are often ‘violation’10 of texts; and one detects in the more complex works of cinema a resistance to interpretation, which must be respected. Given these factors, a pertinent issue is the depth of understanding of the local culture that is considered essential in order to interpret a film convincingly. If the universality of common notions is questionable, how is cinema comprehended across dissimilar cultures, considering that cinema ‘travels’ so well? In asking ‘what is cinema?’, essentialist theorising has looked upon it as an extension of photography, which itself is thought of as presenting (once again) an object or event from the past.11 The difficulty is that there were other views of what cinema was in other parts of the world. In India and Japan, for instance, cinema was not an extension of photography but a derivative of the stage, with little emphasis on realism.12 In India, photography was not a sacred imprint of reality but apparently something else. Early photographic portraits in India paint over the likeness, reintroduce the decorative conventions that preceded photography13 and an individual is turned into a type corresponding to a ‘rich man’ or a

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‘matriarch’ or a ‘landlord’. Realism did not catch on in Indian cinema and this finds correspondence in other areas as well. Indian poetics and dramaturgy treat literature and drama as not subordinate to external reality but greater and truer.14 This may explain why Indian cinema is still largely not ‘cinema’ but the visual delivery of stories in which ideals/types—character types, typical emotions, spaces and narrative turns—predominate.15 But regardless of the different things that cinema means across cultures, comprehending the cinematic narrations of another culture has not proved difficult. Film is not a language like English or Greek is because it arrived at various centres across the world in the late 19th century without a primer accompanying it. As Christian Metz declared, ‘It is not because the cinema is language that it can tell such fine stories, but rather it has become language because it has told such fine stories.’16 The meanings ascribed to any piece of narration may owe to the underlying syntax, but the syntax in film is itself a result of its usage. Many of the formal devices in cinema—like the cut, the dissolve, the 180-degree system in the denotation of film space—are the same around the world; but this is not to assert that the ‘grammar’ in cinema is essentially the same across cultures. For instance, Hollywood, with its causal emphasis on individual motivation, may be regarded as constructing narratives in the active voice, while Indian popular cinema, with its sense of a determined universe, constructs them in the passive voice.17 Still, such differences do not come in the way of cultural outsiders comprehending a film, and they merely offer themselves up for interpretation with regard to the dominant cultural tendencies. The utterance itself is understood but its ‘grammar’ could have someone wonder about the utterer’s attitudes; and, therefore, his/her milieu and its mores. To illustrate, a Japanese love story will be understood by someone from India, although its notion of ‘love’ could also make her/him acutely aware of the cultural differences.

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Cinema is a product of Western capitalism, and regardless of where films originate, they are expected to be comprehended globally. Even the most obscure art-house film hopes to be received well at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, which suggests that the difficulties the spectator might encounter in deciphering it are in the nature of intellectual challenges, unlike someone trying to read literature in an unknown language, since cinema depends on it being less local in its syntax. At the same time, knowing the cultural location of a film leaves one open to meanings/significances that a ‘universalist’ reading cannot accommodate. Comprehension of a film in the context that engendered it, rather than narrowing one’s appreciation to its projection on a universalist mindset, could expand our understanding of cinema itself as this book tries to demonstrate. Much (though not all) of the interpretations in this book pays close attention to the context of articulation, that is, the location of the discourse. Serious filmmakers are not always aware that their concerns are ‘local’ and the ‘local’ is something they might even wish to transcend. But there are two different implications of the ‘local’ that come into play here. Given the location of a discourse, the first is the sociopolitical context being invoked and the second is the context called into question when a film is being interpreted. It is evident that the two ‘locals’ are not identical. An animal fable, for instance, does not specify a context, but animal fables from different cultures bear characteristics that are dissimilar. The first ‘local’ sometimes does not need elaboration as in films from/about spaces that have gone through widely registered historical processes, like Germany, Russia and the socialist world in the 20th century that a worldwide audience would know about. It is reasonable to assume that the name Hitler need not be explained to film audiences. For countries where the local context will be unfamiliar to outsider–audiences, filmmakers use other strategies to contextualise issues. The Iranian Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, 2011), for instance, initially withholds information

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with regard to the ‘first local’ and then springs it upon the audience to resolve the mystery deliberately created. If understanding implicates the local, primarily, the second local should come into play in every kind of film, though identifying it in arthouse cinema from developed countries is not always easy. It would, for instance, be hard to identify a specific social context for Michael Haneke’s minimalistic humanism in Amour (2012),18 although not impossible. The chapters on Robert Bresson and Jacques Rivette, it may be noted, are the ones in which location comes least into play, although in the case of Rivette the use of Paris as a metaphor for the larger world may be taken to be a narrative strategy based on location. The next question is, if location plays a large part in the meaning of a film, what would be the position of the outsider–critic. As already elaborated upon, cinematic syntax is not local and this means that an interpreter–critic in film has more freedom than her/his literary counterpart who works within the territory demarcated by a language shared with a local readership. The interpreter–critic from outside concerned with what the film means to its intended audience may, therefore, overlook unclear cultural references as long as she/ he can interpret the film, however difficult, convincingly. Since filmmakers address audiences by taking the universality of film syntax as a given, these obscure cultural references could be even ‘private’ in nature.19 As additional support to the claims of the cultural outsider as interpreter of film, it may be observed that, often in cinema astute interpretations come from outside the local culture (for example, the French critics on Hollywood), something that does not find an easy parallel in the interpretation of literature since verbal language has to be learned before one comprehends literature. Still, if local elements do not contribute to making a film ‘difficult’ or less accessible, what are the elements that do? Since this book largely interprets the meanings of individual films for their intended public, it will be useful to speculate briefly

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about how filmmakers address their audiences, both inside and outside their own cultures. Moving pictures became popular around the world because they exploit pictorial recognition rather than depend on signifiers, the decoding of which require mastery of the codes.20 But the intelligibility of all films not being equal to everyone, we may propose that they pick audiences they seek to address and they are, therefore, made differently depending on the audience being picked, whether mass audiences or filmliterate ones. Since films are naturally easy to understand, it can be argued that films that address mass audiences rely on elements that make it most intelligible. These elements can be broadly identified as follows21: (a) the cinematic image refers to the referent by picturing and resembling it, (b) variable framing and camera focus tell the viewers exactly what is significant in a scene—the viewers’ gaze is, therefore, directed, (c) the early scenes are related to latter ones just as questions/problems are related to answers/solutions and (d) digressions are allowed although they could impede intelligibility, but they usually relate to specific genres/sub-genres, like music and dance in musicals, spectacles of destruction in disaster films, picturesque locales across a variety of genres. These are attractions promised by their genres but they are placed within brackets, as it were, within the narration to maximise intelligibility. These techniques developed to enhance clarity have made cinema popular with mass audiences, but it has been shown that the post-war European art films that are ‘difficult’ deliberately violate causality (‘c’ in the earlier list) in order to privilege the author as the organising intelligence,22 and forces another question: ‘What is she/he trying to say?’ My proposition here is that whenever a film attempts to address a film-literate rather than a mass audience, it does so only by violating one or more of the above principles. Distorting the resemblance to the referent both visually and aurally,

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framing exceptional objects and directing the viewers’ gaze away from what might have been significant in a standard narrative, introducing elements that break the question–answer arrangement in the flow of events and blurring the bracketing of digressions are ways in which new significance can be brought to a film narrative beyond what would be grasped by a mass audience. It can also be proposed that most difficult filmmakers who ‘get beyond’ addressing mass audiences do so later in their careers after initially making their early films completely intelligible; that is, their violating the norms to make their films intellectually/aesthetically more demanding comes only after creating an artistic context in which their films should be viewed. From the preceding arguments it may be conjectured that one needs to be film-literate rather than immersed in local culture to comprehend/interpret a difficult film, and I intend to demonstrate this proposition in the individual chapters. The chapters tackle several kinds of subjects and the largest number pertains to the works of individual directors. The directors have been selected not because they are certified auteurs, which they obviously are, but because aspects (both political and philosophical) of their works, which can only be of great interest to those interested in film, have not been taken note of by critics/scholars. Since the approach is not affiliated to any school, it is difficult to ‘define’ the interpretive method; but the focus will be to chart the regularities and symmetries. Defining a consistent interpretive approach, it can be argued, would also make it less reliant on the local since it implies that the same approach is valid across cultures. The human sciences—and by inference, film interpretations—arrive at their conclusions not through logical induction but through an unconscious process.23 It is hoped that the reasons for picking out individual elements for interpretation will become apparent to the reader.

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Chapters in the Book As already intimated, the chapters in this book move between surface and deep interpretations, although the interpretations are not theory-down. A way to distinguish between the interpretive focuses is to approach the background provided by the political information available. Soviet/Russian cinema, for instance, has responded deeply to politics and history; therefore, political discourse needs to be especially interpreted. Aleksei German, the greatest Russian filmmaker since Andrei Tarkovsky, is special even within Soviet/ Russian cinema. Western Europe, like the US, on the other hand, resided in political/social stability after the continent recovered from the ravages of the Second World War; therefore, interpreting the films of Robert Bresson and Jacques Rivette is less predicated upon contextual information.24 Mizoguchi’s is a different case: While his aesthetic was enormously impacted by the Second World War, his later films after 1945, which usually deal with a distant past, do not invoke its consequences. The Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou also responds to political dispensations without giving us a true sense of the workings of politics. But where Mizoguchi’s vision shows a profound transformation because of historical developments, Zhang responds less than deliberately to them. My reading of Zhang’s work, therefore, corresponds more to deep interpretation, more so, at least, than my reading of Mizoguchi’s films. Apart from the focus on individual directors, there are: readings of how the film festival network could be dictating the aesthetics of art cinema, an examination of the development of form in Soviet and Russia cinema, an enquiry into the horror film as a genre in India and Pakistan (now political adversaries), and a comparative study of how heterosexual attachments are dealt with across three different cultures. The last two exercises are closer to ‘deep’ than ‘surface’ interpretation, although the readings are not entirely symptomatic. My purpose, it must be noted, is as much to understand cinema as a

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phenomenon—initially with its effect upon the senses25—as to get a grasp of social processes. Needless to add, the underlying supposition in these chapters is that the interpretation of films holds the key to both. Much of film history and interpretation have depended on privileged film viewing and the location of film archives in certain key centres. But this has changed dramatically with the DVD revolution, which has made access to cinema more democratic. It can be argued that the earlier viewing conditions created biases in the writings of film history and film interpretation in which ‘universalist’ approaches were often favoured. The issue, therefore, is whether or not new viewing conditions call for local interpretations of cinema even when addressed to non-local audiences/readers who are able to view the films regardless of where they are located. To conclude, the book includes the phrase ‘world cinema’ in its title but focuses on a mode of interpretation held to be broadly valid across the spectrum of international film. It does not imply that the whole range of world cinema is examined or that the book is an exhaustive look at it. It remains a collection of chapters on a handful of subjects connected by the common interpretive approach just elaborated upon. Still, what are being offered in the book are usually broad views of significant sections of world cinema, as for instance the chapters on film festivals, Soviet/Russian cinema and Zhang Yimou (and Chinese cinema) that try to be comprehensive. Even when focusing on individual filmmakers or thematic groupings, there is an effort to be inclusive, take in as representative a sampling of cinema as the space permits and identify a compelling perspective.

Notes and References   1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 31.  2. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 32.

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  3. David Bordwell, Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 8–9.  4. Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 95–104. Sontag, in the chapter ‘Against Interpretation’ also uses the term ‘interpretation’ to mean only the excavating of repressed or symptomatic meanings.  5. Arthur C. Danto, ‘Deep Interpretation’, in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 51–53.   6. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Eric Dayton (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), 383–386.  7. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 4.   8. Noël Carroll, ‘Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment’, in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 42–43.  9. Carroll, Post-Theory, 44. An instance could be the way Barthes’s notion of the ‘writerly’ text [see Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1974), 4–6] was used to validate avant-garde films like Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) and Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). See also Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 145–164. 10. Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 98–99. It is perhaps this aspect of interpretation that led Sontag to assert that interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art and even upon the world, which we receive unmediated initially through the senses. 11. André Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. 1 trans. H. Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. ‘The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us in space and time.’ 12. Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 2. Japanese cinema also drew from the fact that

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the mechanics of presentation by an authoritative commentator were an integral part of traditional theatre. 13. Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 149. Pinney notes: ‘… photography never seems to merely duplicate the everyday world, but is, rather, prized for its capacity to make traces of persons endure, and to construct the world in a more perfect form than is possible to achieve in the hectic flow of the everyday.’ 14. Edwin Gerow, Indian Poetics (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977), 220. Also see Eliot Deutsch, ‘Reflections on Some aspects of the Theory of Rasa’, in Sanskrit Drama in Performance, eds. Rachel Van M. Baumer and James R. Brandon (Delhi: Motilal Banarasi Das, 1993), 217. 15. M.K. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 45–55. 16. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 47. 17. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar, 45–46. 18. In telling the story of an elderly couple enfeebled and lonely, Haneke’s film appears to have rid itself of every context including the couple’s own social past. It is as though old age and illness are the only issues that engage the couple, since their relationship has no discernible history. But this is still interpretable in terms of how apolitical ‘humanism’ has become in European art cinema and why film festivals promote it. 19. To use an analogy, would not a portrait—apart from respecting the conventions of portrait painting that are understood by a public—also share something privately with the sitter? It may be proposed that all art, including cinema, will include elements that do not benefit by interpretation because they are not addressed except privately. 20. Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 81. 21. Carrol, Theorizing the Moving Image, 78–91. 22. David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 716–724. 23. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 5. Gadamer cites Helmholtz [Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘The Relation of the Natural Sciences to Science

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in General’, in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, ed. Russell Kahl (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 122–143] who distinguishes between logical induction and artistic–instinctive induction, with the latter tied down to particular psychological processes. 24. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, no. 15, Autumn, 1986, 69. Few films from outside the West can deal so exclusively with ‘private life’. It may be useful here to make a reference to Jameson, who, when writing about ‘Third World’ literature and making out a case for it to be read as a national allegory, observes the following about ‘first world’ literature. Let me try to state this distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx. Our numerous theoretical attempts to overcome this great split only reconfirm its existence and shaping power over our individual and collective lives. We have been trained in a deep cultural conviction that the lived experience of our private existences is somehow incommensurable with the abstractions of economic science and political dynamics. It is this ‘split’ that enables Amour or the films of Robert Bresson and Jacques Rivette to come out of the West. 25. There is also an attempt in the book to capture the phenomenal qualities of cinema; that is, to produce descriptions celebrating, to quote Victor Shlokovsky, the ‘palpability of the object’ in cinema rather than only produce abstract criticism and dry interpretation.

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The Engineered Look The Film Festival Circuit and the Aesthetics of the Global Art Film Academic film history has come some distance since the 1980s when film history was largely a matter of determining teleology based on existing/expected technological advances, the notion of national cinemas, the compilation of canons of great masters and masterpieces. This change has come about due to the arrival of New Film Historicism. New Film Historicism, among other things, has tried to put an end to the special pedestal upon which masterworks are placed, and instead draws attention to the context in which films are made.1 When film history was being compiled in the postSecond World War era, and understood in terms of masterpieces and masterworks, film historians began to depend on festivals, and the most important film movements like Italian neorealism, the Nouvelle Vague and New German Cinema were registered by film historians when the early works of each movement won prizes.2 It has been, for instance, demonstrated that the films of New German Cinema became part of the national film canon after they won recognition abroad at festivals.3 The exclusion of Soviet cinema from Western film festivals4 may have been the reason for cinema from the Soviet Union in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras not finding the place that they merit in film history. Much of the initial research by New Historicists concentrated on early cinema and aimed to trace its development by examining 1

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the specific circumstances of early film viewing, production and distribution. Instead of understanding cinema in terms of the genius of filmmakers, attention shifted to conditions in the milieu that prompted the development of film aesthetics. The same approach can be followed now since film aesthetics may continue to be determined by the registering of individual films at film festivals, which are devised as spaces in which new tendencies are tested out: …film festivals are temporary events of short duration, where films are shown in an atmosphere of heightened expectation and festivity…. The creation of the international film festival circuit has further strengthened its resemblance to the early cinema context as many films now travel from festival to festival in anticipation of (or preparation for) access to distribution in permanent cinemas.5

The emphasis on the conditions of viewership determining the nature of film art makes it appear that authorship and art in cinema are more doubtful concepts than they were once thought to be. A work of art is no longer an untainted object, the significance of which is to be speculated about, but the product of a set of manipulations undertaken6 before what is ‘art’ in cinema is determined. Moreover, economic developments in the international movie industry influence the shape of the ‘normative’ in film art.7 Still, there is a gap between developments in theory—trends in the academic realm—and the way films are received by the public. It is this public reception that often determines the way films are written about, or decides what films will be written about academically. Moreover, the reception of a film at a major film festival has consequences not only on the future of the director and the film, which finds distribution through the permanent cinemas easier, but also affects the fortunes of a national cinema, and its global reception—an effect which cannot be wished away.8 The kind of films promoted at the biggest festivals today, through important prizes, could, hence, reinforce aesthetic tendencies in

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world cinema; and the proposition here is that the new tendencies can be understood through an examination of film texts. This chapter tries to look at three international films that are not alike thematically but exhibit comparable characteristics. All of them won top awards on a large number of platforms. The films are Michael Haneke’s French film Amour (2012) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish film Winter Sleep (2014), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2012 and 2014 respectively; and Richard Linklater’s American film Boyhood (2014), which won the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director as well as the FIPRESCI Grand Prix in 2014. The films are from different milieus and have been deliberately selected to identify some late traits in art cinema and speculate about their significance. This is expected to help us understand some aesthetic characteristics of a category broadly identifiable as the ‘global art film’. Before I go on to examine the three films, however, it is necessary to understand how film festivals developed and where they stand. In Cinema Studies, critical reflections have generally taken the form of textual analyses, such as the formalistic readings of a body of selected films; or consisted of quantitative–empirical research using film industry statistics; or concentrated on representations of the power relations of race, gender, class and ethnicity; or tried to grasp the ontology of the cinematic image.9 My tool—as with other chapters in this book—is textual analysis, since my purpose is to understand film art and its changed meaning because of the transformation of the sites where the value of each film is initially registered, that is, film festivals. The factor of importance is that the process of awarding prizes to films by impartial juries constituted from across the world assumes that the only issue of pertinence in the entire process is the film text, which is nominally insulated from all considerations/demands except that of being ‘artistic’.

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Film Festivals and Their Development Film festivals as a phenomenon cannot be grasped without a reference to Europe, where it emerged largely as a way of combating the reach of Hollywood. In fact, the film-going public across the world generally regarded Hollywood and European art cinema as representing polar opposites—Hollywood is understood as mass entertainment heightened by thrills, stars, studios, private enterprise and public exhibition; in contrast, European cinema is identified in terms of elite audiences, auteurs and personal expression, state sponsorship and film festivals. To be sure, the European film festivals arose out of conflict within the continent: The Cannes Film Festival emerged as a joint initiative between France, Britain and the US and a reaction to the Fascist domination of the Venice Film Festival of 1932, the year that also delineates the end of the transition period from the silent to the sound era. This transition is important because it has been used in film history to explain the demise of the European avant-garde. A fundamental aspect of the avant-garde,10 apart from its political radicalism, was its cosmopolitanism. When sound arrived, the presence of spoken language made cinema more hospitable to nationalist agendas. The Venice Film Festival of 1932 was international, but it played up to nationalism by inviting countries to exhibit their best works, which was contrary to the communistinspired internationalism of the avant-garde. Where the avantgarde, with its subversive agenda, agitated against the commercial film system and Hollywood’s hegemony, matching its political utopianism with alternative aesthetics, the Venice Film Festival exhibited contrary sides. On the one hand Hollywood was embraced, its trade organisation the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) accepted as America’s national representative alongside various national film funds of participating countries, and Hollywood stars invited to the events to make glamour an integral part of the festival formula. On the other, films were not treated as

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mass-produced commodities but as national accomplishments, conveyors of local cultural identity and as artistic creations. If the festival had one foot planted in the model of avant-garde cinema and valorising creativity, the other kept pace with market forces within the cultural economy—a compromise that the avant-garde had rejected.11 The film festival model also chose (nostalgically) spots like spas and beach resorts where an elitist/aristocratic culture had flourished before culture was ‘democratised’ by American commercialism, and the choice continues to this day when festivals are held in Cannes, Venice and Karlovy Vary rather than in cities like Paris and Rome, which is where film culture actually thrives.12 Seen in another way, film festivals were also a development of film clubs and societies founded in the 1920s by the avant-garde to directly interfere in film production by contesting the commercialisation of cinema and to develop it for radical purposes. Film festivals took over this function by providing spaces or platforms—like the ‘Forum’ at the Berlinale—as specialised thematic programming for the avant-garde. The growth of film festivals produced, in the post-Second World War era after 1954, art cinema made for international audiences.13 The characteristics of post-war art cinema have been studied and their particularities identified—particularities that show them to be quite different from cinema of the pre-war years. It has been shown that much of post-war art cinema has common traits, the chief of which is the foregrounding of the author as formal component in the narrative through the notion of ‘ambiguity’. What the film is ‘trying to say’ is then directed towards authorial expressivity14 and this can be associated with the way the European film festival positioned itself against the dominant Hollywood mode in which films were marked by the ‘invisible style’, that is, the delivery of the narrative with the greatest clarity without authorial interference. One must not take this to mean that ‘ambiguity’ cannot be associated with cinema before the war, or with non-European cinema. Complexity and ambiguity are kin, but post-war art cinema, in foregrounding the author, made

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itself ‘puzzling’ in a way that complex/ambiguous works like Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) or Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954) do not. This notion of art cinema as a single identifiable category will perhaps be contested by the reader. Art cinema has been described as an ‘impure’ category because of the variety it encompasses15— and this is undeniable. Still, the term ‘auteur’, as it was used in the 1950s and 1960s, demanded an interpretive role from the critic, and ‘ambiguity’ was the characteristic that led the critic to interpret the film text. It is likely that the valourisation of cinema as personal expression through the post-war film festival produced the auteur.16 The 1950s and the 1960s may be regarded as the greatest period for art cinema around the world because of the number of filmmakers (as auteurs) flourishing in the period and making their best-regarded works: Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and the directors of the Nouvelle Vague; Satyajit Ray from India and Kurosawa from Japan reaching the highpoints of their careers in these two decades. But if these filmmakers were ‘international’ in their reach, they still contributed enormously to national culture and were held up as icons in their home countries; and this could hardly have happened if their films had not addressed local issues and contributed to local culture. Where the pre-war avant-garde had been utopian, with the realisation of their ideals mainly projected into the future, the post-war art film, which was promoted primarily as national cinema, was sensitive both to the cultural past and the political present.17 Art cinema fed on resistance to two ‘evils’ represented by Hollywood and indigenous commercial cinemas18 of the countries from which individual art films came; therefore, it valourised a high local tradition debased by commercial cinema. This may explain the literariness of European films like those of the Nouvelle Vague, as well as the tendency of art cinema to adapt literary classics. An important factor here is that since national

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culture is often preoccupied with carrying forward a past, dealing with the burden of the past while negotiating/contending with the political/personal present is manifested in narratives as motifs.19 This attribute may be too broad to identify a category of films by, but it becomes significant when we deal with the contemporary films that this chapter is focused upon. Alongside the growth of film festivals and the rise of the art film largely in Europe, the avant-garde relocated from Paris to New York in the 1950s and 1960s because of America’s economic boom, its newly found cultural confidence and desire to emerge from Europe’s shadow after European modernism had been absorbed by America. This was the time in which radical movements like Abstract Expressionism in painting also emerged. The American underground film movement of the 1950s and 1960s challenged not only Hollywood but also the European art film. The avant-garde filmmakers who emerged in this period include Maya Deren (who had already made Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943), Stan Brakhage (Anticipation of the Night, 1958) and Jonas Mekas (The Brig, 1964). Amos Vogel was a co-founder of the New York Film Festival in 1963 and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) also began to collect and exhibit avant-garde films. But between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s cinema became implicated in a series of political projects initiated by the opposition to the Vietnam War. Film festivals were effective means within the political struggle to make underrepresented cinemas visible and Third World filmmakers heard. In Northern Africa, the biannual Carthage Film Festival (Tunisia) was established in 1966. The PanAfrican Film and Television Festival, known by its French acronym FESPACO, in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), followed in 1969. In addition, from the late 1960s onwards, Third World filmmakers and their critical political cinema slowly found representation and received their first critical praise at the established European festivals. It was in this period that Jean-Luc Godard turned to

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radical politics. Godard’s left-wing ideas culminated in activist interventions in 1968, when he heralded the protests against the dismissal of Cinémathèque director Henri Langlois. The shutting down of the Cannes Film Festival in 1968, in which Godard also participated, influenced the position of the Pesaro Film Festival, which had been a major platform for both feature and documentary films of an experimental and invariably political nature, and an alternative to the ‘First World’, established cinema of Hollywood and Western Europe.20 Pesaro in Italy had developed a radically new festival format with ample opportunity for discussion, lengthy publications and a productive combination of cinephile, political activist and academic inputs. Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Milos Forman, Christian Metz and Pier Paolo Pasolini were among the contributors to the famous Pesaro debates.21 Pesaro was able to respond swiftly to the Cannes crisis, which had an effect on festivals worldwide. Pesaro immediately dedicated the 1969 festival to ‘Cinema and Politics’. Pesaro led the way towards a new type of programming. Festival directors and programmers began to adopt the Pesaro approach since the late 1960s, selecting films on thematic instead of national basis.22

The Film Festival Circuit The third phase in the development of film festivals commenced in the 1980s when their spread saw the film festival phenomenon becoming institutionalised and professionalised, and not understandable as it had earlier been. The film festival phenomenon entered this historic phase when festivals began to spread, so much so that a film festival was underway every day somewhere in the world, with estimated numbers varying from 1,200 to 1,900 festivals each year. There are major international, regional and local film festivals; festivals dedicated to documentaries, animation and education; as well as film weeks and film specials. The mushrooming of film festivals

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worldwide led to the establishment of the international film festival circuit. The following are some characteristics observed with regard to the film festival circuit23:  1. Fierce competition, distinction and emulation abound on this circuit and festivals cannot operate outside of it. The programs, the development and organisation of each festival influence the position and versatility of the rest of the festivals.  2. The interrelational dependency of festivals means that festivals are embedded within the global system of the film festival circuit. Their embedding is visible in many written and unwritten rules, such as the circuit’s giving great importance to the showcasing of world premières.  3. Since film festivals both emulate and counter Hollywood, commercial cinema is not taboo at film festivals and many commercial films opt for their premieres there. Art cinema is, therefore, like a different product meant for a different segment but at the same marketplace.  4. The competition for prizes has become one of the main focuses of press festival coverage, and festivals without prizes are less frequently visited and reported upon by journalists.  5. The historical festivals have lost their exclusivity, which may be interpreted as Europe losing its cultural hegemony in the global order. But this development also does not mean that every nation will have an equal opportunity on the circuit. The hierarchy of festivals remains intact.  6. When, in the early 1970s, the selection procedures of major European film festivals were opened up, this was not only followed by an emphasis on individual artistic achievements, but also by a passionate interest in unfamiliar cinematic cultures. But sincere support for politically marginalised cultures has increasingly given way to a neocolonial attitude: there being few new cultures to discover, festival audiences are looking for intimate (anthropological) encounters with unfamiliar cultures.

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 7. The ‘national’ has returned in a new avatar. The cream of national cinemas is presented at top western film festivals while festivals in the ‘Third World’—Havana, Ouagadougou and Carthage—find it difficult to draw the best films even from their own regions. Indigenous film festivals remain subordinate within the circuit even as their ‘national cinemas’ prosper.  8. The ‘national’ is not associated with the ‘nation’ as it once was. It is more of a free-floating signifier used in film festival discourse to market new cinemas.  9. This situation in which the ‘national’ is dissociated from the ‘nation’ also has its advantages, though. For example, when national film boards censor a controversial film, the international film festival circuit may offer opportunities for global exposure, sidestepping the authority of the nation state. 10. As local differences are erased through globalisation, festivals need to replicate each other. But paradoxically, the notion of novelty is brought in to emphasise differences in another way. 11. Festivals attract people by offering them new experiences in cinema. At present, the public finds its way to festivals to see, for instance, the latest movie of a Japanese cult director, a program specialised in sub-Saharan cinema, animation or short films. The bottom line is that attending festivals has become an established cultural practice for a large public. 12. While festivals give audiences a chance to see smaller-budget and niche films that are not made available to them in the commercial context, the success of the festival network has made it very difficult for many producers and filmmakers to find creative ways of becoming financially independent. 13. Successful movements such as Iranian cinema and ‘Dogme’ prove that different types of films can be sold globally, provided that there is a shared sense of coherence and outstanding value between films—that is, a brand name in marketing terms. In art/world cinema, ‘brands’ are predominantly formed by movements (stylistic and/or national) or authors. Sales

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representatives and companies recognise that film festivals are the places in which such ‘brands’ are made. 14. When a small place like Cannes gains so much importance entirely for its festival, property prices shoot up, as does the cost of living. It is, therefore, unviable for locals to live there and practice other professions not connected to the festival. Consequently, there is no local audience for the films shown, and everyone in the audience is in the position of an international tourist. Phrased differently, those who attend the film festival are the true citizens of Cannes, if only for a week or two every year. While many of these characteristics pertain to the politics of the film festival circuit, it is also to be expected that some of them will influence the course of art cinema. As an example, there will evidently be films made—which will appeal directly to festival audiences—without passing through a local cultural filter in the home space. The ‘look’ of many films, it may be anticipated, will gain importance over the local (political/cultural) purposes that the films serve. A ‘look’ could also be engineered to simulate the ‘artistic’ in cinema, a signal that the film is ‘art’. Filmmakers from far-flung corners of the world may be tempted by the demand for ethnicity to ‘report’ on their own cultures to festival audiences who are constituted differently from the way art film audiences once happened to be. The proliferation of film festivals keeps a class of festival-hopping film professionals busy throughout the year, and this ‘public’ will have a major say in the impact of any global art film. If a comparison can be made with the older cinema, where the avant-garde addressed an informed and cosmopolitan cultural elite, global art cinema addresses film professionals like journalists and critics who are prone to judging cinema largely in terms of film trends, which they are more familiar with than the high culture that art cinema once demanded some acquaintance with.24 Since a basis has now been created for enquiring into the global art

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cinema, I will proceed to examine the three films that this chapter is focused upon.

Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) Amour begins with firemen breaking down the door of an apartment to find the corpse of Anna (Emmanuelle Riva) lying on a bed strewn with flowers. It then shifts to several months earlier with Anna and her husband Georges Laurent (Jean-Louis Trintignant) at a piano concert. Both are in their eighties and they are former teachers of music. The pianist they have come to listen to, Alexandre, is Anna’s former student. The next morning, as they are eating breakfast, Anna breaks off in the middle of a conversation and is struck immobile. Although she recovers a few moments later, it comes out that she has had a stroke. She is made to undergo a surgery, but the operation is a failure. When this happens Anna obtains a promise from her husband that he will not put her back in hospital. Anna’s condition worsens gradually and she suffers another stroke, which prompts her to get about in a wheelchair; and she loses her capacity for speech. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) comes with her English husband Geoff (both of them musicians) and is shocked by her mother’s condition. When she tries to intervene, Georges pushes her away—if she cannot take care of her mother she can at least leave her parents alone. Georges gets two nurses; and when one of them handles Anna too roughly, he sacks her. ‘You are a wicked old man,’ the nurse retorts after getting her wages, and Georges hopes that she suffers in her old age at the hands of someone just like her. Georges does his best to look after Anna on his own, but she is in too much agony. Finally, after relating a story from his childhood to calm her, he smothers her with a pillow. He anoints her with flowers that he cuts from a bouquet, drives a wandering pigeon out of the window, writes a long letter to someone and straightens out the house. He imagines that Anna is washing dishes in the kitchen

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before the two of them go out. The last we see of Georges is he following Anna out by the front door. Being about sickness, people administering to it hopelessly and it ending with death, one cannot but compare Amour with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972). The first aspect that comes to one’s attention is the absence of personal history in Amour, conspicuous in Bergman’s film. By this I mean that Anna and Georges have lived together for over fifty years, but there is no issue between them except that of shared decrepitude. A key motif in art cinema, as I proposed earlier, is negotiating with the burden of the past; in Bergman’s film, there is deep acrimony between the characters that needs resolution. The same motif can be found in Patrice Chéreau’s Son Frère (2003), about two brothers, one of whom is dying of an incurable blood disease. Georges and Anna are both musicians/ teachers of music, but their separate relationships with music are also not of significance to the narrative. This becomes clearer if we compare Amour with Claude Sautet’s A Heart in Winter (1992), in which the three characters are all associated in different ways with the violin, and music plays a part in their manipulations of each other. Amour is over two hours long, and if there is so little in it in terms of interpersonal dynamics, the reader who has not seen it may wonder how the duration is spent, what the director actually shows us. Most of the film is given to the minutiae of the everyday life of an elderly couple. The emotions it deals with are the anger and helplessness of the man, as he is neither able to deal effectively with his wife’s illness nor enlist other people to assist him. There are long monologues from Georges, one of which (a wryly amusing one) involves a funeral he just attended. Some minutes are apportioned to Georges’s dealings with a stray pigeon that keeps coming into the apartment, and a few more to a nightmare he has, telling us of the dangers to old people living by themselves in Paris. Eva’s preoccupation with her financial worries also gets some attention. The musician Alexandre visits Georges and

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Anne, and his pity at their condition becomes an occasion for some ire on Anne’s part. The film is set entirely indoors and this helps it to avoid any contemporary issues that might have otherwise found their way into the narrative. If the film appears visceral in its attention to the everyday details of old age, it is nonetheless careful in keeping out the really ugly bits connected with illness, aspects that Bergman’s film confronted more unequivocally. Amour may be described as ‘humanist’, in that it shows concern at the conditions under which the old and the sick are required to live; but the absence of psychological or political nuance leaves the interpretative critic with little to work on. Great humanist works of the past, like Jean Renoir’s films or those of the neorealists, always suggested enough to make audiences wonder at the portrayed relationships, and the one between Ricci and Bruno in Bicycle Thief (1948), once reflected upon by André Bazin,25 is an illustration. It is the banality of the three-way relationship between Georges, Anna and Eva26 that makes Amour lack complexity and ambiguity. In characterising the fourth among the seven types of ambiguity, William Empson notes27 that two or more meanings that do not agree can sometimes combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author, and this is arguably what auteurs in cinema had sought to emulate. After what the film chooses not to do/show have been listed, what remains is the ‘look’ of the film. The film exudes gravity: the apartment is sumptuously appointed with oils hanging on the walls and tasteful/period furniture. There is a small segment in the film in which we are shown reproductions of landscape paintings for no ostensible reason except that Georges is studying them. The fact that Georges and Anna are musicians becomes reason for us to hear interludes of piano music, diegetic in its employment, although the music played by Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud is an actual musician) at the concert continues on the soundtrack even after the

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concert is over. Georges also plays on the piano a short snatch from Ich ruf ’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ by J.S. Bach, which informed artfilm audiences will recognise from Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). The film casts Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in the lead roles, although they are not given very much to do as actors enacting roles. They are old people and it is only their agedness that the film is enlisting. These two thespians have important places in European art cinema. Trintignant has appeared in classics by Eric Rohmer (My Night at Maud’s, 1969), Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist, 1970), Claude Chabrol (Les Biches, 1968) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colours: Red, 1994); while Emmanuelle Riva’s presence was iconic in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Amour is therefore constantly invoking high culture without finding legitimate places in the narrative for the artefacts it uses or alludes to—they are all perhaps there only on display to make it recognisable as film art.

Nuri Bilge Seylan’s Winter Sleep (2014) Winter Sleep tells the story of a rich man, a landlord named Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), who owns a hotel in Cappadocia and lives with his much younger wife and a divorced sister. Winter is approaching and his hotel has only one or two guests. When the film begins, he is seen from a distance, ruminating thoughtfully over a landscape. The same day, Aydin and his helper, Hidayet, are driving along when a stone flung at their vehicle smashes one of its windows. Hidayet catches the culprit, the son of one of Aydin’s tenants named Ismail, who has been behind on his rent. A collection agency has already been to Ismail’s house and taken his television and refrigerator. At the centre of Winter Sleep is Aydin’s character, of which we get a sharp impression. He has inherited his wealth and spends his hours writing a weekly column for a local periodical that, his sister Necla (Demet Akbağ) asserts, no one reads. Aydin has just written a piece on aesthetic deprivation in Anatolya and its urban ugliness.

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He is not a practicing Muslim but he tries to stay clear of controversy by praising the religion in his journalistic pieces. Necla does little. She is obviously bored after her divorce, and hates her surroundings so much that she is even contemplating returning to her ex-husband who is now much farther down the road of alcoholism since she left him. Aydin’s young wife, Nihal (Melisa Sözen), also has little to do, so she tries to find meaning in philanthropy. Aydin himself has received a letter from a distant village asking for a donation. Ismail and his family have been tenants of Aydin’s father for decades; he is without a job after spending six months in jail and the family is being managed on the salary of Ismail’s unmarried brother Hamdi, who is also the local imam. Hamdi is less hostile to Aydin than Ismail is. Aydin imagines himself a rational person, and he certainly seems to be so. But he is not willing to exert himself or take a stand. For instance, he can afford to be more generous to Ismail’s family, but his affairs are managed by Hidayet and he does not want to interfere in Hidayet’s decisions. The relationships in Winter Sleep are well drawn because of finely etched performances, but the slightness of the conflicts is difficult to conceal. Aydin and Necla come into conflict with each other, but there is hardly any deeper exploration of the divide between them than the irritation of two people bored with each other. There are, for instance, no property issues between them, or issues carried forward from their youth or childhood that need resolving. Necla says that Aydin (a former actor) raised expectations of greatness within his family, which he did not fulfil; but these expectations are not spelt out. Aydin just seems like an average, moderately intelligent person, who is not up to anything very important or wrestling with deep personal issues. The conflict between Necla and Nihal is also due to some differences of opinion on ‘philosophical’ matters, such as how evil should be treated. Nihal resents Aydin’s money but uses it in her philanthropic ventures. Aydin treats these ventures as ill-thought-out

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indulgences and tries to render advice, but this is once again resented. The slightness of the conflicts may be judged from the fact that only one finds a conclusion, the one between Aydin and Nihal, which appears resolved when he brings home a conciliatory rabbit from a hunt after a night when he was out drinking with some acquaintances. Nihal, we are told, married the much older Aydin out of her own free will, but the details—why a beautiful young woman should marry such an old man, or if there was ever someone else—are scrupulously avoided. The film is reportedly based on a story ‘The Wife’ written by Anton Chekov.28 The similarity rests in the protagonist of Chekov’s story being a rich man with scholarly ambitions being similarly approached through a letter from a distant village for material help. But the letter in Chekov’s story is brutally graphic in its portrayal of the misery of the poor,29 while the letter in Ceylan’s film only makes a casual appeal. Yet, in spite of its narrative slightness, Winter Sleep exudes gravity like Amour, which is never justified. Winter Sleep is over three hours long and proceeds deliberately. The location is Cappadocia in winter, a spectacular tourist destination that gives it an unforgettable ‘look’. Aydin owns a hotel but this detail is not of much significance to the narrative since the guests at the hotel play no part in it. It would have been adequate if Aydin had been a rich man with inherited wealth, but making him a hotel owner justifies the spectacular locale. We have segments where characters are brooding, but what they are brooding about is not clear. When a character stares out so pensively in a film (as in the opening scene of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, 1972) there needs to be some emotion or trauma, usually from a past experience, which comes later into importance; but Aydin can only be thinking about his next newspaper article. Then there are long conversations conducted with great solemnity, but that are essentially trite, as one in which Necla regrets the breaking of an expensive glass by the maid. In others, Aydin, Necla and Nihal debate on intellectual issues. The reader will get a sense of the level of debate

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if the most important one is described here. Necla believes that evil can be prevented simply by yielding to it. If she went back to her former husband and asked for forgiveness, she believes, he would be shamed into giving up alcohol. Necla says this separately to both Aydin and Nihal, and both of them (rightly) dismiss it as nonsense. But if this is nonsense, why should so much time and attention be given to the idea? Aydin is subjected to some bitter attacks by the women (Necla calls him ‘selfish, spiteful and cynical’) and one might see the influence of Ingmar Bergman in this interpersonal rancour.30 One cannot help but find the venom incongruous, since there is nothing that Aydin does that merits it. As a gesture to help in her philanthropy, Aydin even gives Nihal a large sum of money (‘enough to buy a house’) but she sees it fit to go over to their tenant Ismail/Hamdi’s place and hand it over. This seems like a kind gesture on her part and Ismail using the money to pay off her husband might have resolved issues between them. What happens instead is that Ismail feels insulted and throws the money into a fire and allows it to burn.31 My implication here is not that poor people who receive money that they badly need are unlikely to burn it, but that gestures like these are easier made in fiction than in real life. Aydin reiterates that it is not his fault that he is rich and other people are poor, and the film does not hold this viewpoint as unreasonable. This being the case, we wonder how to judge Ismail’s belief that the money Nihal is offering them is on account of her ‘guilt’. The film is non-committal politically and hardly puts it across as a given that the rich are inherently ‘guilty’. Since Ismail is intended to be a sympathetic figure one can see little purpose in this episode, except to lend the story some emotional intensity, which might appear lacking otherwise. Another observation has to do with the film’s use of metaphor. A striking motif in the film relates to the capturing of a wild horse. This capture takes place immediately after Ismail’s rebellious son is brought to Aydin by Hamdi to apologise (by kissing Aydin’s hand),

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but the boy promptly faints before he can do it. The capturing of the wild horse takes place immediately thereafter. Similarly, Aydin lets the tethered horse go free when he feels that his attitude towards Nihal has been too constricting. This may be symbolic but the images are too strong on their own—in relation to the occasions on which they are used—to serve as honest metaphor. Another strong image that is inserted with little reason is that of a dead dog in the snow outside the railway station. A concluding episode in the film deals with the killing of a rabbit by Aydin, and we are shown the rabbit gasping in its final moments. This is reminiscent of the last few minutes of Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) when an encounter with a dying rabbit happens just before the girl kills herself. Here the rabbit becomes Aydin’s peace offering to Nihal and is meant to be eaten—which makes its last gasps incongruous—more evidence that Ceylan uses images as an affective device rather than to serve a legitimate narrative purpose. The literary/film influences cited when one deals with Ceylan are usually European—Anton Chekov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman—which suggests that his is more a cosmopolitan sensibility than most Turkish filmmakers before him. The music he uses in Winter Sleep is also the same segment from Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 20 in A Major used by Bresson in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), and this gives the film a more melancholic air than is justified by the narrative.32 But the issues and the motifs that his film works with are deliberately less political than those of Chekov’s (as the segment of the letter from ‘The Wife’ will indicate) and evoke milder emotions than those evoked by Bresson and Bergman’s films. In fact, the earlier Turkish films that were not so ‘cosmopolitan’—not only those of Yilmaz Guney, who spent a large part of his life in jail, but also films like Zeki Demirkubuz’s Masumiyet (1997)—are not only more political but elicit stronger emotional responses because they engage much more deeply with local issues. Both Guney’s Yol (1982) and Masumiyet are about people coming

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out of jail for crimes they have been punished for; and the sense of an oppressive political past shines through in their work, a sense of the past that Ceylan’s film does not provide. A film that is attentive to local experience may ultimately be more universal than one that strives straightaway for universality as Ceylan’s film does. Perhaps the global art film needs to be local/national first because: In [a] sense, the national canon is determined by judgments based on universal values and often pronounced outside the geographical boundaries of the nation.33

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014) The narratives of both Amour and Winter Sleep are played out over a small period of time and both appear set in an unchanging present, as little or no change is observed in the condition of their characters except those brought about by the advance of age and decay. Georges expends himself on his sick wife without a transformation in his condition; and we do not expect Aydin’s household tensions to end with his gift of the rabbit to Nihal, regardless of the half-smile on his lips and she lowering her gaze. Both films are about retired people, and they are similar in that neither has a discernible ‘before and ‘after’, a critical event (or set of events) either in the story as it is played out in the present, or a disturbance in the ‘prehistory’ of the story—a narrative strategy employed by art films like Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) or Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (1958), in which past happenings are reflected upon in the present. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is a different kind of film because it is about a boy growing up between the ages of six and eighteen. Its innovation lies in it having been actually filmed over twelve years with the same actors playing the same roles: we see the actual advance of age and maturity. Boyhood, as may be anticipated, is filmed in several segments—ten in all. It begins with Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), 6 years old, living with his divorced mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and older

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sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). Their father, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), is an affectionate father and a well-meaning liberal who has not been able to settle down to anything, and has left his former wife to care for the kids. Olivia works hard to make both ends meet and the only way she can do so, she feels, is to go back to college to get a degree and find a better job. She, therefore, moves to Houston with the children, close to where her mother lives. In Houston she comes in contact with a psychology professor, Bill Welbrock, whom she flirts with, and eventually marries. This is situated at the moment when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince appeared in book form, which is around June 2005. Bill Welbrock has two children from an earlier marriage and all four children live with him and Olivia. Welbrock reveals himself, gradually, to be an overbearing father and addicted to alcohol. Things get from bad to worse—more so for his own children than for Mason and Samantha—when he starts getting violent. Olivia leaves him and moves away to another place with her own children. The next segment opens in 2008, with Mason and Samantha, now older, assisting their father in canvassing for Obama against McCain. Samantha is approaching eighteen and Mason Sr. cautions her against teen pregnancy, as had happened to Sarah Palin’s daughter. Mason is also getting interested in girls now. It is at this time that Olivia meets a former member of the Army National Guard, who was in Bosnia and Afghanistan and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Jim seems like a nice person and acknowledges that, to locals in Iraq, oil was what the war was about. A little while later Olivia is married to Jim. He soon becomes alcoholic—like Bill Welbrock—conservative and bad-tempered, especially to Mason who is now in his adolescence. Olivia is doing well in her career and she and Jim are living in a lovely house. The children will soon go to college and staying in a house so expensive to maintain may not be sensible. In the next segment Jim is not to be seen, having been divorced by Olivia in the meantime. Mason Sr., now married to Annie and with a baby, is in touch with Olivia, and there is bonhomie between

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them. The last few segments are about Mason getting interested in photography, his application to University of Texas at Austin, his girlfriend Sheena, who cheats on him and his moving into a dorm at Austin with a new girlfriend as a possibility. Olivia, who has brought up her children as best she can, gets Mason Sr.’s acknowledgement for what she has done. Just before Mason leaves for Austin to study in college, she breaks down at how quickly life has passed her by and how little of it is left for her, except perhaps only one more milestone—her death and funeral. Since Boyhood was filmed over twelve years with the same set of actors, Linklater may have been uncertain about how his actors would turn out, and these uncertainties could have infected his story. The closest film relative of Boyhood is Francois Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle of five films (1959–1979), which all starred Jean-Pierre Léaud. The actor’s persona as a boy is very different from the way it turned out when he became an adult, and the later films suffer after the dazzling 400 Blows (1959). Linklater may have wanted to avoid Ellar Coltrane’s development taking an unforeseen direction and affecting the film adversely; he does not delineate his chief character as strongly as Truffaut does Antoine Doinel in 400 Blows. But despite these doubts, it is still possible to say a few things about the conception of Boyhood. Olivia and Mason Sr. are the most agreeable adults in Boyhood and they are the only ones seen throughout the length of the film. The casting of the film’s only two stars—Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke—as Mason’s parents suggests that Boyhood is intended as a paean to the model American family. We see the two fighting in the first segment, but we are deliberately kept from hearing the words spoken, which otherwise might have made us judge one of them adversely.34 Although Olivia and Mason Sr. are divorced, we are still persuaded to pair them off in our minds. The good-natured Annie is also correct in her conduct, but the film is ambivalent about her parents who are from the Bible Belt—committed to evangelical

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gatherings and presenting Mason Jr. with a shot gun on his eighteenth birthday, which his father takes away.35 While the individual events were probably thought out over time and the whole story may not have come to the director before he commenced shooting, there are aspects of Boyhood that need commenting upon. This has to do with there being no visible teleology in the narrative: Each crisis is not determining the development of the children and no psychological residue is carried forward from each experience. Every happening in the narrative does not always happen on-screen, and one wonders why some psychologically determining events could not have been placed off-screen, in case they could not be filmed. There are some potential crises in the narrative36 and one is struck by none of them leading anywhere to actually threaten—and shape—the children. In a sense the children are generic constructs corresponding to people going through ‘normal childhood’ and belonging to a ‘model American family’ in which the parents are mindful of their duties while also being conscious of needing to be individuals, which will serve as models for their children. That the parents are divorced suggests only that parenthood as an ideal is distinct from marriage, which has its own logic driven by another set of needs and responsibilities, and that each of the roles, as a parent and a spouse, needed to be attended to separately. The constant reassurance provided by the father works against the divorce— otherwise representing a past trauma—which might have been psychologically determining in another story. Childhood and growing up are, by and large, not common motifs in American cinema, apart from films specially meant for children. And the reason is, arguably, the high degree of generic differentiation. Many popular genres—like the Western, noir, the gangster film, the horror film and science fiction—find it hard to accommodate children in focal roles, exceptions being films like Shane (1953). But when one does encounter such a film, the transition out of

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childhood is crucial and caused by a key event. In Citizen Kane (1941), the boy Kane’s childhood is interrupted when his mother comes into wealth and decides that her son’s upbringing should be entrusted to the lawyer Thatcher. It is, therefore, his lost childhood (signified by his sled ‘Rosebud’) that the dying Charles Foster Kane recalls. Bicycle Thief, 400 Blows and Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948) are other art films that culminate in transformational experiences for the child as individual. Hence, Boyhood is like Amour and Winter Sleep, in that there is neither any past burden to overcome nor a moral crisis in the present, with a resolution positing a new awareness in the protagonist(s). A moral crisis divides the narrative into a ‘before’ and ‘after’, and the films do not include such an event. To demonstrate what I mean through an alternate scenario, in Boyhood Mason could have been indifferent to politics until he was actually shot at by the Southern redneck (who threatens him in the film) during the Obama campaign, and hence become a convinced liberal. This would have created a ‘before’ and ‘after’ around a climactic event and provided Mason’s evolution with a rationale. The three films dealt with hitherto have flat narrative trajectories resulting from lack of transformational experience, either in the narratives or their prehistory. This might have been frowned upon in the past, but all three films have been phenomenally successful with critics now. On scrutinising their ‘flatness’ and reflecting upon the absent climactic/critical event, we are led to ask how such an event should be selected. It would seem to me that the climactic/critical event would need to be designated in such a way that social/political conditions specific to the milieu are implicated in it. If we look at films cited earlier, all of them do this: Citizen Kane, for instance, implicates the American dream of abrupt wealth, and is taken up with how sudden, enormous wealth could alienate one from his/her own past; 400 Blows implicates the French penal system for juveniles and in Bicycle Thief the transformational event is the child witnessing

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his father’s public humiliation while trying to protect his job. None of the three recent films provide us with critiques of the social milieus in which they are set. Boyhood may appear different, but while the ‘look’ of the milieu is captured authentically, there is little in the film implicating social institutions/practices in Texas or the US. Events like the Obama campaign woven into the narrative, amount only to period detail, like the release of the Harry Potter book. The underlying story in Citizen Kane is politically ‘American’ unlike that in Boyhood. While dealing with Amour and Winter Sleep I noted how the films positioned themselves as art cinema by invoking high art— music, painting and art films of the past. Also conspicuous in Winter Sleep is philosophical conversation reminiscent of the talk in Eric Rohmer’s films Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969), Le Rayon Vert (1986) and Pauline at the Beach (1983). Both these films deal with the cultural elite; but Boyhood—which deals with an average family in cultural terms but still positions itself as an art film— needs to signal its positioning and does this through the reflective conversation. Much of this conversation is ‘meta-conversation’; that is, rather than simply communicating, it is acutely conscious of fulfilling the need to make philosophical/abstract conversation. For instance, parents talking to their children about the compulsions of parenting instead of instructing them to do this or that. Here is a small illustrative exchange between Mason and Sheena, which shows how the conversation is intended to be especially ‘reflective’, as would be appropriate in art films: Sheena: How long have you been here? Mason: I don’t know. Awhile, I guess. Sheena: Awhile? Mason: I just feel like there are so many things that I could be doing and probably want to be doing that I’m just not. Sheena: Why aren’t you? Mason: I mean, I guess it’s just being afraid of what people would think. You know, judgment. Yeah. I guess it’s really easy to say like,

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Locating World Cinema ‘I don’t care what anyone else thinks,’ but everyone does, you know? Exactly. Deep down. I find myself so furious at all these people that I’m in contact with just for controlling me or whatever but, you know, they’re not even aware they’re doing it. Sheena: Yeah. So, in this perfect world, where no one’s controlling you, what’s different? What changes? Mason: Everything. I mean, I just wanna be able to do anything I want, because it makes me feel alive. As opposed to giving me the appearance of normality. Whatever that means. I don’t think it means much. Sheena: You’re kinda weird, you know that?

The three recent films, it would seem, engineer a ‘look’ for themselves, which implies milieu specificity while signifying sociopolitical conditions too nebulous to be locally pertinent. They also attempt ‘high mimesis’, that is, give the everyday the appearance of high culture. And these strategies, arguably, owe to conditions created by the global film festival circuit.

Simulating a Local Look The three films that have been the focus of this chapter are all from milieus that festival audiences will be familiar with and they do not allow much room for exotic appeal. Winter Sleep could have been different because it is Turkish, but instead of foregrounding ethnicity it presents itself more as a European film through cosmopolitan concerns. An association is that the film represents the new European image of Turkey. This could also explain why Chekov’s brutal description of Russian misery does not find a place in the film. A similar description of Turkish poverty might have been inconvenient to its European aspirations. All three films engineer ‘looks’ for themselves, which suggests attention to the milieu but any sociopolitical discourse specific to it are nonetheless avoided. This strategy, while useful for spaces understood as cosmopolitan, cannot be useful when dealing with

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cultures known to have strong sociopolitical undercurrents, such as those in Russia, China and Iran. And filmmakers from these spaces need to adopt other strategies for the film festival circuit. It will be helpful to conclude this chapter with a few comments on films by an Iranian and a Russian director that have attracted attention. Asgar Farhadi, the Iranian filmmaker, is best known for his two films About Elly (2009) and A Separation (2011). About Elly won the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director in 2009 and A Separation won the Golden Berlin Bear in 2011. While both films won numerous other awards, A Separation received the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2011. Both these films use a single effective strategy, which is to posit a social situation involving gender, but all the pertinent facts and social issues are deliberately not made known at the outset. About Elly is constructed around the disappearance of a young woman Elly during a picnic trip. The fact that a relationship is being engineered by the heroine Sepideh between Elly and a young man Ahmad is held back. Elly is already engaged to be married to someone else, but is trying to break it off. The film relies on the surprise likely to be felt by the audience from complications arising out of strict conditions laid down for heterosexual bonding between unmarried people. The observation is that the norms for such bonding and the consequences of violating them will be startling only to non-Iranians. Since the locals would be aware of them and will anticipate the social consequences, the element of surprise that the film relies upon could hardly enchant them. In A Separation, the wife wants to migrate to the West with her daughter, but since her husband is unwilling to join her because of his incontinent father, she asks for a divorce. As part of the solution the husband appoints a female nurse to look after his father; the film uses the surprise likely to be felt by audiences at the conditions laid down with regard to female nurses’ handling of males, even one as physically helpless as the protagonist’s father. The film also introduces

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elements like the role of religious instruction and a husband’s place in such arrangements, which are all instructive of the sociopolitical conditions in Iran. Both of Farhadi’s films can also be read as veiled criticism but their intricately constructed plots, and the complicated sense of social conventions to be obtained from them, are primarily meant for cultural outsiders to wonder at.37 In the introduction to this book I argued that ‘difficult’ films demand film-literacy rather than familiarity with local culture. The implication is that social experience, while not the same across cultures, is still understandable as variants of something essentially ‘human’. Asghar Farhadi’s films are not ‘difficult’, but they attempt to render local experiences embedded in them deliberately unfamiliar. An issue to be resolved, hence, is whether they are not undermining the unity of human experience, and the plurality of social meanings attached to them, by making us ‘wonder’ at them. If social norms determined by religion are key to determining the look of Farhadi’s films, corruption in the Russian state is a key local element imparting its look to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014). Zvyagintsev is the best-known Russian filmmaker in the film festival circuit. He won the Golden Lion at Venice for The Return in 2003, secured a Palme d’Or nomination for Leviathan and also won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2014. Even though Leviathan attracted controversy for its unsparing portrayal of corruption in Russia,38 a scrutiny suggests film festival aspirations rather than an incisive social critique. The film is about a simple working-class man losing his land to the local mayor through a questionable legal process. One would suppose that such a theme would give a filmmaker the opportunity to examine how the structures of power function in his society, but the only demonstration Leviathan makes is of drunken politicians using violence to secure their interests. The sense that the political situation is ‘hopeless’ in Russia may not be as much invalid as unusable, since it neither illuminates nor informs. This

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is evidence of art cinema refusing to address those inhabiting the milieu it is describing, instead catering to audiences elsewhere and calling upon them to judge the same milieu, not based on insights nuanced enough to be convincing but on the basis of diatribe. What can such a one-sided prognosis do, one wonders, except win prizes at film festivals, where what matters is the look of a film rather than the local insights it offers.

Notes and References   1. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985).  2. Rosselini’s Rome Open City (1945) won the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1946, Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959) won the Best Director prize in 1959 and Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966) won several prizes at the Venice Film Festival in 1966.  3. Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (London: BFI/ Macmillan, 1989).   4. Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 54–57. The Berlinale was founded as a way of showcasing the culture of the democratic West in the East (since Berlin was located inside East Germany), and until 1974 Soviet films were not shown in the festival. The East responded with a festival of its own at Karlovy Vary in which no major film from the East was denied a prize.   5. de Valck, Film Festivals, 21.  6. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture’, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (London: Routledge, 1989), 12.  7. Janet Staiger and Douglas Gomery, ‘The History of World Cinema: Models for Economic Analysis’, in Film Reader 4 (Northwestern University Press, 1979), 42.  8. Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic (London: Routledge, 2010), 138–161. An instance would be Iranian cinema that was later transformed by the global reception to some earlier films.

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  9. de Valck, Film Festivals, 33. The author draws on Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (New York: Harvey Wheatsheaf, 1993), 5–6. 10. A key filmmaker from the avant-garde of the 1920s still remembered today but more for his later films was Luis Buñuel who was a Surrealist. His two key films of the period were Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’age d’Or (1930). Other key films were by Fernand Leger, Ballet Mecanique (1924) and Germaine Dulac, The Clergyman and the Seashell (1928). 11. de Valck, Film Festivals, 24. 12. de Valck, Film Festivals, 25. The Berlin Film Festival originated in another impetus owing to Cold War rivalries. 13. Thomas H. Guback, The International Film Industry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). 14. David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (5th edition), eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 717–720. 15. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, ‘Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema’, in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, eds. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–27. 16. The ‘Auteur Theory’ that valorised the personal vision of the director was annunciated by Francois Truffaut in 1954, around the same time as the birth of the international art film. 17. de Valck, Film Festivals, 25. 18. Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau, Popular European Cinema (London: Routledge, 1992), 8. 19. Noël Carroll, ‘The Ontology of Mass Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55, no. 2 (Spring, 1997): 188–189. Here are some art film classics of the 1950s and 1960s that this observation is especially true of: Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963), Fellini’s 8½ (1963), Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (1961), Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959), Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). The summoning of past events as a burden to be negotiated with is much less common in popular film narratives. An explanation is that mass art (which includes commercial cinema), being a product of industrial society and relying on technology as a means of dissemination, is intended to be consumed by people divided

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by great distances who may not respond equally to an over-delineated past. 20. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Hollywood & Europe: Economy, Culture, National Identity 1945–1995, eds. Geoffrey NowellSmith and Steven Ricci (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), 3. 21. de Valck, Film Festivals, 28. 22. Don Ranvaud, ‘Pesaro Revisited’, in Framework, no. 18 (1982): 34. 23. de Valck, Film Festivals, 68–74, 112–113 and 118. 24. To provide examples from the Nouvelle Vague, Godard uses lines from Jorge Luis Borges’s essay ‘A New Refutation of Time’, in Alphaville (1965); Rohmer has a long segment with a discussion around ‘Pascal’s Wager’ in My Night at Maud’s (1969); Rivette is constantly invoking theatre, as Shakespeare’s Pericles in Paris Belongs to Us (1958). 25. André Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. II, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 53–55. 26. There are, for instance, none of the emotional conflicts induced by old resentments in the film that mark Mark Rydell’s On Golden Pond (1981), a film about an aged couple and their daughter, starring Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn, two legendary actors. 27. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chato and Windus, 1949), 33–54. 28. Rachel Donadio, ‘A Director Holds Up a Mirror to Turkey’, The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/movies/winter-sleepa-nuri-bilge-ceylan-take-on-turkish-life.html?_r=0. The film is based on two Chekov’s stories: The Wife and Excellent People. Accessed on 24 January 2015. 29. Here is a passage from the letter: Not far from you—that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo—very distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which I feel it my duty to write to you. All the peasants of that village sold their cottages and all their belongings, and set off for the province of Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting there, and have come back. Here, of course, they have nothing now; everything belongs to other people. They have settled three or four families in a hut, so that there are no less than fifteen persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the young children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing to eat. There is famine and there is a

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Locating World Cinema terrible pestilence of hunger, or spotted, typhus; literally everyone is stricken. The doctor’s assistant says one goes into a cottage and what does one see? Everyone is sick, every one delirious, some laughing, others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no one to fetch them water, no one to give them a drink, and nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor) and his lady assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need bread which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them, on the ground that their names have been taken off the register of this district, and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants of Tomsk; and, besides, the Zemstvo has no money.

Anton Chekov, The Wife and Other Stories, The Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1883/1883-h/1883-h.htm. Accessed on 24 January 2015. 30. The New York Times describes the dialogues as ‘Bergman-esque’. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/movies/winter-sleep-a-nuri-bilgeceylan-take-on-turkish-life.html?_r=0. Accessed on 25 January 2015. 31. The sequence is reminiscent of the one in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in which Nastasya Filipovna drops the money with which she has just been bought into a fire and dares those who are wooing her for her money to pull it out. Ceylan cites Dostoyevsky as an influence also. http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/9146812/NuriBilge-Ceylan-on-Once-Upon-a-Time-in-Anatolia.html. Accessed on 24 January 2015. 32. Ceylan has declared his intent as producing the same melancholy in viewers that Chekov produces, but the legitimacy of using music to achieve it instead of narrative needs examination. http://www.nytimes. com/2014/12/23/movies/winter-sleep-a-nuri-bilge-ceylan-take-onturkish-life.html. Accessed on 25 January 2015. 33. Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts, and Frameworks (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), 34. 34. It is impossible for there to be a violent disagreement with both parties being in the right. Showing us the fight from behind a closed window pane prevents us from taking sides with one of them against the other, thereby taking away from the ideal qualities of the family in which no one can be seriously wrong in his/her conduct/attitudes.

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35. I propose that we are meant to read this in conjunction with the episode in which McCain supporter threatens to shoot Mason and Samantha for trespassing when they try to plant an Obama poster on his lawn. The director could be seeing the church and the gun going hand-inhand in the South. 36. As instances, Mason being bullied by other boys in the school he is put into, a party in which the boys smoke marijuana and their host promises that they will be later joined by prostitutes (which does not materialise), and the older boys picking on a smaller Mexican boy at this same party. Mason being bullied by the boys is reminiscent of a similar scene in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005), in which the consequences are catastrophic. 37. Zeydabadi-Nejad, The Politics, 152–154. It is significant that settling abroad is being considered by the woman protagonist, and this can be seen as covert discourse that only immigration to the West can alleviate these social complications for an Iranian citizen. A complaint voiced in Iran is that film festivals dictate the shape of Iranian art films although this is not universally voiced. 38. Neil McFarquhar, ‘Russian Movie Leviathan Gets Applause in Hollywood But Scorn at Home’, The New York Times, 27 January 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/world/europe/leviathanarussian-movie-gets-applause-in-hollywood-but-scorn-at-home. html?_r=1. Accessed on 30 January 2015.

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A Fallible Tradition Kenji Mizoguchi and the Post-War Transformation of Japan Straddling Two Eras Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the greatest of Japanese film directors, made eighty-six films between 1922 and 1956, but the films still considered his best are those that he made in the twilight of his career—The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954). It is unusual for a filmmaker to produce his best work at the end of his career, and since Mizoguchi’s last films are strikingly different even from those that he made in the late 1930s, the characteristics marking out his last films need to be examined and his transformation as a filmmaker enquired into. Japan suffered military defeat, endured Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s and underwent enormous changes under occupation. A question that can be asked is whether these events left a mark on Mizoguchi’s cinema. The Second World War and its aftermath may have transformed Kenji Mizoguchi’s artistic vision in a fundamental way, and this chapter is based on the premise that a comparison between his work immediately before the war and his last great films will help us understand this transformation—the effect it had on his worldview. Given Mizoguchi’s artistic importance within his country, it would also reflect upon Japanese cinema as a whole, since the Japanese New Wave and its directors, like Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima, came out of the same sociocultural transformation. 35

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Japanese Cinema before the War Kenji Mizoguchi is recognised, first and foremost, as a stylist with a penchant for the long tracking shots. But if this suggests similarities with a director like Max Ophüls, his style has different connotations in the Japanese context. Ophüls’ long tracking sequences can be defined as ‘realistic’ in the Bazinian sense. The French theorist André Bazin drew a distinction between what he regarded as the two sides of cinema. The first, ‘montage’—which he associated with editing—is primarily connected to the spectator filling in the unseen details as well as inferring the various relations in the narrative. The second, ‘mise-en-scène’—which Bazin also associated with uncut shots, incorporating tracking and/or panning—is more a matter of observation. Where relations are only implied in montage, mise-en-scène enables the spectator to actually see the relevant relations. Bazin argued that montage was manipulative because it forces emotional responses through associations instead of allowing the spectator to merely observe. Where ‘realism’ was—to Eisenstein—not only the world as it was, but also as it should be made; Bazin regarded Eisenstein’s films as ‘Expressionist’ because they did not respect ‘reality’ as it was, but endeavoured to refashion it through montage. Bazin believed that ‘realism’ should respect reality instead of recomposing it according to the dictates of a political/ethical or aesthetic belief, which is essentially what Eisenstein had done. One can say that Ophüls subscribed to realism and achieved the same things with his tracking shots that Welles had with deep focus; and maintained the integrity of space without dismembering it so that the spectator catches ‘reality’, with the freedom to interpret it instead of only receiving the ‘interpretation’ provided by montage. If Ophüls’s tracking camera can be associated with realism as defined by Bazin, Japanese cinema, at least in its early years, had no use for ‘realism’ in this sense.

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As in many other countries, Japanese cinema initially followed many of the practices of traditional theatre. It has been noted that since the mechanics of presentation of the performances were often as important part of entertainment as the performances themselves, the spectator’s interest in film projectors was initially almost as great as what was projected.1 Cinema simply captured performances together with the commentaries. Performance in Japanese theatre was usually incomplete without a commentator. The Noh play had choruses, the Bunraku puppet drama had Joruri singers, Kabuki had Gidayu chanters and silent cinema in Japan had Benshi commentators. Imported films needed interpretation and the Benshi provided it.2 It has been said that films with different Benshis were entirely different films, so much so that the Benshis mediate in each individual screening. Overall, if in the West cinema was an extension of photography, in Japan it was an extension of traditional theatre.3 Since cinema originated in the West and the earliest experience of cinema for the Japanese came from Western films, a question is whether Japanese cinema was not influenced by the West. The general consensus is that Western storytelling methods were only adapted for their novelty and no justification was found for them. A characteristic of Japanese art is that it is not separate from the written or spoken word. Panting, dance and music—all of them are accompanied by texts to be read or heard,4 and this proved to be true of cinema as well.5 Instead of a realist space, as in Western cinema in which action is mimetic, space in Japanese cinema is a playing area bound by conventions. One does not look through the screen into an illusion of space but at the screen itself. This accounts for the flat compositions of Japanese cinema, the painterly scenes of Ozu and Mizoguchi. As a noted theorist of Japanese cinema said, ‘A film can never become reality itself because film always takes place within a frame.’6 This is in contrast to the Western theorists of realism who see the frame in realist cinema as a momentary one around an

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ongoing reality that existed before the camera focused on it and will exist after the film is over.7 What is crucial there is the catching of a moment in an ongoing process, a moment that implies the process. The apprehended ‘real’ need not be a social/political one, and might even pertain to a moment in human life in which a truth about it is abruptly laid bare as in Robert Bresson’s films.8 An instance would be young priests sweating copiously as they stoke the fire in which Joan of Arc is being burned (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962). Regardless of his concerns, which will be examined in due course, Mizoguchi was very much a part of the Japanese tradition; to him ‘realism’ was selective and reductive, and attributable to the will to aestheticise. ‘Beauty is the striving for realism. The realistic consists of a selection of what is considered beautiful, just as in the West, the real is defined by what is not’, Mizoguchi once declared,9 and this places him in a different category from Ophüls, although their respective camera styles appear to owe to the same principles. Mizoguchi’s films, therefore, have a strong moral discourse that may sometimes make them appear sententious. But the important issue is that his moral/ethical viewpoints, though ‘traditional’, do not remain undisturbed in his films, and it is the difference between the pre-war and the post-war perspectives that is of importance here. This being the case, it will be useful to begin this enquiry with an examination of Sisters of Gion (1936), which—along with another 1936 film—is acknowledged as the earliest serious work of his career.

Sisters of Gion (1936) This film is about two sisters, Umekichi and Omosha, both geisha in Kyoto. When the film begins, Furusawa, a once-rich businessman, is bankrupt and the furniture and antiques in his house are being auctioned off. Furusawa moves to Umekichi’s house where she begins to look after him. Umekichi feels loyalty towards Furusawa who always treated her well, but the pragmatic

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Omosha does not believe that her sister is indebted to him. In order to get rid of Furusawa, Omosha obtains money from an antiques dealer, Jurakudo, to ‘pay off ’ Furusawa to enable him to leave. Since Umekichi cannot take on a new patron with Furusawa lodging with her, Furusawa needs be got rid of. Omosha pays Furusawa half the money she borrowed from Jurakudo, while pocketing the rest, and informs him that Umekichi wants him to leave. Furusawa, therefore, departs reluctantly and takes up lodging with a former employee. Omosha does this ‘service’ for her elder sister but she is also looking out for herself by getting a merchant, Kudo, to become her patron, while also leading his shop assistant Kimura on, to get an expensive kimono from him as a gift. These episodes are primarily intended to bring out the differences between the two women. Mizoguchi sets the tone when he first shows us the women: Umekichi in traditional dress, bowing and welcoming Furusawa; and Omosha making an entrance, casually brushing her teeth. Mizoguchi sets up several sharp sequences: Kimura’s gift of the kimono is discovered by his employer, Kudo, who ‘forgives’ him because he is himself taken up with Omosha. Kimura is warned by Kudo to stay away from Omosha, but he returns to find Kudo there. Kimura, then dismissed from service, calls Kudo’s wife and tells her about her husband and Omosha. Another sequence involves Furusawa and Jurakado meeting at Umekichi’s place. Furusawa suspects Jurakado of having sold him fake antiques that Jurakado is now buying back at reduced prices. Jurakado is the rich man but he treats his bankrupt former customer with a tradesman’s courtesy, even as he is gently easing him out of Umekichi’s home. But after Furusawa has been evicted, the loyal Umekichi runs into him again and the two take up quarters together, until Furusawa finds employment close to his wife’s home and abandons her. Kimura gets revenge when he kidnaps Omosha and pushes her out of a car.

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The film ends with Umekichi visiting Omosha in hospital. The two are now without patrons and Omosha expresses regret for their lot being geisha. Central to Sisters of Gion is the contrast between the two sisters. Umekichi is traditional and exhibits the virtues that a geisha is expected to, including loyalty to her patron even when he is in difficulty. Omosha, in contrast, seems to have embarked on a more adventurous ‘Western’ path after her education in a public school— she smokes cigarettes and wears Western clothes except when she is working as a geisha. She is cynical and playacts, trying to take advantage of men by feigning ‘love’ and ‘loyalty’ when she is willing to give neither. Omosha is perhaps even interpretable as the traditional geisha transformed by capitalism. Mizoguchi is a more ‘political’ filmmaker than Kurosawa or Ozu, in that he is preoccupied with the interactions between different social groups. Sisters of Gion is often described as ‘feminist’; but where ‘feminist’ films are usually humanist laments over the ill-treatment of women, Mizoguchi’s geisha are not individual victims of heartless or brutal men,10 but members of a group that is a victim of patriarchy. The geisha is a ‘professional’, but while providing ‘love’ and ‘loyalty’ as services, she has no recourse against clients as a professional might have. After Umekichi has convincingly demonstrated her loyalty to Furusawa, she does not demand reciprocation from his side, and Mizoguchi does not suggest that she can expect it. It is significant that Omosha, not Umekichi, is the one who expresses resentment at the end. At first glance, Omosha seems more determined to deal with her lot as geisha, but she hardly emerges triumphant. Omosha regarding her relationships with her clients as a strictly commercial one does not really help her. Mizoguchi is critical of patriarchy and sees social mores as skewed, but his position is that of an insider. If every relationship in Sisters of Gion is circumscribed by hierarchical

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structure, Mizoguchi takes a wry look at it but does not try to wish it away. Mizoguchi’s own sister was sold as a geisha and this influenced his outlook enormously, but his attitude, despite the sharp irony with which he approaches his subject, is one of acceptance, though he is by no means an apologist for patriarchy and tradition, and hence does not show its ‘good side’. The apologist and the rebel are perhaps closer to each other than we imagine, since both try to remake reality in their own image. The apologist tries to remake it as it was ‘intended to be’, while the rebel/iconoclast tries to make it as it ‘should be’. Unlike the traditionalist, both of them flinch at portraying something ‘the way it is’. Mizoguchi—and this is true of his later films as well—is content with dealing with the world with patient understanding, and accommodating its complexity within a single vision. His acceptance is not an ‘approval’, as much as a recognition that, while art must be clear-eyed about reality, it need not set about trying to transform it—a role that can perhaps be left to other agencies. Mizoguchi’s camera style, as noted earlier, bears a strong resemblance to Ophüls’s mise-en-scène, and the first sequence in Sisters of Gion bears testimony to it. But where Ophüls uses the tracking camera to explore space—as in the sequence from Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) in which Joan Fontaine watches Louis Jourdan’s furniture being moved—the space in the sequence from Sisters of Gion is demarcated by screens, which naturally suggest impermanence. The camera catches the damage wreaked by the auction—the objects scattered across a largely empty space as well as the noisy bidders—and when it finally rests upon the players in the sequence, they are positioned in a way that makes their hierarchical relationships apparent. Furusawa’s employee bows and kneels, as he sincerely regrets what has happened to his employer, and conveys it to him and his wife. The bankrupt merchant expresses the hope that when he is better placed he will be able to give the young man employment again, but advises him to join a more successful

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competitor for now. The conversation and the gestures are important, and being affirmed here is the stability of traditional hierarchy where the employee continues to honour his bankrupt employer. It may be recalled that this is the same employee who later supports Furusawa as an insolvent individual. But Furusawa’s wife displays a different attitude when she indicates that much of the furniture just auctioned was part of her wedding trousseau. The merchant apparently married into a rich family, and his wife is now sharing (bitterly) the depredations misfortune wreaked on her husband. The wife’s bitter response is caught through a cut that disrupts the tracking shot. Since the smooth tracking can be associated with an affirmation of tradition, one could say that the opening sequence begins by setting the context of Furusawa’s bankruptcy, and then affirms that traditional values can survive such a disaster, although they can also be tested, the last qualification being formally linked to the cut. In Umekichi’s house as well, Furusawa is welcomed by Umekichi, and there is a sharp disruption of the tracking by a cut when the cynical/pragmatic younger sister enters the frame. Since Mizoguchi’s tracking shots have been linked to formal beauty, there is the sense, in his filming, of ‘beauty’ being associated with traditional values, in which loyalty, respect and the honouring of hierarchical imperatives reign supreme. The first sequence—with the implication that traditional values when adhered to sincerely are ‘beautiful’—creates the social context for Umekichi’s unquestioning loyalty to Furusawa thereafter, and her conduct is deemed more laudable. Although Mizoguchi does not judge Omosha, he still sees Umekichi as exemplary, and formal devices are employed to make the moral affirmation. The fact that the two are left with only each other for consolation is significant, because it suggests that honouring traditional values, although nobler, may not translate into material advantages to those who do so.

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In the same year in which he made Sisters of Gion, Mizoguchi made another film, Osaka Elegy (1936), that contains few of the affirmations of the other film. In Osaka Elegy, a telephone operator in a pharmaceutical company, Ayako Murai, consents to become her boss’ mistress because her father has embezzled money and will be arrested unless the amount is made good. After this debt is paid off, she becomes the mistress of another workplace superior, and some of her money goes to pay for her brother’s education. Desperate to marry and settle down with an admiring colleague, Ayako makes a wrong move that sees her arrested, and her frightened boyfriend disowns her. When Ayako returns home, she is ostracised by her family, although they have depended on her. Ayako in Osaka Elegy could well be Omosha from Sisters of Gion, not only because both of them are played by Isuzu Yamada and are ‘Westernized’ women, but also because of certain common character attributes. Omosha, it will be recollected, was curiously amoral, in that she was prepared to break social codes in order to get ahead, but it is also a fact that many of the things she does are done for her sister’s sake. Her ‘amorality’ goes, paradoxically, along with a certain kind of selflessness. If Omosha’s amorality gets emphasis in Sisters of Gion, Ayako’s selflessness gets more attention in Osaka Elegy. Still, this should not distract us from the sense that Ayako loves the good life and, in her eagerness for marriage, humiliates the reasonable man who has been keeping her well-provided for. Both Sisters of Gion and Osaka Elegy can be described as being about women trying to gain independence in a patriarchal society, but failing because of the lack of codes outside tradition. Rather than valorising tradition, it would be accurate to say that Mizoguchi sees patriarchy and tradition as providing stability to the social structure that is skewed and oppressive but also protective. Osaka Elegy came when militarist Japan was expanding westward. The film was labelled as decadent and eventually banned in 1940. But

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even without this information, this is a much more pessimistic film than Sisters of Gion, even more so than the brief description I have provided may indicate. Since dark irony is so much more in evidence in Osaka Elegy, Mizoguchi virtually eschews the long tracking shot, and the film is also choppy with little or no emphasis on formal beauty. But Osaka Elegy seems to be an exception in Mizoguchi’s oeuvre, while a more typical film is The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939). This film was made just before the advent of the war and its affirmations were more in tune with the nation’s efforts.

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939) Unlike the other two films, this film is centred around a male protagonist, although it is about sacrifices that a woman makes to help him succeed. The film is set in Japan in 1885, in a family of Kabuki actors. Kikunosuke Onoue is the adoptive son of a famous Kabuki actor, Kikigoro, training to succeed his father who has had an illustrious career. Kikunosuke is not the best of actors, and the rest of his father’s troupe derides him behind his back while hypocritically praising his acting to his face. Otoku, the young nurse of Kikigoro’s infant son, is the only one frank enough to disclose his artistic shortcomings and urges him to improve himself. When Otoku is dismissed by Kikunosuke’s family for her closeness to the young master, which is seen as having the potential to create scandal, Kikunosuke leaves Tokyo to practice his art away from his father, even as his colleagues try to dissuade him. Otoku eventually joins Kikunosuke, and she encourages him to persevere through difficult times, though hardships take a toll on her. When Kikunosuke finally has a chance to join a famed Tokyo troupe and establish himself as a nationally renowned Kabuki actor, Otoku (unknown to Kikunosuke) sacrifices their relationship to enable him to seize the opportunity and reconcile with his father. Although Kikunosuke’s father ultimately accepts Otoku as Kikunosuke’s wife, this reconciliation comes only

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when she is already on her deathbed, suffering from tuberculosis, and dies—at the moment of her husband’s theatrical triumph. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is the antithesis of the other two films discussed earlier in as much as it is almost entirely without irony. As may be expected from what has been said about Mizoguchi’s camera style, this suggests long takes and exquisite tracking shots. Here are a few examples that help us understand the affirmations that the film makes. His first tracking shot occurs almost immediately after the title sequence—when Kikigoro gets into his costume and prepares to enter the stage. He is a star and there are a number of troupe members and helpers who attend to him reverentially and follow him down the stairs to the stage. There is a celebration of traditional performance in this sequence, and a short while later we have another great segment in which Kikigoro dresses up for post-party celebration while his adoptive son stands uneasily in a corner of the room. Kikigoro exudes authority even as he combs his hair before the mirror—with his chest out as he examines himself; while Kikunosuke seems to lack confidence—with his head held less firmly and face turned downward. This sequence is not simply demonstrating Kikunosuke’s emotional condition but is also an affirmation of hierarchy—a novice acknowledging experience, apart from a son honouring his authoritarian/authoritative father. In a third sequence, Kikunosuke is taken to task by his father for meeting Otoku after she has been dismissed. This is not a tracking shot but a long take with an immobile camera. Kikunosuke is being addressed by his father and chastised, but we do not see Kikigoro, who is apparently just beyond the top left-hand corner of the frame. Kikunosuke listens, but when he replies finally—announcing his desire to leave the troupe—a man’s face enters the frame from the left, and a woman, till then obscured by his figure, enters the space from behind Kikunosuke, although Kikigoro remains invisible. Apart from this suggesting Kikigoro’s distance and inaccessibility,

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Kikunosuke has not been alone with his father when having to talk to him on such a personal matter; and even intimate meetings with him are mediated by members of the troupe. This suggests the impersonal nature of the relationship between the two, which is simply unlike that between a father and a son. The two are as hierarchically placed in relation to each other as a King and a Prince might be. All these sequences emphasise professional/family hierarchy and obedience, but there are sequences involving the relationship between Kikunosuke and Otoku. An important aspect is that this relationship is also circumscribed by hierarchy, since the two come from different classes. Otoku is separated from Kikunosuke twice, and both separations involve his departure on trains—the first time when he leaves his father’s troupe to seek a career in Osaka and she is kept away from him by her parents (at his father’s behest) and the second time when he returns to Tokyo. In the second instance, Otoku sacrifices her own happiness by leaving him. She is not on the train that Kikunosuke is taking—when she should have been on it—and he searches for her desperately. He hurries along the platform searching each compartment for Otoku while the camera tracks his movements from inside the train. When he hears the whistle, Kikunosuke climbs into the compartment and joins his colleagues who are also proceeding to Tokyo. Inside, they tell him about Otoku’s sacrifice. As with filial relationship discussed earlier, his relationship with Otoku, although understandable as ‘love’, is not an unmediated one. Otoku, rather than seek their happiness together, seeks out what is good for him in the social hierarchy. This hierarchical aspect gets emphasised when we learn that he is a good actor now but having the backing of his family name will still help his career. My argument here is that Otoku’s sacrifice is not to help him prove himself, which he already has, but to enable him to take his rightful place in the hierarchy in which she is excluded. I describe The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums as taken up with an affirmation but what is being affirmed here might

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appear perverse in a Western love story, although one can imagine a lowly born woman giving up her man so that he can be a King. As indicated, Mizoguchi is often described as a ‘feminist’ filmmaker, but these three key films made before the war all deal with women coming to grief because of hierarchical imperatives. The choice before the women is only two, Mizoguchi suggests in these films: Either affirm tradition and social structure, and a woman’s rightful place in them, in which case her suffering will at least be ‘beautiful’, that is, it will be mitigated by the stature that her acceptance of social dictate imparts; or, alternatively, disobey traditional hierarchical imperatives and be simply destroyed. Mizoguchi is deeply sympathetic to the conditions of women, but his indebtedness to tradition, regardless of how skewed it is, is so enormous that he sees no possibility for a life that chooses to negate it. We have looked at three films made in the 1930s. We may now go on to examine Mizoguchi’s great post-war work. But before we do this, it is necessary to understand the effects of military defeat upon Japan, and what follows is a brief recapitulation to help us get a sense of how the defeat changed Japan.

Japan after the Surrender At the end of the Second World War Japan was occupied by the Allied powers led by the United States. Japan initially surrendered to the Allies on 14 August 1945 when the Japanese government notified the Allies about its acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. The following day, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender on the radio. The formal inaccessibility of the Emperor may be gauged from the fact that this announcement was his first ever radio broadcast and the first time most citizens of Japan ever heard his voice. This date is known as Victory over Japan Day, or V-J Day, and marked the end of the Second World War and the beginning of a long road to recovery for a shattered Japan. On V-J Day, President Harry Truman appointed General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), to

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supervise the occupation of Japan. This foreign presence marked the first time in its history that the island nation had been occupied by a foreign power. The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on 8 September 1951, marked the end of the Allied occupation; and after it came into force on 28 April 1952, Japan was once again an independent country. It was in independent post-war Japan that Mizoguchi produced his greatest work. The Allied occupation of Japan was not a simple experiment in democracy because, with the intensification of the Cold War, SCAP reined in its reform initiatives. From late 1947, the US priorities shifted perceptibly from liberal social change to internal political stability and economic recovery. During the occupation, many of the financial coalitions that had previously monopolised industries were successfully abolished, although economic reforms were also hampered by wealthy and influential Japanese who stood to lose a great deal. As such, looser industrial groupings evolved, since there were those who resisted any attempts at reform, claiming that coalitions were required for Japan to compete internationally. A major land reform was also initiated. Between 1947 and 1949, approximately 38 per cent of Japan’s cultivated land was purchased from the landlords under the government’s reform program and resold at extremely low prices to the farmers who worked on them. By 1950, three million peasants had acquired land, dismantling a power structure that the landlords had long dominated. In 1946, a new constitution of Japan was promulgated as an amendment to the old Meiji constitution. The political project drew much of its inspiration from the US Bill of Rights, New Deal social legislation, liberal constitutions of several European states and even from the Soviet Union’s. It transferred sovereignty from the Emperor to the people in an attempt to depoliticise the throne and reduce it to the status of a state symbol. The new constitution also enfranchised women, guaranteed fundamental human rights, strengthened the powers of Parliament and the cabinet, and decentralised the police and local governments.

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Since Mizoguchi’s films have dealt primarily with women’s position in Japanese society, it will be useful to examine the effects of occupation on women’s issues. It has been convincingly argued that the granting of rights to women played an important role in the radical shift Japan underwent from a war nation to a democratised and demilitarised country.11 Although there were views that this was an over-simplification, Japanese women were perceived as helpless victims of feudalistic traditions who needed Western guidance. American women assumed a central role in the reforms that affected the lives of Japanese women: They educated the Japanese about Western ideals of democracy, and it was an American woman who wrote the Japanese Equal Rights Amendment for the new constitution.12 Although their efforts were genuine for the most part, and did bring benefits to Japanese women, the attitudes of American women may have strengthened Orientalist perceptions of Japan. American women involved in the reform perceived themselves as ‘feminist agents endowed with progressive and modern ideology and practice’—appointed to the mission of liberating Japanese women.13 We may surmise that all these initiatives had transformed Japan considerably by the time it became independent once again in 1951 and had lightened the baggage of tradition. Mizoguchi’s films in the period 1945–1951, although hardly dismissed, are not regarded as highly today as his later work. One could surmise that he was trying to cope with the changes wrought upon his society by the Allied occupation and its implications for the traditional way of life. Many of these films are ‘socially committed’ work, with Mizoguchi taking a fairly transparent stand. For instance, The Love of Sumako the Actress (1947) revolves around a radical theatre group that wishes to break away from the Japanese tradition of Kabuki and start tackling the European classics. For the inaugural play, the group chooses Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the archetypal feminist tract. To understand the more profound changes in his vision, therefore, we may proceed directly to the film that some consider his greatest—The Life of Oharu (1952).

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The Life of Oharu (1952) The Life of Oharu begins with Oharu, as an old woman, in a temple; and goes back through the events of her life. The narrative commences with Oharu as a lady in waiting and her love affair with Katsunosuke, a page in the same court. The class difference between the two leads to his execution and her family’s banishment. Oharu attempts suicide but fails, and is sent off to be the mistress of Lord Matsudaira with the hope that she will bear him a son. She does, but is then sent home with minimal compensation to the dismay of her father, who has become quite indebted in the meantime. He again sends her away to be a courtesan, but she fails there, too, and is sent home. She then goes to serve the family of a woman who must hide her baldness from her husband, but the woman becomes jealous of Oharu. She finds a good man to marry, but the man is murdered. She attempts to become a nun, but is thrown out of the temple. She becomes a common prostitute, but fails even at that. Some pilgrims engage her to be convinced of the vileness of the flesh. After all these, she learns that Lord Matsudaira, for whom she bore a son, is dead, and her son has succeeded him. She is summoned to meet him—and is required to thank him for the ‘privilege of having borne him’— but the meeting is called off because her being a prostitute is seen as potentially jeopardising to his position at the Imperial Court. Oharu runs away from the palace where her son lives a protected life, and chooses the life of a beggar. An achievement of The Life of Oharu is its conveying a sense of ‘patriarchal society’ without the rancour that feminist films often display. As an illustration of what Mizoguchi’s film does, neither Lord Matsudaira nor Oharu’s son by him are shown to be uncaring and callous. But both of them are so cocooned and enmeshed in officialdom that they do not seem to have the freedom to act on their own. Lord Matsudaira’s establishment decides that Oharu should be sent away with a few measly coins after delivering his heir.

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The same establishment decides that it would be unbecoming of a Lord’s mother to be a common prostitute. When Oharu sees her grown son for the first time, she makes a move to talk to him, but the servants around him—who decide where he should go and at what pace he must walk—prevent her from meeting him; and he is too preoccupied with protocol to pay attention to her. Oharu’s condition is pathetic; but, by the end she has grown as a woman and stopped being a ‘victim’—which a lesser film might portray her to be. The episode with the pilgrims, when the aged and garishly painted Oharu is exhibited as an example of the frailty of the flesh, shows her grimly amused rather than hurt or offended. It is her acceptance of this condition without giving in to self-pity that is most striking. In fact, the elderly man who engages her describes her as a ‘goblin cat’ to his younger companions; and Oharu, after accepting his money, mimics a ‘goblin cat’ before thanking them. The strangest aspect of The Life of Oharu is its humour in the face of human degradation. Here are some instances: The qualifications required to become Lord Matsudaira’s concubine are high, and strict standards of beauty and breeding are demanded. The woman, for instance, should not have wisps of hair at the back of her neck. The emissary deputed to look for suitable women is elderly as it would be difficult to trust a younger man on the return journey. When the bald woman, who later employs Oharu, discovers that she once worked in a high-class brothel, she concludes that her husband had her installed at home on purpose. But the miserly husband, who protests his innocence vehemently to his wife, cannot help but wonder if employing a former courtesan does not entitle him to have her without paying. This humour, it must be noted, is very different from the irony that characterises some of Mizoguchi’s earlier films— especially Osaka Elegy. The dark irony in Osaka Elegy and the humour in The Life of Oharu both come out of a critical scrutiny of social mores; but, I propose,

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the irony in the earlier film comes out of faith in a given traditional order. Underneath the cynicism of Osaka Elegy (if cynicism is the correct word) is dissatisfaction with society for not conforming to standards set by tradition. Ayako conducts herself as she does because Japanese society respects honour as it should. The Life of Oharu is different, in that Mizoguchi by now appears to have dispensed with the expectations he had of society. This being the case, virtually every social practice becomes fair game for humour. Coming to camera style, The Life of Oharu is beautifully shot, but Mizoguchi eschews both sharp cuts and long tracking shots. I earlier associated the long tracking shot with an affirmation of tradition, and there is little affirmation of tradition in The Life of Oharu. Where Mizoguchi never left us in doubt as to where his sympathies lay, the evenness of the filming here makes it more dispassionate than we were accustomed to in his films, and it is this dispassionate quality that allows for so much humour in the most abject situations and leaves the humour gentle. Although this cannot be asserted with certainty, there may be some significance in Oharu’s story being related in flashback. As in many Hollywood films, this flashback is motivated by character memory14 and begins when Oharu recollects Katsunosuke who loved her. After this we see many things that she could not have seen, and the story does not correspond to her ‘point of view’. Still, the fact that the film hints at character subjectivity is unexpected, because Japanese cinema (especially Mizoguchi’s films), being designed as ‘presentation of performance’, could not have allowed for point of view at all. This suggests a fundamental transformation in an important aesthetic principle; and, like the other aspects just written about, can perhaps be attributed to drastic change in the Japanese way of life in the late 1940s.15 If there is a single strong affirmation in The Life of Oharu, it resides in the love between Oharu and Katsunosuke. Oharu initially rejects him because she is from the Imperial Palace while he is a mere ‘servant’. But she understands when he asks her if any Lord has ever

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looked at her with ‘sincerity’. He stresses the importance of ‘sincere love’ when he offers to marry her and proposes that they run away together. When he is executed, his last words echo the hope that people will be allowed to love each other regardless of their station in life, and he wishes that Oharu finds a good man to love her sincerely. One has only to compare this notion of love with the one valorised in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums to understand how far Mizoguchi had come between 1939 and 1952, as indeed had Japan. There is another key aspect of The Life of Oharu that deserves a comment, which is Oharu’s unrelenting downward trajectory. An aspect of his earlier films, as indicated before, is the sense that those who honour tradition will not be abandoned by it. Otoku, although she dies from tuberculosis in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, finds posthumous acceptance when Kikunosuke’s father concedes her innate nobility and accepts her as his daughter-in-law. Umekichi in Sisters of Gion is, similarly, perhaps victorious in defeat. Oharu, in contrast, is completely abandoned although she has been true to tradition. There is a sense in this film that tradition, although it makes huge demands, has nothing to offer in return. It is also significant that while loyalty is a cardinal virtue in his earlier films, it is not invoked in The Life of Oharu. Implicating ‘loyalty’ in the narrative allows reverence towards a transcendental object—which may be the ‘nation’ as in mainstream Bollywood, the ‘American way of life’ in Hollywood’s valorisation of the nuclear family or tradition as in Mizoguchi’s earlier films—and the fact that it is not made an issue shows up the weakening of tradition and the growing sense that it has nothing to give. Also, it is the absence of ‘loyalty’ that shows up strongly in the comic sequences. It shows up once again in Ugetsu (1953), the film that made Mizoguchi famous in the West.

Ugetsu (1953) The film is set in the 16th century near Lake Biwa in the province of Omi during the Japanese civil wars. Genjurô, a potter, travels to

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Nagahama to sell his wares and makes a small fortune. His neighbour, Tobei, is a foolish man who dreams of becoming a samurai, but cannot afford to buy the necessary outfit. The greedy Genjurô and Tobei work together to produce clayware, expecting to sell them and become rich, while their wives, Miyage and Ohama, are only worried about the army coming to their village. The two men are so fixated on becoming rich that they ignore their family: Genjurô keeps worrying if the fire in the oven has been put out and his pottery destroyed even when his family is in danger of being killed. Their village is looted but the families survive and the pottery is also saved. Genjurô and Tobei decide to travel by boat with their wives and a baby to sell the wares in a bigger town. When they meet another boat that was attacked by pirates, Genjurô decides to leave his wife and son on the bank of the river, promising to return within ten days. Genjurô, Tobei and Ohama raise a large amount, but Tobei leaves his wife to buy the samurai outfit and seek fame and fortune. He becomes successful in his endeavours when he chances upon a defeated general committing suicide, and appropriates the dead general’s head to claim personal credit for killing him. As Genjurô is selling his pottery he is approached by two customers who look different from the villagers. They turn out to be Lady Wakasa, an aristocrat, and her elderly maidservant. They ask Genjurô to deliver their purchase at Kutsuki Mansion, located some distance away in a scarcely inhabited region. When Genjurô reaches the mansion, he is welcomed and presented with an offer of marriage: His blue pottery is excellent and Wakasa has been taught to appreciate objects of beauty and their creators, is the explanation offered. Genjurô begins living an extremely pleasurable life, the like of which he has not experienced before. Time passes as if in a dream, until he discovers that Lady Wakasa and her attendant are ghosts, and that Kutsuki Mansion is a mere ruin on a hillside. Genjurô now realises that he must return home to his family. Likewise, and

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at about the same time, Tobei discovers that his wife Ohama has become a courtesan and, therefore, he gives up the life of a samurai to return to being a potter with her. When Genjurô returns home his wife welcomes him. The next morning he finds out that Miyage too has become a ghost after she was murdered by Shibata’s soldiers. Their son is now being looked after by the village headman. The two men, understanding the advantages of an ordinary existence, resume their interrupted lives as potters. There are aspects of Ugetsu that are almost Brechtian—the motif of small people trying to take advantage of war but coming to grief is the central one in Mother Courage and Her Children (1939). The difference is that, perhaps because it was based on a folk tale, the male protagonists of Ugetsu eventually learn their lessons and decide to live their lives wisely. Needless to add, this means that there is a great deal of humour in the film—chiefly, Tobei’s escapades and his pretence at being a great samurai warrior being up-to-date in his scholarship of military strategy. The motif of the opportunistic samurai with no loyalty to any master is also a subversion of the mythical samurai figure. A key tale told traditionally in Japan is that of the loyal forty-seven Ronin (masterless samurai) who avenge their dead lord. In this story, which has been made into several films (including one by Mizoguchi in 1941), the forty-seven samurai plan their revenge for over a year. They pretend to be dissipated and cowardly to put the enemy off-guard— then kill him and commit ritual suicide after their plan has been accomplished. It is evident that Tobei is a samurai from a different mould than might have been traditionally upheld. The sub-narrative of Genjurô and Lady Wakasa, by being an erotic encounter between two people from completely different classes, anticipates Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976). In a rigidly hierarchical society such as Japan’s, eroticism introduces the notion of equality because, in submitting totally to pleasure, neither one submits to the other. Lady Wakasa being a ghost does not undo this. If one were to interpret the

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erotic encounter as an ‘aspirational fantasy’ on Genjurô’s part, it is still different from what might have been permitted in Mizoguchi’s prewar films in which one may not aspire outside the hierarchy. Even in Portrait of Madame Yuki (1950), Mizoguchi restricts eroticism to within the marriage, although Yuki secretly loves another man. Ugetsu is more playful than The Life of Oharu, and is certainly a lighter film. There is a moment in The Life of Oharu when, during Oharu’s encounter with the pilgrims, one actually catches a glimpse of flesh grasping its own infirmity. Oharu has painted herself for her clients, but it is evident that she is being hired for the spectacle under her paint. This is a horrifying moment of clarity because she understands that what she has become will show through any amount of playacting. Ugetsu, being derived from a ‘fairy tale’, contains no such moment, and its highpoint is perhaps the erotic interludes involving Genjurô and Lady Wakasa. The motif in The Life of Oharu brings it close to ‘realism’ because Mizoguchi apprehends a real moment that goes beyond performance. Performance, in fact, abruptly drops off when Oharu is confronted by the state of her flesh underneath the paint. If Mizoguchi is still true to the tenets of his craft, one can imagine no such moment from early Japanese cinema. But the film that is most ‘realistic’ in this sense is Sansho the Bailiff (1954)—perhaps the culmination of Mizoguchi’s filmmaking career.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954) Sansho the Bailiff is set in feudal Japan. A virtuous governor who cares more for the poor peasants than those he is serving is banished to a far-off province. His wife and children are sent to live with her brother, but are tricked on the journey by a deceitful priestess and sold into slavery and prostitution. The mother is sold to Sado as a courtesan. The children, Anju and Zushio, are sold by slave traders to a manorial estate in which slaves are brutalised, made to work under horrific conditions and are branded whenever they try to escape.

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The estate, protected under the Minister of the Right, is administered by the eponymous Sansho. Sansho’s son, Taro—the second-incharge—is a more humane master, and he convinces the two that they must survive in the manor before they can escape to find their father. The children grow to young adulthood at the slave camp. Anju still believes in the teachings of her father, who advocated treating others with humanity; but Zushio has repressed his humanity, becoming one of the sterner overseers in the belief that this is the only way to survive. When Anju hears a song that invokes her brother and her in the lyric—sung by a new slave girl from Sado, which was learned from a courtesan—she begins to believe that their mother is still alive. She tries to convince Zushio to escape, but he refuses, citing the difficulty and their lack of resources. But Zushio is ordered to take Namiji, an older woman, out of the slave camp to be left to die in the wilderness due to her sickness. Anju accompanies them. And while they are breaking branches to provide covering for the dying woman, they recall their earlier childhood memories. Zushio asks Anju to escape with him to find their mother. Anju tells him to instead take Namiji with him, convincing her brother that she will stay behind to distract the guards. However, after Zushio escapes, Anju commits suicide by walking into a lake and drowning herself so that she will not be tortured and forced to reveal her brother’s whereabouts. After Zushio escapes in the wilderness, he finds his old mentor, Taro—Sansho’s son—at an Imperial temple. Taro writes him a letter as a proof of who he is and advises him to go to Kyoto to seek redressal from the chief advisor. Although initially refusing to see him, the chief advisor realises the truth after seeing the statuette inherited by Zushio from his father. He then tells Zushio that his exiled father died the year before, and offers Zushio the post of governor of Tango, the very province where Sansho’s manor is situated. As governor of Tango, the first thing Zushio does is to pass an order forbidding slavery both on public and private grounds,

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although he has no authority to do so. Sansho offers initial resistance but Zushio orders him and his minions arrested, thus freeing the slaves. When he looks for Anju among Sansho’s slaves, he finds out his sister sacrificed herself for his freedom. Zushio tells the slaves that they will be paid for their work henceforth. The manor is burned down by ex-slaves, while Sansho and his family are exiled. Since he has openly flouted the law, Zushio resigns and takes leave of the subordinates who had once cautioned him. Zushio leaves for Sado where he searches for his mother, who he believes is still a courtesan. After hearing that she died in a tsunami in another corner of the island, he goes to the beach where she is reported to have been killed. He finds a nearly blind, decrepit old woman in a shack singing the same song he heard at Sansho’s mansion, ‘Zushio, Anju…’. The tendons behind her knees have been brutally severed to prevent her from leaving Sado, and she cannot walk without assistance. Zushio reveals his identity to her but Tamaki assumes he is a tormentor, until he shows her the statuette. Zushio tells his mother that both Anju and his father are dead. And that he has been true to his father’s teachings. The first aspect that strikes someone familiar with Mizoguchi’s work is how the virtues he upheld have transformed. Without this in mind, the tenets to which Zushio’s father subscribes—mercy, kindness and the basic equality of man—may sound clichéd. It is as if Mizoguchi was being abruptly exposed to these ordinary virtues because he was shut off from the rest of the world. This is comparable to The Life of Oharu pronouncing that people must have the freedom to love across barriers of class in the manner of making a discovery. Mizoguchi makes these commonplace assertions sound fresh, but it is not this alone that gives Sansho the Bailiff its extraordinary power— the phenomenon needs a deeper investigation. The focus in the film is mainly Zushio, whose adult inclinations are not to be merciful but to simply perform the duties set for him.

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Sansho himself is hardly ‘evil’; he is in charge of property owned by the Minister of the Right, and is performing the duties entrusted to him. He admonishes his son for not being stern and attributes it to his weakness, indicating that Taro does not have the stomach for difficult work. If Sansho is not kind or merciful, it is because these notions lie outside his moral vocabulary. On reflecting upon the film, we recognise that Zushio changes in his ways not because kindness and mercy are ‘right’, but because they were advocated by his father, and that it is only correct that he follows his father’s teachings. It is significant that Zushio does not have a ‘moral awakening’, but simply decides to follow his father rather than Sansho. Memory of these teachings is brought to him by a family heirloom (a statuette), which also confirms his noble birth. When Zushio proceeds to Kyoto to meet the authorities, he does not reason with them but screams out his pleas, animal-like. A key moment in the film occurs when Zushio (as governor) and Sansho come face-to-face. Sansho does not recognise him until Zushio reveals his true identity. Sansho’s response is to express surprise that a slave could have ascended to such a level, but it is significant that he sees no contradiction in his honouring a former slave, because the slave, now having station and power, deserves such honour. It is only when Zushio begins to pass unlawful orders that Sansho protests, also asserting that Zushio cannot get away by acting beyond his power. Zushio’s ‘moral’ acts as governor of the province are not thought out. His subordinates advise him against them and, when Sansho is exiled for keeping slaves, there is even disbelief on the bailiff ’s part. The general sense to be gathered is that Zushio’s actions being unlawful, Sansho will have his position restored. If Sansho had been executed, the step would have been irreversible, but not so when exiled. Sansho is highly prized as manager of the Minister’s property, and there is no way he can be punished, but Zushio ignores this. Also, when Zushio tells the slaves that they

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will be paid decent wages if they remain behind, his statement is patently a falsehood. When the former slaves are in the throes of alcoholic frenzy, and burning the mansion down, we are certain that their freedom will be short lived. Similarly, we are left apprehensive for Zushio’s subordinates in the governor’s office for they have followed orders they know to be unlawful. This suggests that Sansho the Bailiff is more complex than it is made out to be, and is by no means merely ‘humanist’. If Mizoguchi is upholding broadly ‘democratic’ values, he still has less faith in their applicability than he had in the efficacy of the Japanese tradition and patriarchy before the war. Sansho the Bailiff, with its praise of simple virtues, begins as a kind of fable in which the initial state is restored, but in the course of the story we begin to realise that Mizoguchi is creating events that cannot be undone, moments that imply an irreversible process. The heart-breaking scene in which Tamaki is separated from her children by human traffickers is the first one, and she being deliberately crippled after her failed escape from Sado is perhaps the next. Zushio promises Anju that he will return for her, but Anju kills herself immediately thereafter, confirming that she has little faith that she will be released. These are events that drag the characters deeper into abjection, but when Zushio is given the power to do some good— however unlawfully—it is ironic that each of his decisions is certain to be overturned. When Zushio resigns from his position, the film’s brief dalliance with good fortune concludes and he is left alone with his hopelessly crippled mother, weeping for things as they might have been. Japanese cinema began as a ‘presentation of performance’, a commentary on what was socially appropriate rather than an imitation of life. Mizoguchi’s earlier films, therefore, have discourses valorising traditional values even while acknowledging the attendant distress. Sansho the Bailiff begins by making one expect its message to be reassuring in some way but, as it unfolds, the world intrudes so

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insistently that its moral affirmations are actually undermined. That Zushio screams out his pleas instead of articulating them suggests deafness of the traditional order to persuasion. In the final analysis, it would appear that the film attains extraordinary power not because of its righteous moral viewpoint but because it is unrelentingly ‘realistic’—it admits that the real world will not submit to any kind of moral order, owing either to Japanese tradition or the liberal democratic West. It is this bleak perspective alongside its persistent moral affirmations that makes it such a devastating film.

The Discovery of a New Vision Kenji Mizoguchi has a unique place in cinema: he was prolific over such a long period that he has made great films in every era. He belonged to a nation that underwent cataclysmic change in the 20th century, perhaps only comparable to Germany, Russia and China. But where the cultural history of each of these nations was so brutally interrupted that it is difficult to find any kind of continuity in their cinemas, Japan’s case is conspicuously different. While Yasujiro Ozu is another Japanese filmmaker who produced great work in more than one era, the domain of his work—restricted as it is to the family—is smaller and, therefore, not as imprinted upon by political transformation as Mizoguchi’s films are. Mizoguchi’s great pre-war films make way for his even greater post-war work; but since his concern was Japanese society, his work has enormous political implications. The Japanese military establishment had made demands upon filmmakers before 1939, and even Mizoguchi yielded to these demands,16 although his artistic integrity was not compromised. Mizoguchi’s genius survived the post-war transformation of Japan, but there is evidence that his moral vision and his aesthetic were both overwhelmed by new elements after 1945. Japanese cinema, as indicated earlier, existed in a hermetic environment till the war, and Mizoguchi’s films provide as much evidence of this as those of any other filmmaker. Mizoguchi’s early films acknowledge the difficulties with

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Japan’s patriarchal tradition; but, taking it as a given, they valorise it while acknowledging its tragic implications for individual lives. The war proved that tradition was not infallible and had led Japan to catastrophe. The post-war transformation of Japan perhaps made it necessary for Mizoguchi to re-examine his convictions, and he emerged from it with his faith in the traditional order destroyed. But what is more important is that his great films of the 1950s have insights into the limits of human order itself, and it is this aspect that gives his films a new profundity, which being merely ‘humanist’ might not have imparted to them.

Notes and References   1. Donald Ritchie, Japanese Cinema: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 2.  2. Ritchie, Japanese Cinema, 4. The Benshi had rivals—the Kagezerifu (‘shadow speech’) who stood behind the screen and dubbed presumed dialogue and the Kowairo or the ‘voice colorer’ who was a narrator presenting presumed dialogue—indirect speech to the Kagezerifu’s direct speech.  3. Ritchie, Japanese Cinema, 2.  4. Ritchie, Japanese Cinema, 7.   5. Aaron Gerow, ‘The Word Before the Image: Criticism, the Screenplay, and the Regulation of Meaning in Pre-war Japanese Film Culture’, in Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, eds. Dennis Washburn and Carole Cavanaugh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23. One of the first ‘film-like’ films, that is, films that asserted the purity of the image by playing down the word and the story was Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (1926) that was influenced by German Expressionism. This film was celebrated for its non-narrativity. A Page of Madness, however, was shown with the Benshi present, and its reliance on the Benshi for narrative assistance was severely criticised by such critics as Naoki Sanjugô who acknowledged this as a sign of the film’s imperfect purity.  6. Film theorist Sugiyama Heiichi quoted in Tadao Sato, Nihon Eiga Rironshi, trans. Peter B. High (Tokyo: Hyronsha, 1977). Partial unpublished translation.

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  7. Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 46–47.   8. Susan Sontag, ‘Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson’, in A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 121–136. Bresson, as Susan Sontag says, was preoccupied with the ‘physics of the human soul’.  9. Ritchie, Japanese Cinema, 27. 10. Portrayals of courtesans or sex workers in cinema usually include sequences of individual brutality. Even Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962) emphasises the humiliation and emotional agony that an individual woman is forced to bear in practicing her profession. In Sisters of Gion, the general sense of the geisha is of a legitimate group which is socially acknowledged. The two sisters are not ill-treated by their men and what Kimura does to Omosha is not done gratuitously but to ‘right a wrong’. 11. Lisa Yoneyama, ‘Liberation under Siege: U.S. Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement’, American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 887. 12. Mire Koikari, ‘Exporting Democracy? American Women, “Feminist Reforms” and Politics of Imperialism in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952’, Frontier: A Journal of Women Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 30. 13. Koikari, Exporting Democracy, 27. 14. David Bordwell, ‘The Classical Hollywood Style’, in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, eds. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (London: Routledge, 1985), 42–43. 15. It is significant that Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which is about character subjectivity, came out in the same period. 16. Darrel William Davis, Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Films (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 7. For instance, it has been said about The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums that its style and ideology are consistent with the selfsacrifice called for on the home front. The Ministry of Education award it received apparently enhanced its market penetration.

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3

World and Text Interpreting Jacques Rivette A ‘Difficult’ Filmmaker Jacques Rivette passed away in January 2016 after a highly productive career, but for someone fascinated by his work, the critical writing devoted to his films tends to disappoint. While the films themselves never fail to intrigue, reviews/critical essays rarely engage with his apparent intent—‘apparent’ because the filmmaker's purpose is never very clear. While there are innumerable ways in which cinema can be written about, cinephiles who take up avidly a single filmmaker's oeuvre feel obliged, when examining the different experiences, to identify a single thread bringing them together. In the case of Rivette’s films this is an exceptionally difficult task because of the bewildering variety in his subjects and the seeming absence of a governing thematic concern. Critics who admire him have, therefore, tended to offer interpretations that are theory-down—without being conscious of their belittling implications.1 As already set out in the introduction, surface and deep interpretations do not correspond to degrees of ‘sophistication’, but only serve different agendas. It is evident that deep interpretation, which yields the film’s ‘repressed’ or ‘symptomatic’ meaning, cannot become the basis of an appreciation since it goes beyond artistic intent—into phobias and prejudices. 65

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Critics and Rivette Although the kinds of interpretation just outlined serve different purposes/agendas, there is, in practice, confusion in their employment; filmmakers like Rivette often become its victims. Rivette’s films are always demanding but there appears to be a consensus that Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) is among the films that are more accessible. If it is argued by cinephiles that the ‘accessibility’ of a film obliges the critic to first exhaust its literal meaning, it is deep interpretation that the researcher–critic still chooses. To cite a response to Céline and Julie Go Boating, here is a passage from a feminist critique that says more about the writer’s preoccupations than about the film: The internal story that Celine and Julie keep going back to is the so-called ‘masochistic’ female fantasy, the drama of dominance and submission that originates in the nuclear family and in which everything revolves around the fact of male power. In that interior story the ‘child’ is suppressed, both as a real child in the family and in the personalities of the stultified adults. The interior story resembles the depictions found in melodrama for the last two hundred years and which flourish today in TV’s soaps, with the women competing for the man and the bourgeois comfort he can bring them. The ‘cues’ are all too stable in that world; its patterns of destructive interaction are continually repeated.2

The essay also includes a suggestion that Céline and Julie Go Boating is interpretable as a ‘lesbian film’. While, to be fair, the author is unequivocal that her goal is not to make people ‘like’ the film but to use it as a pretext for reflecting on feminist film theory, there is a strange feature about many theory-based responses to Rivette. It is as though the filmmaker is actually required to assist in deep interpretation. Here is a segment from an interview in which the interviewer draws Rivette’s attention to a mirror in a scene from Out 1: Spectre (1972).

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Interviewer: Have you read Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Phase’? That shot of Bulle in front of the mirror near the end of Spectre reminded me of Lacan. Rivette: I have read this very dense essay, but it has nothing to do with that shot. The mirror was in the house where we were shooting, and I used it.3

The interviewer is perhaps unaware of the insinuation here—that Rivette is deliberately introducing into Spectre aspects gathered from theory to assist in its interpretation by theorists. Since the agenda in deep interpretation ignores the filmmaker's actual preoccupations, as these instances show, one wonders why Rivette’s films should be selected in the first place. Would not any film involving the friendship between two girls be, to a feminist-critic interested in gender issues and feminine bonding, as useful as Céline and Julie Go Boating? The responses cited belong to critics whose primary interest is not in film as film. But even critics preoccupied with film form and film as art have not done better in identifying Rivette’s recurring themes. It is, for instance, asserted that Rivette’s films have an identifiable relationship with those of Fritz Lang,4 but it is still to be convincingly demonstrated that the surface meaning of Rivette’s work is comparable to that of Lang’s. ‘Solitude and togetherness’5 may feature as conditions in which Rivette’s protagonists are placed but they do not mark his films out more than they do those of many other filmmakers—like Hawks, perhaps—and it seems hasty to identify them as underlying themes. More disappointing is when a critic like Peter Harcourt—whose writings on film art are even inspiring, especially on Fellini, Godard and Bergman—fails to make much sense of Rivette.6 Harcourt compares Paris Belongs to Us (1961) to the existentialist writing of the period. He tries to understand the use of the play (Shakespeare’s Pericles) as ‘demystification of illusionist practice’ by relying on one of Rivette’s unhelpful remarks,

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and comments upon by the apparent irrelevance of the play to the lives of those rehearsing it. Like much of the writing on Rivette’s work, he identifies random attributes without providing insights into how they come together in the films.

Rivette on Rivette Since the manifest content of Rivette’s films is so elusive, the next question is obviously whether clues can be found in his interviews that will help us approach it. An early criticism made against directors of the French New Wave was that they are frankly autobiographical and that this helps them avoid the issue of choice inherent in true creation.7 While this is evidently true of some of Truffaut’s work, one is hard-pressed to extend it to Rivette. Unlike many of the world’s great filmmakers who put themselves into their works, there are few visible evidences of the personal in Rivette’s films. More strikingly perhaps, Rivette’s interviews contain little information about himself, apart from his experiences in the making and distribution of his films. In contrast to filmmakers like Fellini who appear even eager to talk about themselves, Rivette’s interviews rarely tell us very much about him. Also, in contrast to the others who have little to say about other people’s films, Rivette seems to exist largely for cinema— he emerges more as a cinephile than an auteur with a personal statement. Since there is no evidence that Rivette is reticent about himself, this could be due to the nature of the questions themselves. One of the aims in an interview is to understand the filmmaker's work through her/his person. But this implies that interviewers must commit themselves implicitly to an interpretation of the work before pursuing the artist with questions focused on it. In Jacques Rivette’s interviews, one hardly finds each interviewer committing herself/ himself in such a way.8 When Rivette invokes a little-known work of literature/cinema that might have provided useful clues for more exploration, interviewers unfamiliar with the work tend to avoid

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further questioning.9 It is perhaps easier to approach an artist who draws from life rather than from texts, and Rivette’s concerns appear entirely to be mediated by texts from literature and cinema. But, as if to confound people, Rivette also speaks of many of his films being ‘autobiographical’. If this is true, it is perhaps in the sense that all art must reflect personal experience in some way. Most directors of the French New Wave began as critics, but— with the exception of Truffaut—they are not always lucid writers. This is as true of Rivette, who has strong opinions about films; but these opinions do not emerge, either from his reviews (in translation) or from his interviews, as deeply analytical. This is perhaps why the interviews rarely follow an observation to its end and tend to get lost in trivia. There is always the danger of artists who give good interviews becoming, in Pauline Kael’s words about Fellini, works of art in themselves. While it is certainly beneficial for artists whose work is as difficult as Rivette’s not to explain themselves, it also frees the critic writing about his films from the obligation to take into account the filmmaker's remarks about them. I propose that since the films are not private utterances and we understand them through what we and the filmmaker know commonly, we are in as good a position to interpret them as Rivette is. It would, therefore, be advantageous for the critic to be wary of his interviews. Paris Belongs to Us is one of the least accessible first features in the history of cinema, and not being understood is apparently a risk that Rivette was prepared to take.

Interpreting Rivette Two features stand out in the films of Jacques Rivette. The first can perhaps be understood in relation to a remark made by Samuel Beckett about the virtues of a work legible on its own terms but completely inscrutable on any other. What this means can be argued about, but it could pertain to the need for art to transcend, or render irrelevant, the context in which it is produced. This aim seems to contradict the

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approach of this book, but I will argue that the critic has obligations that the creative artist does not, since she/he is trying to produce stable meaning out of a subconscious process, which is the creation of the art object. The proposition actually suggests that literature should be independent of the history of ideas. Rivette’s films, as brought out, have not been the easiest films to explain, but their legibility is not determined by our knowledge of their historical circumstances or the filmmaker's background. There is also little reason to believe that they owe anything to a pre-existing philosophical viewpoint. The films are intellectually demanding, but all they appear to demand is intelligent engagement. If they are peppered with references to quotes from literature and/or various other films, it would appear that sense can be made of Rivette’s films without deep knowledge of the literature and cinema to which his works allude. In this respect, he may be compared to Jorge Luis Borges whose fictions can be understood by readers who do not share his erudition.10 Jacques Rivette has other resemblances to Borges as well, and comparisons will be made in the course of this chapter. The second feature about Rivette’s films is the way in which they have gradually become more ‘accessible’. Rivette made a substantially larger number of films in the latter part of his career, and films like La Belle Noiseuse (1991) and Secret Défense (1998) seem quite straightforward in relation to L’Amour Fou (1969) and Paris Belongs to Us. The later films seem intended for a wider appeal than the early ones, but it can be argued that the early films were made when there was clearly a different relationship between the filmmaker and the spectator. The nearly adversarial responses invited by filmmakers like Godard and Rivette in the 1960s may not be possible today when films need to virtually woo the spectator. Rivette was perhaps able to be more prolific later since Secret Défense passes for a simple, though ‘overlong’, thriller to spectators not inclined to grapple with its nuances. The Story of Marie and Julien may even be enjoyed as a

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supernatural romance from the same category as Jerry Zucker’s Ghost (1990). Rivette’s later films may appear slight to those unfamiliar with his oeuvre, but this ‘slight’ appearance may be an escape provided to the indolent spectator by a more relenting, although not less exacting, artist than the one of Paris Belongs to Us.11 Rivette’s importance as an artist in cinema has never been denied, but this will not be selfevident to audiences familiar only with his recent work, which is perhaps difficult to interpret without the knowledge of his early films, and other aspects such as Rivette’s persisting obsession with theatre. The purpose of this chapter is partly to demonstrate—through an inquiry into his motifs—that Rivette has been consistent in his pursuits. In order to show this I propose to examine four films made over a large period, with the films chosen from different genres: a strange film about a conspiracy (Paris Belongs to Us), a fantasy (Céline and Julie Go Boating), a revenge thriller (Secret Défense) and a romantic ‘ghost’ story (The Story of Marie and Julien). These are among his most familiar films and it seems appropriate to derive a new meaning from his oeuvre by relying on the least esoteric examples. Rivette’s first film, Paris Belongs to Us, will perhaps furnish us with the most useful clues because it was the film through which he announced himself to the world. To those who know these films well, I must add that my interpretation will involve a bit of storytelling. ‘Knowing’ a film includes interpreting it implicitly and a fresh interpretation perhaps justifies a retelling.

Paris Belongs to Us (1960) Paris Belongs to Us (Paris Nous Appartient) is a film about a group of young people in Paris in the late 1950s who are embroiled in different ways in a worldwide conspiracy of some sort. Anne, a literature student, is taken to a party by Pierre, her elder brother, where she meets Philip Kaufman, an expatriate American escaping McCarthyism, and Gerard Lenz, a theatre director who is with a

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mysterious woman named Terry. The talk at the party is about the apparent suicide of their friend Juan, a Spanish activist who had recently broken up with Terry. Philip warns Anne that the forces that killed Juan will soon do the same to Gerard, who is trying, without financial backing, to stage Shakespeare’s Pericles. Also discussed is a missing guitar recording by Juan, which Gerard wants for Pericles. Anne takes part in the play to help Gerard, and to try to discover the truth about Juan. This information may not be entirely pertinent to the thrust of Paris Belongs to Us, but it must be mentioned that the film was made at the height of the Cold War, and the title suggests the staking of claims upon the same space by ideologies in conflict. The group of young people in the film is split down the middle, and there is little doubt about which group Rivette is with—those broadly describable as ‘anti-Fascist’. Still, his concerns do not appear ‘political’, and while his protagonists are apparently reacting to a political stimulus of some sort, the film is silent about the stimulus itself—the villains feared so much by the group are allowed to remain mysterious. In fact, the film could as well be about political paranoia as about political intrigue, and the grotesque pencil drawings on Phillip Kaufman’s walls announce this clearly. Making clear sense of Paris Belongs to Us is undoubtedly a difficult task, but a method is to seek out a line or two of crucial dialogue.12 Although the film is about a group of young people, Rivette’s attention is largely taken up by the relationship between two of them—Anne and Gerard Lenz. Apart from getting more attention than others, the two also appear to be the only normal persons not beset by fears and conducting themselves calmly. Gerard is apparently under threat but, unlike Terry and Phillip, his behaviour does not suggest it. If Anne is young and innocent and placed in the analogous position of the spectator because she is unravelling the story, Gerard Lenz, because of his artistic/philosophical preoccupations, may be the receptacle of

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the film’s conceptual meaning. It is always appropriate to verbalise the concerns of the film through characters not in a condition of excitement, because only then would the conceptual meaning be received undistorted, and only these two characters appear to suit the requirement. Since Gerard is preoccupied with Pericles it can also be argued that the production could be a likely place to conceal clues to the film’s meaning and his remarks about it are hence significant. In describing Pericles to Anne, Gerard indicates that the play is patchy and appears to even lack teleology. It is his endeavour, he says, to bring the disparate threads together and reveal its hidden purpose. It can be argued that this description of Pericles applies roughly to the world of the film as well. This political world is a mysterious one, but there appear to be two broad ‘narratives’ struggling for its control, one being liberal democratic and the other right-wing and Fascist. What I mean by ‘narrative’ needs explaining and, to illustrate my meaning, the Darwinian model for evolution and the Biblical account of creation can be usefully viewed as narratives competing for control over the history of life on the planet. If this is conceded, we could say that the characters in Paris Belongs to Us have variously thrown their lot with two dominant narratives—each one corresponding to a political affiliation—struggling for control over the world as emblemised by Paris. We could say that the film is about the political world having become so impenetrable that one must believe in a ‘narrative’ regardless of how bizarre it might appear. For someone subscribing to liberal democratic principles and outraged by the Cold War rhetoric of the times, a mysterious worldwide Fascist conspiracy was perhaps the most alluring grand narrative around 1960. Another clue inserted conspicuously into the second half of Paris Belongs to Us is a segment from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) entitled ‘Babel’ and pertaining to the story related by Lang’s heroine Maria. As the reader may be aware, the segment is a variation of the episode from the Old Testament in which those working on

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the Tower of Babel lose their ability to communicate with the planners, resulting in the eventual abandonment of the Tower and its construction. The chasm between the movers and the planners in Babel may correspond to the one between the characters of Paris Belongs to Us and the shadowy authors of worldwide conflicts. It can be argued that the greater the chasm between the planners of vast enterprises and their movers, the more the need for the lowly movers to generate narratives. Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, while also invoking Babel, demonstrates how the disparity between the planners and the movers generates narratives to explain the enterprise of the Great Wall. A key motif in Paris Belongs to Us pertains to Juan’s guitar composition, which occupies approximately the same position in the film as Frenhofer’s painting La Belle Noiseuse occupies in the 1991 film. That film is about a retired painter struggling to regain his touch while painting a nude, and being successful only when he recovers an inspired but unfinished masterwork of his own and paints over it. If the act in La Belle Noiseuse is like using a ritual ingredient to impart magical qualities to a representation, Gerard Lenz’s obsession with using Juan’s guitar composition for his own production of Pericles carries the same urgency. Juan was the first victim of the political reality perhaps allegorised by Lenz’s production, and sanctification by an element of the represented reality could render the enactment powerful. The sanctifying is as a nail from the original cross might a Passion Play—and testifies to an underlying belief in the primacy of reality over art. Another story with which Rivette’s film has an interesting relationship is Borges’s The Lottery in Babylon. That story is about the institution of a lottery to provide excitement to citizens of Babylon, and about its gradual investment with omnipotence so that the benefits from it can be universal. Over time the lottery company begins to work so secretly that even its existence is disputed. This is how the story concludes:

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That silent functioning, comparable to God’s, gives rise to all sorts of conjectures. One abominably insinuates that the (lottery) Company has not existed … and that the … disorder of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional. Another judges it eternal and teaches that it will last until the last night, when the last god annihilates the world. Another declares that the (lottery) Company is omnipotent, but that it only has influence in tiny things: in a bird’s call, in the shadings of rust and of dust, in the half dreams of dawn…. Another, no less vile, reasons that it is indifferent to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing else than an infinite game of chance.13

The conspiracy in Paris Belongs to Us perhaps occupies the same position as the lottery in Borges’s story. Both are ‘narratives of omnipotence’ in which human agencies progressively usurp reality. Rivette’s film, of course, does not conclude with the triumph of the conspiracy but the space of the narrative, till then confined to streets, abruptly opening out to nature, like birds flying across a body of water; and the implications are perhaps the same as the lottery gaining influence over ‘tiny things’. The narrative will encompass even the smallest aspects of reality.

Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) The second of the four films is as playful as Paris Belongs to Us is sombre, but it still has a discernible relationship with the earlier film. Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) is a fantasy about two girls, a librarian and an amateur magician, who find themselves mysteriously caught up in the destinies of the residents of a house on one of Paris’ quieter streets. Céline claims to have worked as a nanny at the house, about which both of them are curious, and a cyclical pattern emerges. Céline or Julie enters the house and emerges later, forgetting whatever transpired during her stay, but with a sweet in her mouth. They soon understand that sucking the sweet brings back fragmented memories of the events in the house; we witness happenings that seem arbitrary at first, but begin falling

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into place when they are recollected in different permutations and combinations after each subsequent visit. Gradually, we recognise that what is happening in the house is a recurring narrative of some sort, and this ‘story’ also becomes clear to Céline and Julie. The story14 involves a widowed man and two women, both seeking to become his wife. The difficulty is that the man has a little daughter from his first marriage to a woman who is now deceased, but before her death she had extracted a promise from him that he would not remarry, for their daughter’s sake. Each of the two women is now intent on removing this impediment by killing the little girl. Since the unfolding of the story is a cyclical occurrence, the girl is murdered over and over again, with Céline or Julie participating passively, as the nanny, in the constant unfolding. The nanny’s role in the story is predetermined; although the girls wish to rescue the child, it is impossible. The solution they finally hit upon is a supernatural one devised by the amateur magician: The two girls will have to find a way to enter the story together and feed the same potion that frees them from the shackles of the story to the little girl to extricate her from it. The two girls now enter the story together but since there is a role for only one nanny, the other is invisible to the man and the two women. After some comic encounters between the free and facetious ‘nannies’ and the three characters whose conduct is constrained by the story, the little girl is duly extricated and brought back into ‘reality’. The next morning, Céline and Julie discover that what transpired was not a dream because the girl is still with them. Rivette’s film concludes on a strange note wherein Céline and Julie, in the penultimate sequence, take the little girl boating and discover, to their surprise, that the man and two women are on the lake as well, although their motions are not of real people but stiff, as though frozen. The final sequence of the film begins like the opening one: A girl spots another girl in a park in Paris and follows her when the latter drops various accessories from her bag as she hurries along.15

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The girls are Céline and Julie again—only this time, the roles are reversed: Céline is sitting on the park bench as Julie rushes by. What Céline and Julie Go Boating is about has never been explained, but there are clues suggesting that it is about reading a story, or perhaps spectatorship in cinema. The film is longer than Paris Belongs to Us and much slower, and the reason is partly that Rivette introduces large real-time segments when nothing of dramatic significance happens but the camera is catching ‘tiny things’—a cat stalking a bird or the wind against the trees. In contrast, the happenings in the ‘house’ are all filmed theatre and Rivette, through this strategy, is evidently making a distinction between reality as physically experienced and a text that is perceived, understood and interpreted. The device of the sweets, I propose, is employed to separate the assimilation of fictional data in the story and the ‘making sense’ of it. Making sense of a narrative is a process following its reading, largely immediate although not necessarily so. If the happenings in the house constitute a ‘story’, and not simply a narrative, because of their completeness, teleology and intentionality in assembly, recollecting them by sucking on the sweet corresponds to ‘narrativity’, or the active construction of the story by the reader/spectator from the fictional data available.16 Similarly, the occurrences outside the ‘house’, the segments dealing with Céline and Julie, are also less of a ‘story’. They have the appearance of a recounting that is not unified by an expressive purpose, and the real-time segments deliberately weaken their teleology.17 To understand more about Céline and Julie Go Boating, it may be appropriate to examine how it connects to Paris Belongs to Us. The earlier film, as I suggested, can be equally about paranoia as about a political conspiracy and, significantly, ‘narrativity’ has been described as a benign form of paranoia. The reader of a narrative, through identification/empathy, willingly assumes she/he is in the grip of processes outside of himself, designed to do things to him

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that she/he will be powerless to resist18. The instant that narrativity ceases is also the moment when life outside the narrative resumes for the reader/spectator. The ‘paranoia’ exhibited by some characters of Paris Belongs to Us, in a sense, arises out of their narrativitous urge. Philip Kaufman and Terry interpret the actual world as they might a text, and find themselves permanently trapped in processes outside their control, processes they are powerless to resist. Céline and Julie, in contrast, undergo only intermittent spells of narrativity, and ‘life outside the narrative’ resumes after the interludes.19 But Rivette makes us understand that ‘life’ and the ‘story’ are not discrete because Céline and Julie remove the little girl from the coils of the story and bring her into their world, only to discover that the borders of the story have been expanded to include them. It is difficult to interpret the closing segment of Céline and Julie Go Boating, but there is also a suggestion that the cyclical character of the story of the man and two women overwhelms their reality when the first episode of the film is repeated in the last segment. To draw another parallel with Borges, the conclusion is perhaps like the world becoming ‘Tlön’ in the fantastic story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, that is, reality contaminated by fiction.20 To phrase this differently, the world is factual—the real-time segments and the attention to physical detail are evidence of this assertion—but we comprehend it only as a narrative, as a kind of fiction. Is it not feasible, then, that the fiction we make of the world will eventually corrupt it? Both Paris Belongs to Us and Céline and Julie Go Boating are nominally about ‘togetherness’ and it would perhaps be useful to look at why the two films could not have been about ‘solitude’. Or, to phrase it differently, why these films could not have featured the adventures of a single unaffiliated character. The reason, I think, is that such an approach might have made the films appear ‘psychological’, that is, misunderstood as being about a particular state of mind instead of an exploration of the process by which we all interpret reality. Another

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feature that needs to be explained is Rivette’s use of women characters rather than men, especially because the film has been interpreted as a feminist tract. My own sense is that the film is about comprehending or ‘receiving’ the world, and male actors would perhaps come across as too driven by ‘doing’. Rivette uses women actors because they are in the appropriate state of receptivity, as men might not have been. When he needs a protagonist who ‘does’ rather than ‘is’, he uses a man, as in La Belle Noiseuse (1991).

Secret Défense (1998) The third of the four films is actually a retelling of the story of Electra, with the narrative rearranged as a revenge thriller. Melodramas and tragedies contain the same story material as whodunits and crime thrillers—heightened emotions, violence and moral polarisation. The Russian formalist term ‘fabula’ (story) represents the imaginary construct created progressively and retroactively as we interact with text. ‘Syuzhet’ (plot) is the actual arrangement of fabula in a narrative. Syuzhet is the blow-by-blow recounting of a story as a film or a piece of fiction would render it. A detective thriller yields a fabula beginning with the planning of a murder, and concluding with the criminal being brought to book. A syuzhet (narrative as told) conceals parts of a fabula to create ‘suspense’ and sharpen the impact of text upon the reader.21 Secret Défense, therefore, begins with Sylvie, a scientist, being visited by her brother, Paul, who brings disturbing news about their father. They had believed that their father was killed in a railway accident when Sylvie was little, but Paul tells her that he was pushed to his death by his deputy Walser, who now occupies his position as the head of a strategic, military-related, enterprise. Since Paul has convincing evidence of Walser’s involvement and intends to kill him, Sylvie sees it fit to visit her father’s supposed murderer. The rest of the film follows with Sylvie accidentally killing Walser’s young secretary Veronique and Walser himself helping and

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sheltering her thereafter. Sylvie also meets her mother Geneviève, who lives nearby, and it comes out that there is more to the story than meets the eye. Geneviève and Walser plotted together and killed Sylvie’s father on a train because he had used Sylvie’s older sister to further his own ambitions, an act leading to the young girl’s suicide. The relationship between Secret Défense and the tale of Electra is evident from this recounting because Orestes, with Electra’s help, killed his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus for having murdered their father Agamemnon. Agamemnon had earlier sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the god Artemis, asking for winds to start so that they could sail to Troy. But the resemblance stops here because neither Geneviève nor Walser dies. It is Sylvie who is killed accidentally after her initiatives bring nothing but misfortune. If Secret Défense is simply considered as a revenge thriller there is no excusing its length—it is 170 minutes long. Viewers often complain about the interminable train rides because Rivette includes real-time segments on the Metro, both in Paris and outside, that appear to have little dramatic potential. A careful viewing, nonetheless, makes is clear that the train rides, the attention to everyday life as it is lived, are crucial to the film. To provide the reader with an instance, Sylvie decides to eliminate Walser and hence gets herself a gun. She has, however, only a fuzzy notion of how a murder is done and acquires two pairs of dark glasses before boarding the train, perhaps as a gesture towards subterfuge. The next part of the film—running to fifteen minutes—is taken up with Sylvie on her way to Walser’s and her discomfort at the prospect of becoming an assassin. Where amateur killers in crime films, though beset by moral qualms, slip easily into such roles, Rivette focuses on how incongruous ordinary people might feel in dramatic roles alien to their banal, everyday routines. In Sylvie’s case, she and Paul decide upon killing Walser although they have no clear recollection of their father. They choose the course, perhaps, because they can think of no other. They have

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few ties with their mother, who lives alone, and discussing the issue with her is not even considered. In Walser’s country estate, a space once occupied by her family, Sylvie encounters Veronique—for whom a disturbed woman pointing a gun at her is as unfamiliar an occurrence as any—and the predictable happens. It is Walser who conceals Veronique’s corpse to save Sylvie. While Rivette pays much more attention to the ordinary, yet fascinating details of everyday life in Secret Défense than in the other two films, his purpose also remains more elusive. A complaint voiced about the film is the triteness of the plot, but there is, perhaps, a clue concealed in it. The information that Sylvie’s father virtually sold his 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth to secure a defence contract is not one designed to startle the spectator, and this is compounded by the absence of detail. Where a clever thriller might have played up the emotional angle and furnished details to make it plausible, Rivette refuses to do any such thing. I would like to argue that the final revelation is akin to one of Hitchcock’s McGuffins—a plot device that motivates the characters but has little actual relevance to the story. The device in Secret Défense, while bringing the narrative to closure, means nothing in itself. It is appropriate here to examine the actual segment in the film in which the information about Elizabeth is given to the spectator. This segment, perhaps the most brilliant in the film, shows a short train journey undertaken by Sylvie and her mother together. Geneviève has already been told by Walser that Sylvie and Paul are seeking to avenge their father, and Geneviève evidently has knowledge about her husband’s death, information not yet divulged to her daughter. Instead of creating a sequence overflowing with excitement and leading to a dramatic revelation, Rivette shifts the emphasis deliberately to the disparity between mother and daughter. It is as though the two women have little to communicate to each other. Much of the segment is taken up by the two looking out at the

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passing landscape in silence. When the subject does come around to her husband’s murder, and Elizabeth as the reason, Geneviève is reluctant to talk about it. ‘Imagine the worst and you will be right’, she says perfunctorily, and the final revelation is hardly more illuminating. Sylvie also shows less persistence than a comparable character in a successful thriller might have. The two women part at the spot from where their father traveled to his death, but they are neither anxious to meet nor inclined to discuss their shared past again. This segment, apt to disappoint those looking for a dramatic finale, makes it apparent that the thriller format of Secret Défense is actually misleading, that the film is not pitched at this level of excitement. The only way of interpreting the segment is that it points to the impossibility of ‘knowing’. It is not simply that some secrets are not divulged, but that it is impossible to wrench open truths about the world. This is not unrelated, I propose, to the inability of the protagonists of Paris Belongs to Us to know the truth about the conspiracy, although in the case of Secret Défense the unknowable pertains only to an old happening. A key absence in Secret Défense is perhaps the process by which two law abiding people like Paul and Sylvie decide that liquidating Walser is the necessary step for them. If, unlike Paul, Sylvie is a fair person and seeks to understand more before condemning Walser, it is significant that the only satisfaction she gets is from an almost fruitless train journey. If thriller aficionados are dissatisfied with the ‘silly plot’, I suggest that whatever Geneviève has to divulge about the past stands eroded to a bare plot outline. Most adaptations of epics and tragedies in which the original characters are transplanted into contemporary milieus tend to feed upon the prestige associated with the original. O’Neil’s Mourning Becomes Electra, for instance, virtually claims the stature of Agamemnon and Electra for its protagonists. Rivette is more modest in his claims and Sylvie, Paul and Walser are, by all reckoning,

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small people. Rivette, I propose, simply chose the plot of Electra as something so familiar that it would even be clichéd.22 When Sylvie listens to a narrative about a crucial occurrence of several years ago, one likely to result in the most extreme decision of her life, all she apparently hears is a clichéd plot outline. This, I would argue, is an even stronger statement about ‘knowledge’ than the one in Paris Belongs to Us. Whatever has been said about Rivette may make the filmmaker seem too dryly schematic, but in actual fact, a film like Secret Défense is permeated by deep melancholy. Rivette is not using his films to demonstrate the validity of a philosophical thesis about knowledge in contemporary world. Such a design on the filmmaker's part would, I propose, have even made him a lesser artist, perhaps because art would do well to be independent of the history of ideas. Rivette is preoccupied with the possibilities of human lives but his preoccupations are those of a storyteller.

The Story of Marie and Julien (2003) In The Story of Marie and Julien (Histoire de Marie et Julien), Julien is a clockmaker living alone with his cat. Marie is the girl he met at a party about a year ago when the two were attracted to each other. Unfortunately, Marie was in a relationship with another man at the time and Julien was with another woman. But their respective relationships have since broken up and each of them is now alone. The two meet accidentally just after Julien dreamed about Marie. The Story of Marie and Julien contains two separate, though interwoven, narratives. The first is about Julien and Marie, with Marie stepping in and out of Julien’s life. Marie has a strange presence—she seems obsessed with rearranging a room in Julien’s residence; she lapses into interludes of complete withdrawal and she is afflicted by a strange inability to feel. Julien enquires after her whenever she leaves without notice and things gradually come to light. Marie, it becomes

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evident, is really dead—she hanged herself after a terrible squabble with her erstwhile lover Simon. So vengeful was the girl that she arranged circumstances for Simon to be blamed but Simon was killed soon after in a road mishap. The dead Marie exists now with only a memory of the hanging and the purpose of her obsession with rearranging furniture in Julien’s attic is to make it resemble the space of her death so that she can hang herself all over again—although that is impossible. While the principal story—about Julien and Marie—engages the senses overwhelmingly and also relies on real-time interludes characterising the other films being discussed, Rivette is almost perfunctory in the second story, making its purpose seem merely a facilitation of the first. In the second story, Julien is blackmailing a woman, Madame X, who engages in selling fake Chinese silk. The woman had a younger sister Adrienne, who also apparently committed suicide, and her ghost now haunts the older woman whom she hated and tried to frame for murder, like Marie did to Simon. The purpose of the second story, it seems to me, is to define the limbo in which the dead are placed, intended to assist us in understanding Marie. The two dead girls, for instance, have conversations through which we learn about Marie’s emotional condition, and this could not have been communicated otherwise. If this purpose to the second story is conceded, it will be appropriate to interpret only the first one. Ghost stories proceed according to conventions that need to be understood before going ahead with interpretations. One of these stipulates that ‘ghosthood’ is a condition that all dead people cannot attain. Only a human being who dies in a dark, emotional condition, or had an obsessive, unfulfilled desire, becomes a ghost. A recurring motif in ghost stories, for instance, is dead person seeking retribution haunting a space or an individual. The Story of Marie and Julien follows the convention—both ghosts/revenants in the film are not just people who took their own lives but also died when overcome by deep rancour. Where it differs from other ghost films is in its defining

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the conventions openly—through Adrienne’s story and Julien’s blackmailing of Madame X. Rivette’s two ghosts/revenants are best understood as lives reduced to a purpose/teleology because the sole memory that remains with each of them is the moment of her suicide23 and the emotions associated with it. While all ghosts are given obsessions in stories, most obsessions in ghost stories are linked to incomplete tasks. In Marie’s case, Simon is dead and her task, therefore, is complete. She is, unlike other ghosts, reliving the moment of reckoning again and again; and there is, therefore, a suggestion that Marie is locked into a cyclical narrative. If the motif of life reduced to a bare narrative makes the film resemble Secret Défense, the rigid cyclical narrative makes it comparable to Céline and Julie Go Boating. The dialogue in The Story of Marie and Julien emphasises the chasm between Marie and Julien more than once. At the simplest level, this can be understood as that between Marie’s ghostliness and Julien’s corporeality, but the physical intimacy between the two downplays this difference. There is, however, another key aspect to the film that also finds an equivalent in Secret Défense—the physical attention to everyday, realtime interludes, complete with minutely detailed background sounds. There are long, deeply affecting segments in The Story of Marie and Julien in which Julien works on his clocks while Marie either sleeps on a couch or stares into space, as though lost. When Marie exerts herself, it is only to arrange the circumstances of her next death, towards which she works obsessively. Drawing upon my observations about Céline and Julie Go Boating, which suggests a division between the world and a text, Julien and Marie find an analogous correspondence in life as physically experienced and life narrativised and/or reduced to teleology.

Rivette and Theatre The place of theatre in Rivette’s films has been written about extensively by critics like James Monaco.24 Still, not attracting much

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notice is that his films are of two distinct kinds in their relation to theatre. One kind is straightforwardly ‘theatrical’: La Religeuse (1966), Hurlevent (1985), Joan the Maid (1994) and Don’t Touch the Axe (2007). The other kind incorporates a stage production, or a narrative text of some sort, into the action. Some examples here are Paris Belongs to Us, L’Amour Fou (1969), Céline and Julie Go Boating and Va Savoir (2001). The first kind of film is ‘theatrical’ in the sense that Rivette resists showing what a spectator might not see in a theatrical production, for example, introspection as denoted by intimate closeups. Rivette also excludes the real-time sequences I noticed in Céline and Julie Go Boating, and also found in many of his other films. Each theatrical film is a relatively faithful adaptation of a pre-existing text, even a historical one as in Joan the Maid. The difference in texture between theatrical films, which depend enormously on gesture and blocking, and the others is visible; but the complex question is why Rivette surrenders ‘cinema’ for ‘theatre’ in these ostensibly simple adaptations of pre-existent texts. As an instance, the best segments in Joan the Maid show Joan’s interrogation by noblemen or clerics, and they rely on blocking in a way that Bresson’s or Dreyer’s renderings of the same events do not. These films of Rivette, incidentally, have not always received praise, and even his admirers have responded to Hurlevent with puzzlement. Still, if these films of Rivette are theatrical, there are differences between them and the more traditional ‘filmed plays’ like Kozintsev’s Shakespeare films, Olivier’s Henry V (1944) and Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons (1966), although this needs elaboration. As theorists like André Bazin reiterate, the human presence is everything in theatre. Filmed plays, perhaps for this reason, depend largely on a larger-than-life central presence. Works that do not provide it—as some of Shakespeare’s comedies, for instance—do not usually succeed as filmed theatre. Rivette does not use a larger-than-life presence but relies entirely on blocking in his theatrical films. It is significant that

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when Joan the Maid provides him with the opportunity for a huge central presence, Rivette still declines to take advantage of it. A factor to be considered with regard to Joan the Maid is whether the heroic enactment of a historical text interferes with our knowledge of the teleology of the text. No heroism on Joan’s part in the film, for instance, would have the smallest effect upon her destiny. The same thing is true for retelling a familiar literary work through the medium of cinema, as Wuthering Heights is retold in Rivette’s Hurlevent. Here again, our knowledge of the original text imposes a fate upon the characters and Rivette’s treatment underscores this. If the girls in Céline and Julie Go Boating enjoy ‘freedom’ only when ‘outside the house’ because the lives of the characters inside it are determined by a pre-existing text, the same is true of the characters in Hurlevent who are equally shackled by Bronte’s novel. Perhaps a way to understand his approach in the straightforwardly theatrical films would be to go back to the other films involving theatre, the kind to which Céline and Julie belongs. Céline and Julie, as I suggested, proposes a dichotomy between ‘world’ and ‘text’, probably arising from the need to interpret a world that resists interpretation. This finds correspondence in other (in my view, secondary) dichotomies noticed in his films: between rigid staging and improvisation, between Rivette’s ‘Langian’ side and his ‘Renoirean’ side. But since Hurlevent is constructed like the happenings in the house in Céline and Julie, is it not conceivable that (also like Joan the Maid) it is a meditation on the text and not an independent meditation on the world? If we were to understand Rivette’s films like Secret Défense and The Story of Marie and Julien within this pattern (they make no explicit references to theatre), we could say that the protagonists meditate obsessively on constructed texts under the misapprehension that they are meditating on the world. Rivette, like Borges, is perhaps overcome by the recognition that the world as we know it is a construction in which literature/

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cinema has played a determining part. Given this recognition, it is perhaps impossible for a litterateur/filmmaker to work ingenuously, exploring the world ‘afresh’ each time, as if literature and cinema did not already exist.

The Artist and the Moralist It is tempting to see The Story of Marie and Julien as ‘more than a ghost story’ because of our discomfort with art that makes no claim to prophecy or to profound moral purpose. But unlike many other supernatural beings in cinema that are essentially manifestations of other issues,25 Marie is really a ghost/revenant. Rivette is an unusual artist in as much as the enormous ambition in what he attempts as a storyteller is belied by the modest claims he makes for himself as a moralist, though this may be the natural outcome of seeing the world as constructed by texts. It is perhaps because of this modesty that the conclusions of The Story of Marie and Julien and Céline and Julie are so playful and also decline to promote a philosophical ‘meaning’ despite the formal rigor of the films. We live in a time when the persuasive power of artists is smaller than ever, but demands for their commitment to causes other than their vocations are louder and shriller. Artistic endeavour, if it must be honest, should perhaps be sceptical of moral ends, if only because artists have so little moral influence upon the world today. To Jacques Rivette, the world, though impenetrable, is still everything. But unlike many other filmmakers who confuse the distinction between their worlds and the world, his films have always proceeded from the position that the two are different.

Notes and References   1. To provide an analogy, if a ‘castration complex’ is detected in a filmmaker’s work, this cannot do him much credit since it points to an unconscious personal psychological characteristic that he might even want to be cured of if he recognised it.

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  2. Julia Lesage, ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating: Subversive Fantasy’, Jump Cut, no. 24–25 (March 1981): 36–43.  3. John Hughes, ‘The Director as Psychoanalyst: An Interview with Jacques Rivette’, Rear Window, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 3–10. Reprinted in Rouge 4 (2004) with an Introduction by Jonathan Rosenbaum. http://www.rouge.com.au/4/hughes.html. Accessed on 8 July 2013.  4. David Bordwell, ‘The Classical Hollywood Style’, in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, eds. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 382–384. For instance, David Bordwell notes Rivette’s ‘revision of Lang’.   5. Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Ragged but Right’, Chicago Reader, 26 July 1996. Also see http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=6729   6. Peter Harcourt, ‘On Jacques Rivette (The Early Films)’, Ciné-Tracts 1, no. 3 (Fall/Winter, 1977–1978): 41–52.   7. Noel Burch, ‘Qu’est-ce que la Nouvelle Vague?’ Film Quarterly 13, no. 2 (Winter, 1959): 16–30.  8. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sedofsky, Lauren, Adair, Gilbert, ‘Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette’, Film Comment 10, no. 5 (Sept–Oct 1974): 18–24. Here, for instance, are some questions asked by the interviewer(s) about Céline and Julie Go Boating: (a) How was Celine et Julie vont en Bateau prepared? What was the initial motive? (b) There seems to be a Hollywood aspect to Celine et Julie that’s quite different from your earlier films. (c) Were cartoons an influence?   9. The literary work invoked by Rivette in the interview to discuss Celine et Julie is the novel The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Cassares, 1940), which might have provided a good opening. Cassares was a friend and collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges. 10. Borges, it must be noted, frequently puts in quotations from nonexistent literary sources into his fictions. If anything, this points to his formidable erudition used playfully. 11. Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, ‘Interview with Jacques Rivette’, Cahiers du Cinema, 323–324 (May–June 1981): 42–49. There is a suggestion as early as 1981 that Rivette regards his later films are less ambitious. 12. David Bordwell, Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 8–9. As explained, the literal meaning includes a conceptual component or ‘point’ to the story

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constructed by the spectator. She/he seeks out explicit clues of various sorts, assuming that the film ‘intentionally’ indicates how this is to be read. A verbal indication could usually furnish such a clue as in The Wizard of Oz in which ‘There’s no place like home’ is crucial. 13. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 61. 14. As is known, the story within the story is adapted from two stories by Henry James—The Romance of Certain Old Clothes and The Other House. 15. This has been seen to echo to the behaviour of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. 16. Robert Scholes, ‘Narration and Narrativity in Film’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 392–393. 17. It would, of course, be absurd to assert that this part of Rivette’s film is not governed by intentionality and that it is not a ‘story’. The argument is that the melodrama within the house is a ‘story’ in a stronger, more deliberate sense than the one about Céline and Julie, left deliberately loose and without an apparent teleology. 18. Scholes, ‘Narration and Narrativity’, 396–397. 19. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky and Gilbert Adair, ‘Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette’, Film Comment 10, no. 5 (Sept–Oct 1974): 18–24. ‘Life’ and ‘narrativity/text’ perhaps correspond to Rivette’s Renoirean and Langian sides commented upon by critics in interviews. ‘Every Rivette film has its Eisenstein/Lang/Hitchcock side—an impulse to design and plot, dominate and control—and its Renoir/Hawks/ Rossellini side: an impulse to let things go, open one’s self up to the play and power of other personalities, and watch what happens.’ 20. The story is about a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world: Tlön. In due course the narrator encounters increasingly substantive artefacts of Tlön and by the end of the story, the Earth is Tlön. The cyclical narrative is also a recurring motif in Borges’ fiction, for example, The Secret Miracle. 21. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), 70. 22. The plot, as we learn, is about a highly-placed man, a ‘monster of ambition’, who sacrifices his young daughter to further his ambitions and is, in turn, murdered by his wife and her lover.

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23. ‘A girl who dies at twenty-one is at every moment of her life someone who dies at twenty-one’, writes Borges somewhere. This is perhaps even truer of someone who kills herself. 24. James Monaco, The New Wave (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 25. Banquo’s ghost is, for instance, a manifestation of Macbeth’s conscience. Similarly, the ghost of the princess in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) gives shape to the potter’s aspirations.

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4

Unattainable Women Sexual Anxiety and Location: Scorsese, Rohmer and Kiarostami The Focus and the Films This chapter was originally envisaged as a tribute to Eric Rohmer who passed away in 2010. Rohmer, one of the founding fathers of the French New Wave, made films that are largely about social behaviour with coupling or pairing—situations in which a man and a woman relate to each other as sexual beings—as a common motif. They are dominated by talk and much of the conversation is improvised by the actors. Although Rohmer is still my principal interest, I wondered if his significance could not be grasped better by comparing his films with those of filmmakers from other cultures who have sometimes dealt with comparable themes. There is something uniquely French about Rohmer’s films. While filmmakers from other cultures have only occasionally shown the same extraordinary interest in the intricacies of observed social behaviour, several French directors like Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game, 1939), Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim, 1962), Claude Sautet (Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others, 1974), Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse, 1991) and Claude Chabrol (Les Bonnes Femmes, 1960) have been deeply responsive to it even when their concerns are different. Among filmmakers from other cultures who appear sensitive are Yasujiro Ozu, Abbas Kiarostami and Martin Scorsese, although their films cannot entirely 93

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be subsumed under the rubric of ‘cinema of social behaviour’ as most of Rohmer’s films can be. Since it would be sensible to examine only films which have broadly comparable motifs, I decided to put side by side Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife (1981)—about a young postman and his older girlfriend who is gradually moving away from him—and films by Martin Scorsese and Abbas Kiarostami that deal with similar anxieties. Although the main thrust of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is hardly the same as The Aviator’s Wife, it is partly about Travis Bickle’s futile wooing of Betsy. Kiarostami’s Under the Olive Trees (1994) is about an illiterate mason and a young woman with some schooling who are recruited to play ‘a couple’ in a film, and the male lead attempting, hopelessly, to woo the female lead while filming is in progress. Rohmer’s and Kiarostami’s films have nonstars or non-actors in the lead roles while Scorsese made his film before De Niro became a big star so that its characters try to breathe ordinariness. All three films deal with working class protagonists and they are naturalistic in their methods. The filmmakers are seemingly intent on capturing real people in actual situations. They also get convincing performances from the actors and capture their milieus vividly. Through the comparison, I hope to be able to arrive at a broad appreciation of what ‘understanding people’ connotes to each of these filmmakers and why. I will discuss the three films in the order in which they were made, beginning with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. I am not as interested in the narrative plotting as in the styles of narration and the sociocultural assumptions underlying the adopted narrative styles.

Taxi Driver (1976) Taxi Driver begins with Travis Bickle driving around New York at night, his eyes darting this way and that, at the people on the streets. The first part of Taxi Driver, the part that specifically interests me,

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deals with Travis (Robert De Niro), who is obsessed with the sordidness of the city, spotting Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for Senator Charles Palantine, a candidate for president of the United States. Betsy, Travis is certain, does not belong in the ‘filth’ that is New York; she is the one person with whom he might connect, but she has an admirer Tom, a colleague who has declared his love for her, usually in attendance. Since this is the first film of the three being discussed, I will begin in a very basic way by discussing the filming of the interpersonal exchanges. There are different kinds of exchanges in Taxi Driver. In the first kind, Travis deals with the person at the taxi office or with the other taxi drivers like Wizard (Peter Boyle) by engaging them in small talk. In these exchanges, lines of dialogue spoken by Travis are usually cut to the listener-other (the standard shot-reaction-shot format) and there is a back and forth set-up. While we are privy to Travis listening to the other person, there is never a situation when Travis is talking and the camera focused on the listener. Travis’s countenance when he is listening registers what he is hearing and Travis acquires an ‘interiority’ that is not granted to the other person(s). This means that while Travis is individuated, the others are merely denoted as ‘friends’, ‘taxi drivers’, ‘the girl at the counter’ or ‘the man at the office’. They are not ‘exchanges’ between persons as much as Travis transacting with an impersonal world. Since it is quite a while before Travis interacts with a ‘person’, for example with Betsy, he emerges as separate from a world full of faceless people and this is given emphasis by the voice-over when he speaks to us. The dominance of night sequences reduces humanity to the level of fleeting shapes silhouetted against the neon. When close-ups of Travis are constantly cut to these moving shapes, we expect that whatever action occurs in Taxi Driver will originate in Travis’s person—action not derived from the relationships, still to be defined, but initiated by his psychology. When film theorists describe American film narrative

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as driven by ‘psychological causation’ as an operating principle,1 they imply causation only by those endowed with psychology since all characters are not thus conceived. The other kind of verbal exchange in Taxi Driver occurs between Travis and Betsy—and later between him and Iris—when there are actually two ‘persons’ involved. Betsy is introduced to us through a voice-over. Travis announces her even before she is seen by the camera. When she is introduced, we also see something independently for the first time—without Travis as the mediator. Betsy is in her office interacting with Tom and, when she sees Travis staring at her, dispatches Tom to send him away. The camera quickly shifts to Travis now and his viewpoint is resumed. Betsy, despite being a ‘person’, is not allowed the same interiority that Travis has been given. She, in essence, remains defined in terms of what she means to Travis, and causation, evidently, cannot proceed from her. Taxi Driver is constructed around Travis Bickle, or rather, the individuality that Robert De Niro is seen to possess. Where early cinema depended on the type (the vamp, the family man, the villain), there was, as cinema developed, a move towards more complex types and even ironic reversals of type. This means that films have tried to create individuals, or rather, ‘individualities’ as types. The factor bestowing a type with ‘individuality’ is her/his striking separateness from other people, her/his ability to make us believe that she/he is as ‘we’ are behind our disguises, someone capable of ‘defeating our selfdefeats’.2 What this means is that there is close identification with the star-as-protagonist because she/he represents us as we might have been if we had had the strength to be what we actually are. We, therefore, project ourselves into the ‘individuality as type’, something we do not do with ‘character-types’. Hollywood films rely profoundly on the ‘individuality’, but there cannot be room for more than one or two of these in any film.3 Films, therefore, also include character-types, without which the

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‘individuality’ loses significance. It is perhaps only because of the presence of people indistinguishable from their social roles that the ‘individuality’ retains its appeal. In Spider-Man (2001), for instance, Peter Parker (Tobey Macguire) is the ‘individuality’, while his uncle and aunt are character-types. The ‘Individuality’ is valued because she/he stands out above her/his given social role to which the character-type submits. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is the ‘individuality’ but Betsy is not describable in that way. Betsy is different only because she is physically set apart from other women by her appearance, and the camera dwells on this. There is another convention here, which is the dominance of heterosexual monogamy as an operating principle. This convention implies that the audience will only accept Travis being paired with Betsy and not Tom to whom she will be unattainable. Travis, a taxi driver, making such a confident move to woo someone above his class/station originates in the conventions of cinema rather than in any social expectations that the audience might ascribe to him. As the only ‘individuality’ in the film, he is projected by the audience to win her, just as his rival Tom (Albert Brooks) is not. Betsy’s brief reappearance at the end is perhaps only to reassure that no pairing has taken place between her and Tom despite her break-up with Travis. Since my interest in Taxi Driver is principally in Travis’s ‘futile wooing of Betsy’, how is their relationship represented? The film has endowed Betsy with no more than surface lustre, and she is what she seems at first glance. That is why Taxi Driver hits on the rudimentary episode of porn film to induce Betsy to reject him. If she had a psychology of some sort, the break-up might have had more complex implications, but here it is left to Travis to initiate it through his thoughtlessness. Also, there being more than an indication that Travis is revolted by the sex industry, is it likely that he would be a porn film addict? The porn film reference is only to create grounds for his break-up with Betsy, which must be from his side.

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I have hitherto presented Travis’s wooing of Betsy and his rejection by her as being rooted in his psychology because Betsy is only barely a ‘person’. This being the case, is their relationship even a ‘relationship’ as we understand the term? Even in the submission of the weak to the strong, it is naive to attribute the submission only to the psychology of the strong. My argument is that the film is only interested in charting Travis’s emotional trajectory and that Betsy is no more than an appropriate stimulus. Her presence is required to provide Travis with a fleeting beacon before he lapses into an incurable condition. Another kind of beacon might have been just as effective, although not as decorative. The most effective segment in the film, in my view, contains the moment when Travis has become ‘political’ and tells Senator Palantine that the whole city should be ‘flushed down the toilet’. Optimism and expectations are emotions that politicians live on but Travis is beyond that, although, briefly, he is still connected enough to communicate this to a listener. Travis is incapable of articulating his unease as a social problem with a viable solution. His own body is, rather, a metaphor for the city and cleansing it is the first step towards cleansing the city. Taxi Driver is about ‘alienation’ and Travis is apparently ‘pathological’, but there is a difficulty with De Niro playing him. De Niro is a charismatic actor, but what is ‘charisma’, really? It can be argued that ‘charisma’ implies an identifiable audience at whom it is directed. The issue here is how someone could be pathologically alienated and still be charismatic since ‘alienation’ implies being cut off from social interactions. If one recollects Meursault from Camus’s The Outsider, he is presented as colourless. But colourlessness in the ‘individuality’ would also inhibit projection into her/him by the audience. Whereas the pathological subject should be an unreliable narrator,4 what we see corresponds to what Travis has been telling us. The film

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is depending on point-of-view but not merely restricting our field of knowledge to Travis’s viewpoint. Moral justification for the action is also provided by Travis5 and he remains ‘moral’. Just consider where Travis’s ‘pathological condition’6 eventually takes him to: shooting an armed robber, killing a pimp trafficking in minors as well as a dreaded gangster, rescuing a 12-year-old prostitute and becoming a public hero. Given that Travis is the ‘individuality’ in whom audiences have invested their emotions, it might have been inconvenient to have him being senselessly destructive or even mistaken in his actions. The cultural significance of Travis Bickle and Taxi Driver will be looked at separately, but Scorsese’s film valorises the motivated individual, the person who cannot go wrong even when she/he is as pathological as Travis is. But the stranger aspect of the film is that the unattainable woman is made unattainable by him, she has no voice in her own ‘unattainability’. The fact that all action in the film originate from the only ‘individual’ in it ensures this. Theorists have noted how, in American cinema, we recall the individuality represented by the stars but rarely the roles.7 In Taxi Driver, ‘Travis Bickle’ is a name made ordinary and attached to the role, a token gesture towards the colourlessness appropriate to the outsider—there is an evident mismatch between it and ‘Robert De Niro’.

The Aviator’s Wife (1981) Rohmer’s film is not nearly as well-known as Scorsese’s and hence needs to be described in greater detail. The male protagonist is Francois, a young postman. The film begins with a colleague giving him details about a plumber who is evidently needed by his girlfriend, Anne. Anne (Marie Rivère) does not like receiving calls at her office and has no telephone at home. Francois (Philippe Marlaud) has just completed his night shift and must go to her apartment to leave a message for her. But Francois’s pen does not write and he goes out to a store to get another. Even as he leaves, another man climbs out of a

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taxi and goes up to Anne’s apartment to drop a note. Anne wakes up, sees who it is and hastily prevents him from departing. It turns out that this man is her boyfriend Christian (Mathieu Carrière), a pilot, from whom she has not heard for several months. But Christian’s wife is pregnant and he has come only for a last goodbye. He is now moving to Paris with his wife, and since it is inappropriate to have two girls in the same city he is leaving Anne and getting back to his wife whom he loves. When Francois returns to Anne’s apartment with a pencil—he dozed off in a cafe for a while—he finds Anne leaving with Christian. He withdraws discreetly, but, later that morning, he sees Christian in a café meeting a blonde woman. Francois gets into the same bus as the two, intending to follow them. On the bus he catches the attention of a younger girl. As luck will have it, the girl gets off at the same spot where Christian, the blonde girl and Francois get off, and she and Francois bump into each other. One thing leads to another and Francois and the girl, Lucie (Anne-Laure Meury), are soon following the other two into a nearby park. Francois tells her a few untruths but when he finds the girl lively and excited, he tells her everything she needs to know. The two play at being detectives to try and determine how the other two are related. Anne has already told Francois a little about Christian, and he now suspects that the blonde woman is his wife. When Francois and Lucie find out that the two are not only romantically not involved but also visiting a lawyer, an answer presents itself—that they are getting divorced! Francois and Lucie part ways after they learn that Lucie lives close to where he works. As they part Francois promises to drop a postcard without fail if he learns more about Christian. Rohmer’s film looks innocuous in comparison with the apparent importance of Taxi Driver. It only deals with two men and two women and the process of couple formation, a more fluid activity than American cinema usually allows. Its characters are ‘ordinary’

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and even the camera emphasises it. The film begins in a post office where a conversation is taking place between Francois and his unnamed friend about a plumber. There is nothing that marks out Francois as the protagonist and the camera gives equal importance to both men. The more dramatic shot-reaction-shot way of recording a conversation is eschewed and the camera often catches both together, sometimes even looking away or down. It also catches gestures and objects not part of the drama, and ‘noise’ is deliberately created to play down the sense that the events chosen for the ‘story’ are more important than others. The way this segment emerges, the narrative might well have followed Francois’s unnamed friend instead, and got an equally interesting narrative. The film does not use point of view extensively but has different sections dealing with different people. What happens is that we get information in these segments from people who are seen to conceal it from others, especially when the information might be pertinent to them. Even when the information is only partly revealed to these others, it has to be extracted through dogged questioning. At the climax of the film Anne finally allows Francois to confront her, after having avoided him hitherto. We now have facts about Anne and Francois that they are themselves unaware of and/or hesitant to tell each other. Anne is impatient to break up with Francois, who she finds irksome, even when the man she loves has just broken off with her. She is, therefore, hesitant to tell him about the break-up, which might encourage him. Francois has just met Lucie and they have followed Christian around the city, but he is too embarrassed to tell Anne that he has been playing spy. Rohmer does not explain why people conceal so much from each other, but he allows us to appreciate their conduct from what we already know about real people. Interpersonal communication is as much about concealment as about revelation, because of the implications of saying too much in relationships. The film acknowledges that social behaviour depends

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on the constructs people help create of themselves in other people’s minds, and that they protect and sustain these constructs. The climactic scene in The Aviator’s Wife begins with Anne intending to tell Francois to find another girlfriend but Francois is certain he only wants Anne. He has had an encounter with the 15-year-old Lucie meanwhile, and has been given her home address, but he is not really considering her. Rohmer needs to stage this scene in such a way that there is some kind of rapprochement between Anne and Francois. Anne is deeply unhappy and Francois is extremely frustrated and jealous, but the exchange between them must be comforting to both without their respective mysteries being breached. To elaborate on this last sentence, Anne and Francois cannot tell each other ‘everything’, as in the mutual confessions that often happen in the climaxes of Hollywood films. They must reveal something about themselves but not so much as to jeopardise their own ‘safeties’ as individuals. Anne cannot seem more vulnerable than she would like to seem, and Francois cannot seem like the juvenile person that he is. Anne desperately wants a companion but she also wants to stay alone in her small apartment. Although she wants to be comforted, she cannot allow Francois to kiss her because that might send a wrong signal. Francois tells her that he will work during the day so that he can spend the night with her, and she replies that if they had seen more of each other they might have broken up a long time ago. It is in situations like this that Rohmer’s control of the medium becomes most apparent. He allows the actors to improvise, which includes gestures not part of the predetermined ‘text’. The tension in the scene comes from people wanting love and comfort from each other but also wary of being hurt. What happens in this climactic scene is the breakup of a relationship, but both participants are left with comfort and understanding, so also are the spectators. And there is also Lucie to be dealt with, without her providing simple recompense to Francois because she is too independent to merely ‘fill the gap’ left by Anne.

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Rohmer’s value as a filmmaker comes out of seeing every kind of person as inherently interesting. There is no effort in his films to get people to project themselves into characters on the screen. All his later films use minor actors who do not even appear in other people’s films. An actor who plays a major part in one of Rohmer’s films could only get a small part in another. I earlier described Rohmer as ‘typically French’, but other directors like Chabrol and Sautet do not go as far in their democratic attention to different varieties of people. In films like Taxi Driver, scenes where the protagonist is alone are important because they define what he ‘is’. In Rohmer’s films, people are nothing in themselves; they are defined by their transactions. These transactions are not necessarily interpersonal but are also implied in the work they do. In a later Rohmer film, the woman protagonist remarks that she finds men most attractive when they are working, but that they stop working when they see her. This does not mean that people are not ‘alone’ in Rohmer’s films, but there is always something else going on. Anne, for instance, is ‘resting’ when she is alone in The Aviator’s Wife. This sense of people defined by social transactions is also present in other French cinema, for instance, in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939). The difference in Rohmer’s films is the sense we get of the transactions being contingent—people are constantly renegotiating their positions with other people. It is this sense of positions being renegotiated that makes the relationships in Rohmer’s films more fleeting and ambiguous8 than those of, say, Francois Truffaut, who is also telling stories about man–woman relationships, as in The Woman Next Door (1981) and The Man who Loved Women (1983). I tried to show how the action proceeds entirely from the ‘individuality’ in Taxi Driver, but if ‘persons’ are defined by their transactions in Rohmer’s films, what place does the individual have in a film like The Aviator’s Wife? Much of the interpersonal rhetoric in the film focuses on ‘love’, that is, the notion of individual choice in sexual relationships. My sense is of a mismatch between the contingent nature of each

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relationship and the rhetoric employed. It is not that Francois does not ‘love’ Anne, but that such an indelible label is attached to something so impermanent and conditional. One falls in love but one could fall out of it if the circumstances were not congenial. I, therefore, propose that ‘romantic choice’ in Rohmer’s films is partly a rhetorical way of coping with the compulsion to fulfil social roles. But ‘compulsion’ does not imply that the demands of a role are cast in stone, because they are constantly being renewed and renegotiated between people.

Under the Olive Trees (1994) Abbas Kiarostami’s film is set in Koker in Iran after a devastating earthquake. The film is unusual because it appears to be part fiction and part documentary, with people in the region actually playing themselves. It is so cleverly constructed that it is difficult to say which part is documentary and which is fiction, but I will try to provide an accurate account of the film. Under the Olive Trees begins with a film director, played by Mohammed Ali Keshavarz, addressing the camera and telling us of the local women recruited to film a story in which the principal characters are a young couple. After shortlisting several candidates, a young woman is recruited and the filming starts. The story being filmed pertains to a young couple married just after the earthquake, and Scene 1 involves the man taking a sack of plaster upstairs to repair a portion of the house. This bare scene is filmed several times but always cut short because the man does not say the lines he is expected to. It turns out that the young man stammers in the presence of women. He is therefore replaced by another man named Hossain (Hossain Rezai), who works at odd jobs in the camp where the crew has its quarters. The sequence in which Hossain is driven to the film set is part of the documentary side of Under the Olive Trees, and we understand something about the young man on the verge of becoming an actor. When the young man is driven to the film set, a lady coordinator, Mrs Shiva (Zarifeh Shiva), finds the road blocked by bricks. Since the

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workers are not prepared to move the bricks immediately, Mrs Shiva and Hossain wait. When a worker suggests that Hossain could help, he refuses. He is trained as a mason but he is being employed as an actor now, so he will not do the work of a mason, which is handling bricks. Hossain, it is apparent, is deliberate about what he would like to do because is also upwardly mobile and wants to move above his station. Hossain takes up his film role immediately and in right earnest but there is still something seriously wrong. This time it is the girl, Tahereh (Tahereh Ladanian), not doing something right. She has known Hossain from before and that is apparently interfering with her performance. What had happened was that Hossain decided at first sight that Tahereh would be his wife, but her parents wanted someone better placed for her—someone with a house. A day later, the earthquake leveled Tahereh’s house and killed her parents. Hossain believes that this meant they were roughly equal now as neither of them had a house. But despite this ‘equalisation’ of status, Tahereh and her grandmother, with whom she lives, will not accept him as her husband. She finds it awkward now to be in a film in which Hossain is playing her husband. Hossain wants to marry Tahereh because she is literate and he is not. She could help their children with homework, he believes. In several subsequent conversations between the director and Hossain, other facts emerge. Hossain has social views about marriage, and he will not marry someone illiterate, regardless of how pretty she is. Rich people must marry poor people, and the literate must marry the illiterate, so that people can help each other. ‘What will happen if husband and wife have a house each?’ he asks. ‘Would they put their heads in one house and their feet in another?’ When the director replies that they could live in one and rent out the other, Hossain admits the possibility, but unhappily. As I noted earlier, it is difficult to be certain which parts are the documentary segments of the film. If one were to describe the film more accurately, a film company enlists two young rustics named Hossain Rezai and Tahereh Ladanian to play two young rustics named Hossain

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Rezai and Tahereh Ladanian. It is only in the filming within the film that Hossain and Tahereh are fictional because they are married. The ‘real’ Hossain’s problem in Kiarostami’s film is that the ‘real’ Tahereh will not marry him. But what we cannot be certain about is whether Under the Olive Trees is telling the actual story of two persons it has recruited as actors, at least in part. Judging from the discussions between the director and Hossain, which seem so authentic, my suspicion is that it is. At the same time, there are segments in the film that could only have happened in private and in the absence of an intrusive camera. In the first of these, Hossain pursues Tahereh’s grandmother, asking for her granddaughter’s hand in marriage but without much success. In the second instance, Hossain tries to talk to Tahereh in between shootings, without the girl responding in any way. He talks to her about the bright future that masons have after the earthquake, and of his eagerness to get back to his profession after she marries him. He tells her what a considerate husband he would be, even making tea for her. Still, Tahereh is adamantly silent and incommunicative. When she is required to address him as ‘Mr Hossain’ in her fictional role (the way wives address their husbands), she deliberately calls him ‘Hossain’. But Hossain explains to the director that nowadays wives address their husbands without prefixing ‘Mr’, and that Tahereh is being authentic by omitting it. The film ends with Hossain following Tahereh on the way home—after the filming—to press his suit. The logic of the film implies that their marriage is not possible. But Kiarostami, when shooting from a great distance, shows Hossain as a white speck, running back as if in delight . The music also becomes cheerful and we presume that he has been finally accepted. These ‘private’ sequences appear staged not because they are inauthentic, but because they are filmed in long shot, with Hossain speaking sentences that are longer and more eloquent, but delivered more mechanically. We do not see the faces of the two from close enough to be sure of the ‘truth’ of the segments. When Hossain

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follows Tahereh in the last sequence, for instance, we do not see them in the same frame (the real Tahereh might not have consented to act this out) but only put together on the editing table, with the man’s voice on the soundtrack as the woman hurries along. Perhaps Tahereh Ladanian was not even aware that, at the conclusion of this segment she would be consenting to marry Hossain Rezai! Somewhere in the film Mrs Shiva talks to someone, presumably the actor who plays the teacher in Kiarostami’s Where is My Friend’s Home (1987) and the man affirms he is that in real life too—a teacher. If one recollects that film, the children in Where is My Friend’s Home are terrified of their teacher, though he does nothing in the film that should elicit such terror. Since the terror felt by the children is palpable, what may be happening is that Kiarostami is constructing fiction out of actual people in actual relationships. The teacher perhaps elicits terror from his students in real life. The emotions felt by real people in actual social circumstances are registered in each film, and informs the fictional circumstances created in the narrative. In Under the Olive Trees, the tensions between Hossain and Tahereh, and their social causes, are real, but the way the tension is resolved is fictional. I suggest that the fictional resolutions provided are, at best, perfunctory, and the underlying real tensions are all important in Kiarostami’s films. Another aspect of Under the Olive Trees that deserves examination is Kiarostami’s tendency to name the characters by the real names of the actors. This suggests that Kiarostami is not looking at his characters as different from his actors. They are not allowed to act out fiction in the film but are what they are playing. The offhand way in which names are given to the characters is suggested by the sequence in the film within the film when Hossain has to mention ‘sixty-five deaths’ in the man’s family. But each time, Hossain gives the number as ‘twenty-five’—the number of deceased members in his own family—because of which he is corrected and the sequence reshot. The filmmaker is being scrupulous about details here but although

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Hossain has replaced another actor, the young man he plays is called ‘Hossain’. Since it is too much of a coincidence to believe that the character was called ‘Hossain’ even with the earlier actor, we may presume that the director is less fastidious about proper names for his characters than with the other details. There is, perhaps, a deliberate erasure of individuality in Under the Olive Trees indulged in by Kiarostami that could be significant. It is important that while Hossain uses rhetoric to justify his desire to marry Tahereh, it does not focus on ‘love’ but on the social need for such an alliance. He has strong views about what kind of marriage would be socially beneficial. In fact, his position is nearly the opposite of Francois’s in Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife. In that film, people were, in a sense, trying to cope with social necessities by employing the rhetoric of romantic choice. In this film, one gets the sense that Hossain is selfserving but has invented a ‘social ethic’ to justify it. Kiarostami is not judging Hossain in the film, but pointing to the endurance of individual aspirations in a cultural milieu that actively discourages them. People act in their individual interests but rather than the rhetoric of emotional choice they employ the one of social ethic. The director’s indifference to the specificity of proper names perhaps reflects on how the milieu treats individuality, since actor and fictional role are not kept distinctly apart.

Three Cultures and Their Approaches I have examined three films about heterosexual anxiety in which there are obstacles to couple formation. Taxi Driver is a specifically American cultural product while The Aviator’s Wife is a distinctly French one, and the narrative approaches in the two films rely on notions of individuality specific to their respective cultures. Individuality is perhaps best approached through the notion of liberty, and American cinema is informed by a notion of individuality from the intellectual tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. This tradition defines liberty and freedom largely in negative terms. By defining freedom as ‘the absence of external obstacles’, it proposes a

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legal sphere in which individuals remain unobstructed by the external authorities of the church and the state. It has looked to laissez-faire capitalism for its fundamental values, emphasising the independence of the individual—and above all, the ‘rational’ individual—from political, social and economic constraints; this school celebrates the free pursuit of private gain in the open marketplace of material and cultural goods.9 This tradition is associated with scholars from the United States and Great Britain, but it gained more importance in the United States, which was born a democratic country whereas Great Britain became a democracy after being a monarchy for a long while. Further, as Tocqueville notes,10 for the majority of the nations of Europe, political existence commenced among the superior ranks and was gradually communicated to different members of the social body. In America, on the other hand, social organisation began at the smallest level. The township was organised before the county, the county before the state, the state before the Union. The simplest kind of social organisation led to more complex forms. The individual plays more significant role in simpler kinds of social organisation and there is perhaps an association between this and the mythical dimensions assumed by individuality in American popular culture, although the protestant/ puritan ethic should also be factored in as a noteworthy cause. It is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to examine it deeply, but the proposition that in America the simplest kind of social organisation existed independently before leading to more complex forms also accounts for the moral significance of the family (heterosexual monogamy) in cinema. If the genre of the western creates a mythology out of the origins of the American nation, John Ford’s westerns look to the white nuclear family as the civilising influence in the frontier, even while the westerner is fighting natives and making the land safe for civilisation.11 With regard to liberty, another school of thought comes from France in the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and from

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the Revolution itself, especially the radical Jacobin phase of 1793– 1794. This school conceived liberty not as the ‘absence of external obstacles’ but rather as democratic ‘self-rule’, both of the individual citizen and of civil society as a whole. It proposed, in other words, to substitute the particular will of monarchs with the ‘general will of the people’, and thereby redeployed the authority of the state to secure ‘autonomous selfhood’ for each member of civil society. Rousseauian liberty comprises not of the ‘negative’ freedom of the individual from interference but rather of the participation of all members of society in a ‘public power’ that is entitled to interfere in every aspect of every citizen’s life. The French Revolution itself, especially in its Jacobin phase, represented ‘an eruption of the desire for the positive freedom of collective self-assertion’.12 If ‘collective self-assertion’ is concerned with the political side, how would this show itself in the way interpersonal relationships are explored in a cultural product like cinema? I suggest that where American cinema valorises individuality, French cinema is drawn to dealing with the citizen. Since the citizen exists only as an element in a political collective, French cinema may have been led to define the ‘person’ only through her/his relationships with other citizens and not as an entity in herself/himself. That may be why, where American cinema invites spectators to project themselves into the individuality, French cinema declines to do so. It is impossible to identify with someone in a French film because what are of interest are relationships between citizens and not individualities whose values come from their triumphing over their socially given roles. Of the three films I have discussed, two come from cultures in which the notion of liberty has been publicly defined. The third film is from Iran in which there has apparently not been any political upheaval (like the American War of Independence and the French Revolution) that might have led to the question of ‘liberty’ being addressed. The Islamic Revolution in Iran brought up religious issues primarily, and it is difficult, from our perspective, to be certain about its deeper

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impact upon the country’s secular culture. But if there had been such an upheaval in which liberty as an issue had been addressed, perhaps Hossein in Under the Olive Trees would have cited ‘love’ as a reason to marry Tahereh13 instead of inventing an elaborate social ethic. And Abbas Kiarostami might also have given other names—instead of ‘Hossein’ and ‘Tahereh’—to the young couple involved in the story filmed by the fictional director within Kiarostami’s film.

Notes and References   1. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), 157.  2. Stanley Cavell, ‘The World Viewed’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 337–342.   3. Even two male stars suggesting interiority in a film is quite rare. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is an example. The film stars John Wayne and James Stewart. Another would be Heat (1995) with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.  4. Although their protagonists are not ‘pathological’, point of view is extensively employed by Hitchcock in Vertigo and Rear Window but the spectator takes a different moral viewpoint from that of the protagonists. We judge Scottie in Vertigo as we do not judge Travis in Taxi Driver.  5. When, in the voice-over, Travis describes the humanity shown as ‘whores, skunks, pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies’ and declares he takes every kind in his taxi because it makes no difference to him, Travis is tarring everyone with the same brush, generalising far too broadly but the film’s moral viewpoint still remains Travis’s because what we see corresponds to what he is describing.   6. The film concludes with Travis’s eyes darting around intensely, suggesting that his veneer of normalcy is superficial and that this is only a respite before another explosion. But even if that occurred, one finds it difficult to believe that Travis’s doings might have more regrettable consequences; they would, more likely, be only ‘beneficial to all those concerned’.   7. Cavell, ‘The World Viewed’, 341.

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  8. David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 716–725. Another way of seeing this would be that ‘ambiguity’ is a key aspect common to much post-war European art cinema, for example, Fellini, Bergman, Rivette, Antonioni and Godard—which is deliberately structured to invite interpretation.   9. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 123–130. 10. Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Origin of the Anglo-Americans’, in Democracy in America 1, trans. Henry Reeve (2006), Project Gutenberg E-book. 11. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973), 143. ‘Myth is a kind of language by which the exigencies of a historical moment are given eternal justifications’ and genre films perpetuate mythologies. My argument is that since the ‘Westerner’ and the ‘civilising white family’ are encoded in the mythology of the Western, they point to the exigencies of the actual historical moment that engendered the American nation. Also see Thomas Schatz, ‘Film Genre and the Genre Film’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 647. As Schatz notes, ‘The western hero, regardless of his social or legal standing, is necessarily an agent of civilisation in the savage frontier.’ 12. Berlin, Four Essays, 162. 13. Hamid Reza Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History (London: IB Taurus, 2006), 235. It is interesting that an analysis of Under the Olive Trees by an Iranian critic describes the film using the notion of romance and mutual love in the following way: The two amateur actors who play a newly married couple in this film are, in fact, embroiled in a real-life romance. Hossein, a local handyman, who plays the groom, is desperately in love with Tahereh, but she is reluctant to play opposite him as the bride. This simple tale of two young lovers shrugging off their grief in the face of the earthquake attempts to transcend the unsettling dichotomy between their desires and the reality of their lives.

One can see in this an attempt to explain the emotions involved in the film to an audience accustomed to Western cinema and Hollywood.

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5

Beyond Religion The Spiritual Cinema of Robert Bresson Religion and Artistic Value Robert Bresson is not an easy filmmaker to write about but whatever critical discourse there is around his films is dominated by the school that sees him as a ‘Catholic’ filmmaker. To use the jargon of academia, the meaning of Bresson’s films is a contested site in which Catholic film-critics have hegemonic control. While the notion of a ‘Catholic artist’ might be more appropriate to a medieval painter to whom the world was the Roman Catholic world, I would like to argue that characterising a filmmaker who worked in the 1980s in this way tends to limit his value, because Bresson’s importance should be evident to Catholics and nonCatholics alike. Bresson once described himself as a ‘Christian atheist’, which has seen him being appropriated by Catholic filmcritics. But I propose to approach him from his ‘atheist’ side, that is, to view him as a secular filmmaker, albeit with a Catholic background and with Catholic motifs in his work. Moreover, it is one thing to recognise that a filmmaker is religious and another to assert that the value of her/his work lies in her/his religious beliefs. Another difficulty with a religious interpretation of Robert Bresson’s films is that it is ‘theory-down’, as a psychoanalytical or a Marxist interpretation would also be, with the difference that the ‘theory’ employed is theology rather than Marxism or Freudian 113

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psychoanalysis. A theoretical position charts a generality, of which the interpreted work is only an instance. As has been reiterated, showing that a film is an instance of a general theory would imply that the film is, in certain respects, routine and pretty much like everything else in the same domain.1 This being the case, how can the Catholic critic argue that Bresson’s films are different from those of another ‘Jansenist’ filmmaker, assuming of course that there is another? Even if there is no other Jansenist filmmaker, the argument can only point to Bresson being Jansenist, but not to his being an outstanding artist of world cinema. One of the most insightful essays about Robert Bresson not overly preoccupied with religion is the one by Susan Sontag.2 Sontag surveys Bresson’s oeuvre up to The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), but it is her understanding of Bresson’s methods rather than her analyses of individual films that is most revealing. Since I propose to use Sontag’s conclusions about Robert Bresson’s methods in the course of my arguments, I will begin by listing them here: 1. Bresson’s art is a reflective art because its emotional power is mediated. The pull towards emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements that promote distance, disinterestedness and impartiality. 2. Bresson is regarded as a ‘cold’ filmmaker but this is only in relation to the exuberance of Fellini. Sometimes the form and material are deliberately placed in opposition to each other. Brecht, for instance, often places hot subjects in a cold frame. Bresson’s ‘coldness’ is not like this and the form is perfectly compatible with the theme. 3. Form and manner are not the same. Welles, the early Rene Clair and Sternberg are directors with an unmistakable style. But they never created a rigorous form as Bresson (and Ozu) have. Like Ozu’s films, Bresson’s films are designed to discipline the emotions even while arousing them. Reflective art like Bresson’s is art that imposes a certain discipline on the audience, postponing easy gratification.

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4.

5. 6.

7.

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Where Brecht wishes distance to keep hot emotions cool and intelligence to prevail, the emotional distance maintained by Bresson is because identification with a character is a kind of impertinence, an affront to the mystery that is human action and the human heart. The elimination of suspense in Bresson’s films (often by revealing the ending very early) is a way of moderating narrative involvement. Bresson’s use of non-acting ‘models’ instead of actors is also a way of restricting narrative involvement. Also, there are spiritual resources beyond the actor’s effort. But Bresson’s films work best when the presence of actors is itself luminous, for example, Francois Leterrier in A Condemned Man Escapes (1957). In many other films like Pickpocket (1959) and The Trial of Joan of Arc, this is not entirely successful. Bresson is interested in spiritual action—in the ‘physics rather than the psychology of souls’. Why people behave as they do is, ultimately, not to be understood. Actions cannot appear implausible but motivation is to be left opaque.

An Approach to Bresson Sontag’s essay is a useful way in which to approach the films of Robert Bresson, and another is the filmmaker’s own denser writing, maxims collected in a slim volume entitled Notes on Cinematography3. The following are a few of Bresson’s maxims that could lead us to an understanding of his films: 1. ‘No directing of actors. No learning of parts. No staging. But the use of working models taken from life. Being (models) instead of seeming (actors).’ 2. ‘Nothing rings more false in a film than that natural tone of the theatre copying life and traced over studied sentiments.’ 3. ‘Respect man’s nature without wishing it more palpable than it is.’ 4. ‘Apply myself to insignificant (non-significant) images. Flatten my images without attenuating them.’

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

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‘To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.’ ‘Radically suppress intentions in your models.’ ‘No music as accompaniment, support or reinforcement. No music at all. The noises must become music.’ ‘Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought.’ ‘Actor. The to and fro of the character in front of his nature forces the public to look for talent on his face, instead of the enigma peculiar to each living creature.’ ‘Hide the ideas so people find them. The most important will also be the most hidden.’ ‘Debussy himself used to play with the piano’s lid down.’ ‘When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralise it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer. A sound must never come to the help of an image or an image to the help of a sound.’ ‘No psychology (of the kind which discovers only what it can explain.)’ ‘The real when it has reached the mind, is already not real any more. Our too thoughtful, too intelligent eye.’ ‘The true is inimitable, the false, untransformable.’ ‘Your genius is not in the counterfeiting of nature (actors, sets) but in your own way of choosing and coordinating bits taken directly from it by machines.’ ‘Cut what would deflect attention elsewhere.’ ‘The things we bring off by chance—what power they have!’ ‘(Fragmentation) is indispensable if one does not want to fall into representation. To see beings and things in their separate parts. Render them independent in order to give them a new dependence.’ ‘Displaying everything condemns cinema to cliché, obliges it to display things as everyone is in the habit of seeing them.’

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The maxims pertain to Robert Bresson’s filmmaking methods and not to his thematic concerns, but it is still possible to say something about the kind of subjects that interest the filmmaker. First, Bresson is less preoccupied with ‘personal expression’ than with getting at the ‘real’ and with understanding ‘nature’, which suggests that in sensibility he belongs to an earlier period with greater faith in ‘objective reality’. This is confirmed by Bresson’s dependence upon texts by classical writers (like Bernanos, Diderot, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy) who believed that the world and man’s place in it could be known. Unlike Jacques Rivette who treats classical literature (like the work of Diderot, Balzac, Emily Bronte) as ‘texts’4, Bresson is preoccupied with bringing alive their ‘truths’, even if this means that he is not being faithful to them by taking the original texts literally. Sceptical readers may question the notion of an immutable ‘truth’, but Bresson is only using it as a basis for praxis and not presenting it as possible to reach rigorously. Another aspect of Bresson that seems to be important is his belief that the ‘real’ is not ‘imitation’ in any sense. Actors ‘imitate’ what they are expected to be, but ‘models’ can simple be, even this ‘being’ happens only intermittently. Bresson apparently does not expect his films to reflect the ‘truth’ continuously but only glimpsed now and then through chance. The trick is perhaps not to put in narrative material that will ‘deflect from the real’. The recognition of the ‘real’ is also not the result of one’s intelligence, it is not mediated by thought but grasped intuitively by the model/filmmaker/audience. Judging from whatever Bresson says, it would seem that the model playing Joan of Arc is not simply ‘representing’ her but is her, even if this is only for a moment or two in an entire film. What this means is difficult to grasp but it could have a parallel in Jorge Luis Borges’s dictum: ‘Anyone who recites a line from Shakespeare is Shakespeare.’ If Shakespeare became ‘Shakespeare’ because of the magical lines he wrote, could not the same thing happen to someone else who catches

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their magic? Similarly, what Bresson suggests is that since we do not know Joan as an individual but only though her acts of faith, the same acts of faith could happen in some form on the screen, even if only for a fleeting moment or two, and his purpose is to allow them to happen. There are two other characteristics of Bresson’s films that may be pertinent here. While Bresson’s remarks suggest that he uses sounds instead of music as a way of capturing the ‘real’ instead of ‘supporting’ or ‘reinforcing’ it, another aspect from his films that seems related is Bresson’s focus on hands and feet instead of faces. There is a passage in a Borges ‘parable’ that may shed some light on this latter aspect: The profile of a Jew in the subway may be that of Christ; the hands that give us some coins at a change window may recall those which some soldiers once nailed to the Cross. Perhaps some feature of the Crucified Face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the Face died, was effaced, so that God might become everyone.5

What interests me more than the religious thrust of the passage is that God’s face needs to be ‘effaced’ before God can become ‘everyone’, but the hands giving us some coins in a change window may already recall those once nailed to the Cross. To elaborate, the countenance is an index of individual identity while hands and feet are not. If Bresson’s models are to be Jesus, Joan of Arc or Raskolnikov (Bresson makes no distinction between historical characters and fictional ones in his search for the ‘real’—both come to us through texts) their identities must be subdued, which implies that their faces should be ‘effaced’ in some way. It would perhaps be appropriate to attend more to hands and feet, which not only cannot be associated with individual identity but are also less self-conscious. This notion, I would like to argue, could be extended to deal with Bresson’s great attention to sounds as well. Sounds, unlike images, are difficult to assign to individual objects. As an instance, the scratching of a pen6 is no different from the scratching of another, but the difference in appearance between

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two pens is more manifest. The emphasis on sounds over images once again points to the suppression of the individuality of the object. Joan of Arc coughing at the stake (instead of crying out) can also be interpreted as a way of suppressing the model’s identity so she could ‘become’ Joan. Being one of the few filmmakers to have actually theorised about filmmaking,7 these conclusions are expected to be useful in understanding Bresson’s work. While I will examine a few of Bresson’s films, my interest is also in the enormous transformation in his outlook after he started using colour. Two phases can be identified in his career—corresponding to his black-and-white films beginning with Diary of a Country Priest and colour films beginning with A Gentle Woman (1969). I will not discuss the earliest films because they are not ‘Bressonian’—they do not follow his expressed ideas on filmmaking. I propose to examine three films from each phase in his career and then speculate on the difference between the two phases, an inquiry that is perhaps long overdue. Lastly, this chapter is primarily an appreciation, and while there are different criteria by which films may be evaluated—coherence, originality, intensity and complexity being some of them8—I hope to be able to bring out the complexity of Bresson’s approach through the way his films narrate and generate meaning. Needless to add, the intention is to make Bresson accessible to lay persons, which means describing the films in greater detail than is common in criticism. I also hope to explore Bresson’s development as an artist by looking at these two phases.

Diary of a Country Priest (1950) Diary of a Country Priest is based on a novel by the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos. Written in first person, the novel is a journal maintained by a sickly young priest of a parish in rural France. The film begins with the priest arriving in a village in Ambricourt, and witnessing lovers locked in furtive embrace, turning their backs on

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him as he looks at them. This sequence virtually sets the tone for the first part that deals with local hostility to the priest. The priest then comes upon a man named Fabregars, who is haggling over the funeral expenses of his wife, and accuses the church of exploiting the poor. The other notable characters that the priest encounters are the priest of Torcy, a man much older and worldly wise, if not cynical, who believes that they are ‘at war’; Dr Delbende, a friend of the priest of Torcy, a non-believing medical practitioner about whom there are rumours of unhygienic ways that led to him losing his patients; when the young priest first meets him, ‘his hands are unclean after hunting’. The most striking moment in this part of the film is perhaps the catechism class in which only one child, Seraphita, appears attentive, with her hands bobbing up and down in suppressed excitement at being the only one who knows the answers. But when he appreciates her in private, he discovers that it was a set-up. The girl responds with the maturity of an adult and praises his ‘beautiful eyes’. Already quite surprised by this, he further finds out that the other girls have all been made witness to this ‘private’ exchange in order to humiliate him. There is a hint of suggestiveness in Seraphita’s conduct here, because the admission of a grown man’s physical beauty is not something one would expect from a girl her age. Although this is later belied when Seraphita— still displaying maturity far beyond her age—administers to him, the child’s conduct in this sequence even anticipates Regan’s innuendo in The Exorcist (1973) in as much as a child displays sexual maturity and her remarks are directed at a priest. The point here is not that the two films are similar, but that both films are set in Catholic milieus and feature children strangely, without their customary innocence. Organised religion is a space in which wickedness proliferates, Bresson appears to say, as he did more powerfully in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), in which the compulsively evil Gerard is shown singing in the church choir.

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There is another moment in Diary of a Country Priest, a little later after Dr Delbende’s funeral, when the protagonist talks to his wellwisher, the priest of Torcy. (The doctor apparently shot himself .) The two stand a short distance from the church that has been decorated for the funeral. What I find significant is that we see the decorations being removed even as the conversation is in progress, and the sense we get is of the church suddenly rendered naked and being reduced to what it essentially is—a cold grey stone edifice. Bresson’s film is based on a deeply religious literary work and hardly subverts the purpose of the original. Still, it exhibits towards the church a kind of ambivalence that is palpable. One contributing factor could be that while the novel is in first person, cinema cannot provide a corresponding viewpoint; we see what the priest sees as well as his own responses, of which he cannot always be aware. There are, therefore, small differences between what we see happening and what his diary is describing that should be taken note of. This, I suggest, becomes significant in the second part of the film in which the priest’s health improves marginally and he is able to give solace to people who resisted him, chiefly the countess and her daughter Chantal. Chantal appears to hate everyone around her—her father the count, her mother and her father’s lover, the governess. After a conversation with Chantal in which she pours out her contempt for the world, the priest senses correctly that she has a suicide note with her and asks for it. Chantal is visibly perturbed and audibly declares him to be the devil. While the priest does not succeed in bringing comfort to Chantal, he does succeed with her mother. The countess is a proud but lonely woman, living with the memory of a dead male child. She has become accustomed to her husband’s infidelities and no longer cares. As with Chantal, the priest displays such wisdom that the countess even attributes his words to someone else since he could not have had such understanding at his age. Although his exchange with the countess is later misinterpreted, the priest makes

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her reconcile herself to her position and she acknowledges the help he rendered through a letter. The countess, however, dies the very next morning and the priest returns to the manor to pay his last respects. While much of the religious conversation between the priest and the countess, as with the priest and Chantal, has the appearance of being rushed through, the sequence in which the priest visits the dead countess is striking. Everyone in attendance is formally dressed for the occasion while the priest looks scruffy as he always does, and the sense is that he is an intruder and barely tolerated. The count does not even look at him when he passes by on the staircase. ‘The count pretended not to see me’, says the voice-over, but we only see the priest not taken notice of. To give emphasis to the intimacy between the priest and the countess, the camera catches the priest kissing her cold forehead in close-up, as if there had been a private informal bond between them, even a mystical communion, unmediated by the church. The priest has never been close to official power and privilege, and his distance from the count is given emphasis by the bars of the manor gate. He is not shown at the pulpit in church, he visits people personally and his religious exchanges with his congregation are inevitably private. The more closely we look at the protagonist, the more he appears a mystic rather than a representative of the church, and his power belongs to his own person rather than derived from the institution. The priest of Torcy, who once patronised him, acknowledges it when he seeks his blessing at their parting. The last part of Diary of a Country Priest begins with the priest’s worsening health and concludes in his death from stomach cancer. His stomach has been unable to stand anything except dry bread soaked in wine, and the ‘wine’ he has been using is a poisonous brew that kills, according to the priest of Torcy. He is also told that his background implies drunkard ancestors, and his blood was poisoned at birth—he was ‘pickled in alcohol’ is the way the priest of Torcy

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puts it. While this has a parallel in Renoir’s The Human Beast (1938), in which Jacques Lantier has murderous fits because of alcohol consumed by his ancestors, the association of mental illness with mystical visions/power is made by Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, in which Prince Myshkin, has epileptic fits, commencing with his seeing things with exceptional clarity. In Bresson’s film, many people in the village regard the priest as a drunkard, and the film is ambiguous about the source of his mystical power. The priest’s dying exclamation, ‘All is grace’, is not necessarily Bresson affirming Catholicism. This is reported to his friend, the priest of Torcy, by another religious outcast, Dufrety, and the sense is that if a representative of the church must attain ‘grace’, it is only as an outsider. Diary of a Country Priest is ambiguous but it does not display the kind of deliberate ambiguity that European art cinema has been shown to exhibit.9 European art cinema after 1945, David Bordwell argues, defines itself specifically against the classical Hollywood narrative mode, especially with regard to the cause–effect linkage between events, and the linkages become looser and more tenuous. Bordwell cites films like Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), in which Anna is lost and never found, and Godard’s Breathless (1959), in which the reasons for Patricia’s betrayal of Michel are not known. The art film narrative works on two principles: realism and authorial expressivity. Here, ‘realism’ is an acknowledgement of ‘life’s untidiness’. To elaborate, the detective in a whodunit cannot be accidentally run over just before he solves a crime, but such an occurrence is not impossible in a thriller, for example, by Jean-Luc Godard. The protagonists of the art film are not motivated as those in the classical Hollywood films, and their inconsistency, their lack of purpose, for instance in films ranging from Breathless and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) to Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), needs to be interpreted as owing to ‘real’ malaises of contemporary life— alienation, inability to communicate etc. Bordwell suggests that

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since classical Hollywood cinema is the covert reference point, the audience is invited to interpret deviations from classical Hollywood storytelling in terms of authorial expressivity, that is, induce the audience to ask: what is the director trying to say? Ambiguity, therefore, becomes a key element that invites interpretation in art cinema, and the ‘author’ becomes a key organising element in the narrative where ‘signature styles’ usually provide clues as to what filmmakers may be meaning. While Diary of a Country Priest has a discernible signature style—like films that come under art cinema, for example, films by Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni and others—the audience is not drawn into interpreting the film in terms of what Bresson is ‘trying to say’. The filmmaker does not become a mediator between the spectator and the world. The ambiguity in Diary of a Country Priest has correspondence, instead, with the mystery of the world that will not submit to any doctrine, Catholic or otherwise. If Bresson would suppress intention in his models, it is the same ‘intention’, on the part of the artist, to make of the world what it is not, in the guise of authorial ‘expression’ that he is wary of.

A Condemned Man Escapes (1957) Bresson’s films are dimly described as ‘spiritual’ but it is less the ‘Catholic’ film Diary of a Country Priest than the prison escape film A Condemned Man Escapes that illuminates the meaning of the term, which is not gratuitous. This film, which is based on a real-life incident, tells the story of a condemned prisoner, Lieutenant Fontaine, who escaped from a Nazi prison in occupied France. What makes this film so ‘spiritual’ is, paradoxically, its scrupulous attention to material things. The film begins inside a car, with a hand moving furtively to the door handle. The hand, we discover, belongs to Fontaine, who is being taken to prison. Unlike the other prisoner beside him he is not handcuffed and is therefore attempting to jump out of the car at the smallest opportunity. When Fontaine does jump out, he fails to break

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free. Brought into his cell, his face is later bleeding profusely, apparently from the pistol-whipping he received after the failed escape attempt. Bresson is very particular about what he may show and what he may not. We never see a German soldier’s face in full; we are neither made witness to any violence nor to any emotional outburst. The film has a voice-over, as in Diary of a Country Priest, but here it is more laconic, the verbal account not conflicting with what we see but attempting to complement it. Fontaine’s own breakdown is not shown on screen but the voice-over fills in: ‘My courage abandoned me and I cried’, he says matter-of-factly. The images saturating A Condemned Man Escapes pertain to the physical details of Fontaine’s incarceration. The camera often catches movements through a narrow slit between two prison doors where movements are so restricted that prisoners can hardly make any contact. Even overtaking prisoners in a line to get nearer to a ‘friend’ is a formidable task. It is in this milieu that Fontaine gets to know other people. There is a priest with whom Fontaine argues about God, and Orsini who was betrayed by his wife and is shot after he makes the first attempt to break out in the film. But it is still Fontaine who is shown most preoccupied with escaping, his resolve becoming greater when he is sentenced to death. There are long segments in which Fontaine sharpens a soup spoon on a stone floor, using it to chisel away at the door joints to separate and detach the oak boards, extracting steel wires from his wooden bed to make a rope, and carefully dismantling a lantern to make hooks. There are few films as attentive to physical detail as A Condemned Man Escapes, but instead of becoming grounded in physicality, these images of confinement take it elsewhere. Where ‘freedom’ is empty rhetoric in most dramas extolling it, the palpability of obstacles placed in Lieutenant Fontaine’s way make us understand not only freedom and fellowship but also the doggedness of the human spirit in pursuing them to the end.

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Given the restrictions placed upon character development by a story in which people communicate to each other through taps and scratching, meet each other only when they wash themselves, Bresson gets his effects through an economy all but impossible. A glance at the man and a one-line account are all we get, and we are convinced of Orsini’s tragic story. We are never in doubt that death is near and betrayal likely. Fontaine finally escapes with a lice-infested young man in German uniform (a ‘deserter’) named Jost who shares his cell. Fontaine is not sure if he can trust Jost, but he has no option but to let him in on the plan. He decides that if Jost refuses to join him, he will have to be killed. Jost has a single anxious expression on his face, and he hardly ‘acts’, but we are convinced, not only that he is acutely flesh and blood, but that his blood might also need to be spilled by Fontaine. Bresson, as I suggested, has no ‘unique vision’ to offer the world, although he has a unique method, and this film does not propose anything outside the domain of the familiar. It values the same things that conventional wisdom has taught us to value—freedom and camaraderie, specifically. But what the film does is to give new life to a cliché, and awaken an idea all but dead. A Condemned Man Escapes is ‘spiritual’ because, through the drama of overcoming actual obstacles (and not abstractions), the film makes the ‘human spirit’ palpable in an unprecedented way. A Condemned Man Escapes makes us aware that what Bresson is attempting is to deal with the notion of spiritual freedom through a studied emphasis on confinement, or the other things opposing it. In Diary of a Country Priest the priest attains ‘grace’ because he struggles against the apathy of the community perhaps created by the very institution he is serving. Although many of the other characters are initially hostile to the priest, he is still able to reach them through his ministrations, but the count himself remains impervious. It is significant that the ‘villain’ of the film, the count, is the only person

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who has had a good relationship with the church, and is prepared to make contributions. It is also significant that Bresson does not identify any individual with the church, and the senior-most official, the canon, who is the count’s uncle, is even sympathetic to the priest. But there is still a sense that the church as an institution is connecting only with the privileged few, and is indifferent to the spiritual needs of the community. Therefore, the Catholic church, I suggest, plays the same role in Diary of a Country Priest as the prison plays in A Condemned Man Escapes—it is an obstacle that the human spirit must strain itself to overcome.

The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) Bresson’s films from Diary of a Country Priest onwards become sparer with every effort. The Trial of Joan of Arc is even more austere than A Condemned Man Escapes because the filmmaker places more restrictions upon himself with regard to what he may show. The film is a faithful visualisation of the Joan’s trial using actual transcripts. It is virtually all questions and answers, which means that people rarely ever talk informally as questions are read out and Joan’s answers rarely reveal anything of importance. Since Bresson takes trouble to add very little, even in terms of facial expressions, this is as ‘truthful’ a recreation of Joan’s last days as it is possible for cinema to provide. There are, for instance, none of the close-ups that Dreyer provides in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which, because they display everything, might have ‘condemned cinema to cliché’. While Diary of a Country Priest has a strong narrative, narration reduces progressively in the other two films, with an increasing emphasis on ‘real moments’. The ‘real moments’ in The Trial of Joan of Arc, upon which rests most of the film’s weight, can almost be marked. The first is perhaps Joan’s mother making an official statement about her daughter’s life and death about twenty-five years after the girl’s martyrdom. The mother’s face is not seen as she is helped into the

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court, at the ‘trial of rehabilitation’, to read out her statement. Joan’s trial is like a set piece but in court there is a young monk provided to her as counsel who makes covert gestures indicating how she should answer. The gestures cease gradually once the monk senses that Joan’s position cannot be retrieved. Another important sequence pertains to Joan lying ill in bed after consuming what she has been given to eat. We do not see her eat but a wooden bowl with fish bones is taken away. We are shown Joan’s limp white hand coming out from under a cover to have her pulse taken, and heavy steel manacles being hauled out from under the cover so she can be unchained briefly. In writing about the ‘model’ playing Joan, Susan Sontag comments upon her lack of luminosity, and contrasts it with Francois Leterrier, who plays the protagonist in A Condemned Man Escapes. I would like to argue that The Trial of Joan of Arc is about Joan as a spent force, after her visions have ceased, and ‘luminosity’ from the model might have been counterproductive. Joan of Arc in Bresson’s film is perhaps the opposite of Fontaine in A Condemned Man Escapes, because while Fontaine represents the resolute human spirit, Joan in The Trial of Joan of Arc represents the human spirit entirely subdued. It is after her trial that this becomes more evident because Joan fears death and repeats a recantation that is written out for her. Joan is emotional now but Bresson avoids catching her countenance; all we see is Joan turning away or falling back on her bed with a moan. The sequence dealing with her execution is also revealing because, instead of dwelling on Joan, it commences with her meagre belongings being put away in a sack—a pair of boots and some tattered clothes, mainly. Then we see boards being hammered together to erect a platform and sticks heaped around it. Joan is barefoot and takes short steps to the stake because the cassock is narrow around her ankles. When the wood is lit Joan mutters her prayers mechanically and coughs out when the smoke reaches her. The eyes of the monks tending to the fire are also wet because of the smoke. The last image we see—when

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the fire is spent and the smoke has cleared—is the burned-out stake with empty chains entwined around it. The interpretation that The Trial of Joan of Arc is about the subdued human spirit may be met with opposition from those who would assert that the spirit is indestructible. This is a weak objection because we cannot value what is ‘indestructible’ and ‘eternal’; life, after all, is valuable only because we are mortal. Bresson also does not need to convince us that Joan of Arc once had ‘spirit’ because we come to the film only with that knowledge and conviction. But Bresson may still have imagined that The Trial of Joan of Arc would be found too ‘bleak’ because he puts in two incongruous images at the end. When Joan ascends the steps to the stake, he shows a spaniel that appears to be following her, but then stops and looks up. A moment later he shows us pigeons alighting on a roof. These images may be intended to signify ‘life’ and ‘renewal’ in a film that could otherwise be taken to be about defeat and death, but they contradict Bresson’s own expressed tenets because they are ‘traced over by studied sentiments’. That Bresson is a great filmmaker should not be taken to mean complete infallibility.

Shifting to Colour Filmmakers usually shift to colour when the technology becomes available, and non-mainstream cinema is usually slower to shift because of budgetary constraints. But it is not very often that one senses a change in sensibility in the director’s work when she or he makes the shift. To the artist in cinema, colour has evidently more complex possibilities than black-and-white. When filmmakers consciously choose blackand-white, they often do it to suggest Manichaean divisions (Schindler’s List), or when their preoccupation is psychology or interiority, divided or ruptured selves (Psycho or Ingmar Bergman’s films). Robert Bresson’s films in black-and-white suggest binary conflict of some kind, usually a struggle. His last two films in black-and-white appear to belie this, because they are psychologically more complex. Au Hasard Balthazar

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(1966) and Mouchette (1967) deal with girl protagonists who conduct themselves more strangely than the protagonists of his earlier films. Both are people with ‘spirit’ placed in difficult situations, but instead of a remedy they seek out their own destruction. I will not discuss these two films but they include elements that contradict my own supposition that Bresson is an unbeliever, in a way that the films I have discussed do not. Both films conclude with the death of the protagonists—not the girl but the donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar—with optimistic lighting and bars of music to convey the sense that they are ‘watched over’. Bresson seems to imply that, while the fates of their respective protagonists may defeat human understanding, there is still a higher authority who judges. The two films are emotionally moving in a way that none of the other films discussed are, but their implications, it can be argued, actually make them suspect. They defeat the admission that human action is not always understandable. Implying an ‘overseeing’ authority who witnesses what we do not, perhaps also amounts to ‘wishing Man’s nature more palpable than it is’. Bresson’s last films in colour are the films in which humankind’s mystery is preserved most uncompromisingly, and they are the films to which his own tenets most apply. Where most filmmakers use colour beguilingly, Bresson is cold and harsh, and there is scarcely a frame in these films that is eye-catching. If Bergman’s colours (Cries and Whispers, 1972) are deep and rich to suggest great torment, Fellini’s (Amarcord, 1974) are muted as if to suggest affectionate recall, Bresson’s colours appear to mimic cheap plastic, unappealing but functional, as if deliberately devised not to distract. The three films in colour that I propose to discuss are A Gentle Woman (1969), The Devil, Probably (1977) and L’Argent (1983).

A Gentle Woman (1969) This film is based on a short story by Dostoyevsky, which might be considered difficult to film because it takes the shape of an obsessive

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monologue, that of a husband grieving over the death of his wife by suicide. The man is a rich moneylender who married a poor girl of very gentle disposition. The moneylender loved her dearly but withheld demonstration of it from her, intending to shower her with love at the appropriate moment. As may be expected from Dostoyevsky, the man presents no reason for his conduct, which is not to say that he is not a vivid and compelling creation. When the moneylender abandons his coldness and wholeheartedly embraces the girl, she is too far gone—though she sheds tears of joy—and kills herself. Bresson is faithful to the original story, but he reduces the obsessive monologue to a first-person account that sounds like a report comparable to Fontaine’s in A Condemned Man Escapes. This means that the centre of focus is the girl—and not the moneylender— who becomes the greater object of interest. The psychological logic of the story is much more opaque than in any of Bresson’s other films up to this point; but where Dostoyevsky’s story depends entirely on its vividness for its power, Bresson’s film leaves the behaviour of the two protagonists enigmatic, although strangely recognisable. The first event in the film is the wife jumping to her death from an apartment balcony to the pavement below. We do not see her jumping off, but the housekeeper who comes in sees the chair she has climbed on still wobbling and a flowerpot on the balcony overbalancing. The husband’s narration of their married life begins shortly thereafter, with him standing close to the feet of the dead girl on the bed in their room, her hands crossed over her breast. The film returns to the same scene after every incidence of narration. The husband, Luc, is a moneylender; and the girl, who is from a poor background, keeps coming to him to sell numerous possessions. Luc notices her as quiet and educated, and helps her with an advertisement that she wants to put out, offering her services as an au pair girl. Luc also surprises her by quoting a line spoken by Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. He pursues her and asks her

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to marry him. It is not love he is offering her but marriage, and he makes that clear. The two are married at the registrar’s office with no one else in attendance, after which they retire to his apartment. Luc has clear ideas about the direction their lives should take, as he tells us when the brief excitement of their first night together is over: ‘I quenched her elation.’ Luc recites to his wife the various terms of their marriage. They need to build ‘capital’ and must, therefore, conserve their money. They cannot visit the theatre, which is expensive, although they can go to the cinema once every week. The girl listens to all this without demur, although the word ‘capital’ appears to have her wondering. Few words are spoken between the husband and wife, and explanations are not provided. The first luminously ‘real’ moment perhaps occurs in the cinema hall. The two watch a film that seems like a historical costume drama. Suddenly, she looks at a stranger sitting to the other side of her, and we see their hands. From the tense way their hands are poised on their respective laps—her right hand and the stranger’s left—there has evidently been an attempt by the stranger to make contact. The girl looks deliberately at Luc now, and he understands instantly. The husband and wife exchange places, and Luc glances at the stranger briefly before returning to the film. After the film ends, the stranger follows the two to their car, still hopeful of making contact with the woman perhaps estranged from her man. But she gives Luc an impulsive hug, and Luc says, ‘I was sure of her love’ in the voice-over. In Dostoyevsky’s story, the husband is cold and incommunicative in his marriage but articulate when addressing the reader. This means he is conscious of the deviousness of his own conduct, and the recognition induces us to interpret his psychology. My own interpretation is that the husband is enacting the fantasy of power that we see in children when they ill-treat their pets and then shower them with love, enjoying the animal’s display of relief. Denying love and extending it at will perhaps actualises the fantasy that the inclination

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to love is unilaterally ours. Bresson’s film, in contrast, does not allow us to interpret Luc’s or his wife’s psychology. What we see is all there is, though we need to watch closely. Although their quarrels are interspersed with interludes of tenderness, the relationship between Luc and his wife deteriorates progressively after their first disagreement, when he finds her ‘being charitable with his money’. Luc knows that a boy has been coming to see her occasionally, although he deliberately does not try to look at or identify him. It is not that Luc feels no jealousy, but it is not his nature to exhibit it unduly. Bresson interrupts the sequences dealing with their exchanges—including their silences—with distracting interludes like the extended theatre sequence from Hamlet. It is difficult to say what the interlude does in terms of narrative development, but since their responses to culture are so different (she is clearly more sensitive) we sense the distance between them growing. Bresson gives this emphasis when she is hunched forward in her seat and he is reclining. Their relationship reaches the point of no return when Luc finds his wife with the boy. Luc hears a bit of conversation and knows she has behaved creditably, but he deliberately keeps silent about what he has heard, briefly enjoying the moral power it gives him. The wife is humiliated; and while he pretends to be asleep, he sees her contemplating him with a loaded pistol. He says nothing to her when he ‘awakens’, but arranges it so that the two will sleep in separate rooms, indicating that he knows. The girl’s consequent illness changes matters, because Luc tries to be caring, talk about the things she loves, but none of it is of much avail because their silences deepen. When Luc finally bursts out with an expression of deep regret and proposes that they begin life anew, the girl weeps as in Dostoyevsky’s story, but points out, ‘We won’t be new.’ The film eventually concludes with Luc lowering his dead wife’s head back into the coffin and the mahogany lid being screwed on.

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A Gentle Woman is a new kind of film for Robert Bresson because it is almost completely devoid of the optimism that marked even The Trial of Joan of Arc, which is still haunted by what Joan once was. I have hitherto tried to defend the use of the term ‘spiritual’ with regard to Bresson’s cinema, although it is imprecise and tends to be applied to everything redolent of religion. A Gentle Woman is not even remotely religious10 and, if anything, the closing of the film works against the belief in an afterlife. Still, it can be argued, it is ‘spiritual’ in a way that films by more overtly religious filmmakers have not been. If one considers Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Ingmar Bergman communicates an intense sense of physical/emotional distance developing between two people in the process of a marital breakup, anticipated in the opening altercation between the other couple. Bergman gets us interested in the psychology of his characters, in a way that Bresson does not. Psychology is a way of explaining human beings in a rational way but, as Bresson notes, creative artists with faith in psychology create only what can be explained. In A Gentle Woman, the husband and wife drift apart not because of their respective psychological traits, but because they are weighed down in some baffling way. Luc, who must bear most of the responsibility because the girl tries to reach out to him initially, is deliberate in extinguishing whatever elation she feels at having a man, but without knowing why. More strikingly, the girl submits without a protest, but also without appearing a ‘victim’ incapable of choosing or acting. She seems to be in the grip of a realisation going beyond a reason or even a cause. Bresson may be using a ‘model’ to play the girl, but Dominique Sanda is infused with inner mystery in A Gentle Woman, and her performance is perhaps the apogee of all Bressonian performances. The girl’s suicide, after weeping tears of joy at the husband’s declaration of love, seems the most natural thing in the world. We are not in control of our own acts, Bresson’s film implies, and, if anything, it communicates the impossibility of ‘happiness’.

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The Devil, Probably (1977) A Gentle Woman was made a year after the student uprising in Paris but it shows no engagement with politics. Bresson’s only engagement with politics, however, came eight years later. The Devil, Probably is based on a screenplay by Bresson himself, and tells a contemporary story about four people: Charles, Alberte, Edwige and Michel. The characters are a foursome obsessively preoccupied with the havoc caused to the environment by human greed (perhaps ‘the market’ would be a euphemism for it today). Bresson uses some stock footage—trees pulled down, baby seals clubbed to death, rivers being polluted—not to tell us what we know too well, but to enlighten us on the preoccupations of his protagonists. Charles is the charismatic leader of the group, while Michel is the one who has his feet still planted in everyday life and preoccupied with ‘getting on’. Alberte and Edwige are both in love with Charles, and neither is jealous of the other. Alberte declares to Michel that he is the one she loves, but the indications are that she still gives herself to Charles out of admiration and respect, yet Michel gladly plays along. Much of the first part of the film is taken up with student activism and rhetoric. Groups gather and people cheer, and the general sense is of people who know that things are desperately wrong, but are merely fidgeting at the discomfort of knowing this, or proposing ‘destruction’. Bresson’s view is the very antithesis of Jean-Luc Godard’s in La Chinoise (1967) (also about radical students), which suggests that even misguided action is preferable to no action. In The Devil, Probably, the group is united in the understanding that political action without a clear purpose is stupid. Charles is the protagonist of The Devil, Probably, and the film gives us glimpses of his attempts at finding solutions, as much for the world as for himself: youth meetings, students’ discussions with Catholic priests, an encounter with a psychiatrist and an attempt at rehabilitating a drug addict. The general sense we get of Charles is of someone restless but reaching an impasse in nearly every path he

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takes, either politically or personally. In a meeting of slogan-shouting radical students, for instance, he mutters ‘idiots’ in the middle of a tirade from a platform, and leaves, quickly followed by the other three. Bresson’s film seems to be made in some strange visual shorthand, because in one or two sequences the dialogue sounds as though inbetween sentences had been deliberately omitted. This, I propose, is a quick way of suggesting the deadening monotony of intellectual arguments. The paths in ‘crucial’ debates concerning mankind’s survival are so unwavering that the activist-thinker has scarcely any liberty to step outside. The ‘in-between’ lines of dialogue, not being especially significant, are, therefore, deliberately omitted. When these ‘debates’ or ‘protestations’ are interspersed with footage of the world depleting itself furiously, the spectator catches the despair of a young man gradually discovering that he is only toying with an elaborate system of futile words and gestures. To make matters worse, everyone is implicated in the relentless march. Michel, for instance, is employed in a road construction project cutting through a forest being decimated. So is every object, perhaps—and even the food items in Alberte’s refrigerator cannot protest their innocence. There will be no revolution, someone asserts, because it is too late. To the question of who or what is responsible for all these, a commuter on a bus replies, ‘The devil, probably.’ That Charles is going to take his life is never in doubt because his death is announced in a newspaper at the start, and the rest of the film is related in flashback. Charles, even while being mothered by the two devoted girls, is only debating about what exit he should take: drowning in bath tub seems very difficult and one has too many misgivings about pulling the actual trigger of a gun. The best way is perhaps to pay a needy someone to shoot him from behind, which is what Charles does after getting a last shot of cognac at a late-night cafe. Mouchette, A Gentle Woman and The Devil, Probably are all about people who kill themselves, but we see a gradual change in the way

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Bresson approaches suicide. The difference between the suicides in Mouchette and The Devil, Probably is that Mouchette takes her own life almost out of rage at her condition—it is an act of rebellion. We are never in doubt about Mouchette’s motives because we have been made privy to her condition. Charles in The Devil, Probably (like the girl in A Gentle Woman) is more mysterious in his actual motives. The suicide sequence does not focus upon Charles but concludes in silence with his killer walking away. Charles getting someone to kill him also means that with a person present there is no possible speculation about Bresson’s faith in an omniscient eye. The Devil, Probably shares a characteristic with A Gentle Woman that we do not detect in the early films. Where the early films, in blackand-white, are given to the travails of single protagonists, the later films are more complex in as much as they deal with relationships and/or external preoccupations. Bresson appears to make a shift from interiority to behaviour, as if more conscious of the impossibility of ‘knowing’ people and understanding their motivations. Also, while interiority can be explored cinematically through private gestures perceptible only to the camera, behaviour is manifested only in relationships and exchanges. It is significant that where Bresson’s protagonists are often caught ruminating alone in the early films, they appear only in ‘transactions’ in the later ones. What Bresson shows us in Diary of a Country Priest and A Condemned Man Escapes, he keeps out of our reach in A Gentle Woman and The Devil, Probably; and whatever our inferences, they are entirely tentative.

L’Argent (1983) The Devil, Probably is uncharacteristically political for a film by Bresson. It may have caused discomfort at the time—still given to radical optimism—because very little has been written about it. While its bleak view of civilisation seems more valid today than the more optimistic tracts of the 1970s, the political–documentary side

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of the film tends to overbalance the Bressonian side, and I am not sure if Charles is one of Bresson’s more successful creations. Perhaps Bresson’s own moral preoccupations induce him to identify with Charles in some way. After The Devil, Probably, however, Bresson made his last film, L’Argent, based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy, possibly the most mysterious film in his entire career. In L’Argent, forged currency notes are passed on by two boys to a photographer, who passes them on—with full knowledge—to Yvon, a driver of an oil tanker. Yvon is caught passing them on and is judged guilty when the photographer and his wily assistant, Lucien, deny knowledge either of him or of the forged notes. Since Yvon loses his job and is hard-up, he is easily talked into driving the getaway car in a robbery. Up to this point the film is laying the foundation for what is to follow, since the film is primarily about Yvon’s fate. The first sequence involving Yvon’s conscious descent into crime begins with him waiting in the getaway car. We do not get to see the robbery and Bresson catches the action entirely from the periphery— some gun-wielding plainclothesmen behind parked cars, police cars patrolling the street. The actual ‘action’ is seen from so far away that it is barely recognisable as a robbery. Yvon only knows that he has been engaged to do something illegal but has not troubled himself with the details. In court he has little to say and is sentenced to three years of jail time. Bresson also gives us a brief glimpse of Yvon as a husband and a father. While Yvon can barely keep away from his little daughter Yvette, he has few words for his anxious wife Elise. He is led away even before Elise can get a clear sense of what is happening. Bresson shows Yvon’s entry into prison in his characteristic shorthand: a prison van backing into a yard, the rear door opening and three pieces of luggage being deposited outside, three handcuffed prisoners descending one by one, each one picking up a piece and being led away. The sequence involving Yvon’s only meeting with Elise is also unembellished: prisoners in single file receiving

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numbered tokens corresponding to the windows at which their loved ones wait, Yvon having nothing to ask except about Yvette but Elise saying nothing. The next few segments dealing with Yvon in prison are among the most poignant in Bresson’s films. They commence with letters being brought in to be sorted and read before they are sent to the prisoners. One letter is from Elise and addressed to Yvon. Elise reveals that their daughter Yvette is dead from diphtheria, but that she could not bring herself to reveal it when she met Yvon in prison. This is cut to the scene where the letter is lying on a stone floor and a hand reaching for it. We soon see that Elise’s letter is being studied by Yvon’s cellmates. Yvon is shown lying face down on his bed and the letter is the apparent reason for his distress. One of the prisoners murmurs wisely that we value life because death is always near, and the two comfort themselves with some liquor hidden inside the mattress. Bresson has already dealt with imprisonment in A Condemned Man Escapes, but its portrayal here is different. Where the earlier film dwelt partly on the camaraderie between prisoners, L’Argent is about the crushing nature of confinement. Yvon’s letters to Elise are returned unopened, and the biggest blow is her two-line letter telling him that she will not see him again, and that she is beginning life anew. When news of this letter gets around the other prisoners’ comments infuriate him; he is then forced into an outburst, and the consequence is solitary confinement.. Bresson inserts a resplendent moment in the segment dealing with the solitary confinement, which culminates in Yvon’s attempted suicide. We hear a grating noise from Yvon’s cell, then a guard peers through the keyhole before entering to talk to him. The noise ceases briefly and starts again. This time Bresson shows us Yvon lying on his bed and staring up at the ceiling while his left hand aimlessly drags a metal cup to and fro on the stone floor. Sensing that he may need to be pacified, the guard returns with a sedative that Yvon puts into his mouth. When the guard leaves,

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Yvon pulls it out and adds it to the small pile of pills he has already collected. Yvon does not die from the pills he subsequently swallows but is discharged when his term is completed. Yvon’s first act after he leaves prison is to check in at a shabby hotel and kill the proprietor and his wife. Bresson shows us Yvon washing his hands and tinted water flowing into the drain. He is also shown buttoning his trousers—it is apparent that he has raped the proprietor’s wife as well. The ostensible motive is robbery but Yvon finds little money in the safe. I earlier described L’Argent as ‘mysterious’, and the reason is that there are few clues pointing to the motive behind Yvon’s conduct after his release. His killing of the couple in the hotel is perhaps simply a means to stop the noise in his head. After the act, Yvon finds shelter with a grey-haired elderly woman who lives with her alcoholic musician father and her sister’s family. She is a widow and does all the work in the household. She is accepting of Yvon’s killing of the couple in the hotel. Bresson, of course, keeps the drama in this revelation off-screen but the widow acts normally after being told by Yvon himself about the killing, and he continues to stay in a small shack on her land, although her father resents his presence. Yvon and the widow do not have much to communicate but there is a bond growing between them and Yvon asks her why she is willing to suffer such drudgery when she is so ill-treated. At the climax, Yvon kills the woman and the rest of the family members, including a handicapped child, with an axe and surrenders to the police. My rendering of the story of L’Argent is faithful in the sense that the effort has been to stay away from questions pertaining to Yvon’s psychology. I have also not paid attention to the story of Lucien, the photographer’s assistant, who embarks upon a series of frauds, becomes rich and a philanthropist, and announces his ‘philosophy’ in court when tried. Lucien meets Yvon in prison but is whisked off to a high-security prison after he tries to break out and we do not

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hear of him thereafter. It is difficult to say what the story of Lucien is doing in L’Argent, but it could help us understand Yvon. Lucien and Yvon are not alike: Lucien is smart while Yvon is unthinking and impulsive. But the same act of deceit turns both the perpetrator (Lucien) and the victim (Yvon) into committing acts of which they might otherwise have been incapable. Both Yvon and Lucien are eventually also destroyed. Bresson is rarely schematic since that would contradict his tenets, but we can see why Lucien’s story is necessary to the film. Without Lucien, it can be argued, Yvon emerges as a victim and his conduct after his release would become too bizarre. Our immediate response might then be to grant him absolution, but that would be too difficult, given the horrific nature of his crimes. Moreover, with Lucien joining him at the ‘bottom’, society’s unfairness is no longer the issue, and the film cannot be read as social criticism. This forces us to attach other meanings to Yvon’s conduct, try to speculate about its significance. Yvon is imprisoned for being in the periphery of criminality, and his being in the ‘periphery’ of things has perhaps a clue for us. He does not conceal from the elderly widow his murder of the couple in the hotel, and we may presume that he is not driven by the instinct for self-preservation. The widow is aware of the risk in sheltering him but still does so. When Yvon goes up to her room at the climax, she does not look surprised and only waits. Judging from his conversation with her, his killing of the widow is perhaps intended as a release for her. But Yvon does not stop there; he kills the others as well and proceeds to ‘look for money’. The manner in which Yvon is accidentally driven into a life of crime determines only the initial thrust of the film. Yvon begins as a victim of circumstances and the break-up of his family also pushes him into despair, but at that point, something happens to him. Here again, the contrast with Lucien is instructive because while Lucien

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retains his panache even in prison, Yvon seems to be conscious of his own insignificance, his own position in the ‘periphery’, as it were. An inner change apparently occurs and Yvon perhaps decides that he is not worthy of a moral life. When he kills subsequently, it is perhaps less for gain than to confirm the moral depths to which he can sink. It may, therefore, not be quite correct to describe Yvon as ‘evil’; he seems, rather, to be simply bent on renouncing ‘the kingdom of heaven’ because he is unworthy of it. His killing of the widow follows an indication that he feels for her, and one wonders if he sees this tendency towards the good as unbecoming of his ‘true’ self. Yvon has earlier discovered that there is no money in the house, but he not only demands it of the woman but also axes her before she can respond. The perfunctory demand enables him to sink even lower, and that is perhaps its essential purpose. L’Argent has a strange closing that has not been written about. Yvon surrenders to the police in a cafe and this arouses the curiosity of the bystanders. When he is led out in handcuffs, there is a huge crowd outside waiting to see him; but, curiously enough, the crowd keeps looking into the cafe even after he has been led out, as if the real drama is still to happen, that is, the man already led out by the police is too ordinary to be at the centre of such drama. Yvon, who has been on the periphery, remains, in effect, on the periphery, despite the conspicuous nature of his acts.

Familiar and Unfamiliar L’Argent is not enigmatic by design, and this interpretation of Yvon’s conduct is not invited by Bresson, who is content with Pascal’s dictum: ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.’11 But my interpretation is not ‘psychological’ in the accepted sense. Psychology, of which Bresson is distrustful, manifests itself in transactions and interpersonal behaviour. Yvon’s personal sense of insignificance, as I have argued, is not in

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relation to other men. While Lucien’s self-worth stems from his belief in his superiority, Yvon’s unworthiness is metaphysical, even religious, because it is directed at a moral order not controlled by a human agency. To phrase it differently, Yvon’s condition is less psychological than spiritual. While it may appear contradictory for me to describe Bresson as an unbeliever, and still invoke religion in my arguments, Bresson is perhaps an ‘unbeliever’ in the sense that he sees no possibility of God outside humankind. With humankind eventually destroying itself, God would also be dead. Bresson’s protagonists are often driven by belief—or the lack of it—but this does not mean that he shares the beliefs. This view, I would argue, is still different from that of the Catholic critics who, because they treat his films as illustrating doctrine, turn Bresson into a religious polemicist. In studying Bresson’s career, I divided his output into two distinct phases corresponding to black-and-white and colour because I detected differences in Bresson’s approach in the two phases. The early films are simpler in as much as they are about struggles— against lack of faith in Diary of a Country Priest and for freedom in A Condemned Man Escapes. Of course, this way of identifying films is much too broad because every Second World War film from Hollywood is about Manichaean ‘struggles’. Still, Bresson has hardly distinguished himself by the singularity of his themes, and the categorisation is only intended to differentiate within his oeuvre. Bresson’s colour films show more interest in character/ relationships than the early ones but, as I have already noted, this is prefigured by his last two films in black-and-white: Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette. While ‘struggle’ is still a key notion in these two films,12 it disappears altogether in A Gentle Woman. The later films are also bleaker. In his Notes on Cinematography, Bresson writes against the use of music, but it is only beginning with A Gentle Woman that his films completely eschew background scores,

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which may be regarded as manipulating emotions to certain ends. It is difficult to speculate on the reasons for the change in Bresson’s approach, partly because so little is known about his life. His psychology, like those of his characters’—must remain opaque. But it is as though the early films had some faith in the transformative power of cinema that was suddenly lost by the time Bresson made A Gentle Woman. One of the cornerstones of film appreciation is the auteur theory, which was first enunciated by Francois Truffaut.13 The first valuedetermining premise of the auteur theory is that the distinguishable personality of the director is a criterion of value. Over a group of films, an auteur must exhibit recurrent characteristics of style that serve as his signature. The second important, even ultimate, premise is concerned with ‘interior meaning’, which is not quite the director’s vision of the world or her/his personal beliefs about life. It is, rather, the ‘tension’ between the director’s personality and his material that manifests itself in a certain attitude brought to bear on her/his subject matter. Although Bresson is hailed as an auteur, he was not taken up with a ‘personal vision’ but only with being ‘true to nature’. Even his ‘signature style’ is not an expression of his personality—like Fellini’s, for instance—but devised deliberately to achieve his purpose. Bresson was a humanist like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the insights that emerge from his films are not private discoveries but familiar truths. Perhaps, Robert Bresson’s greatest achievement was that he devised a rigorous method that emptied these familiar truths of cliché and made them unfamiliar once more.

Notes and References   1. Noël Carroll, ‘Prospects for Film Theory’, in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 43.

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  2. Susan Sontag, ‘Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson’, in A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 121–136.   3. Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography (New York: Urizen Books, 1977). ‘Cinematography’ to Bresson is not simply operating the camera but the most important element in cinema.   4. This is dealt with in Chapter 3: ‘World and Text: Interpreting Jacques Rivette’.   5. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Paradiso XXXI, 108’, in A Personal Anthology, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 176.   6. This refers to a celebrated trial scene in The Trial of Joan of Arc.   7. Unlike Eistenstein and Pudovkin who were also theorists but whose films are easily understood, Bresson is a difficult filmmaker and the intention behind his filmmaking is far from apparent. Eisenstein and Pudovkin’s writing was intended to explain cinema. Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography helps us to understand only his cinema.   8. David Bordwell, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 52–54.   9. David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 716–724. 10. Of course, the meaning of ‘religious’ will be disputed, but I take it to mean belief in the existence of a God who is aware. Films that subscribe to this belief usually have views associated with specific religions. A ‘cinema without religion’ cannot be equated with a ‘materialist cinema’ or a ‘rationalist cinema’ because one may disbelieve in an aware and just God, but also disbelieve that the answers provided by materialism are final. 11. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was an influential mathematician and religious philosopher. Robert Bresson was an admirer of Pascal, who he regarded as ‘for everyone’, as I have characterised Bresson himself, instead of ‘for only’ Roman Catholics. 12. While Mouchette clearly deals with a girl’s struggle Au Hasard Balthasar may present a problem because neither the girl Marie nor the donkey appears to be engaged in a ‘struggle’ as we understand it. Still, Marie, like Mouchette, has an oppositional relationship to society because she is capable of deliberate cruelty—as towards the miser as well as the weak boy who loves her. But the optimism of the ending of

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Au Hasard Balthasar with the donkey’s death has us wondering— whether optimism could exist unless there was an implied struggle of some kind. What could a filmmaker be ‘optimistic’ about except the conclusion of a struggle? Yvon in L’Argent, on the other hand ‘surrenders’ rather than ‘resists’ or ‘opposes’ even when he kills, although this is to his own ‘intrinsic nature’. 13. Andrew Sarris, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 515–535.

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6

Nation and Transgression Ideology and the Horror Film in India and Pakistan Horror as a Transgressive Mode Horror, at least after pornography, is perhaps the least reputable among all categories of film. The emotions it deals with are often tied up intimately to the body, rather than to the mind or the soul, and might be understood as unpleasant—fear, disgust and revulsion. Yet, there is a huge appetite for horror that continues even when other popular genres in cinema have lost their attraction. One of the key elements in most horror films is the ‘monster’—the horrific or repulsive object that few horror films can do without. Examples of the monster range from Regan in The Exorcist (1973) to Jason in Friday the 13th (1980) and Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Among the explanations offered for the place of the monster, the most tenable one is that it is not its appearance that the audience finds most attractive but the narrative around it, that is, the curiosity aroused by the ‘impossible’ and its fulfillment in the monster. Where a disaster film arouses curiosity about an unknown experience—an asteroid crashing into the Earth, a volcano under New York; the horror film arouses curiosity about the impossible— possession by the devil or a man-eating alien. The disgust aroused by the object at the heart of the horror film is, therefore, not craved for by the audience as an emotion but is only a predictable concomitant of satisfying the curiosity that has been aroused.1 The revulsion is 147

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simply attendant to our being made to believe in the ‘impossibility’ of the occurrence. To use a helpful analogy, the bitterness of the pill induces belief in an impossible ailment. The ‘impossibility’ at the heart of the horror film does not, however, mean that the films are necessarily ‘fantastic’. Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), for instance, arouses curiosity about a dead woman (Norman Bates’s mother) coming alive, and the impossibility of the occurrence finds manifestation in the climax in the fruit cellar when the protagonists (and the audience) discover the ‘monster’, Mrs Bates’s mummified corpse turning around in its chair, its eye sockets empty but the swinging light overhead making it seem grotesquely alive. While a rational account follows, it does not negate the fact that, until the climax, the film has toyed with the ‘impossible’ and planted an occult explanation in our minds. ‘Horror’ is perhaps not a ‘genre’ in the sense that it is not bound to the conventions of a given age. Like some other ‘modes’, it exists across a whole range of historical periods, offering itself, if only intermittently, as a formal possibility that can be revived or renewed.2 This may explain why it frequently occurs as an element combining with recognisable genres—like science fiction (Alien, 1979), teen film (Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984) and detective story (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991). In the process, the effect of the horrific element inserted into a genre film is transformatory, sometimes even subversive. Where science fiction is often optimistic (as in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), science fiction–horror (Alien, 1979) is dark. Where whodunit celebrates the triumph of science and rationality, the detective in The Silence of the Lambs uses the assistance of a dangerous lunatic. This, it can be argued, opens out the story to possibilities beyond those offered by the normal detective story. It is perhaps this ‘subversive’ side of the horrific element that makes the horror film ‘political’ in some sense, because popular genres in cinema are often vehicles for dominant ideologies. It has,

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for instance, been noted that horror films are often engaged in an unprecedented assault on all that bourgeois culture is supposed to cherish, like the ‘ideological apparatus’ of the family and the school,3 and films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) have been celebrated for their adversarial relation to contemporary culture and society. In this film, a family of men, driven out of the slaughterhouse business by advanced technology, turns to cannibalism. This has been interpreted as embodying both a critique of capitalism, since it shows people quite literally living off other people; and of the institution of the family, since it implies that the monster is the family.4 Even if such an overtly political reading is not allowed, there is still little doubt that the horror film offers something vividly scandalous and transgressive to the audience. It has been found, for instance, that mail order video companies bracket cult horror with European art cinema, much of which—like the films of Luis Buñuel and JeanLuc Godard—is formally bizarre and unashamedly ventures into disreputable terrain.5 If mainstream cinema is ideologically coercive, it can be argued that the transgressions of the horror film, like those of art cinema, offer respite, and are, therefore, adversarial in a politically distinct way. If this political function is granted, the dominant form taken by horror in cinema in any period also helps one identify the kind of ideological coercion it is aligned against. To illustrate, the kind of horror film most popular in the United States in the past decade or two may be teen horror. If the teen film is the genre into which the horrific element is inserted, it will be interesting to look at the conventions of the genre. The codes and conventions of the teen film genre vary depending on the cultural context of the film, but they can include proms, alcohol, illegal substances, high school, parties and all-night raves, losing one’s virginity, relationships and rivalries, social groups and cliques and American pop culture.

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A characteristic of the youth film is that adults constitute a separate group kept apart to enforce the sense that young people are ‘rebels’, or at least breaking with an older generation instead of inheriting its attitudes. The reason is perhaps that teen films do not simply have young people as its subject but also target them. The ‘break’ with parents in teen films may be a way of making the targeting more effective by keeping the space of the narrative excluded to the older generation. It is this ‘exclusivity’ of the narrative space that enables teen films to parody ‘adult’ notions like patriotism, as in Grease 2 (1982) in which boy and girl sing ‘We’ll do it for our country’ as part of a seduction, without the film incorporating radical political discourse. While there is an apparent journey towards monogamous heterosexuality with a suggestion of future family formation in teen films, more important is the sense to be derived from them that that they celebrate youth and health. If the ‘inner body’ refers to the maintenance of the body, its protection from disease, abuse and deterioration, the ‘outer body’ refers to the appearance and the employment of the body within the social space. Consumer culture, with advertising at its helm, has, in the past few decades, increasingly focused on the young–outer body as a vehicle for self-expression, achievement and pleasure. Images of the body—beautiful, openly sexual and associated with hedonism, leisure and display—emphasise the importance of appearance and ‘look’.6 It is in this context that films like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) are significant. All these are ‘slasher’ films in which a group of young people are attacked one by one and done to gruesome death usually by someone unknown. Where teen films focus on the young body as an object of envy or desire, these films create uneasiness around it. The object of fetish in teen films is deliberately dismembered, sometimes dwelling with relish on mutilation. Another important aspect is that, where

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teen films try to exclude the older generation from the narrative space, these films are about the difficulty of such exclusion. In Nightmare on Elm Street, young people are killed by the ghost of a man who was burned alive by mothers after he was acquitted in court on the charge of murdering children. In the other two films, young people, in their eagerness to have fun, are responsible for deaths, and the killings revolve around the dead person, or an agent, seeking vengeance. There is, therefore, the sense that the sins of the past are inherited by the young. While the films just cited try to create uneasiness around the young body, most of them are too apprehensive to venture into truly ‘disreputable’ terrain. They try to compensate through sudden violence. But to rely on the analogy used earlier, the ‘bitterness of the pill’ may make the impossible ailment believable, but it does not guarantee unease from it, and the teen–horror film has increasingly been domesticated. To provide a more successful instance of the creation of unease, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) draws from both horror and pornography in its subversion of teen film convention and ventures boldly into disreputable territory. Although it is not as gruesome as Friday the 13th or I know what you did Last Summer, it is much more disconcerting. This leads us to suspect that it is cult cinema in which one can find the truly disreputable and transgressive.7 The popular is perhaps too much hostage to dominant ideologies to be adversarial. If cult cinema proceeds by extending the scope of artistic expression, popular horror films like I know what you did Last Summer even stereotype the ‘impossible’.

The Indian Nation and the Horror Film Issues like consumer culture, monogamous heterosexuality and the family that feature prominently in mainstream cinema, and sometimes subverted by the horror film, are often implicated in the ‘nation’ and can hence be regarded as aligned with the ideology

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of the nation-state. The unease generated by Blue Velvet can be linked to its subversion of the comforting mythology around the small-town community (Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, 2016), and most disturbing horror films often subvert cherished national values. If America is inscribed in mainstream Hollywood cinema through certain cherished values, often through valourisation of the family and the motivated individual, mainstream Hindi cinema relies on other strategies to admit the Indian nation into its narratives. The idea of the nation is often accompanied in this cinema by associated notions—land, state and tradition, to name a few. The state has a strong presence from the 1950s onwards, and is emblemised by the police and the judiciary. The land was perhaps notably represented when agrarian issues dominated public consciousness as in Upkaar (1969). Some of the other notions have weakened, but tradition has been the most durable among them. The favoured (although not the only) way of representing tradition is for an elderly character (usually a parent) becoming a moral signpost directing or judging. In Deewar (1975), when Vijay’s mother leaves him to live with her younger son, a police officer, the discourse is partly that tradition is aligned with the state. The community is another presence in cinema, but it could be a way of allegorising the nation since it is often given the nation’s attributes. In Mother India (1957), the community is the village, and in Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (HAHK, 1994), Kailas Nath’s family gatherings represent the community. In Border (1998), the community is the military, while in Lagaan (2002), it is a cricket team. In each of these films the community is constituted to include religious minorities, different castes and social classes. The community, like the nation, commands loyalty, and betraying it or its creed merits punishment. This sanctity accorded to the community means that it has a greater significance than suggested by its physical constitution. To explicate, the village in Mother India is not merely

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an Indian village, just as the cricket team in Lagaan is not merely a village cricket team. The community, as the nation in microcosm, also means that the deepest conflict in the narrative are arranged within and not caused by agencies external to it. The character(s) at the moral centre of the narrative, as well as those creating discord are, therefore, part of the community, as in Mother India, HAHK and Lagaan. A characteristic of the nation in mainstream Hindi films is that it is ‘modern’. If films after 1947 are frequently set in the city, the city is also an emblem of Nehruvian modernity.8 The city is not always the chosen locale, and there are other motifs associated with modernity. When farmers are the key motif, modernity can be represented by dams (as in Mother India) or mechanised farming (as in Upkaar). In later films, doctors, colleges and industry can also serve as useful emblems of modernity. The Hindi mainstream film was once labelled ‘fantasy’, but what is important here is that occult elements (‘magic’ and rituals associated with it) rarely feature in it. As has been convincingly argued,9 the reform movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries consciously tried to remake India in the image of the colonisers, and this explains why mainstream films—since they address the post-colonial nation—eschew the magical elements in which tradition had once been rich. Even mythology was rejected by mainstream films in their mature years, and the kind of mythological films favoured were saint films (Sant Tukaram, 1936) in which the issue is social reform, an off-shoot of modernity, rather than gods and demons of the Puranas. Devotion is allowed,10 as is reincarnation; still, these are cornerstones of Hindu belief and are not fantastic, just as the power of faith and redemption (Ben-Hur, 1959) cannot be termed fantastic when we deal with Hollywood. If fantasy still flourishes in regional-language popular films, it is because regional cinema is not national in the way that Hindi films are, and primarily addresses local identities.

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In defining fantasy, Tzvetan Todorov11 concentrates on the responses generated by ‘fantastic’ events in stories. In this light, fantasy must be considered not just one mode but three. Fantasy creates a situation in which the reader/audience experiences feelings of hesitation and awe, provoked by strange, improbable events. If the implausibility of the events can be explained rationally or psychologically (as, for instance, dreams and hallucinations), then the term ‘uncanny’ is applied. In stories like The Lord of the Rings, in which an alternative world or reality is created, the term ‘marvellous’ is considered most appropriate to describe the work. Going by this definition, it is largely the horror film that corresponds to ‘fantasy’ in Hindi cinema, and the genre is distinctly outside the mainstream.12 To get a rough idea of the horror film in India, I propose to examine two films made twenty-five years apart. The first film, Purana Mandir (1984), was made by Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay, who are generally associated with horror films. The pre-title sequence in the film is set in a bygone century in which a shaitaan (demon) named Samri runs amok and attacks princess Rupali. King Hariman Singh’s men arrest Samri, and the shaitaan is tried, found guilty and beheaded. At the time Samri pronounces the following curse upon the king: ‘So long as my head is away from my body, every woman in your line shall die at childbirth; and when my head is rejoined to my body, I will arise and wipe out every living person in your dynasty.’ The head and the body are, therefore, kept apart, a trishul (trident) chained to the box containing the body, so that Samri does not return to life. The film then moves to contemporary times, in which the king’s descendant, Thakur Ranvir Singh (Pradeep Kumar), lives in an unnamed city. This part of the film deals with the king’s apprehension at his daughter falling in love because of Samri’s curse on the family. When the daughter, Suman (Aarti Gupta), who is in college learns about it, she and her boyfriend, Sanjay (Mohnish Behl), proceed to the ancient

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haveli (mansion) in which Samri is still interred. The shaitaan finally appears before he is destroyed through guidance from the God Shiva. The second film Shaapit (2010), which is directed by Vikram Bhatt, also features a king’s family and begins around 350 years ago with a curse by which any female descendant born into the family will die in an accident. The rest of the story is in the present, with Kaya unable to marry Aman because of the curse. This time, however, there is a professor of the occult named Pashupathi (Rahul Dev) who assists them. The three return to the family’s ancestral place and uncover a story of royal intrigue, which engendered the evil spirit in the present. Like in the other film, Shaapit also ends with the monster being destroyed forever. While mainstream Hindi films of the 1980s are virtually unrecognisable when one compares them with the cinema of around 2010, the two horror films cited earlier are much closer to each other in their motifs. Both films are fantasies in a Todorovian sense because there is an initial (though nominal) disinclination on the part of the protagonists to believe in the story of the curses. Both films invoke the modern: in Purana Mandir, this is confined to the lifestyles of the protagonists, but Professor Pashupathi in Shaapit is a ‘scientist’ and the author of several books. Pashupathi also uses Western academic vocabulary often to justify his theories. There is a sense in both films of modernity not being equipped to account for certain kinds of experience unless it is redefined to include the spiritual/ irrational. Third, both films involve ghosts/demons created in royal households and invoke a pre-colonial past, though colonisation itself finds no mention in the narratives. It is only by acknowledging the accumulated spiritual ‘knowledge’ of the past that the protagonists are able to combat the forces aligned against them. Attention may also be drawn to the fact that in both films, while the evil is dealt with summarily in the pre-colonial past, modernity appears to fumble when it resurfaces.

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Another factor of some importance is both films keeping apart the descendants of the erstwhile royal families—those affected by the curses—and other folk, as though the two categories did not belong within the same community. While a key motif is the romantic attachment between members of the two groups, there is a residual unease at the conclusion as though a union between the two would still be hazardous. If the timeline of the story traverses 300 years or more, it is apparent that the hero and the heroine have taken different trajectories, and that they are not equal within the nation and the distance between them is not just a matter of one family being wealthier than the other. This is also given emphasis in Shaapit when Kaya’s parents ignore Aman and hardly acknowledge his presence. There is apparently more than the curse keeping Aman and Kaya apart, the film suggests. There is, therefore, a strong sense of the nation being a heterogeneous mix, and not entirely the ‘community’ in which differences are resolvable, as mainstream films would have it, and it is from the interstices in the heterogeneity that the monster emerges. Hindi mainstream films are disinclined to deal with historical time,13 although period films with romance as the key motif (Jodhaa Akbar, 2008) or patriotic films set in the colonial past (Lagaan, 2001) are routine today. But the important fact is that there is scarcely any mainstream film that deals with the distant past and the present as part of the same linear continuum. The past referred to here is not necessarily recorded history because there are various other ways in which sense can be made of the present. Partha Chatterjee cites a Puranic history of India written in the 18th century that tries to make sense of the Battle of Plassey of 1757, which took place in the historian’s childhood, in Puranic terms.14 While other non-Western cinemas of the world like African and Chinese are able to deal with the past in similarly mythological terms,15 mainstream Hindi films appear strangely handicapped. My argument is that mainstream

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cinema’s address being directed entirely towards post-colonial nation, its modern self-image prevents it from using the Puranas. Horror films, which are outside the mainstream and perhaps impervious to the modern nation, are not only able to rely on a Puranic sense of the past, but even suggest that modernity might benefit from Puranic instruction. Ashis Nandy, as a critic of rationality and enlightenment, has seen popular cinema as a response to the deadening homogenisation and standardisation wrought by the modernist imperative upon a variety of traditional cultures,16 but this is truer of the fantastic cinema outside the mainstream, notably horror films, because mainstream Hindi films, to all appearances, are still hostage to post-colonial modernity, as embodied in the nation after 1947. In summary, to single out a characteristic of the two horror films just described, they convey the sense of post-colonial modernity being unable to bring individual histories together or, to phrase it differently, integrate subnarratives resisting subsumption by the narrative of national history.

The Pakistani Horror Film Unlike Indian cinema that has been well-served by film theorists, very little theorising has apparently been done for cinema in Pakistan. This means that we will have to rely entirely on the evidence of the horror films examined to draw any conclusions. As in the previous section, I have chosen two Pakistani films set forty years apart but not alike in their motifs. The first film, Zinda Laash (Khwaja Sarfaraz, 1967), was also the first X-rated film in Pakistan and it almost got banned. The film is actually a reworking of the story of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, with the difference that Mr Hyde is modelled on the figure of Dracula and is a blood-sucking vampire. In the film, Dr Tabani is experimenting on an elixir that, he believes, will grant him immortality. Matters, however, work out differently and he dies. When his assistant discovers this, she carries his corpse into a crypt in the basement, but

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the scientist comes back to life and is now a vampire; his assistant also becomes a vampire soon enough. The rest of the film follows the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula quite closely. Dr Aqil, an associate of Dr Tabani, is also the vampire’s victim, and looking for Aqil is his brother. Aqil has a fiancée named Shabnam, who the vampire Tabani lusts for. After she too becomes a vampire—and even abducts children—her brother steps in and intervenes. Dr Tabani is finally destroyed when the hero prays to God and an accident happens. He dislodges a screen from the window and the sunlight streaming into the room destroys the vampire. The first observation to be made about Zinda Laash is that, where the Indian examples cited in the last section and Bram Stoker’s novel are ‘fantastic’, the film may be defined as ‘uncanny’, that is, rational explanations are provided at every step. The film begins with a dedication to God, but declines to invoke the occult or even divinity, although it does leave itself open to religious interpretation.17 Faith, I propose, is sufficiently elastic to allow an Islamic artefact the same qualities as the cross in the Dracula films. In an Indian vampire film Bandh Darwaza (Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay, 1990), the vampire is equally defenceless against the Cross, the Hindu Om and the Koran. The accident that lets the sunlight in at the conclusion of Zinda Laash can be attributed to the hero’s prayers, but most films about religious belief have no difficulty in introducing God-induced miracles, and the film’s disinclination to do so here (making it an accident) should be taken note of. The deliberate banality of the chosen resolution leads one to interpret the ending as agnostic, and the film is perhaps suggesting that there are man-made things outside God’s purview. Of course, since the first cause in Zinda Laash is the failure of a scientific experiment, it might destroy the compositional unity of the film for religion to provide the eventual solution, but the issue is this: why pick on science at all for the initial disturbance? The film faced censor trouble only for its suggestive dances, but I would

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like to argue that just as Indian horror cinema chooses the occult for the initial disturbance as a way of resisting post-colonial modernity, Zinda Laash chooses science as a way of resisting the religious nation. Where Zinda Laash is tentative in its horror, Omar Khan’s Zibahkhana (2007) is ferocious. The film was a huge multiplex success in Rawalpindi, so much so that a private screening for students in Lahore virtually caused a riot, but Benazir Bhutto’s assassination saw it withdrawn.18 The film brings together the zombie film (The Night of the Living Dead, 1968) and the splatter film (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974) and is, once again, uncanny rather than fantastic. In this film, a group of five college students set out for a concert and take a short cut across unfamiliar terrain outside the city. When they stop in a patch of degraded forest close to a polluted stream, they run into a bunch of zombies, evidently created by the pollution. One of the zombies bites the leg of a member of the group, who gets ‘infected’ even as other members try to escape, but only to get deeper into the forest. When they meet a fakir, who offers to guide them, they admit him into the car, but he soon starts attacking them. The fakir is finally caught under their car but his death is of little avail because they run into a zibahkhana (slaughterhouse) deeper in the forest, where a burqa-clad cannibal is on the loose. And it turns out that the owners are providing human meat to the zombies the group encountered earlier. While Zibahkhana also begins with a prayer to God, one cannot help but notice that the film itself is far from religious. Apart from the film providing a first cause, industrial pollution, which is outside the purview of religion, and being a critique of the fetish of meat-eating,19 it uses images associated with religious instruction to evoke horror. Since the fakir is a religious person, and the burqa an attire prescribed by Islam, having a burqa-clad cannibal may even be considered antireligious.20 Where the Indian horror films and Zinda Laash offer resistance to the dominant ideologies of their respective nations,

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it is not unreasonable to argue that Zibahkhana goes further—it is consciously adversarial. Coming to the spectators’ profile of Pakistani horror films, one gets a sense that it is vastly different from that of Hindi horror films. Industry data is hard to come by, but Hindi horror films are more successful in single-screen dominated circuits rather than in multiplexes.21 This suggests that Hindi horror film audiences are not from the upwardly mobile society of the metropolitan cities, but more from smaller towns and places where admissions are cheaper. Horror films may be addressing a class economically lower than those attuned to mainstream films, perhaps a public (or an aspect of the public) less integrated with the ‘modern nation’. Regarding Pakistani audiences, here too, no industry data is available, but the portrayal of college students in Zibahkana as modern and carefree corresponds to those portrayed in Bollywood youth films like Wake up Sid (2009), for instance, which was a multiplex success.22 It can be argued on the basis of this limited data that Pakistani horror films address the same class within Pakistan that some multiplex Hindi films address within India—the economically middle and upper echelons. This implies that, while the dominant ideology of modernity within India is maintained by the upper-class elite, the elite in Pakistan has little or no control over the dominant ideology of the nation, which is rigidly Islamic regardless of who is ruling the country politically. The elite or educated class is actually resisting this dominant ideology. The political factor of pertinence with regard to the creation of Pakistan is that the Muslim community in India had a very small middle-class population. In Pakistan, apart from medical doctors, lawyers and the clergy, everyone of ability apparently gravitated to high posts in the government or the army.23 This meant there was a large class-gap between the leaders of the Muslim League and their followers. Jinnah himself was elegant and Westernised,24 and far from the devout Muslim that future leaders of what would become a

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theocratic Islamic state would be, while the bulk of his followers were different. Since Pakistan was created on religious grounds, it became Islamic, although Jinnah himself might have wanted it to be secular. The elite class represented by leaders of the Muslim League has continued to rule Pakistan, and much of the class is educated abroad but, apparently, their following has gradually imposed its collective will on Pakistan’s leadership, although this was evidently facilitated by Islamisation under President Zia ul-Haq. To all appearances Zibakhana is an elite-class subversion of Islamic nationalism.

Conclusion This chapter has been about horror films, or rather, cult horror and the resistance of the genre to dominant ideologies for which mainstream cinema is often a useful vehicle. Cult horror films create unease around certain valorised notions or objects, and goes beyond merely creating disgust or revulsion. To recognise this, one needs to only look at the unease generated by a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which makes it seem that nothing will be forbidden to the spectator. Even if the overtly political reading given to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is disregarded as ‘implausible’, the disquiet it generates may still be understood as resistance to the covert ideological coercion inherent in popular entertainment. A mainstream horror film, like The Exorcist, does not perform the same role, and actually reinforces the dominant ideology. Where The Texas Chainsaw Massacre locates its narrative in a marginal part of America, a corner hidden away from public attention, The Exorcist not only locates its action plum in the middle of mainstream America, but may also be interpreted as a warning to Christian America that reinforces dominant religious prejudices. For reasons already explained, there is little in Indian (Hindi) cinema that corresponds to mainstream horror—far from it, the horror film is B-category cinema resisting dominant ideologies of modern India, but hardly adversarial. At the same time, there has never been any

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kind of cult cinema in India to generate any ‘political’ disquiet. One reason may be that Indian film aesthetics, as has now been sufficiently demonstrated, is based not on cognition but on recognition, and the fan knows what to expect. Thus, the Hindi film is a particular product of the ‘aesthetics of identity’ rather than ‘aesthetics of opposition’.25 A typical, but also trivial product of the latter, is the detective story, which functions, as a rule, on the basis of the reader’s ignorance of ‘whodunit’. If familiarity is demanded, films will be hard-pressed to produce shock and disquiet of the kind generated by cult horror films. This explains the predictability of Indian horror films. Pakistani horror films are not very different, although Zibahkhana is more adversarial. These films draw their plots from well-known literary or film material like Dracula and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the borrowing perhaps also owes to the need to reproduce the familiar. Art cinema in India might also have included cult cinema, and become the ideal vehicle for producing disquiet. But the fact that it depends entirely on state patronage has produced different results. Art cinema in India is virtually fulfilling the cultural agenda of the state by dealing with subjects publicly regarded as important— human rights, communalism, agrarian issues etc. Selection for the Indian Panorama at the International Film Festival of India that showcases films presenting an ‘authentic’ picture of India is crucial for art cinema. This means that a large number of these art films unwittingly serve the modern Indian state as cultural artefacts. This evidently prevents it from producing cult cinema like Blue Velvet, which might cause acute disquiet and actually become adversarial.

Notes and References  1. Noël Carroll, ‘Why Horror?’, in Horror: The Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 37.  2. Frederic Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary History 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1975): 133–163.

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  3. Tania Modleski, ‘The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 694. The term ‘ideological apparatus’ is derived from the writing of Louis Althusser. According to Althusser, ideological state apparatuses (for example, religion, education, the family, media, culture) function as indirect control structures because modern hegemony is not exercised by direct coercion but by achieving the consent of the dominated through the use of the media and institutions. See also, Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 127–186.  4. Robin Wood, ‘Introduction’, in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, eds. A. Button, R. Lippe, T. Williams and R. Wood (Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979), 20–22.  5. Joan Hawkins, ‘Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash and High Art: The Place of European Art Films in American Low Culture’, in Horror: The Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 125–134.   6. Mike Featherstone, ‘The Body in Consumer Culture’, Theory, Culture and Society 1, no. 2 (September 1982): 18–33.  7. Robin Wood, ‘Introduction’, in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, eds. A. Button, R. Lippe, T. Williams and R. Wood (Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979), 7–28. A characteristic of the horror film is that—like art cinema—it caters to a cult following.   8. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998), 61.  9. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 10. I mean devotion leading to a happy outcome because of divine intervention. An example would be the family dog empowered by divinity to assist in the resolution of misunderstandings as in HAHK. 11. Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), 24–40. 12. The regional cinemas—Telugu and Kannada specifically—are often rich in fantasy and mythological elements. They address local identities within India. 13. M.K. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 31–40.

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14. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 84–85. 15. For instance, the Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou has even attained international recognition though his mythological treatment of Chinese ‘history’, for example, Hero (2002). African filmmakers who have attained renown include Suleymane Cisse from Mali—Yeleen (1987). 16. Ashis Nandy, ‘An Intelligent Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema’, Deep Focus I, no. I (December 1987): 69. 17. For instance, see http://www.braineater.com/zinda.html. Accessed on 17 January 2009. 18. Achal Prabhala, ‘31 Flavours of Death’, Pulp, issue no. 15, Bidoun. See www.bidoun.com. Accessed on 25 September 2019. 19. There has been a move to persuade Pakistanis to consume less meat because it is ‘Islamic’. See http://www.defence.pk/forums/world-affairs/70745-eatingless-meat-more-islamic.html 20. Achal Prabhala, ‘31 Flavours of Death’, Pulp, Issue no. 15, Bidoun. See www.bidoun.com. Accessed on 25 September 2019. Unlike the makers of Indian horror films who do not talk about their films as political, here is Omar Khan, the articulate director of Zibahkhana on the burqa, which apparently frightened him as a child: ‘(it is) a fantastically gothic and dramatic outfit that manages to strip all expression, emotion and warmth from a human face.’ 21. This appears true of Shaapit. See http://fenilandbollywood.com/tag/ shaapit/.Accessed on 18 January 2009. 22. http://satyamshot.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/jayshah%E2%80%99ssaturday-box-office-column-%E2%80%93-wake-up-sid-good-inmultiplexes-do-knot-disturb-weak/.Accessed on 25 September 2009. 23. Spear, ‘Percival’, A History of India 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 223. 24. Spear, ‘Percival’, 228. 25. Lothar Lutze, ‘From Bharata to Bombay: Change and Continuity in Hindi Film Aesthetics’, in The Hindi Film: Agent and Re-agent of Cultural Change, eds. Beatrix Pfleiderer and Lothar Lutze (Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1985), 5.

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7

A Trajectory of Form The Development of Soviet/Russian Cinema (1910–2010) The Trajectory of a National Cinema Tracing the development of form and narration in a national cinema has generally not been an onerous task. Whether from Hollywood, France or India, cinema follows the earliest precedents in most ways. Individual motivation, for instance, drove the action in D.W. Griffith’s films, as it still does in American cinema. The exceptions may be the cinemas of countries that have gone through political upheaval or turmoil—like Germany and Russia. The dominant film form is not accidentally adopted, but is historically and politically engendered, and the cinemas of Germany and Russia, understandably, bear little resemblance to their respective cinemas of the 1920s. If associating the changes in film form with political transformation is a complicated task, Russian cinema, being formally more distinguished, offers a greater challenge today. Soviet cinema attained renown through its use of montage in the 1920s; however, Russian cinema is not only difficult to pigeonhole but is also marked by a variety that defeats characterisation. Still, ‘variety’ itself could be its defining feature after 2000 and may have arisen for political reasons. While providing information cannot be avoided, the following is, essentially, an attempt at interpreting politically the trajectory of Soviet/Russian cinema from the 1920s to the new millennium, through films. The conjecture is that while 165

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politics may not entirely determine film forms, it nonetheless influences its direction in time.

The Artistic Roots of Russian Cinema The first thing that draws one’s attention in accounts of the reception accorded to cinema in Russia in the early part of the 20th century is the amount of intellectual debate generated around it. The accounts have us believe that even in the 1900s writers like Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy and a host of major artists, intellectuals and literary theorists and critics had become involved in the understanding of cinema’s essential nature, and the way it transformed humankind’s understanding of itself and the world.1 Unlike in America where cinema began as an essentially lowbrow exercise, the desire in Russian cinema to compete with ‘high art’ was present from the very beginning. The story of how the first Russian feature film, Alexander Drankov’s version of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (1907), was made is indicative of this. Pushkin’s play had always been considered difficult to stage, and Stanislavski had suggested breaking up the action into a series of fragmented excerpts, and this was the model followed by the Moscow Art Theatre that staged the play in 1907. The resemblance of this production to cinema was duly commented upon by the audience, and the idea of filming the performance caught Drankov.2 This bias towards the classics as subject matter for cinema accounted for ‘Russian endings’—tragic fates emulating those in classical tragedy rather than the happy endings common to Western film melodramas,3 which were demonstrably lighter in literary content. A characteristic of the Russian cinema of the 1910s was the immobility of the characters. But rather than signifying directorial deficiencies, the static mise-en-scène, in actual fact, was the result of a conscious aesthetic program. A theorist of the period divided the schools of cinematography into three kinds: (a) that based on

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movement as in the American school, (b) the one based on forms as in the European school and (c) the psychological Russian school.4 Later, in 1916, the champions of Russian style began to call American and French cinema ‘film drama’, a genre that in their view was superficial. ‘Film drama’ was contrasted with ‘film story’, the preferred genre of Russian cinema. ‘Film story’, it was said, breaks decisively with all the established views on the essence of the cinematographic picture because it repudiates movement. The resulting ‘aesthetics of immobility’ could be traced back to two sources: the psychological pauses of the Moscow Art Theatre and the acting style of Danish and Italian cinemas. When they came together in Russian cinema, these sources formed a new synthesis: The operatic posturing of the Italian diva acquired psychological motivation, while the acoustic and intonational pauses of the Moscow Art Theatre found its plastic equivalent on the screen. That gave rise to the minimalist technique of the Russian film actor, which was put to use by the style of film direction which developed,5 in contrast to which American acting was too ‘fidgety’. Another feature of silent Russian cinema before the revolution was the importance given to the inter-title. Rather than merely directing the action, the inter-title in silent cinema was seen as literary. A short story was preferred as the source of a screen adaptation rather than a play made from the same story. Equality was proposed between the inter-title and the images like in an illustrated book. Also popular before 1917 was recitation with a lecturer-as-commentator with suitable academic paraphernalia to make it look intellectual. Lev Tolstoy himself was excited by the idea of cinema with such a commentary.6 With the revolution in 1917, a possible influence upon cinema was also that of constructivism, an artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art

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as a practice for social purposes. Its influence was pervasive, with major impacts upon architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music. Although the communists were beset on all sides and a ferocious civil war was being fought, the importance of cinema was understood by the communist state. On the front were always cameramen shooting the war, and directors like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein began their artistic/ film careers in the Red Army—while Soviet cinema itself was in a terrible state in 1920, not only because many prominent people of cinema had become émigrés in Europe, but also because industry was in tatters on account of the ongoing civil war. Soviet cinema began its process of consolidation in 1921 with the end of military hostilities and the New Economic Policy (NEP) that permitted free trade.7 One can say that during the few years beginning with 1924, Soviet was at its avant-garde best, not only with the experiments in montage by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Pudovkin, but also in set design where the influence of the constructivists can be seen as in Yakov Protazanov’s science fiction film Aelita8. Still, it was montage rather than set design that earned for Soviet cinema its place in film history.

Montage and Choreography As will be familiar to students of film history, the key notion at the heart of early Soviet cinema is montage, although each filmmaker– theorist—Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov and Kuleshov, to name the important ones—approached it differently. In contrast to Hollywood editing, which simply tried to deliver the story to the audience with minimal interference through an emphasis on continuity, the Soviet school saw montage (the French term for editing) as creating meaning in a different way altogether, sometimes through rhythmic manipulation, sometimes by using it as metaphor and sometimes as an intellectual tool in the service of (usually

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political) ideas of a more abstract nature. The key notion underlying montage theory of the early Soviet era is that meaning does not exist in the individual shots; it only arises when they are juxtaposed, that is, through montage that apparently had its origins partly in the rhythm of the dance.9 Since the effects that early Soviet filmmakers obtained through montage were striking, one would have expected montage theory to grow from strength to strength. As it happened, however, most of the filmmakers abandoned it in the 1930s without theoretical bases being provided. Eisenstein, the most celebrated filmmaker– theorist went on to make Ivan the Terrible in two parts (1944, 1958), which seem, compositionally, closer to German expressionism than to the filmmaker’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). An even better illustration is perhaps the difference between two films by Mikhail Kalatozov: Nail in the Boot (1931), which uses montage and rhythm to telling effect and his later The Cranes are Flying (1957), in which he uses mise-en-scène, the uncut tracking shot, particularly. As already reiterated, montage and mise-en-scène represent polarities in film style/emphasis, the first corresponding to dismemberment of film space in order to strengthen expressivity, and the second to maintaining its integrity. While there was little aesthetic justification from Soviet filmmakers for abandoning montage, it has been noted by film historians that the end of montage as the operating principle happened under Stalin for political rather than aesthetic reasons. With censorship of films becoming much more severe, it was found that screenplays were more easily scrutinised, and this meant an insistence on screenplays as the source of cinema rather than montage.10 But the way in which screenplays could be subverted by completed films was also demonstrated by Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Part 2), the screenplay of which was approved11 by the censors, but banned when the completed film was seen by officials in 1946. After the 1920s, therefore, montage is less in evidence, although some of its effects are still achieved differently.

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Another important aspect of filmmaking in which Soviet cinema attained proficiency in the 1920s was choreography. Choreographed movement in Soviet cinema apparently had its origins in the works of theorists like Frenchman F.A. Delsarte, the Swiss J. Dalcroze and Delsarte’s disciple Jean d’Udine, which had its initial influence in theatre. There was, in the 1910s and early 1920s, a reaction against the methods of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre, which later gained ground in the US, and the works of these theorists offered an alternative. Delsarte’s teaching consisted to a large extent in the accentuation of the rhythmic side of mime and gesture. Dalcroze created a system of rhythmic gymnastics that was extremely popular in the 1910s, and on which he based an original aesthetic theory. Delsarte’s ideas began to penetrate Russia at the very beginning of the 20th century and achieved real popularity around 1910–1913 when a former director of the Imperial Theatres, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, became its advocate. Volkonsky published a series of articles on Delsarte and Dalcroze in the periodical Apollon and, under that periodical’s imprint, several books giving a detailed exposition of the new acting system. The Volkonsky system compared man to a dynamo through which the ‘synaesthetic’ rhythmic–inductive impulses pass. The proposition is that human emotion is expressed in external movement, and movement can ‘inductively’ provoke in the spectator the same emotion that gave rise to the movement. It is maintained that for every emotion, of whatever kind, there is a corresponding body movement of some sort, and it is through that movement that the complex synaesthetic transfer accompanying any work of art is accomplished. The Delsartian ‘technological’ part of the system is essentially orientated towards the search for a precise record of gesture, its segmentation like musical notation and the exposure of the psychological content of each gesture.12 It was through theatre that these ideas penetrated film circles, and the first traces of their

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influence can be found around 1916. By 1918–1919, among filmmakers there was already an entire group of followers of Delsarte and Dalcroze. By coincidence, there were among them a number of filmmakers who actively supported Soviet power and, as a result, occupied key posts in cinema immediately after the October Revolution. The desire to divide action into minute physiological elements (and the enormous role attributed to the eye in this process) led Vladimir Gardin13 towards the widespread use of close-ups, that is, the cutting off of the actor by the frame of the shot, which was partly analogous to Delsarte’s ‘independence of the limbs from one another’. The implication of montage in the system may be gauged from Gardin’s experiments with the model actor taking the form of a series of exercises with ‘velvet screens’. With the aid of these screens he formed a window whose shape resembled the frame of a film shot. Into the window he put the face of the actor who had to work out precise mimic reflex reactions to externally provided stimuli. One can see in this a precursor to Lev Kuleshov’s celebrated experiments with the actor Ivan Mozhukin. Kuleshov, it must be recalled, cut the actor’s same impassive countenance to different stimuli to suggest different emotions. There were many other theorists and practitioners, like Alexander Tairov, Vsevelod Meyerhold and Boris Fernandinov, working with actors and trying to understand the human body as a machine. While this is enormously interesting to anyone interested in the evolution of film language, it is only necessary to understand at this point that stage movements were being understood as akin to poetry and music,14 and choreography was, essentially, akin to music. Since Vsevolod Pudovkin’s theories of montage were deeply influential, it may be useful to look at the choreography in his Mother (1926) to understand what choreography meant in the 1920s. Other filmmakers like Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), Dovzhenko (Arsenal, 1929) and Mikhail Kalatozov (Nail in the Boot, 1931) did

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not use montage in the same way, but whatever is concluded about Pudovkin may be broadly applicable to their films as well.15

Mother (1926) At the beginning of Pudovkin’s Mother is a sequence in which the drunken Father returns home and tries to appropriate the clock to pawn it for more vodka. This sequence is edited in the recognisable Pudovkin’s way: Father entering room (long shot, low angle), close-up of belligerent father with bloodshot eyes glancing right and left, sleeping son, father looking ahead, clock hanging on the wall, mother staring tiredly back, father (long shot) striding forward, mother’s eyes following him, father detaching the iron hanging from the clock, putting it into his pocket (close-up), father looking up at clock (long shot)…. While movement in this sequence is caught entirely through montage, the effects are obtained by combining concordant elements in the manner of orchestrated music. This is even truer of the sequence that follows: a pub scene in which workers are ‘resting’ after work. It is important here that Pudovkin also has the means to convey movement without using montage, because this means that movement, and not the cut, is the primary interest. In the pub scene, for instance, there are inclusive shots in which activities of different kinds are happening at the same time: a waiter serving someone, a drunkard staggering from his chair towards the counter, an orchestra in the top left-hand corner, people dancing in the far distance to the right. These inclusive shots are immediately cut to tighter others, in which details are singled out, but the presence of the inclusive long view is unmistakable, as is Pudovkin’s orchestration of movement within a single frame. When Pudovkin shows two or more faces within a single frame, the faces either represent different character types or are composed differently, like the three men at a table watching a disturbance, each one studying it with a marginally different attitude—attention, irony and indifference.

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That this is ‘composed’ like music, with harmony as the operating principle, and is not simply a ‘realistic’ depiction of an actual scene, is suggested by the fact that D.W. Griffith, who influenced the Soviets greatly, does not have the same capabilities at his command. Birth of Nation (1915), for instance, handles its action differently. Griffith’s film rarely has two or more faces within a single frame, and groups are shot from a distance without ‘choreographing’ crowd movement. In an early segment dealing with a flock of abolitionists, a seated group is filmed from behind so that we do not catch individual faces; the only countenance, seen from a distance, is that of a man getting contributions. Pudovkin’s film also has a depth of focus that Griffith’s film does not, which, therefore, incorporates more detail. If Griffith is simply showing contributions being collected, one can imagine Pudovkin doing the same scene: the congregation responding to an expectation in a less than uniform way—with enthusiasm, indifferent submission as well as resistance.

Realism and ‘Polyphony’ Soviet realism and montage were contrasted unfavourably by André Bazin with the kind of realism in which mise-en-scène (rather than montage) is the operating principle (like the work of the Italian neorealists), but the films of the early Soviet directors have a virtue that remains largely unmatched—their sense of movement as orchestrated music. The important thing is that choreography consists of combining individual actions that are not alike—when brought together, they suggest a whole that is not simply a collection of its constituent parts. ‘Choreography’ as thus understood involves composing ‘movement’ in a broader sense, because movement is created by juxtaposition (within the same frame or through the cut) rather than catching physical activity. A collection of faces at a table, set differently although directed towards one stimulus, would imply choreography.

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The first thought about choreography in silent Soviet cinema is that it is simply a technique that can be learned, but its implications also go deeper; cinema in the Stalin era appears to lose it. I compared Pudovkin’s Mother with Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. It is widely understood that Pudovkin was influenced by Griffith and tried simply to bring the story together, while Eisenstein employed deliberately ‘explosive’ editing effects to make emotional responses stronger. Still, Griffith is making us absorb the film at the plot or story level and empathise it, while Pudovkin is making us aware of its construction. Pudovkin’s deviation from Griffith arises because, like the constructivists and Bertolt Brecht in later theatre, the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s tried to create an audience that would be one of active viewers. It is not enough for Pudovkin that the audience is manipulated into empathising; he demands that it engages actively with what it sees on the screen. If there is an attempt here to mobilise the public towards a single political agenda, ‘plane polarise’ as it were, there is also an admission that the public is initially in an unpolarised and unreceptive state from which it needs to be critically aroused. And that is where choreography becomes important. Its application or employment conveys the sense that the world has no single meaning, and that perceptions of its nature are ‘polyphonic’, allowing simultaneity of points of view and voices within a particular narrative plane, though ideological affinities and broad class interests will help subordinate different perceptions. To draw a literary parallel, Mother is like a ‘dialogic text’ in which the constitutive elements are allowed a liberty/ polyphony that although subordinated to the authoritative discourse of Marxist–Leninist doctrine,16 still reveals itself above it. It will perhaps strengthen my argument if Pudovkin’s film is placed alongside Mark Donskoi’s Mother (1956), which adapts the same novel by Maxim Gorky. This is a film which came out in the thaw period after Stalin’s death; but Donskoi, who came into prominence in the Stalin era, made other films (The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, 1938) that

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reveal the same characteristics as his Mother. Donskoi’s film has an early segment comparable to that from Pudovkin’s film: the belligerent father returning to his impoverished home and clashing with his wife and son. The segments from the two films contain differences in their narrative elements—for example, here the son returns from work with his father, while in Pudovkin’s film the son is asleep when the father returns—but more important from the perspective chosen is the use of the ‘eyeline match’ in the two films. In Pudovkin’s film, the father has his eyes only on the clock and the iron, which he wishes to take away, and he notices his wife and son only when they try to stop him, which is when he pushes them aside. In Donskoi’s film, there is palpable hostility between the man and his family, but his acknowledgement of them comes first. It is in their respective use of the eyeline match that the attitudes of the two films are largely manifested.17 When people make eye contact conspicuously, there is an acknowledgement of each other, not only as persons to negotiate with, but also as viewpoints to accommodate. One can conclude that where in Pudovkin’s film the mother and her husband exist on different planes of understanding, but are forced to transact because of the mother’s instinct for survival, Donskoi’s film shows man and wife, despite their underlying distrust of each other, as being together on the same plane—sharing a single understanding of their milieu. The difference between the two couples is this: the first is just two people who live on different planes of awareness (Pudovkin), while the other is mutually distrustful but with the cause of the distrust established between them (Donskoi). If the quality of ‘polyphony’ is in evidence in Pudovkin’s realism but not in Donskoi’s,18 the Stalin era is the period in which the polyphony of Soviet cinema was interrupted, until it reemerges in later cinema, arguably in the later Brezhnev era.

‘Socialist Realism’ and Its Effects In its early days, the Soviet government was internationalist in its aims, but that changed with the ascent of Stalin. Stalin had formulated

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his personal doctrine generally known as ‘socialism in one country’ as early as 1924, and this was apparently in response to Leon Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’, which argued that socialism could not survive in one country but needed to become internationalised.19 Soviet filmmaking, although it declined artistically under Stalin, became a vastly more important ideological exercise than had been imagined by the early theorists. Ideology, in Marxist terms, is constituted largely by unconscious predispositions owing to economic forces of which one is not fully aware. Instead of the audience reacting to cultural issues in a consciously political and critical way,20 it was encouraged to absorb political ideas subliminally so that they became part of an internalised value or belief system. History was central but rather than history being pre-existent to the film, which only ‘adapted’ historical narrative, film became an instrument through which history was ‘constructed’. The use of cinema as a means of constructing history is not restricted to totalitarian systems, but it was used in the 20th century most effectively and deliberately by Hitler21 and Stalin. Stalinism was exceptionally sensitive to the problem of consumption and assimilation of filmic texts and the creation of ideology through the process. Preoccupied with the ideological validation of its own historical legitimacy, and creating a new Soviet identity that was dependent on it, Stalinism relied on cinema, seeing in this ‘most important of the arts’ the most effective form of propaganda and means of organising the masses. Stalin, therefore, directly intervened in the management of Soviet cinematography and devoted attention to it.22 Alongside came the systematic denigration of the pioneers because they had experimented with film structure and narration instead of constructing history in the consciousness of the masses as a singular truth. The films of directors like Eisenstein and Vertov were declared ‘plotless’, which in the new understanding had the same implications as ‘un-ideological’. ‘The plot of a work,’ noted the then head of Soviet

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cinema, Shumyatsky, ‘is the constructed expression of its ideas. The plotless form . . . is powerless to express any significant ideas.’23 As a film historian phrases it: The inevitable and total historicism of Stalinism was linked exactly with its total ‘realism’; the ‘truth of life’ (or the ‘truth of history’) had to shine from the screen with the unfading light of the mimetic.24

Socialist realism, the official aesthetic creed under Stalin, did not simply use history. History proves to be the basis of the legitimacy of Stalinism, and the adjustment of ‘historical images’ was deliberately made to fit their ‘prototypes’ from the past. The middle ages, for instance, were consistently presented as an analogy for the present. It was officially declared that the viewer went to the cinema to become acquainted with reality, and it, therefore, followed that historical and artistic truth were fused inextricably together25. One of the key genres of the Stalin epoch was the biography of a charismatic leader, whether Yemelyan Pugachev, Stenka Razin, Peter the Great, Alexander Suvorov or Pavel Nakhimov. Sergei Eistenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Part 1) received an important state award, but Eisenstein had deliberately shot it in an operatic style with exaggerated gestures, arguably to prevent its reading by the public as ‘real history’. Finances being scarce for filmmaking, it became Soviet film policy in the 1920s that commercial films needed to be made in order to fund the unviable ‘class films’, which was how the experimental work of the pioneers was described. Lenin had died in 1924 and Stalin gradually strengthened his hold on the party thereafter. After initially refusing to take sides on film aesthetics, it became the growing party view that ‘the main criterion for evaluating the formal and artistic qualities of films is the requirement that cinema furnishes a form that is intelligible to the millions’,26 and one can see in this the movement away from a politically critical audience envisaged in the 1920s towards the creation of ‘ideology’. With the demand for entertainment and the arrival of sound, it was natural

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that montage should come under attack from Boris Shumyatsky, who was the de facto executive producer for the state film monopoly from 1930 to 1937. It was at this juncture that the plot was identified as the basis of entertainment and ‘plotless’ films castigated. Montage represented ‘creative atavism’ and plot represented ‘the discipline of the concrete tasks that our mass audience is setting’. Plot necessitated the script and an effective script had to be worked out carefully. ‘At the basis of every feature film lies a work of drama, a play for cinema, a script’,27 was the dictum. Since the classes hostile to the proletariat had then been notionally liquidated, it followed that a responsible task was the creation of ‘joyous spectacle’, and genres like comedy, musicals and even fairy tales thrived. Shumyatsky later visited Hollywood and came up with a gigantic plan to set up a Soviet film city in Crimea. This eventually became too expensive and he fell from favour with Stalin—and was executed in 1938—but he had laid the foundation for popular entertainment in the Stalin era in which some of the most talented filmmakers collaborated.28

Nail in the Boot (1931) and Chapaev (1934) A film not only held to be the culmination of Soviet film practice but also the greatest of Soviet cinema was the Vassiliev brothers’ Chapaev (1934), a civil war drama with an ‘invisible’ editing style. Seeing this alongside an earlier civil war film of Mikhail Kalatozov, Nail in the Boot (1931)—which, although intended as a propaganda film, was banned—reveals the changed aesthetics. Nail in the Boot is about the Red Army losing an armoured train because a nail protruding from a boot prevents a reinforcement message to be carried to the battalion headquarters. Kalatozov’s film uses montage to great effect and is the epitome of the aesthetic likening the human body to a machine. The film is shot and edited in staccato fashion, with the machinery (guns, train, bullets) not differentiated from the human content like soldiers,

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workers and members of a tribunal. The faces chosen are also hard and appear sculpted. Chapaev is about the exploits of a Red Army general who was born a poor peasant but defeated trained generals of the Tsarist White Army. Chapaev is an action film and tries to present the Red Army hero as a human being, warts and all, and there are also light moments with his assistants and the political commissar Fumanov, anecdotes and jokes about whom later became folklore. As against Kalatozov’s film, which may have been shot with a handful of actors, Chapaev has a huge cast, but it is Nail in the Boot that is arguably closer to an ‘epic’. Both films are about the past but it has been argued by Mikhail Bakhtin—in contrasting the epic and the novel—that the past constituting the content of the epic is unimportant. Bakhtin wrote about literature but finding film analogues to his illustrations could assist in understanding cinema as well. As he phrases it, the formally constitutive element of the epic as a genre is the ‘transferal of a represented world into the past’. Nail in the Boot is constructed to draw an elemental lesson from the past and, although it pertains to a moment in the civil war of a decade ago, its participants stand on a different ‘time-and-value plane’ from the filmmaker and the audience.29 The same characteristic is shared by many other films from the period such as Pudovkin’s Mother and Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin as well as Fridrikh Ermler’s Fragments of Empire (1929), which is set in the present but talks about past values. Judging from Bakhtin’s formulations, epic characters are not like us and we cannot identify with them, placing ourselves in their shoes. Chapaev, in contrast, is—like Ben-Hur (1959) or Novecento (1976)—closer to a novel and is enacted with the familiarity of a contemporary story, although the past constitutes its content. One of the criteria by which Bakhtin identifies the novel is its ‘stylistic threedimensionality, which is linked to the multi-language consciousness realised in it.’ This is a characteristic Bakhtin associates with the

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emergence of Europe (where the novel originated) from a ‘socially isolated and culturally deaf society and its entry into international and inter-lingual contacts and relationships’.30 There is a sense to be gained from the novel of communication unhindered; it is as if all the characters in it speak a single tongue, and this is also true of Chapaev, in which everyone understands everyone else. The sense of polyphony to be got from Nail in the Boot arises out of a tacit admission that the plane of the action is an elevated one in which the players have briefly ascended and only by common agreement. The general sense to be got from Chapaev is communication unhindered, even the villains admitted within the same plane of understanding, although their loyalties are different. But one’s immediate question is whether this can be associated with the notion of the ‘plot’ since the cinema of the pioneers was rebuked for favouring ‘plotlessness’ and this plotlessness made the films ‘epic’ in some way. Since plot is associated with causal linkages in the narrative it can be argued that such linking is inhibited by the ‘dialogism’ in a polyphonic text in which there is not enough consonance between the voices for a single causal thread to be pursued.31 Chapaev’s monophonic character is reinforced by the use of character glance and facial compositions that help underline the sense of a common destiny. The steely resolve exhibited by the hard faces in Nail in the Boot point to a commonness of purpose, but it is purpose that is assumed over the resistance offered by the underlying polyphony and the multiplicity of destinies. In Chapaev, there is no indication that ‘resolve’ is necessary because all people are essentially like one. Between Nail in the Boot—in which polyphony is a natural condition, even if it is to be suppressed in the service of a common political end—and Chapaev, something has apparently transpired and this is the moral ‘polarisation’ of the citizenry. The social/ ideological agent causing the polarisation is evidently the Soviet identity, which is still elusive in Nail in the Boot. It can be argued

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that the viewpoint treating ‘man as a machine’ will also deny a human being a ‘national identity’. National identity may, in fact, be a common binding agent across world cinema mediating directly or indirectly in plot construction and, consequently, inhibiting polyphony,32 although this needs more investigation. The hypothesis is nonetheless supported by polyphony coming to the fore once again in the late Brezhnev era when the state, and the Soviet identity it had nurtured, began to weaken. Given the repression in the Stalin epoch—and the amount of red tape routinely required to be overcome—which lasted for two decades, how Soviet cinema survived as an intellectual force needs to be examined because it did not emerge aesthetically weakened but strong after Stalin.

Soviet Cinema under Stalin and Its Survival As regards studios in the Stalin era—Mezhrabpomfilm in the early 1930s and Mosfilm later—there was a high degree of centralisation that increased till the end of the 1930s, until reform was necessitated by frequently paralysed production. The reforms were not ideal and favoured only senior filmmakers. Initially, after the reform, Mosfilm tried to be liberal towards films with questionable Soviet credentials, but that too did not last.33 Another matter of importance is that of film education and training. By the end of the 1920s, the GTK (State School for Cinematography, Moscow) had become dominant. This had been a polytechnic—since cinema had still to prove itself as an academic discipline—but was made an institute in 1930 (GIK). With Shumyatsky as the head of the cinema administration, it became the Higher State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) with the Scientific Research Cinema Institute (NIKFI) integrated into it and a film library and historical archive also established alongside. The cinema administration had the power to appoint the director of the Institute and give approval to important decisions, including those

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that concerned course content. But in practice leaders and teachers were given a great deal of autonomy in devising such content and in the day-to-day running of the Institute. Lecturers produced their own detailed programs, which were then approved by the director of the Institute and the cadres department at Soiuzkino (the cinema administration). Judging by the intellectual freedom granted to figures such as Sergei Eisenstein, administration approval was essentially a formality. Lecturers and professors were often appointed on the basis of their reputation in the cinema industry rather than their perceived political reliability. The call for the establishment of a new generation of highly trained proletarian specialists provoked a shift in educational policy—towards securing for men and women from this background a significant quota of guaranteed places in higher educational institutions, and introducing a utilitarian approach that emphasised the connection between learning and industrial production, although this policy was reversed in 1932 because of its failure to produce high quality specialists. The mid-to-late 1930s saw the return of traditional academic standards in universities. Although the ideologically-dictated policies of the administration (the ‘cultural revolution’) brought it into conflict with the industry and the educational institutions, a broad consensus was still reached. In 1929, it had been decided that 75 per cent of the seats in VGIK and minor institutes would be reserved for people of proletarian origin, and this had support within the institute as well as that of Eisenstein, but by 1934 everyone concerned was in agreement that the policy was a failure. Most of the proletarian students had struggled to understand the academically challenging lectures given by figures such as Eisenstein, whose crossdisciplinary approach required a broad basic knowledge of theatre, art and literature, and the drop-out rate went up to over 50 per cent. The standard of the students needed to be approved and the solution was the establishment of an elite academy that would offer shorter twoyear specialist courses aimed at individuals who had already received

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a higher education and had worked in cinema as assistants or in other branches of the arts. But the poor finances led to under-investment in the institute and abysmal living conditions. The cumulative effect of these difficulties in film education and the cinema industry as a whole meant that graduates struggled to find work. The filmmakers who had established themselves in the 1920s predominantly occupied the main posts in the studios, while those graduates of the 1930s who were employed were either sent to the dead-end studios in the republics where career opportunities were extremely limited or found themselves permanently in the role of assistants. The future for new students was not bright but the teaching talent available at the institute could not have been better. The status of the institute, by far the most important establishment for the education of creative personnel from Russia and other Soviet republics, was reflected in the wealth of teaching talent that it was able to attract in the 1930s. Many of the institute’s key pedagogues in the 1930s had fallen out of favour with the cinema administration by the start of the decade, including Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov and Abram Room. The cinematography faculty included Vladimir Nilsen as well as Eduard Tisse, Eisenstein’s great cinematographer. Paradoxically, those personnel not trusted to make films for the new ‘cinema for the millions’ era were entrusted with the task of teaching the new generation who were intended to be the driving force behind the new industry. Eisenstein now played the central role in VGIK. In the 1930s he was partly responsible for the shift from the less formal, spontaneous nature of film education, with its limited curriculum, experimental workshops, sometimes featuring tightrope walking, juggling and horse riding to a more organised, academically rigorous system based on longer courses akin to those in traditional universities, with both undergraduate and postgraduate provision. One of Eisenstein’s most important measures was to broaden the curriculum far beyond the practical aspects of directorial work to

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embrace the entire spectrum of the arts, including literature, theatre, painting and music, and specialist subjects such as Meyerhold’s biomechanics,34 a development of the Delsarte and Dalcroze approach to human movement. This involvement of the best filmmaking talent in pedagogy was not only at VGIK but in other institutes as well; and teachers at the institutes in the subsequent decades included people like Mikhail Romm, Ivan Pyrev, Andrei Tarkovsky, Marlen Khutsiyev and Aleksei German, and many of their students were also illustrious. Tarkovsky, for instance, was Romm’s student and he had Alexander Sokurov as a student. There was thus an unbroken tradition of the best talents of a generation passing on their skills to the next one. Although political orthodoxy continued to exert itself, professionalism and creativity did not give way. All students entering VGIK had to have a good knowledge of dialectical materialism. This influenced the content of certain courses especially the study of film history. In addition, other political pressures, such as the purges, did have an impact on the institute. Despite this, the ethos of the institute was one of broad learning and creativity. Although the immediate effect of film education was not felt by the industry in the 1930s, it was to have long-standing effects because it had created a body of filmmaking talent35 and also incorporated the discoveries of the pioneers into formal learning. As already indicated, some of the biggest Soviet successes of the 1930s were musicals and melodramatic comedies and the directors associated with it were Grigori Alexandrov and Ivan Pyrev. Alexandrov had a smash hit with The Circus (1936), which is about a white American woman with a black child who flees the US to be accepted in the USSR. The rural equivalents of Alexandrov’s urban musicals were made by Pyrev. The plots of Pyrev’s films were straightforward, all dealing with countryside romance against a background of collective farm development and conflict. Making the films popular was usually the music; for example, in The Circus,

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one of the opening compositions Song on the Cannon, has a distinct jazz feel. Another, more classical piece entitled The Lunar Waltz has a romanticism that reflects the heroine’s dream of a happy life beyond the racial hatred that she has known (in the US). If the political side was never abandoned even in the musicals, there was also more straightforward political propaganda like Pyrev’s infamous The Party Card (1936), about an ‘enemy of the people’ who steals his innocent friend Yasha’s girl and her party card on the instructions of a foreign spy. In making this contrast between the two men, Pyrev sought to convey the most important central message of this film: The Soviet citizen should never give in to spontaneous feelings or be tempted to explore dangerous paths as such choices will inevitably lead to negative consequences. Fridrikh Ermler, one of the pioneers of the 1920s (Fragments of Empire, 1929), who had become a reliable party filmmaker in the 1930s, made a two-part political epic The Great Citizen (1937–1939), a fictionalised biography of Sergei Kirov, head of the party in Leningrad who was murdered in December 1934. Kirov’s murder (allegedly on Stalin’s orders, although this has not been proved) became a pretext for the great terror that commenced in 1936. During the war years, Soviet cinema was completely mobilised towards the war effort—much more so than even in Germany, where also cinema was primarily an instrument of propaganda. It is interesting that when the allies won the war, they found it necessary to ban only 208 Nazi-period films out of a total production of 1363.36 Just how apolitical the majority of German films were can be gauged from the fact that the Soviets even distributed a majority of the captured films. There were reasons for why Stalin’s Russia, in which a vast majority of films made during the war were, in contrast, clearly propagandist. The most obvious ones were that the Nazis had ruled for a much shorter time and also did not have a philosophy that claimed to be applicable in every walk of life. Unlike Stalin, Hitler and Goebbels did not have a coherent

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worldview to transmit to the public. Ideology had so permeated life in the Soviet Union that it was not even necessary to persuade the film industry greatly because filmmakers were willing to help in the war effort despite Stalinist repression. The first films to come out were documentaries in which the Soviet Union had enormous experience. It is reported that the very first wartime newsreel made in the Soviet Union was shown three days after the commencement of the war, so well-organised were the filming crews. After that, there was apparently a fresh newsreel every third day.37 Also, in contrast to documentaries from Germany and other countries participating in the war that tried to emphasise victories, it suited Soviet documentaries to dwell on human misery, which is perhaps why they are still deeply moving from today’s distance. Also, many of the Russian films, especially those about battles fought in the worst conditions, were made far away but were still convincing, like Mark Donskoi’s The Rainbow (1944), which was set in Ukraine but actually shot in the studios at Alma-Ata. They might have been helped here by the experiments of the pioneers, like Kuleshov’s ‘imaginary geography’. Donskoi’s film tells the story of a woman partisan, Olena, who returns to her village to give birth, where she is captured and subjected to the most dreadful torture, but does not betray her comrades. Rainbow has a powerful effect even on today’s audiences largely because of its unusually graphic and detailed depiction of Nazi barbarities. Soviet opinion-makers made the conscious decision not to allow the depiction of decent Germans. In 1942, Pudovkin used Brecht’s stories as a basis for a film entitled Murderers Go Out on the Road that showed native victims of Hitler’s regime and fear among ordinary German citizens.38 The film was not allowed to be distributed. This is in stark contrast to how Germans were treated sympathetically in film when the First World War was the subject as in Boris Barnet’s Outskirts (1933), because that was in the context of the October Revolution that had largely benefited from anti-militarist sentiments.

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Considering the other movies made at the time, it is extraordinary that Eisenstein was able to complete Ivan the Terrible (Part I) in 1944. Eisenstein too aimed to show the victory of Russian arms, the importance of a heroic leader, but the film can also be read as partly allegorising the internecine conspiracies and conflicts within the party. The second part of the film (whose shooting completed in 1946) goes much further in its depiction of the paranoid leader and was promptly banned, although the first part had received a prize. After the war, and until after Stalin’s death in 1953, the people who had survived the war became tired of utopias and desired nothing but ordinary life; ideological messages are hence played down in films made in the period.

The Thaw and After The decade and a half after Stalin’s death (1953–1968) is generally referred to as the ‘thaw’, and a number of films made in this period show a marked departure from the motifs of Stalinist cinema. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 marked a new era and cinema blossomed for a decade. From the old guard, Sergei Eisenstein had died in 1950, Vsevelod Pudovkin in 1953 and Alexander Dovzhenko in 1956, but Mikhail Kalatozov and Fridrikh Ermler continued to work. The Soviet Union hardly abandoned communism in Khrushchev’s period and the films contain much of the familiar, but there is a new emphasis on domestic issues.39 In Marlen Khutsiyev’s Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), Tatyana is a Moscow girl who takes up the job of a teacher in a small town, where she is required to teach Russian literature to steel factory workers. Making the film noteworthy is the discernible sense of threat from the workers against the educated woman, they undermining her authority in class with their proletarian masculinity. The class differences are, however, resolved when Tatyana visits Sasha in his factory (a staggeringly shot sequence) and the film

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returns to a celebration of production and national identity. Spring on Zarechnaya Street is in black-and-white and, if anything more can be said about it, it is about the quality of the camera work and the performances. The camera track effortlessly among the people in the crowd or party sequences and there are moments when the film even acquires the authenticity of a documentary, although the treatment may have been expected to have been more sentimental. That Soviet cinema had the technical means at its command to rival the best in the world is also indicated by two films from Kalatozov— The Cranes are Flying (1957) and Letter Never Sent (1959). The first is a beautiful war-time film in which the principal motif is the love between a soldier, who dies at the war front, and a girl who, while waiting for him to return, is persuaded to marry another suitor. The second film is more ambiguous and, therefore, deserves deeper scrutiny. In this film, a group of four young people are dropped off in Siberia to prospect for diamonds. Sabinine is older and their leader while Tanya and Andrei are geologists and in love. Sergei is their proletarian guide who falls in love with Tanya while Andrei pretends not to see it. The letter in the title is the one written by Sabinine to the wife he has left behind and it becomes the means of narrating and conveying the emotions felt by the group. After many hardships and backbreaking exertion, the group finally discovers diamond bearing minerals but that is when their travails actually begin because they are caught in a forest fire. The film emphasises the spirit of discovery with the Soviet science as the inspiration, but instead of arranging it so that the triumph follows the suffering, it is the suffering that comes later. It is as if Kalatozov, while eulogising collective life (without irony), is also suggesting that it guarantees nothing except perhaps a statue for oneself in a public place, although one cannot be sure that this is not acceptable compensation. The contempt expressed by Sergei towards Andrei for ignoring his advances to Tanya is also intriguing, especially since it remains unresolved. It is evident

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that one cannot evaluate the discourse in a Soviet film of the postStalin period without considering the possibility that there really was collective life and this transformed the nature of its citizens, perhaps making their desires and dreams difficult for those outside to fully comprehend. Another factor to be considered is that while the silent pioneers had developed highly individualised responses to film form, they were not ‘auteurs’ as we understand the term, and all of them were characterised by faith in the same political philosophy. The importance of auteur has perhaps been overestimated in cinema and many key filmmakers outside the West, including those in Japan and the USSR cannot be distinguished by their personal concerns. In the Stalin era there were many exceptional filmmakers still working, but their craft was inevitably subordinated to the purpose determined by the state. When the state loosened up under Khrushchev, they did not begin voicing their personal concerns but continued in the familiar way although there are changes in their approach. Kalatozov can perhaps be characterised in this way based on Letter Never Sent. In fact, the Khrushchev period has been compared to the 1920s because artists still had faith in the revolution and dreamed of a utopian community.40

The ‘Difficult’ Film Nikita Khrushchev was deposed in 1964 and replaced by a collective leadership in which Leonid Brezhnev gradually ascended to the top position. Brezhnev resisted liberalisation and reform and his rule is generally synonymous with decades of ‘stagnation’ at all levels. It would appear that the Soviet state weakened under his leadership and Russian nationalism, especially the religious variety, began to grow stronger. Marxism–Leninism had tried to co-opt nationalist tendencies into the system41 but without much success, and nationalism had remained indigestible. Instead of furthering the promise of liberalisation of the Khrushchev era, the 1970s and 1980s

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mark the period when the state was ineffective but ideological pressure on artists increased, together with petty-minded attempts to control every detail of their work.42 The range of free expression, which had only begun to be extended in the early 1960s, commenced to shrink, and every experimental work was suspected of undermining the system. Films were allowed to be made and without strict control over the script but they were then found to be unsuitable and suppressed or given a limited release from where they went into obscurity. The suppression of a film like Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1971), which could only have been made with an approved (enormous) official budget, could not have happened if the state administration had been fully in control of filmmaking, because the film follows its screenplay quite closely.43 In the Stalin era, it must be recollected, the screenplay was the document to be scrutinised before a film project was approved. Judging from what was said earlier, it may be hypothesised that there was enormous filmmaking talent available in the 1970s, but with the Soviet state weakening, the scrutiny of projects had slackened considerably. ‘Personal expression’ that had not been much in evidence in Soviet cinema earlier, began to be gradually seen and this may be responsible for what is broadly described as the ‘difficult film’.44 It has been noted that there was a time when any new cinematic innovation was foreshadowed by a theoretical manifesto45 but ideology and political philosophy had weakened considerably and artistic practice had outpaced the manifesto. By and large, ‘difficult film’ is the term used to describe works like those of Sergei Paradjanov beginning with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), which have origins in folk culture from the republics; but one can use the term more broadly to include films subscribing to systems that resisted subsumption under Maxism–Leninism and the Soviet identity inculcated under Stalin, including orthodox Christianity and Russian nationalism, and that now reappeared

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sometimes in covert forms since they had not found expression after 1917. Moreover, with Marxism–Leninism imperfectly imposed as a binding worldview, filmmakers were tackling new subjects that Soviet cinema had never addressed. It must be reiterated that the Soviet films of the ‘thaw’ period like those of Khutsiyev and Kalatozov are hardly ‘difficult’, not only because they still follow the regulation that makes accessibility primary but also because they demonstrate faith in the dominant Marxist worldview. It may be useful at this point to take a brief look at a particularly difficult film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975), which has sometimes been described as ‘Russian nationalist’.

The Mirror (1975) The Mirror is ostensibly autobiographical in many ways and begins with a boy with a stammer being made able to speak. The boy does not reappear and we may take it to represent Russians being cured of a ‘speech impediment’, although the couching of the notion in metaphor suggests that the cure is not complete. The story involves a dying man, Aleksei, in his forties, reminiscing. He was five in 1935 when his father ‘left his mother’, which means that a part of the film is set in the world contemporary to it. The year 1935 has significance to Russia because it was the year in which the first arrests preceding the great terror began and Aleksei’s father ‘leaving’ suggests his arrest, although that is not spelt out. The best scene in the film is set in a printing press in which Aleksei’s mother works. She has been setting the types and fears that she has left in a word which should have been excised, a word she only whispers out to her friend. The important thing, however, is how ‘apolitical’ the film is despite Stalinist terror being invoked in the very first events recollected by the dying man, taken up more by his personal misconduct that caused pain to others, notably his wife whom he divorced. Also inserted into the film are newsreel segments—the Red Army on its advance at Lake

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Sivash in Ukraine, the Red Army in Berlin, Soviet border guards keeping off Chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution. Since, in a section, the child Aleksei is made to read out Pushkin’s letter explaining Russia’s peculiar position—being excluded from Western Christianity but saving the West from the Tartars whom it ‘swallowed up’—the film has been read as an affirmation of Russia’s importance to European civilisation46 and the newsreel footage also instantiates Russia’s sacrifices in this regard. The newsreel footage, unusual though it is, may also be a reflection upon the central role to which the newsreel was put in the Soviet Russia Union. But the stranger aspect of The Mirror is that the protagonist’s ‘regrettable’ personal conduct should take up so much of Tarkovsky’s attention when the year in which the great terror was brewing (1935) and the Second World War are key events also dealt with, and there is no evidence that politics is being treated through metaphor to circumvent censorship. The issues of personal conduct and ‘spiritual salvation’ preoccupied Tarkovsky more than political issues because when he left Russia to work in Europe, his last film (The Sacrifice, 1986) ignores Russia and its politics altogether. A possible explanation is that the political and the personal were not discrete as they would be for a citizen in a representative democracy.47 The nurturing of ‘private space’ in a democracy, it can be argued, is possible because the citizens, in having exercised their franchise, are morally indemnified from the acts of the state,48 as it were, and their moral liability for doing so is perhaps akin to that of a shareholder’s in a limited liability company for the company’s debts. A totalitarian state instituted by a popular movement may be a different proposition and the public shares in the doings of the state. One is, therefore, allowed to speak of ‘innocent citizens’ in a democracy but one does not normally use the term ‘innocent’ to describe the citizens of Nazi Germany who also suffered greatly in the Second World War. The observation here is that state repression had begun even under Lenin, with Felix

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Dzerzhinsky as head of the CHEKA; the Gulag system and the mass executions had commenced even during the civil war. Leon Trotsky had warned (before he embraced Bolshevism) that if the communist party remained a ‘vanguard’ group above the people as envisaged by Lenin, it would eventually substitute itself for the people. A faction would then substitute itself for the party and an individual would eventually replace the faction and substitute himself for the entire people.49 The argument here is that the artists and intellectuals of the Soviet Union in the 1920s would certainly have known about the repression but felt that it was justified because their work shows them to have genuine faith in the communist cause, even when their own kith and kin had to suffer under it. They saw totalitarian tyranny as a consequence of the system they had endorsed in their acceptance of collective life. As Russian film critic Alexander Timofeevsky observes, ‘The horror of Stalinism was not only that millions of people were exterminated, but that both hangmen and victims accepted their destinies as given’50 and this might not have happened if the public had not felt responsible in some way for Stalinism. During Stalin’s last years, the Jewish wife of his aide V.M. Molotov was jailed even when her husband remained in favour. Given such a state of affairs in the Soviet milieu, the difference between a husband that ‘disappeared’ and one that ‘left’ in 1935 may not be so much. Tarkovsky’s film, it may be surmised, was dealing with Russian culture, the immediately political as well as the personal, without the capability to keep the ‘personal’ separate from the ‘political’ and its ‘difficulty’ perhaps stems from it.51

The Return of Polyphony The notion of the polyphonic text that I raised earlier owes to Mikhail Bakhtin, a Soviet literary critic and philosopher who studied the novel. Bakhtin noted that the novel as a whole broke down under scrutiny into separate components: (a) direct authorial literary narration,

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(b) stylisation of everyday oral narration, (c) stylisation of various forms of semi-literary everyday narration (letters, diaries, etc.), (d) various forms of extra-artistic, literary speech (maxims, scientific speeches, legal memoranda etc.) and (e) the stylistically individualised speech of characters.52 Bakhtin did not restrict his study to Russian authors, but also examined the works of writers like Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit) and concluded that a literary work is a site for the dialogic interaction of multiple voices that are the product of ‘multiple determinants specific to classes, social groups and speech communities’. But the ‘dialogic’ tendency or ‘polyphony’ cannot be informing every literary text equally, and may thrive more visibly in milieus with greater exposure to foreign cultures. The Russian cultural elites had exposed themselves to European culture, and this was a milieu favourable to ‘polyglossia’, the coexistence of multiple languages in one society or area. Writers like Vladimir Nabokov are equally proficient in Russian, French and English. Also important is Russia’s racial, cultural and economic heterogeneity, which could assist texts accommodate a multiplicity of voices. These are reasons for why texts from Russia may be more hospitable to polyphony, but a more important issue still to be addressed is also how the same notion of the dialogism/polyphonicity can be extended to cinema since Mikhail Bakhtin was speaking only of literature. ‘Polyphony’ suggests the interplay of different kinds of speech within a single verbal text but it is difficult to similarly conceive of different kinds of ‘speech’ in visual narration. But film is narration as much as the novel is, and there should still be a parallel of some sort. A solution is that since the teleology of a fiction film corresponds to ‘discourse’ in authorial narration—because it is the course imposed on the narrative by the plot—the resistance to teleology, that is, the interruptions in the narration and the elements not ‘resolved’ will constitute its polyphony. It may be recollected that The Mirror includes disparate elements like newsreel and personal reminiscence, which a single filmic text rarely accommodates so easily, but, even otherwise, the trajectories of major characters not tied

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to the resolution of the story could represent polyphony. An immaculate plot, it must be noted, would proceed to eliminate these elements. There should be other ways in which polyphony is manifested, and they will be examined, but one could propose that the ‘difficulty’ of the difficult film is a first step towards polyphony, since it provides evidence of elements not subordinated to the dominant discourse. It has been observed that in the Khrushchev period the intelligentsia still had faith in the revolution, and while they opposed Stalinism, they did not oppose the communist state and the government, and while they longed for democracy, they did not resist the totalitarian utopia under Khrushchev by focusing on the individual instead of the collective.53 They were still romantics and continued to see the ends of art as moral rather than aesthetic, and without allowing for moral codes to be various—political, religious, social and private. It was in this climate that films—like Marlen Khutsiyev’s Illyich Square (1963)—that still believed in the communist utopia were suppressed54 because they were misunderstood.55 The Khrushchev era tried to usher in a ‘moral revolution’ of sorts and while the intelligentsia was in Khrushchev’s favour, the sociopolitical apparatus resisted his efforts. The absence of the personal in the cinema of the thaw period owes to the sense of a political utopia in which every aspect of the citizen might be involved. Brezhnev’s period of stagnation, because it promoted no utopian discourse with conviction, paradoxically gave rise to individual expression, often suppressed quietly—as Tarkovsky’s The Mirror—and resulted in the hesitant reappearance of polyphony. I now proceed to the penultimate part of this chapter, examining instances of how polyphony manifests itself in Russian cinema during glasnost, after the end of the USSR and until the present.

Polyphony under Glasnost and After Cinema was open to scrutiny as never before under glasnost and film critics attempted to take stock of what cinema meant. Since film had

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only played a serious role in society, there was little in the USSR that corresponded to ‘commercial cinema’ with segregation into distinct genres. Genres, in a sense, depend on audience segregation that occurs due to commercial considerations and cinema had been intended only to fulfil an ideological role for decades. Soviet genres like the industrial film, comedies, musicals and thrillers ignore the viewer’s psychology,56 which is essential to be taken note of in genres. Every genre was once directed towards what the viewer should see, which precluded the possibility of generic differentiation. Stated differently, genres create mythologies around different historical experiences that are often unconnected. It would, for instance, be difficult to make a historical association between the western and science fiction. Soviet cinema, because it promoted a single ideological discourse in relation to history, effectively prevented the formation of historically specific and independent genres. The films discussed in this last part of the chapter, therefore, defeat generic categorisation. But they have one aspect in common, which is that they exhibit polyphony and my purpose now will be to describe the films and demonstrate it. The films discussed are all well-known and by important directors from the glasnost era and after.57

Days of Eclipse (1988) Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse (1988) is based on a science fiction novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky published in 1974 called Definitely Maybe (also known as A Billion Years Before the End of the World). In the book, Leningrad astrophysicist Malyanov finds impediments being placed in his research. Approaching the problem scientifically, he suspects that his discovery is in the way of someone (or something) intent on preventing the completion of his work. The same idea occurs to his friends and acquaintances, who find themselves in a similar impasse—some powerful, mysterious, and very selective force impedes their work in fields ranging from

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biology to mathematical linguistics. An explanation is proposed by Malyanov’s friend and neighbour, the mathematician Vecherovsky. He proposes that the mysterious force is the universe’s reaction to mankind’s scientific pursuits, which threaten to destroy its fabric in some distant future. Vecherovsky proposes to treat this universal resistance to scientific progress as a natural phenomenon that can and should be investigated. Sokurov sets the story in a very poor region of Soviet Turkmenistan and makes Malyanov a doctor investigating the effects of religious practices on health. The thrust of the film now becomes covertly political because most of the characters in the story are people who were displaced and resettled in Turkmenistan during the Stalin era, and the milieu seems entirely to be populated by resettled people. The focus of the film becoming biology instead of astrophysics has another consequence that arises out of biology having a larger interface with politics. The protagonist of the film is an emissary of rationality in an irrational milieu, blocked at every intersection. Sokurov sets up several bizarre scenes, not explained—a boy eating pins that do not show up on the X-ray—and involving biological specimens like a monitor lizard, a python, a claw-shaped apparently reptilian creature preserved in hardened plastic and a monstrously shapeless organism putrefying in an ancient wall inside a residence. The biological world is gaining upon science and, symbolically, Stalinist monuments loom at the edge of town—a concrete sickle and hammer, as if trying to obstruct the desert. The film’s purport is not self-evident but if the novel is about the resistance of the universe to science, the film can be interpreted as the resistance of an ‘irrational’ milieu to Soviet science and rationality.

The Asthenic Syndrome (1990) Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome had the distinction of being suppressed under glasnost for its ‘obscenity’ apparently on account of

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a long monologue towards the end that subtitled prints tend to tone down. The Asthenic Syndrome, which begins in sepia, initially focuses on Natasha, a doctor and widow, who has just buried her husband. Her reaction to his death is to rage against everything in sight. About a third of the way into the film, this is revealed to be a film being shown to an unresponsive audience that does not stay for the questions and answers, leaving behind only one spectator who is sleeping in his chair. The rest of Muratova’s film (now in colour) is about the sleeping man, a failed novelist and a school teacher named Nikolai, who is narcoleptic and tends to fall asleep abruptly, sometimes in the middle of trying situations. The film does not focus on Nikolai but is about his milieu and has been understood as a picture of Russia during glasnost. The Asthenic Syndrome is a difficult, extreme and almost incoherent film in which occurrences are seemingly random and conversation is incessantly overlapping, with little that is being said providing clues as to its purport. But the effect is not nonsensical because everything still hangs together. By itself every utterance makes perfect sense to the person uttering the words and an instance is the teachers’ meeting at the school that Nikolai is sleeping through. In the first part of The Asthenic Syndrome—the film within the film— Natasha is shown to have gone off into angry ‘hysteria’ because her husband is young and his death is unexpected. She is shown looking at a series of pictures of the two of them together, arranged almost like a slide show, over a long period of time and also disrupting her home by breaking the glassware, etc. This film ends with Natasha putting her home in order again, and there is a sense that the narrative interrupted by the husband’s death can now commence differently. If the first part of The Asthenic Syndrome is regarded as a key to the second part, and there is no other sense that can be made of it, the second part constructed around Nikolai may be interpreted as being about a society that, because it is suddenly bereft of a grand narrative, exists only from moment to moment. That Natasha’s dead husband resembles Stalin supports this reading since the grand narrative of

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the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era was still Stalinist. Nikolai being a ‘failed novelist’, that is, his inability to complete a narrative of his own, can also be interpreted in this light.

Khrustalev, My Car! (1997) Aleksei German’s Khrustalev, My Car! is about a Jewish surgeon named Major General Klenski who is implicated in the ‘doctor’s plot’ and arrested. A number of Jewish doctors were accused in 1953 of trying to poison the leaders of the party and arrested, but were absolved of the charges after Stalin’s death. Khrustalev, My Car! is a difficult film like the other two, although in a different way. It is not formless but excruciatingly detailed in its depiction of Moscow life in the icy February of 1953. Instead of dealing with Klenski’s travails dramatically, it is as if the happenings in the street and the goings on in his household are as important as his horrific experiences and the climactic sequence at the dying Stalin’s bedside where he, as a doctor, is abruptly summoned, as he is being transported to the gulag. German uses deep focus and the tracking camera to provide a visceral picture of everyday life and his film can be interpreted as a depiction of a historical period, a depiction in which no happening is privileged. A solitary crow on a branch is as significant as Klenski sodomised by his fellow prisoners or Stalin soiling his sheets in the concluding moment of his life. The effort is to rely entirely on ‘remembered history’ and ridding the past of its historicist overlay, and this becomes significant in the light of how history was used in the USSR.

Cargo 200 (2007) Aleksei Balabanov’s Cargo 200 is not a ‘difficult’ film like the other three just dealt with. It is set in 1984 in the Soviet Union just after Yuri Andropov’s death, with the nation still embroiled in Afghanistan. The title pertains to dead soldiers returning from Kabul

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in lead lined coffins. The film has been described as a ‘thriller’ but it is closer to the horror genre with Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) perhaps being its most recognisable relative. The action revolves around two young people, Angelika and Valera, and their adventures after the two decide to go in the dead of night to an illicit distiller to get some vodka. Angelika is kidnapped by a mad police (militia) captain who puts her through unimaginable horrors in the name of ‘love’. The film relies for its horror on the sense of the marginalised spaces but unlike Tobe Hooper’s film, Cargo 200 has other strands that make it highly political—Angelika is the daughter of the local party secretary. Central to the film is also a long dialogue between a bootlegger, Aleksey, and Artem, a professor of ‘scientific atheism’ from Leningrad University, on religion and rationality. The film is set in a fictional industrial town named Leninsk, and the narrative is punctuated by impersonal shots of its giant industrial complex, freight cars going incessantly to and from it. A characteristic of Cargo 200 that takes it away from the genre of the horror film and brings it closer to surrealism is its tone of darkly comic irony. Angelika is not innocent as the protagonists of horror films (including Hooper’s film) usually are, but is the privileged representative of a system in collapse. She undergoes the experiences not in some remote location but in almost familiar terrain. The slumbering state and the party have become so alienated from the society of their own creation that social mutants thrive under their very noses. Balabanov steadfastly refuses to take sides, between the victims and the perpetrators, because the victims here are actually implicated in the creation of the monsters. The dialogue between Artem and Aleksey also furnishes an ironic discursive backdrop before which the horrific central drama is enacted, suggesting a hideous festering taking place in a society where the state promoted rationalism for decades. The four films just described share an attribute, which is that all of them deal with a collapse of order. Cargo 200 provides the most

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precise portrayal of the ‘collapse’ because it is about a political collapse, easier to comprehend directly. But its precision is because it is able to survey the collapse—that of the USSR—from a much greater distance, when the new Russian state had also stabilised. The remaining films deal with other aspects of the collapse, and the nebulousness of their concerns makes them more difficult. Days of Eclipse is centred on the impending collapse of the grand narrative of Soviet science and, as already argued, The Asthenic Syndrome is also about the collapse of a grand narrative. Aleksei German’s Khrustalev, My Car! is nominally about the last moments of the Stalin era but the form it chooses for itself is itself an exposition on the collapse of Marxist–Leninist historicism and the release of personal memory. The collapse of order, therefore, creates the polyphony—voices not subordinated to rationality, science or history—but this would not have been possible if Soviet cinema had not already reached the level of sophistication required to give voice to the experience.

Ambiguity and Polyphony The ‘difficult films’ from the USSR of the glasnost period and Russia of the Yeltsin/Putin era are difficult in a different way from the ‘ambiguous’ films of post-war art cinema from Europe, for example, those of filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman or Jean-Luc Godard. As set out in the Introduction, an aspect of cinema making it widely intelligible is the question–answer format—the later events being related to the earlier ones as answers to questions. It has been shown58 that European art cinema defines itself explicitly against the classical Hollywood narrative mode, especially with regard to the cause–effect linkage between events, that is, it violates the norm just enunciated. Another norm also violated often is the one in which resemblance with the referent is indicated. To elaborate, the imagery/happenings in the European art film is often ‘unrealistic’ and distorted, beginning with the German

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expressionist films and going on to those of directors like Bergman (The Silence, 1963) and Fellini (Satyricon, 1969). ‘Non-resemblance with the referent’ implies that the distortions must be recognised as such, since this is not relevant to a fantasy like The Wizard of Oz (1939) in which the world of the film is accepted on its own terms. The grotesquery of the images/happenings in The Silence makes the film difficult and forces the spectator to interpret the violations as ‘symbolic’ (For example: ‘What do tanks driving around a nameless city at dead of night signify?’) These two kinds of violations in Western cinema posit the author as an organising intelligence and account for more recent auteurs like David Lynch (Mulholand Dr, 2001) and Atom Egoyan (Exotica, 1994). Russian films of the post-glasnost period, despite their ‘difficulty’, do not eschew realism, which means that the ‘resemblance to the referent’ norm is hardly violated. When Russian films break the question–answer format, they do not do it in the way of the European films, in which ‘realism’ replaces the strict causality of the linear plot.59 So many ‘questions’, for instance, are asked in a film like Khrustalev, My Car! and so many ‘answers’ tendered that one cannot be certain of how the questions and answers are related. The Soviet/Russian films described are not identifiable with the ‘ambiguities’ posited by European art cinema. Where the strategies of the European art filmmaker, revolving around authorial expression, presuppose a sociopolitical milieu constant enough to pursue preoccupations that, even if they are not entirely ‘personal’, principally assume a stable private space, the Soviet/Russian filmmakers of the post-Soviet era were grappling with a milieu transformed and rendered unstable after decades in which ‘private life’ had been subordinated to a common historical purpose. The ambiguity of the European art film and the polyphony of Russian cinema both owe to an engagement with the complexity of the world, but while the former is like a product of undisturbed contemplation, the latter is

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an actual struggle with the disturbance. The Asthenic Syndrome was widely understood as a portrayal of life under glasnost, but Western critics also admitted its ‘universality’. This means that if Muratova’s film is an exploration of an extreme social condition, the condition is still identifiable to those outside Russia, just as Dostoyevsky’s characters are recognisable even if we have met none like them. Life after the decline of the USSR may have engendered violently anarchic films like The Asthenic Syndrome; however, the films should not be understood as political criticism of the present but a response to a process. Muratova herself speaks of the bankruptcy of her milieu but the fact that such extraordinary films were made at all speaks of the cultural richness of the Russia of its time, especially when art cinema in the West had deteriorated. All four films are anarchist in temperament, primarily because they are anti-authoritarian in every sense. Russia, it must be recollected, was a country in which anarchism as a political philosophy had flourished in the 19th century, and anarchism entails opposition to all kinds of hierarchical authority. Bakhtin himself is often associated with the philosophy60 because of his work on the ‘carnivalesque’. Just as carnivals, which in many cultures become occasions on which authority is allowed to be flouted, subverted and mocked, Bakhtin detected a parallel he named the ‘carnivalesque’ in many works like those of Rabelais and Dostoyevsky since they are irreverent and/or include subtexts in which authority is parodied. There is a relationship between polyphony and the carnivalesque, since both involve the subversion of authority in some form or the other. To Mikhail Bakhtin, the ‘plot’—which Aristotle valorised in his Poetics—is emblematic of ‘authority’, and the above four films are all essentially plotless. To conclude, the most celebrated films in the world have generally come from countries with a strong national culture, which presupposes a strong grand narrative associated with the nation. Russian cinema is an exception because the Soviet identity, which was

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cultivated virtually from the time of cinema’s origins—as well as the grand narrative associated with the Soviet Union—collapsed around 1990. A thesis in this chapter has been the virtue of polyphony as an enriching component of cinema, but the stronger the national culture and the grand narrative associated with it, the more polyphony is liable to be suppressed. Russian cinema’s richness in the decade concluding with 2010 perhaps owes, paradoxically, to the weakness of national consciousness in Russia—and the non-existence of a clear national grand narrative—that allows for a multiplicity of voices to be heard above the dominant discourse.

Notes and References   1. Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (London: Routledge, 1994), 1–5. Here is a segment about Leonid Andrey, a writer of that time on his first experience of cinema: Cinema kills the very idea of identity. Today my mental image of myself is still formed by what I am at this moment. Imagine what will happen when the cinematograph splits my self-image into what I was at eight years old, at eighteen, at twenty-five!… What on earth will remain of my integrity if I am given free access to what I was at different stages of my life?…. It’s frightening! (p. 3)  2. Yuri Tsivian, ‘Early Russian Cinema: Some Observations’, in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (New York: Routledge, 1991), 9–12.   3. Tsivian, ‘Early Russian Cinema’, 8.   4. Tsivian, ‘Early Russian Cinema’, 13.   5. Tsivian, ‘Early Russian Cinema’, 13–14.   6. Tsivian, ‘Early Russian Cinema’, 19–20. The commentary did not begin in Russia because this was in evidence even in Japan but the ‘academic slant’ was perhaps specifically Russian. Elsewhere it was only verbal performance.   7. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Collier Books, 1960), 155–169. See for a useful first-hand account of this period.

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 8. Ian Christie, ‘Down to Earth: Aelita Relocated’, in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (New York: Routledge, 1991), 81–102. See for a history of the making of this film and the responses to it.   9. Mikhail Yampolsky, ‘Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor’, in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (New York: Routledge, 1991), 38–39. One of the pioneers in whose experiments Soviet style montage originated was Vladimir Gardin, who in 1918 was head of the fiction film section of the All-Russian Photographic and Cinematographic Section (VFKO) of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Gardin conducted an experiment that took the form of a series of exercises with a model actor in which the major prop was the ‘velvet screen’. With the aid of these screens he formed a window whose shape recalled the frame of a film shot. Into the window he put the face of the actor who had to work out precise mimic reflex reactions to stimuli. In this process most attention was devoted to the movement of the eyes, which were recorded in complex schemata. 10. Evgeny Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 5. 11. Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema, 5. 12. Mikhail Yampolsky, ‘Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor’, in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (New York: Routledge, 1991), 31–32. 13. Vladimir Gardin was in 1918 head of the fiction film section of the All-Russian Photographic and Cinematographic Section (VFKO) of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). His associate was his old friend Vasili Ilyin, a painter, an actor and likewise a supporter of Volkonsky’s system. 14. Yampolsky, ‘Kuleshov’s Experiments’, 46. 15. A. Mariamov, Narodnyi Artist SSSR Vsevolod Pudovkin (Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1952), 75–77. It has often been asserted that the Soviet feature film began with Mother.

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16. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 283. Mikhail Bakhtin notes the conflict between the propagandising impulse in Tolstoy and the ‘internal dialogism’; the Marxist polemic of Mother has perhaps the same relationship with the polyphony just noted and introduced by the choreography into the film. 17. The eyeline match—a person’s glance being cut to another’s to indicate their respective positions in relation to each other and character glance as a clue to link shots—can also be interpreted as the acknowledgement by one person of another’s existence. In Pudovkin’s film the father is almost oblivious of his family until mother and son accost him physically and he is forced to look at them in response. This is not the case in Donskoi’s film in which acknowledgement comes first. 18. Evgeny Dobrenko, ‘Three Mothers: Pudovkin–Donskoi–Panfilov’, in Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko, trans. Sarah Young (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 167–179. Gorky regarded his novel as inferior and it was written as a polemical/ideological (and sentimental) counterpoint to Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of revolutionaries (The Possessed) but it was also considered ‘timely’ by the communists. Being ‘timely’ meant that it fulfilled a purpose attributed to art/cinema in the Stalinist epoch. Where Pudovkin’s film was even avant-garde in its aesthetics, Donskoi’s film was described as the only ‘true’ adaptation of Gorky’s novel. But coming out after the death of Stalin and in the period of Kruschev’s thaw, it was castigated for conforming to ‘socialist realism’ for which it would have been unequivocally lauded three years before when Stalin was still alive. 19. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 283–295. 20. Valery Podoroga, Kinematograf i kul’tura, Voprosy filosofii, no. 3 (1990), 24, cited by Dobrenko, Evgeny, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution, 3. It has been noted that precisely as a result of the realisation of the huge ideological potential of the cinema, the artistic experiment from which cinematography was born effectively came to nothing: ‘The cinematographer enters into the era of visual narration, it works more and more with the language of the

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consciousness of the mass viewer, with all the mythology and ideological stereotypes he has assimilated.’ 21. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977). The title plays with the notion of Nazism being conceived as film. 22. G. Mar’iamov, Kremlevskii Tsenzor: Stalin Smotrit Kino (Moscow: Kinotsentr, 1992), cited by Evgeny Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution, 5. 23. Boris Shumiatskii, ‘Tvorcheskie Zadachi Templana’, Sovetskoe Kino, no. 11 (1933): 6–7, cited by Dobrenko, Evgeny, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution, 5. 24. Evgeny Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution, 4. 25. R, Iurenev, Sovetskii Biograficheskii Fil’m (Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1949), 225, Cited by Evgeny Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution, 20. 26. Richard Taylor, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s’, in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (New York: Routledge, 1991), 196. 27. Taylor, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment’, 203–204. The author cites Boris Shumyatsky. Boris Shumyatskii, ‘Dramaturgiya Kino’ (‘The Dramaturgy of Cinema’), Sovetskoe Kino, no. 7 (July 1934): 3. 28. Taylor, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment’, 215–216. 29. M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, 13–14. ‘The world of the epic is a national heroic past: a world of “beginnings” and “peak times”, a world of “firsts” and “bests”.’ 30. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, 11. 31. The term ‘dialogic’ derives from Bakhtin’s arguments about Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. It is perhaps because of their markedly dialogic character that Dostoyevsky’s novels are much more loosely plotted that Tolstoy’s, which are more ‘monologic’. 32. As an instance, monogamous heterosexuality culminating in marriage is a conclusion driving film plots in Hollywood. The issue is whether monogamous heterosexuality that culminates in marriage, since it performs an ideological function on behalf of the nation-state, also does it not invoke the notion of national identity and/or confer it.

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33. Jamie Miller, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion Under Stalin (London: IB Tauris, 2010), 137–138. 34. Vsevolod Meyerhold was a theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre. He was tortured and executed in 1940 on the charges of being a British spy. 35. Jamie Miller, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion Under Stalin (London: IB Tauris, 2010), 139–154. 36. David S. Hall, Film in the Third Reich: A Study of German Cinema, 1933– 1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 8. 37. R. Katsman, ‘Frontovaia Kinokhronika’, Novyi Mir, no. 7 (1942): 109, cited by Peter Kenez, ‘Films of the Second World War’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 150. 38. A. Karaganov, Vsevolod Pudovkin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1983), 209–210. cited by Peter Kenez, ‘Films of the Second World War’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 162. 39. Nancy Condee, ‘Nikita Mikhalkov: European but not Western?’, in The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 97. 40. Alexander Timofeevsky, ‘The Last Romantics’, in Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, eds. Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27. 41. John B. Dunlop, ‘Russian Nationalist Themes in Soviet Film of the 1970s’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 229. 42. Val Golovskoy, ‘Art and Propaganda in the Soviet Union, 1980–5’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 264. 43. An alternate explanation is that one regime approved the project but another one suppressed the film. 44. Herbert Marshall, ‘The New Wave in Soviet Cinema’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Lawton, Anna (London: Routledge, 1992), 174–191.

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45. M. Bleiman, ‘O Kino—Svidetel’Skie Pokazaniia, 1924–197’ (Moscow: Iskusstvo,1973), 477–569, cited by Herbert Marshall, ‘The New Wave in Soviet Cinema’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 174. 46. John B. Dunlop, ‘Russian Nationalist Themes in Soviet Film of the 1970s’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 239–41. 47. One also disputes that the elements Tarkovsky most employs in his images—flowing water, milk boiling over, the wind blowing through the trees are ‘personal’ in any sense and this suggests that his ‘individuality’ is not of the kind that would have characterised a Western filmmaker. 48. Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 177. The key here is that in a democracy, the citizenry is actually more detached from political practice. This may echo Susan Sontag’s observations in another context, that is, the role of the photograph in another totalitarian country, China. On the one hand, cameras arm vision in the service of power—of the state, of industry, of science. On the other hand, cameras make vision expressive in that mythical space known as private life. In China, where no space is left over from politics and moralism for expressions of aesthetic sensibility, only some things are photographed and only in certain ways. For us, as we become further detached from politics, there is more and more free space to fill up with exercises of sensibility such as cameras afford. 49. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (London: Penguin, 1966), 73–74. 50. Alexander Timofeevsky, ‘The Last Romantics’, in Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, eds. Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27. 51. Films from the Soviet Bloc outside the USSR have no cinema corresponding to the ‘difficult’ film and criticism of communism was straightforward as in films like Andrei Wajda’s Man of Marble (1975). In terms of my arguments, this may be attributed to those in countries like Poland having had communism imposed on them unlike in the USSR, where there was a sense of being responsible for the system they laboured under.

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52. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 262. 53. Timofeevsky, ‘The Last Romantics’, 25–26. 54. Marlen Khutsiyev’s film was subsequently released in a truncated version in 1965 as I am Twenty. 55. Timofeevsky, ‘The Last Romantics’, 25. 56. Mikhail Yampolsky, ‘Cinema Without Cinema’, in Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, eds. Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton, 12–13. 57. Nancy Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 58. David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 717–720. 59. For instance, it is plausible in a real situation that a detective is run over accidentally by a truck when he is at the point of solving a crime. But while such a turn will not be permitted in a classical detective story— which insists on a moral order being affirmed by the narrative—it could happen in a film by Antonioni. ‘Realism’ here corresponds to life’s untidiness—which classical film narratives do not usually allow for. 60. Robert F. Barsky, ‘Bakhtin as Anarchist: Language, Law and Creative Impulses in the Work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Rudolph Rocker’, in Bakhtin/‘Bakhtin’: Studies in the Archive and Beyond, ed. Peter Hitchcock, South Atlantic Quarterly 97, no. 3/4 (Summer/Fall, 1998), 623–642.

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8

History as Polyphony Understanding Aleksei German Acknowledging a Master This chapter is intended as an appreciation of Aleksei German, a Russian filmmaker who is little known outside his home country, and who passed away in February 2013 after having completed just four feature-length films. His first attempt at directing, The Seventh Companion (1968), was co-directed with Grigori Aronov, while his last effort, based on a science-fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, Hard to be a God, was completed after his death by his son Aleksei German Jr. If other endorsements are needed to justify German’s place in cinema, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984) was voted among the greatest of Soviet/Russian films by critics in Russia, and this is from a group of films that includes those by Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevelod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov. Still, Aleksei German has not been received well in the West and the last film he completed Khrustalev, My Car! (1998) was met with a mass walk-out by critics at Cannes, where it was in competition because, to cite an obituary in The Guardian, it was ‘incomprehensible for long stretches and unforgivably unfunny in the endless scenes of manic visual satire’. German is not an easy filmmaker to decipher because he appears to have reinvented filmic narration for himself in his later films and, therefore, demands attentive spectators capable of reflecting 211

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after they leave the hall. As attributes of his cinema, the depth of his images recalls Citizen Kane (1941), and his tracking camera is as fluid and mobile within constricted space as Max Ophüls (The Earrings of Madame de…, 1953). Ophüls has scarcely been matched in the West for this ability, though Stanley Kubrick, who he influenced, tried to emulate him. Group activity within each frame in German’s films’ indoor scenes also appears ‘casual’ but it is evidently the result of amazingly intricate choreography. Still, since one cannot locate much of the action in the logic of a coherent plot, the effect can be mistaken for cacophony. German deals mainly with the Stalin era, but there is too much detail in his films for us to read a political meaning in them, at least the kind we are accustomed to. But German is far too radical a filmmaker to remain unknown outside Russia and my purpose is partly to demonstrate that his methods even merit a re-examination of cinematic narration. The task of describing films that few people have seen, making the descriptions engaging and assessing the director’s fundamental achievements on the basis of the descriptions is not an easy one, but I propose to undertake it. But before commencing a deeper scrutiny, I should perhaps begin by examining the thrust of German’s films individually, and the sense made of them by critics, although it will be practical to restrict local cultural references to which critics draw attention. The effort in this chapter will be to understand German’s methods as radical film practice the world over, and not to account for them as the choice of a local artist. If David Lynch or Jean-Luc Godard will stand diminished if he is treated exclusively as an American or French artist, so too will Aleksei German if too much emphasis is placed on his Russian cultural antecedents. German responded to his own milieu but his explorations certainly have larger significance. If he was deeply influenced by Russian literature, especially poetry,1 and makes repeated reference to it, artistic creation and art appreciation

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do not always follow the same trajectory, and the two processes may even be essentially independent. Before examining each film individually, I will provide thumbnail sketches of the films so readers who have not seen them can respond with interest.

The Films Aleksei German made his debut at 29, beside the older and more experienced Grigori Aronov, then 44. The Seventh Companion is a film about an unusual hero (for a Soviet film): a Tsarist general who finds himself alternately in the camps of Reds and Whites, and who realises that all the values he believed in have collapsed, a hero full of doubts and contradictions. German’s central approach is already found to be present here by critics: ‘the instability of historical roles, the overturning of ideological certainties and the elusiveness of the real’.2 Trial on the Road (1971) is a war film that was banned for fifteen years and was released only in 1986. It tells the story of a Russian soldier, a POW who joins the Germans but defects once more, to the Soviet side. Lazarev, a former sergeant in the Red Army who became a collaborator for the Nazis in occupied territory, lets himself be arrested by the partisan division because he wants to return to fighting the Germans. He is, however, willing to undergo every test of courage, submit to the inevitable humiliations and even let himself be shot as a traitor. The film has several other characters and Petushkin is a major who is willing to sacrifice a boat with hundreds of Russian prisoners aboard in order to carry out a sabotage mission against the Germans. He believes in military discipline without concession, and takes comfort in the sacrifice of his son, who died hurling himself at a tank. Korotkov, the commander of the partisan division, is a simple man who trusts his own instinct and humanity more than the rules; he is adored by the men in his division. As may be anticipated, the film is about Lazarev proving himself in war but dying heroically.

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The film departs from Soviet orthodoxy in its depiction of the war— as perhaps exemplified by Yuri Ozorov’s eight-hour epic Liberation (1969)—by being ambivalent about many aspects on which Soviet films take sides. But, while it is a landmark achievement, it does not reveal the characteristics that mark out German’s later films. Its achievements can largely be subsumed under plot development, character study and resolution, and do not prefigure the formal innovations of his remaining three films. Aleksei German’s next film, Twenty Days Without War (1976), is based on a novel by a military journalist, Konstantin Simonov. It was for a while the only one of his films seen outside the Soviet Union. The film describes the adventures of Major Lopatin, a military journalist during the Second World War, who goes to Tashkent (Uzbekistan) at the end of 1942 to spend a twenty-day vacation following the Battle of Stalingrad, and to witness the shooting of a film based on his wartime dispatches, and where he is romantically involved with a local woman. The title ‘twenty days without war’ pertains to this period when he learns how the romantic views of combat held in far flung places like Tashkent bear no relation to the harsh realities of frontline warfare. The film was banned presumably because of its anti-war theme, but was released in 1981 after interference from the film’s screenwriter, the novelist Simonov, a close friend of German’s father, Yuri German, and highly regarded by the Soviet establishment. Both of German’s war films are relatively conventional in their narrative methods and do not present the difficulties for international audiences that My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984) is almost certain to. This film is set in 1935, an important year for the Soviet Union because it was the year following the assassination of Sergei Kirov who headed the party in the Leningrad region. Kirov’s murder was apparently the handiwork of Stalin himself, but it later became a pretext for him to initiate the purges in which a major segment of the Bolsheviks was liquidated. German’s film makes no mention of either the purges of

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1936 or Kirov, and the only fact about the film to give it this political significance is the year in which the story is set in a provincial town in north Russia, with the narrator being a boy, now reminiscing as an elderly person. The locations are the offices and habitation of the town’s police force, under the direction of Ivan Lapshin. Lapshin lives in an apartment in which an indefinite number of people live together. Signs of the time are all too evident but there is no emphasis to drive the story in any discernible political direction. The plot ostensibly revolves around Lapshin’s pursuit of a dangerous criminal and gang leader named Soloviev, whose actual crimes remain unspecified. The only evidence we see of his handiwork are some frozen corpses being carted out of an underground shelter a third of the way into the film. Somewhere closer to the end, Lapshin’s men surround a miserable farmhouse in which Soloviev is apparently quartered, and casually guns the criminal down when he surrenders to him in the snow outside. Equally central to the film is Lapshin’s relationship with an actress. A troupe has arrived to perform an agitprop play and the actress is playing a reformed prostitute who chooses to work on a canal. In order to make her performance more convincing, Lapshin introduces her to an actual prostitute who, he tells the actress at the end of the film, is on her way to a labour camp. Another important character in the film is a writer and intellectual named Khanin, with whom the actress, who Lapshin attempts to court, is in love. Aleksei German’s last completed film Khrustalev, My Car! is also set in a key year for the Soviet Union—1953, the year of Stalin’s death. In the film Major General Klenski is a Jewish neurosurgeon arrested for his complicity in the ‘doctor’s plot’. Shortly before he died on 5 March 1953, Stalin accused nine doctors, six of them Jews, of plotting to poison and kill the Soviet leadership. The innocent men were arrested and, at Stalin’s personal instruction, tortured to obtain confessions. The unfortunate physicians were lucky in comparison with Stalin’s other victims. The dictator died days before their trial

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was to begin. A month later, Pravda announced that the doctors were innocent and released them, except the two who had died. In German’s film, Klenski lives a privileged life with material comfort, family and mistress until he is arrested and taken away. Confined in a narrow space—at the back of a van—in wintry conditions, Klenski finds himself assaulted sexually until, strangely enough, the vehicle in which they are traveling is stopped; he is given back a car and a chauffeur and apparently his rank. He is driven to a forested area where he is escorted to a dacha in which an old man is dying. Several people are attending to him—servants, several nurses and a fat, slovenly man who appears to be in charge. The dying man, who has soiled his sheets, has apparently had a cerebral haemorrhage, and Klenski is now required to save him. Klenski stammers that that this would be impossible, but is immediately threatened with execution. Eventually he asks the fat man if the dying person is his father. ‘Well said,’ the fat man replies, ‘he is, in a way, father’. At that moment a breeze blows through the room, a wardrobe creaks open and Klenski sees the famous White uniform hanging there. The dying person is Josef Stalin, and the fat man Lavrenti Beria, chief of NKVD, the Soviet secret police. It is too late for Klenski to perform any service except to make Stalin ‘fart’, and he does this by pressing the dictator’s hairy belly, which is smeared with excrement. A while later, and after the corpse has been duly removed, Beria is neatly shaved and ready to leave. He shouts to his man Khrustalev to fetch his car, and that is the significance of the film’s title.3 Klenski is also allowed to return home, although this is not the note on which the film concludes.

Interpreting Aleksei German German’s films are not difficult to interpret in the normal sense in that they are not ambiguous but tend to incorporate so much detail that we cannot be certain of what detail is significant. They are markedly ‘polyphonic’, a term introduced in the last chapter

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A Trajectory of Form: The Development of Soviet/Russian Cinema (1910–2010). The characteristic that makes them difficult to interpret even as the stories they tell are broadly understandable is that they do not follow classical causality, which even European art cinema depends upon. The classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or attain specific goals. In the course of this struggle, the characters enter into conflict with others or with external circumstances. The story ends with a decisive victory or a defeat, a resolution of the problem and clear achievement or non-achievement of the goals. The principal causal agency is thus the character, a discriminated individual endowed with a consistent batch of evident traits, qualities and behaviour.4 Post-war European art cinema loosens the causal linking by deliberately admitting accidents into the narrative and presents characters without clear-cut goals, but it still defines itself in relation to classical cinema through its violations.5 Interpretation of the ‘ambiguities’ of art cinema, therefore, revolves around recognition of the deliberate violations of classical storytelling. In a film like Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), for instance, it depends on our interpretation of motifs like the unexplained disappearance, the aimless search, the unexplained crowd behaviour in the sequence involving the woman celebrity and the ‘prohibited’ camera angles, like the one in the ghost town when the protagonists are viewed as if by an intelligent but indifferent phantom presence. In neither classical cinema nor the art film are we ever in doubt as to what events are crucial to the plot, but this is not the case with German’s films, which are virtually plotless. His films are never without an intelligible story, but the elements of the story are so submerged in incidental visual and aural details that we are unable to identify the events that will move the narrative, for which we need to reflect on the film after it is over. Each of the three films being examined here has a protagonist, but rather than the story

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following him closely, the camera often follows other stories in the milieu without trying to exhaust any one through explanations. It is perhaps the ‘unbracketed’ digressions in the film not supported by explanations that make German’s films unintelligible to large sections. In A Trajectory of Form, I tried to show how post-Soviet cinema displays ‘polyphony’ because of the conclusion of the grand narratives connected with the USSR, and the consequent liberation of multiple voices that had once been subordinated to them, and this notion is crucial to German’s films.

Twenty Days Without War (1977): National History and Personal Memory The film begins just after the Battle of Stalingrad but with Leningrad still under siege. A group of soldiers on a beach are bombarded and shot at by some German planes and they take cover, but one of the men does not survive. Major Lopatin (Yuri Nikulin) is entrusted with the task of carrying news of his death to Tashkent, which is far away and untouched by war. Lopatin is a war correspondent and is also going to assist in the making of a film at Tashkent. Almost immediately after this, Lopatin is seen on a train to Tashkent in Central Asia. On the train, Lopatin meets a soldier whose name is not revealed to us, but who tells Lopatin his own story. The story involves his wife’s unfaithfulness when he was at the front. The soldier’s monologue is an intense one and could well be out of Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead—so much is the man on the edge and trying to restrain himself from some dreadful act. But Lopatin neither consoles him nor gives him counsel; he only agrees to write a letter for the soldier. Later, in Tashkent, Lopatin sees the soldier again but the two do not acknowledge each other. In a comparable sequence in Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying (1958), a doctor attends to a wounded man in a similar position and comforts him. In Twenty Days Without War, there is no sense that Lopatin and the soldier’s

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respective existences can be brought together, while in Kalatozov’s film there is ‘human concern’ attempting a coalescing of different lives subordinated to a common destiny. There are other sequences in Twenty Days Without War that reinforce the same sense of lives not coalescing. Lopatin is required to extend solace to the woman to whom he carries news of her dead husband, but she breaks down and simply asks him to leave. Lopatin’s own former wife is in Tashkent and living with another man. He visits her and signs some documents annulling their marriage. His ex-wife asserts that she is happy with the new man in her life, but breaks into tears when Lopatin affixes his signature, blaming him for the break-up because his work was so important to him. Lopatin cannot listen and hurries out of the house, but runs into a woman named Lina with whom he had exchanged glances on the train. She is known to his former wife and is a seamstress. The two leave together and encounter other people on their walk. Lina’s husband ‘ran off’ before the war and she lives with her daughter. Lopatin is now a familiar face in Tashkent and a woman and her son approach him hesitantly. Her husband was last heard from before he went behind enemy lines but his friend turned up recently to hand over his watch, which the husband wanted given to her. Her husband has not been heard from for four months but her son says this is natural. Is that true and is it natural for a man to send his watch to his wife when he is not in danger? When Lopatin proceeds to the location where a film based on his writing is being shot, he discovers that not many people know what war is like. The self-important party ‘consultant’ (who saw action in the civil war) has read some regulations and believes that soldiers should wear gas masks and helmets at all times to be in readiness for battle. Some actors also wear medals, believing it to be the dress code for a soldier on the battlefield. Lopatin disabuses the actors of some of these notions and answers questions about the experience of war.

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He concludes by making a patriotic speech extolling the people of Tashkent for assisting the nation at war. Having to leave the next day Lopatin visits Lina for the last time and the two spend an intimate hour together, even as Lina’s daughter keeps calling out to her from somewhere outside. Lina cannot see him off at the railway station and the two will probably not meet again. The film ends with Lopatin back on the battlefield amidst shelling. A newly arrived lieutenant, who has just chided a sergeant for not addressing him correctly, is expressing happiness after a severe bombardment that he is still alive, because he thought it was all over. ‘This is only the beginning, Lieutenant,’ a soldier assures him, ‘Berlin is still a long way off.’ Twenty Days Without War is the most linear of the three films by German that’s being examined, but one still gets a sense of its ‘plotlessness’ from the description provided. The narration begins as a voice-over, implying that the film represents Lopatin’s memory of his visit to Tashkent and that justifies its episodic character. The recounting in German’s film is not subjective—from Lopatin’s viewpoint—and we witness things that Lopatin could not have seen,6 but he is still at its centre. The film captures a view of the periphery of the action and unlike the centre of the action in which there is forced consonance in the presence of a common danger, the periphery allows the narrative to accommodate some polyphony. Critics writing on Soviet cinema tend to place their evaluative emphasis on each filmmaker’s courage to ‘reveal the truth’. This suggests that the most important aspect of Twenty Days Without War to strike the critic will be Lopatin’s trying to correct the heroic view of the war being propagated in Tashkent,7 since most other Soviet war films of the period were still being made in the patriotic mould.8 But German’s achievement is more radical than this ‘courageous’ aspect of the film—he trying to get at a more ‘truthful’ picture, as it were. This lies in the ‘polyphony’ accommodated by the film’s narrative,

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the sense of individual trajectories not subordinated to a common national history. Accounts of German’s filmmaking methods bring out a curious contradiction. While he is extremely attentive to physical detail pertaining to the periods he deals with, for which purpose he relies on personal memories, he also exhibits a general indifference to historical accuracy.9 A hypothesis explaining this is that personal memories are artistically more reliable than historical memory, especially when the latter had been so ruthlessly put at the service of the state. It should be noted, however, that this is not specific to the Soviet state because all nation states tend to act thus, that is, give the chronology of events a teleology, leading up to a development like independence or a politically defining happening like a revolution. Every major event for over a hundred years before Indian independence, for instance, is interpreted as a step towards the independent nation.10 The Soviet Union was different only in its conviction that doctored history was ‘theoretically correct’ since history had a discernible direction that neutralised the effects of accidents and random occurrences.11 Twenty Days Without War granting equal legitimacy to multiple trajectories and accommodating their polyphony is perhaps a way of subverting the subsumptive characteristics of historical memory, which is like authorial narration in the Bakhtinian sense. Bakhtin, while discussing Leo Tolstoy, notes how the propagandising impulse in the novelist leads to a narrowing-down of ‘heteroglot social consciousness’.12 Bakhtin uses the term ‘heteroglossia’ to describe the diversity of styles going into a single literary text, but in films it is not perhaps different cinematic styles but allowing for different destinies not subordinated to a single teleology as represented by the plot. In Twenty Days Without War, Lina’s story has a trajectory that hints at less than happy times before the war. Her husband ‘running away’ is even reminiscent of the father ‘leaving’ in The Mirror. As opposed to the emotions in Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying

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that dwell on national catastrophe in which personal loss is only a constituent element, personal loss is primary in various trajectories charted in Twenty Days Without War. The film is radical in its approach but it can hardly be asserted that it has an explicit political purpose directed against the Soviet state, or that it debunks the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Its radicalism, instead, consists in it finding a formal way to deal with events of the past that are still personally recollected without subordinating them to the dominant discourse of Soviet national history. If the film’s narrative, which is perhaps less than a ‘story’, is resolved through the relationship between Lopatin and Lina, the resolution is not mediated by history as is usual in war films everywhere. Even in Terrence Mallick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), for instance, the narrative is resolved when Pvt. Witt (who was a deserter) acknowledges the larger cause by giving his own life for it. The last aspect of German’s film that makes it a significant formal achievement is his use of ‘choreography’. The frames of the film are perpetually crowded with activity of various sorts—people move in and out of them usually without their being implicated in the action. The sense to be got is of the numerous personal trajectories disturbed by and not in consonance with the war effort. There is also a sense of the milieu being unstable, and Tashkent itself appears to be a temporary camp of sorts. In The Cranes are Flying and most other war films even from Hollywood, the domestic enclosure is a stable one with the promise of domesticity resuming. In German’s film, the ‘choreography’ adds to the sense of domestic instability. The film concludes with Lopatin carrying on with his part in the war, with no stability to anticipate when it is over—the disturbances will continue as before the war.

My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984): The Periphery of the Cataclysm If the action in Twenty Days Without War takes place in the periphery of a cataclysm, so also it does in My Friend Ivan Lapshin, although the

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‘periphery’ now is in time rather than in space. The film begins with an unnamed narrator describing the happenings in a small town nearly fifty years back, in 1935, perhaps just before the arrests of the Great Terror began. As a boy he lived with his father in a boarding house managed by the stern Patrikeyevna, and among those living there was Chief Inspector Ivan Lapshin (Andrei Boltnev), who was his hero. The film is episodic and shifts from story to story with many of the contextual references not being provided. Okoshkin who also lives at the boarding house is a party official although we discover this only later. The camera (cinematographer Valeri Fedosov, who also shot Twenty Days Without War) does not always follow Lapshin, who is nominally the protagonist, but also tracks various other people and movement, without explanations being provided. In the first sequence, for instance, there is the mimicry of an Italian airplane dropping bombs over Abyssinia, and a chess game between two people in which José Raúl Capablanca, the Cuban Grandmaster, is mentioned. This same kind of ‘noise’, random events not tied to an obvious plot but taking up screen time, is also in evidence in Twenty Days Without War, although the camera nonetheless follows Lopatin much of the time. The fact that Ivan Lapshin focuses on neither the narrator nor the eponymous hero is also central because the film is perhaps not so much about Ivan Lapshin as about people ‘befriending’ a policeman in an authoritarian regime. Significantly, while the camera follows so many people and their activities without providing a logical basis for why it is doing so, its apparent interest in them is belied when we never learn what happened to any of them in fifty years after 1935, not even to Lapshin. The narrative is deliberately left without focus, as though to assert that all people would be of equal interest if they all met roughly the same fate. To give the reader a deeper sense of the film’s unfocused narrative, we see Lapshin waking up with tears in his eyes but not giving reasons

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except, a little later, that he ‘dreamt of an airplane’. At another moment he awakens sweating and mentions the civil war in which he sustained an injury but, ‘We were still happier then,’ he asserts ruefully. Lapshin is engaged in pursuing the Soloviev gang, which is a ‘gang of ruthless criminals’, but we are not told much about Soloviev, although we see frozen corpses being loaded on to a truck in winter—some critics, though, have noted perspicaciously that the gang was trading in human meat.13 ‘We’ll clear the land of scum and plant orchards and still be around to enjoy them!’ declares Lapshin optimistically, as he rides his motorcycle across an arid stretch of land. The 1930s, we recollect, was just after the forced collectivisation when there was an enormous food shortage; both the Solovievs and this optimism about food production may be regarded in relation to that. The key relationship in the film is the one between Lapshin and Natasha, actress in a drama troupe preparing to put up an agitprop play apparently about criminals being reformed through labour. Natasha uses all her charm on Lapshin and he arranges for her to meet a real prostitute so she can lend her role some authenticity. Lapshin is courted by the troupe because he is important in the town and he arranges for them to get some firewood. Another character making his appearance now is Khanin, Lapshin’s friend. Khanin is a writer, journalist and intellectual, although all we are told about him is that his wife died from diphtheria six days ago, about which he appears quite cheerful. Khanin is mischievous and gets Natasha to impersonate Okoshkin’s ‘abandoned wife’ in public as a prank. Khanin has no place to stay and we are not told much about him. All that we know is that he moves into Lapshin’s boarding house and tries to shoot himself in the bathroom. But the cold metallic taste of the barrel makes him gag and he tries putting the revolver to his temple and then his forehead until he fires it accidentally into the bathtub, when Lapshin comes in, wraps it up and hides it away. Khanin’s dead wife cannot be the reason and the poet Mayakovsky’s

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suicide is later casually invoked by him, suggesting a political cause. By this time, his relationship with Lapshin having deteriorated after Natasha’s prank, Okoshkin moves out of the boarding house to live with another actress from the same drama troupe, a woman senior to Natasha. Later on, Okoshkin moves back into it, having apparently had enough of the woman. The climactic action in the film happens when Lapshin and his men surround a two-storied farmhouse in which Soloviev is holed up. It is foggy and miserable people sit around in the passageways while Lapshin searches in the rooms until he finds the man he is looking for. But Soloviev escapes, assaults Khanin outside and takes shelter some distance away. Lapshin has his men counsel the criminal to surrender, but when Soloviev throws his gun down and surrenders, Lapshin shoots him dead in cold blood and walks away from the scene. Lapshin has been harbouring feelings for Natasha and goes to her apartment, climbs up to it using a ladder provided by an assistant, much against her entreaties. In the apartment, even as Lapshin prepares for some intimacy, Natasha reveals to him hastily that it is Khanin that she loves. Like many of the other segments in the film, this sequence too loses much in the telling. It is evident that Natasha knows that Lapshin would make a much better ‘relationship’ for her than Khanin, who is a maverick and given to avoidable sarcasm. The writer, for instance, finds a tiny scrap of newspaper in his soup and tries to read its political message. At the same time, Natasha loves Khanin rather than the unsophisticated policeman, but realises that she has hurt Lapshin although the policeman attempts to look unaffected. Natasha tries, therefore, to comfort him through kisses even as she is rejecting him, wishing aloud ‘how nice things might have been with him’ since there is really no man in her life. In the last segment Khanin is preparing to depart on a riverboat and Natasha, without too much hope, entreats him to take her along

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while Lapshin is standing by impassively, smoking a cigarette and gazing into the distance. A band is playing military music and the air is faintly festive. Khanin gets on to the boat and Natasha goes off in another direction after bidding a dutiful goodbye to Lapshin. The policeman now joins his men and climbs on to a truck carrying them. The film concludes with the narrator telling us how much the town has changed since then and we see the town as it is now, stretched further on the other side of the river and with more than two tram lines, which is all there were in 1935. While the film is intelligible, it is difficult to imagine a nonRussian audience responding enthusiastically to My Friend Ivan Lapshin since it is so dependent on the evocation of a year that only means something in the former USSR. If it is reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973),14 which also deals with a year in the narrator’s life, German’s film hardly charms us in the same way. There are local allusions not explained, like the fox and rooster shut into the same enclosure, a social experiment of sorts, until the fox eats the rooster. There is so much detail accentuated by the depth of the images that one is unsure where its focus lies. The use of deep focus by German is markedly different from its use in Citizen Kane, in that it complicates the narrative rather than disentangles it. Phrased differently, the surplus of detail prevents us from reading the film in terms of plot, the causal connections are left uncertain, and this is confused further by bits of overlapping speech that do not reinforce a single whole, unlike in, say, a Robert Altman film in which dialogue of no great consequence can be identified and given less attention. My Friend Ivan Lapshin is based on stories by Aleksei German’s father, Yuri German, and most of the people upon whom the characters are based, including the policemen, were executed in 1937–1938.15 The film may be poised at an instant of ‘quiet’ or a moment when history was steadying itself before an assault, and German may be trying to capture a moment akin to that before a tsunami. The moment before

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a cataclysmic event is not ‘still’ in itself and the tranquillity is in retrospect when the elements of daily life, because they are due to be rendered insignificant, are paradoxically made memorable. To further the parallel with Amarcord, the year in Amarcord is memorable because it is the year of Titta’s mother’s death, while 1935 in Ivan Lapshin is made memorable by what commenced in 1936. This last observation furnishes us with another clue pertaining to the ‘plotlessness’ of German’s two films. As already argued, plot and causality find correspondence in teleology but the political cataclysm just beyond the action in Ivan Lapshin is so horrific that the causal elements implicated in the film’s action lose significance. But since each event from 1935 is itself strongly recalled, the period will perhaps be remembered as a series of luminous yet discrete moments not bound together as effect to cause. This may be comparable to how the effect of a municipal scandal in 1945 on local lives in Hiroshima will be remembered. As a last observation about the two films dealt with, a question of importance may be why there is no evidence of domesticity in them. This aspect of Twenty Days Without War has been already explored but, in Ivan Lapshin, the narrator and his father live without their mother in a boarding house and she is not mentioned. Although there is a hint of romance, heterosexual attachments do not prove stable; Natasha is left with neither Lapshin nor Khanin. Okoshkin resumes his life in the boarding house after leaving the actress. There is no evidence that a political message is concealed here about Stalin’s USSR and family life. Still, in films set in cataclysms like war there is a promise of domesticity resuming afterwards because of a happy conclusion to the disturbance.16 The time in which they are set is politically unstable but only temporarily, which is not the sense in German’s two films. To use an analogy, the breakdown of domesticity in them (and also in The Mirror) may be like the ionisation of the atmosphere prior to a storm, which had not fully passed even in 1984.

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Khrustalev, My Car! (1997): Nation and Structure Any account given of Khrustalev, My Car! will tend to relate its plot, as I did earlier, but the primary value of the film lies in its conclusive defeat of the plot, if that is actually possible. The film, in black-andwhite, deals with the travails of Major General Klenski, a surgeon and the head of a psychiatric hospital in Moscow in February–March 1953, and is nominally as recollected by his son, then around ten, and related in a voice-over. The film begins in a dark Moscow with a stoker trying to warm himself on the hood of a parked car, which unfortunately belongs to the NKVD. German is extremely attentive to the milieu he is depicting in its physical detail but without resorting to explanations. Klenski lives in a former aristocratic mansion of some sort, which has now been split up into several small dwellings apparently occupied by families of some influence. The crowded section he lives in—wellappointed with furniture and ancient bric-a-brac perhaps from the Tsarist era—houses members of his family including his mother, sister, two children (Jewish cousins) from Lithuania whom they are sheltering. Klenski is shown to be an ebullient sort given to pranks, and his household is not an aristocrat one. Children spit at mirrors; Klenski dips his fingers into his teacup; gymnastic rings are installed in the living room on which he works out; people eat whenever they please at a handsome dining table, which is never completely cleared of dishes. The household is chaotic and German uses deep focus and a fluid camera to show people clashing in the course of their chores and the children being uncontrollable. Klenski’s boy, for instance, has a wolf’s snarling head that he keeps thrusting into people’s faces. To make it more frantic, the different households are situated so close to each other that one is never sure which people belong to Klenski’s household and which are the neighbours. There is also such a large amount of talk—curses from adults and rhymes from children— that the film cannot be subtitled fruitfully in the service of a linear narrative. This is the milieu as portrayed in which Klenski gradually

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understands that he is in danger. The stoker arrested in the first scene was arrested outside Klenski’s residence and the NKVD may have been watching Klenski, although that is not specified. Since much of the action is in the street and there is quite a bit of unexplained action it would require several viewings of the film to connect the dots, if they can be connected at all. One man seen walks with an umbrella in an early segment, whistling harshly—this is a sound repeatedly associated with the secret police. The man with the umbrella may be an agent provocateur, because he later arrives at the Klenski residence and insinuates that he is bringing a message from the General’s ‘sister in Stockholm’. Klenski assaults him later when he re-appears after being pushed roughly out, again making enquiries. The street scenes are not orderly and there is the familiar sense of discord emphasised by minor traffic accidents in the icy streets. Another strategy seemingly employed by German to underscore the randomness is to have people breaking their actions as if to attend to other business, giving us the sense that their actions have not been completely thought out. The NKVD provocateur, for instance, who is walking carelessly along a pavement, turns abruptly towards the opposite side, because of a hand stretching out of a basement window to reach for a discarded cigarette butt. The provocateur uses his umbrella to push the cigarette to within its reach and then resumes his journey. A motif that is repeated is that of the convoys of black limousines rushing around Moscow in the snow at dead of night, carrying deep portents of apolitical crisis. That he is under suspicion gradually comes upon Klenski. There is some talk of the ‘Doctor’s Plot’ and the arrest of Jewish doctors on charges of attempting to poison top leaders and Klenski is Jewish. He runs his hospital like a personal fiefdom and the sequence set in the hospital is constructed like a weird musical, but without the music. We are familiar with workplace musicals—drawn upon by Lars von Trier in Dancer in the Dark (2000)—and this kind of film

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had its counterpart in the USSR, showing people at work as in Grigori Alexandrov’s The Shining Path (1940), which is set in the textile industry. German is apparently parodying workplace musicals in the segment in which Klenski arrives at work to be met by his anxious assistants, eager to wipe his face, which has become sweaty indoors and his woman assistant anxious to minister to him sexually. Particularly bizarre are the patients—their heads shaved and the sutures on the craniums not removed yet—participating in the energetic goings on. The psychiatric institution was later used routinely in the USSR as a means of dealing with dissenters, and experiments had apparently begun even in the Stalin era. The segment in the psychiatric institution is closer to parody than pastiche, and concludes with Klenski meeting his double, who seems to enjoy all his privileges. What a ‘double’ is doing here is difficult to be certain about, but we are aware that the double always has a useful role in a totalitarian set-up. Doubles, for instance, were often used when ‘confessions’ had to be recorded during show trials. Since German never explains himself—and there is so much peripheral action to defeat every possibility of a plot—it is difficult to say when Klenski becomes aware that he is in danger. At some point, he decides not to get back home but watch it from a distance. Here again, we do not know what he sees but he attends a party after that, which is also attended by other uniformed state functionaries. Klenski makes one or two unguarded statements (‘When Nero dies, there will be some lovely executions.’) and is admonished by his hostess (‘I will not allow you to speak of Him like that.’). There is also some casual talk about the success of longevity research being doubtful, since the researcher died at 51. The highpoint of the evening is Klenski trying to get a large dog drunk. After this he returns to his office, exits by a back entrance, jumps over a wall and makes for his mistress Varvara’s apartment. She is a teacher of Russian literature and he requests to stay the night. This scene is wonderfully poetic—there is snow

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outside and Varvara’s mother in the next room is anxious about who is visiting her daughter at this late hour. The cat, which is trying to get at the carp just brought in by Klenski, is punished by being dunked in the bathtub. A little while later, it is arching its delicate way past the sleeping couple. As with My Friend Ivan Lapshin, the film is also reminiscent of Fellini’s work in the wonderfully poetic moments that abound, but Fellini pushes politics out of the picture (as in Amarcord when he deals with Fascism facetiously). Fellini’s approach is primarily nostalgic and the subordination of the other elements to authorial narration is complete. German is dealing primarily with the memory of a political world with too much independent significance. But the implication is that political repression cannot subdue the richness of the world and the film is essentially a paean to this notion. The parody, the satire, the brutality and the lyricism in the film, therefore, represent the polyphonic elements resisting subordination to the discourse against repression, and memories of the period similarly resisting the subsuming ‘Fellinesque’ authorial voice. The second part of Khrustalev begins with Klenski submitting to arrest, and this is made to seem inevitable because he is shown to wait at a pre-arranged point to be picked up when he is assaulted by a gang of boys, apparently habituated to such indulgences and evidently from the Komsomol, the youth wing of the party. One imagines that the capricious brutality of the state will create similar propensities among the citizenry towards ‘enemies’. The ‘pick up’ of the accused itself is a ceremonial affair with a photographer also present, but the truck conveying him and some others is makeshift and the group is quickly transferred to a vehicle that doubles up as a transporter of wine. After a ride on which Klenski is sodomised by his companions—who later demonstrate that they bear him no ill-will—the vehicle stops under the cover of fog and the prisoners relieve themselves. ‘Can you let me go?’ Klenski requests the guard. ‘Go where?’ asks the guard in reply.

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After Klenski’s car, driver and rank are restored to him, he is taken to a spot where he needs to freshen up and he meets his double—who takes a cigarette from him ‘for old times’ sake’—once again. Here again there are no explanations but a double has many uses. Perhaps, if Klenski had been dead, the double would have taken his place at the dying Stalin’s bedside. There are conflicting reports of the filming of the climax in Stalin’s dacha, and while one view is that German filmed it in the actual dacha, another is that he painstakingly recreated it. But there are apparently factual inaccuracies regarding who was present at Stalin’s death and the actor who plays Lavrenti Beria also does not resemble the actual chief of the NKVD. Still, as already argued, the history of the USSR has not been reliable and German’s creation of ‘artistic truth’ depends, essentially, on his questioning of ‘historical truth’. Filmmakers have portrayed decisive historical moments through fiction in several ways and the most popular one has perhaps been for the narrator’s eye to be in proximity to the leading historical players— as in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) or Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012). An equally common one has been for the viewpoint to be that of the small man—the Nazi destruction of Warsaw from the viewpoint of a Jewish victim as in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002). Scrutinising the two possible approaches,17 it would appear in both of them that ‘national history’ is privileged, with the filmmaker having discernible links with the nation. Even Schindler’s List (1993) can be categorised thus because the film deals with the prehistory of the Jewish ‘nation-to-be’,18 and is by a Jewish filmmaker. Downfall (2004) also deals with ‘national history’, even if the emotions associated with the nation are different. Rather than being political, ‘national history’ is a metaphysical influence because it implies a common destiny binding people (who are not social equals). Everyone partakes equally in the destiny of a nation, is the sense, whether Hitler or the unknown women attendants who share the Führerbunker with him.

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A factor linking various films dealing with national history is that they are ‘monophonic’, and it may be the ‘metaphysics of nationhood’ that is responsible. Khrustalev, although it deals with a turning point in national history, is polyphonic and Klenski, Beria and Stalin, emphatically, do not share the same destiny. This is not only because Stalin, unlike Lincoln, Gandhi or Hitler (as portrayed in Downfall), is a villain whose death simply means deliverance to the people. Many of these films about political villains still imagine a nation with the villain or tyrant excluded. As instances, one recalls American films from the counterculture period in which functionaries of the state and/or military leaders are designated villains (as in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, 1970) but, rather than deny the nation, the films reconfigure the nation as a community from which the state is kept out, and one can conceive of Khrustalev on the same lines. But German’s film, instead, makes an effort not to configure a ‘nation’ by organising a cohesive community around its protagonist—as it happens, despite its polyphony, in My Friend Ivan Lapshin. But if the nation is not inscribed in Khrustalev, there is still ample indication of a political structure in which everyone is implicated. Rather than being a metaphysical binding force, ‘nation’ is synonymous with this political structure and that is where Stalin becomes pertinent. There is a sense to be got from the climax that although Stalin is nominally in charge, the structures of repression are independent. Stalin himself is abridged to a bad odour deposited on Klenski’s hands but the structures remain intact. Later, Klenski is an ordinary man asleep on an upper berth of a train heading out across Russia and his right arm hangs out; a fellow traveller sniffs enquiringly at the hand without suspecting that the odour is the residue of the Father of the Nation. There was a sense in the late Stalin period that the dictator was the nation, and the ultimate accusation that plotting to kill Stalin was not simply intent to murder but high treason. This being the case, there is a suggestion in Stalin’s residual odour of the ‘evaporating nation’, because all that remains of it is empty structure.

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At the conclusion of Khrustalev, My Car! Klenski is in the same compartment as the stoker who is arrested in the first scene of the film, and the stoker has learnt the English language. He has not yet learned the swear words but he knows the word ‘liberty’. This suggests that the absence of nationhood in the film may also be pertinent to the Yeltsin era and its American orientation, when the Soviet identity assiduously cultivated for over seven decades ended. If this reading is allowed, Khrustalev, My Car! marks the conclusion of Soviet cinema.

Towards Polyphony If there is one attribute by which German’s films stand alone in cinema, it lies in his use of choreography. To reiterate what was said in A Trajectory of Form, choreography in Soviet cinema treated the human body as a machine and, stated differently, this means that movement does not stem from the individual, as it happens in Hollywood musicals, which also uses choreography, although of a different sort. In the Soviet cinema of the 1920s, choreography and movement depend on montage and the cut. In cinema under Khruschev, even in the 1950s with films like Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying, montage has made way for the tracking camera and deep focus. But the difference between this later cinema and that of the 1920s is primarily that choreography in the later cinema is used to affirm the Soviet identity, which is still elusive in the 1920s cinema. In the 1920s cinema (Pudovkin’s Mother was cited), montage cannot conceal the fact that the characters respond to each other from different planes, as it were. There is no sense of people making the reassuring eye contact with each other that later cinema provides and it is as if a society with a single political aim is only being assembled. From the 1930s onwards, with the stricter ideological role assumed by cinema and the creation of the Soviet identity, cinema is ‘plane polarised’, as it were, and everyone transacts on the same plane of understanding. German’s first independent effort, Trial of

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the Road, can also be described in this way, although it is thematically daring for being a war film about a Soviet deserter to the enemy side. As already indicated in A Trajectory of Form, the Brezhnev era, with its stagnation, was the period in which utopian discourse weakened in the public space. The arts still flourished but invisibly and, being a period for dissidence,19 the era engendered cinema that departed from the favoured ideological models, although it was often clumsily suppressed. The ‘difficult’ film was, essentially, a product of the stagnation period under Brezhnev, and its ‘difficulty’ was associated with polyphony, because the authoritative discourse of Stalinist doctrine found it increasingly difficult to contain manifold expression. From Twenty Days Without War onwards, there is growing polyphony in German’s films. Instead of merely adopting a ‘critical attitude’ towards the state, it is as if cinema is breaking free of ideology. This last remark needs clarification: it is believed in the democratic West that being disenchanted with the communist state is synonymous with welcoming democracy, but that is perhaps closer to exchanging one ideology for another. The growing polyphony in German’s films—culminating in the visual excess of Khrustalev, My Car!—is indicative of ideology being abandoned, if that is possible. It deals with dark times but is almost buoyant in tone, and if it is a hellish vision of the Stalin era, it is grounded in the anarchic present— its buoyancy is ‘carnivalesque’ rather than satirical. I will conclude this chapter with speculation on what choreography means to Aleksei German—why he uses the tracking camera and deep focus so pointedly instead of montage to accommodate the polyphony. Choreography is evidently at the centre of German’s craft and movement in his films is a deliberate effort to subvert the teleology of the narrative. Teleology can be equated with authorial narration and it would be contradictory for a film that celebrates the carnivalesque to allow its varied elements to submit to authorial narration. Regarding

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his eschewing of montage, German’s cinema is a painstakingly realist cinema. In attempting to recreate ‘history’, with personal memory as its basis instead of ‘fact’, he is essentially subverting Marxist–Leninist or Stalinist historicism. This demands a realist cinema since, going by André Bazin’s formulations, montage is not realist but ‘expressionist’, which is perhaps what Aleksei German did not want his films to be, since he is not creating a private world but recreating a commonly remembered one.

Notes and References   1. Giovanni Buttafava, ‘Alexei German, or the Form of Courage’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 275.   2. Nancy Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 194–200.   3. By the end of Stalin’s life, he had become paranoid and had had most of his former confidants executed. Beria made use of this opportunity to place his own men in Stalin’s household and Khrustalev was one of them. Beria was almost certain that he would assume power but Khrushchev aligned with Malenkov and had him deposed and executed in December 1953.   4. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), 157.   5. David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 717–722.  6. David Bordwell, ‘The Classical Hollywood Style’, in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, eds. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (London: Routledge, 1985), 42–43.   7. Giovanni Buttafava, ‘Alexei German or the Form of Courage’, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 276. It has been noted that Soviet filmmakers were often evaluated in the West by their ‘courage’. I have already tried to show in my examination of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (in the last chapter) that complete opposition to state repression was not the most logically

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12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

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moral position for a filmmaker to take and the Soviet citizen’s feelings were more ambivalent than might have been imagined because of their own ancestors probably having been implicated in Leninism and then Stalinism. This has been articulated in a different way: ‘How are we to retell our history without disgracing our forefathers?’ See also Tony Wood, ‘Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German’, New Left Review, 7 (January–February 2001), 103. Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) is considered a ‘courageous’ Soviet film but it is still heroic in many of its passages. Nancy Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 201–202. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Imaginary Institution of India’, Subaltern Studies, 7 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992): 1–39. Leon Trotsky, responding to whether history was entirely decided by class struggle and whether accidents could never play a decisive part, proposed that the effects of accidents, though individually important, were ultimately eliminated through their ‘natural selection’. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 283. Tony Wood, ‘Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German’, The New Left Review, 7 (January–February 2001). https://newleftreview.org/ issues/II7/articles/tony-wood-time-unfrozen-the-films-of-alekseigerman. Accessed on 29 September 2019. German regards Fellini as ‘cinema’s only realist’. Interview in Iskusstvo Kino, 8, 2000, 12. Cited by Tony Wood, ‘Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German’, New Left Review, 7 (January–February 2001). Nancy Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema, 194. If war concludes as defeat as it did for Germany in 1945, domesticity cannot evidently resume as seen in its films, for example, Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Germany Pale Mother (1980). Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997), 256. After Schindler’s List (1993) swept the Academy Awards, editorials and commentaries made implicit and explicit connections between the film and concerns about the state of Israel, about conflicts between Israelis and Arabs, and about antiSemitic statements by members of the African–American community.

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18. There are evidently other possible approaches. Another course is an investigation into an event from a later perspective. An example is Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem (1970). This approach appears to turn the enquiry into a personal quest or discovery and there is a deliberate blurring of the truth behind the event being investigated. 19. Alexander Timofeevsky, ‘The Last Romantics’, in Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, eds. Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 28–29.

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9

Utopia and the Patriarchal Order Zhang Yimou as a Chinese National Artist A National Filmmaker Zhang Yimou is the best-known film director from what is known as the ‘Fifth Generation’ of filmmakers coming out of mainland China. The cinema of mainland China is one of three distinct streams in Chinese-language cinema, together with the cinema of Hong Kong and the cinema of Taiwan. Motion pictures were introduced in China as early as 1986, and the revolution of 1949 saw motion pictures becoming an important tool of propaganda that ceased after Mao. Zhang’s films, coming after the Cultural Revolution, are hardly propaganda, but reading their politics can still be rewarding. Interpreting them is rewarding because Zhang has worked in a multitude of ‘apolitical’ genres, including the historical/mythological epic, and some of his films have been worldwide hits. Since many of them are intended as mass entertainment, they yield their political meaning despite themselves, unlike propaganda in which political discourse is deliberate. Zhang’s films are part of a national cinema and they belong to a category about which there is perhaps still some uncertainty. Among the eight categories identified under ‘national cinema’,1 they could fall readily under ‘totalitarian cinema’, ‘art cinema’ as well as ‘Asian commercial successes’. Although films from countries like Iran and China today may not be as strictly ‘totalitarian’ as those of the former Soviet Bloc and Mao’s China were once understood 239

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to be, and they are widely accepted as art cinema or entertainment, the degree of censorship in the respective countries must still be taken into account while categorising them. Zhang Yimou works in a space in which there is strict censorship but he is also an auteur, and the works of an auteur—with a large following—from a political system that is uncommunicative about its own workings are doubly interesting. But before going on to examine Zhang’s films it is necessary to get a broad sense of how cinema developed in China after 1949.

Chinese Cinema and Politics in the 1950s and 1960s The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese cinema proceeded quickly in the areas of administration, distribution and exhibition, production and criticism. In April 1949, Northeast Studio released the first socialist feature, Bridge (Qiao, Wang Bin). Set during the liberation war, the film tells how, against all odds, workers complete the construction of a bridge in time for People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers to move across the Sungari River.2 At the same time as glorifying the collective wisdom of the proletariat, the film also shows the transformation of the chief engineer, whose initial lack of confidence in the strengths of the working classes is in the end proved wrong. In its tripartite attention to the revolutionary war, the wisdom of the proletariat and the transformation of the intellectuals, the film points to three recurring themes in socialist cinema. As may be gathered, the earliest films after the CCP consolidated itself were war films. War films functioned also as historical films due to the fact that the CCP, now securely in power, had resorted to cinema to provide a suitable teleology for the history of modern China, as a process in which the communists led the Chinese people. But at the same time, class struggle also needed to be depicted to

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assist the land reform movement and to remind its audience of the ‘permanent’ threat of class enemies. The White-Haired Girl (Bai Mao Nü, Wang Bin, Shui Hua, 1950) is a popular adaptation of a 1944 CCP-sanctioned village opera from the Yan’an era.3 The film presents the villagers as less superstitious and more responsive to communist mobilisation than the opera version, and there are other factors such as the suggestion of female sexuality that makes the film transcend its political function; but this artistic freedom was quickly belied a little later with the release of The Life of Wu Xun (Wu Xun Zhuan, Sun Yu, 1950). Wu Xu was a poverty-stricken beggar in the years of the Qing dynasty who later dedicated his life to raising money and offering free education to poor children. The film’s theme was perhaps ‘insufficiently progressive’ because Chiang Kai-shek had reportedly praised Wu Xun during the war. But the project was still revived (by the privately owned studio Kunlun) due to paucity of screenplays and several changes were made, including a peasant uprising and a critical assessment of Wu Xun from a post-liberation perspective. The film drew enthusiastic crowds and garnered rave reviews; and, perhaps being emboldened, the director brought a print to Beijing, where he cut a one-part version of less than three hours and screened it to a special audience, including Premier Zhou Enlai, actor–director Yuan Muzhi and about a hundred other CCP leaders. Mao was not present at the screening but watched the film soon afterwards and detected serious problems that he gave voice to. He wrote an editorial and had People’s Daily publish it on 20 May 1951. The editorial criticised the film for ‘promoting feudal culture’, ‘distorting peasants’ revolutionary struggles and ‘misrepresenting Chinese history’. Among the issues raised was that only the party, and not filmmakers, had the right to represent history, and that peasants should take on screen the image of fighters and not reformists. Since Mao’s editorial diagnosed the initial media praise of the film as the infiltration of bourgeois thought into the CCP, a nationwide campaign was launched and it spread to all levels of the state. From November

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1951 to January 1952, the entire film circles were forced to go through ‘rectification’. Not only did Sun Yu admit his errors in newspapers, but Premier Zhou himself apparently also apologised to the CCP central committee for his oversight.4 Since, subsequently, eager responses were received from everywhere to substantiate Chairman Mao’s criticism of the film,5 Mao had, in effect, marshalled his support within the party through a film review. The Wu Xun incident has been subsequently studied by film historians and its importance is attached to Mao’s personal hand in a campaign against the film, which he described as ‘poisonous’. Why Mao chose to do this is uncertain but it has been argued that since Chinese cinema was dominated by Shanghai—seen as dominated by capitalism, bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ideas—this was a way of taking it along the path to Yan’an, that is, acknowledgement by Shanghai-affiliated, urban-centred artists of the ideological authority of the Yan’an-trained, rural-educated cadres. But apart from this, it also prefigured a strategy frequently employed by Mao—especially during the Cultural Revolution—to intervene in culture as a way of strengthening his hold over the party,6 that is, forcing cultural figures and party leaders to submit to his authority by admitting their ideological errors openly. Political prescriptions for what cinema should be was confusing in the 1950s, with official pronouncements emphasising seemingly contrary notions like ‘revolutionary idealism’, ‘revolutionary realism’ and ‘revolutionary romanticism’7 but the general push was towards the portrayal of workers and peasants, the elimination of all ambivalence and the ascendancy of political correctness as the highest operating principle. Correspondingly, public spaces with political connotations— factories, mines, villages and military camps—become the preferred settings. The favoured plot usually ends with the triumph of the public over the private, leaving little or no room for addressing personal dilemmas and crises.

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While ‘socialist realism’ was accepted as the credo, the CCP position under Mao was never as clearly articulated as the Soviet position under Stalin was in the 1930s. The purpose was ostensibly the interpellation of the audience as voluntary historical subjects of the socialist nation-state;8 but Mao’s personal interventions, which sometimes seemed capricious, tend to cloud this hypothesis. Mao perhaps extended or held back approval or attacked at will primarily to further the cult of personality around himself, since most of his interventions led to members of the CCP admitting their errors. Even if Mao was not acting deliberately in this way, there is little evidence (as we shall see) in later Chinese cinema that a Marxist worldview was inculcated under Mao. When he launched the Hundred Flowers campaign, it was immediately compared by Western Marxist scholars to the ‘thaw’ in the USSR under Khruschev, but it soon became evident that it was a ploy by Mao to bring dissent into the open. Scholars of Soviet cinema point out the utopian mindset of many of the intellectuals of the thaw period,9 which apparently finds no correlation in China. The most plausible hypothesis about China is that Mao’s socialist utopianism was not intellectual but intended to appeal elsewhere. It commanded a broad-based following in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly among the young generation because of its negation of humanism and its appeal to it to surrender private life and participate wholly in public activity. The generation mobilised by Mao was made eager to sublimate everyday life into an artistic experience teeming with theatricality and ecstasy.10 It was arguably less a mobilisation based on political understanding than a cult of worship. Cinema had been stagnating in the 1950s and the Hundred Flowers campaign helped it.11 The effects of the liberal reform measures resulting from the Hundred Flowers campaign were immediate: annual feature production almost doubled, rising from

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twenty-three in 1955 to forty-two in 1956 and doubled again in 1957. The crowning achievements were perhaps three satirical comedies made by Lu Ban ridiculing the bureaucracy: Before the New Director Arrives (Xin Juzhang Daolai Zhiqian, 1956), A Man with Bad Manners (Buju Xiaojie De Ren, 1956) and The Unfinished Comedies (Wei Wancheng De Xijü, 1957). The Hundred Flowers campaign came to an end with the launch of the Anti-Rightist movement. The ministry of culture judged The Unfinished Comedies to be a ‘poisonous weed’ rather than a blossoming flower, and numerous other films were identified as ‘white flags’ (or non-revolutionary) to be brought down. Critics, intellectuals and filmmakers were classified as ‘Rightists’ and banished from the public eye, some for over two decades. As before, many others (including party leaders) had to admit their errors to survive politically. The Anti-Rightist movement in 1957 swiftly led to the Great Leap Forward in 1958. During this time Chinese cinema still had various genres that went back to before the revolution, like the opera film, the ethnic minority film and the war film, some of which were nationalist in design and continued under the CCP rule. Socialist realism, therefore, was not the only valid film aesthetics, although it was favoured. But this state of affairs was only until 1965, because the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966 and during the next decade only seventy-nine feature films were distributed, including six remakes and thirty-six foreign titles.12 We can, therefore, treat the period up to the later 1970s as a gap in Chinese film history, since our interest is primarily in how cinema re-emerged after Mao. Chinese cinema up to the Cultural Revolution has been usefully divided into two political categories—those owing their allegiance to Yan’an and Shanghai respectively. The former is identified largely through its worker–peasant–soldier themes,13 while the latter embraces more variety, thematically, and includes characters who are more ambiguously conceived (‘middle’ characters), although their class antecedents still plays a determining part in their construction.

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Since both categories favoured political didacticism, it will be interesting to identify the differences between Maoist cinema and Stalinist cinema. Stalinist cinema was principally concerned with the production of history, events from the past featuring as ‘prototypes’14 and biographies of historical models becoming a favoured genre. In Chinese cinema the favoured model is the melodrama, in which there is a process of education, which has been traced to the Confucian stress on self-improvement and broader social education.15 Mao described people as blank sheets of paper to be written upon.

Reversals The political history of China in the decade after Mao’s death in 1976 is dominated by a series of ideological reversals. If this had been true of the Stalin era in the USSR in which yesterday’s revolutionaries became today’s agents of Western imperialism, it was more so in China. Studying Soviet cinema after 1917, one finds that there are genuine political issues being debated upon until well into the Stalin era, even when the cinema is openly propagandist. The issue of the collectivisation of agriculture, for instance, is dealt with in films like Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), Eisenstein’s The General Line (1929) and Bezhin Meadow (1937), although the last film was not allowed to be completed. The emancipation of women was dealt with in Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa (1927) and in Fridrikh Ermler’s Fragments of an Empire (1929). Ideological positions are always coming into conflict as in Mikhail Romm’s Mechta (1943). If there was more theoretical consistency—although the status of individuals could change overnight—this was because leaders of the Russian Revolution had argued out their political positions extensively in tracts. Each leader—Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or Bukharin—had a political position that was widely understood. Political struggles, therefore, began as ideological disagreements, and an instance is the struggle in the mid1920s between Stalin and Bukarin on one side and Zinoviev and

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Kamenev on the other, against the pro-muzhik policy expounded by the former group.16 The survival of communism in the USSR after Stalin—despite the horrors perpetrated under him—evidently owed to political theory remaining intact. ‘Maoist theory’ is much more nebulous since Mao expressed himself chiefly in maxims and practical instructions on matters ranging from physical education to guerrilla war and informed by local conditions. They are mainly primers containing assertions in which categories are simplistically drawn and these categories are identified for the limited purpose of determining the capacity of each one for ‘revolutionary action’. They cannot be described as analyses attempting to reflect on matters like history, philosophy and culture. An instance is Mao’s 1951 review of the film The Life of Wu Xun,17 which became the occasion for many leaders to admit their political errors. On scrutinising the review in question, we find that what Mao does essentially is to denounce people for ‘propagating feudal culture’ and also eulogising a class that ‘slavishly flattered the feudal rulers’. Mao lists the writers who wrote about the film positively—including its director Sun Yu—and, rather than being a provocation intended to spark off cultural debate, it conveys a sense of dire warning, with cultural views and activities of ‘some people’ noted down. Instead of encouraging dialogue on politics and history, therefore, political discourse in the public space was perhaps left deliberately unresolved so that Mao, and those chosen by him, could remain arbiters on what was politically correct. This situation in which political mores were clouded in doubt apparently left the public space a bed of ideological confusion after Mao’s death and it was out of this confusion that Deng Xiaoping emerged. Because of the arbitrariness of many political dispensations under Mao, Chinese cinema had been unwilling to take chances and had become extremely predictable by the 1970s. The affirmation underlying every film was the myth of progress under communism: Prior to 1949, life was bad, except in those liberated areas where the

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communist party already held sway. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, everything was good and progressing steadily towards a communist utopia.18 All films that concluded before the revolution or in areas outside those liberated by the communists before 1949 concluded unhappily for the protagonists, while those after the revolution or in the liberated areas had happy endings. This followed from Mao’s theory of culture propagated before the revolution in his Yan’an talks. Mao had expressly stated that although works of exposure were appropriate to any critique of the old society, they were not appropriate to works representing the liberated areas controlled by the party, being neither ‘realistic’ nor serving the party’s political goals.19 The result of the policy was that all problems were treated as either owing to the pre-revolutionary past or to foreign agencies. The difference between the Shanghai and the Yan’an approaches was that, while the former could conceive of positive characters with ideological problems, the latter demonised all people with wrong ideologies.20 Since political thought had hardly developed in Mao’s China, his death in 1976 did not lead to a repudiation of his politics, and for several years after the event the leadership continued to nominally adhere to his ‘theories’, although in actual practice political and economic decisions did not honour his principles. In the two years after Mao’s death, most historians see a three-way struggle in the party—between the revolutionary Maoists (who were later identified with the Gang of Four), the restorationists (who gathered around Hua Guofeng) and the reformists headed by Deng Xiaoping. The revolutionary Maoists favoured continuation of the Cultural Revolution policies and the restorationists advocated a return to the pre-Cultural Revolution policies. The reformists, as opposed to these two, advocated the introduction of pro-market reforms to improve material conditions. Deng, who had been brought back as vice-premier by Zhou Enlai after having been removed from power

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in 1966 at the commencement of the Cultural Revolution, had been removed once again shortly after Zhou’s death in January 1976, with Hua Guofeng becoming the premier. Deng did not return to positions of power immediately after Mao’s death, and was brought back only later by Hua to fight extremists within the party. It should be noted here that the Gang of Four were arrested within a month of Mao’s death in September 1976, strictly on the basis of Maoist principles, and they were labelled ‘ultra-rightists’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries determined to restore capitalism’ by Hua, whose principle political pronouncement was that whatever decisions Mao had taken should be upheld and whatever directions he had given must be respected (‘the two whatevers’). By 1977, support for Deng grew within the party, chiefly from those who, like him, had suffered because of the Cultural Revolution. Deng quoted Mao—‘seek truth from facts’—to which he added his own slogan: ‘Practice is the sole criterion for truth.’21 The implication here is that rather than being a reconsideration of political theory, Deng began by repudiating theory and dwelling only on practice, confirming that Maoist theory was hollow by the 1970s and depended enormously on the iconic presence of the chairman rather than any political doctrine that he ostensibly stood for.22 A matter of pertinence here is that Marxist historians had once wondered at what Maoism represented politically, since there was virtually no Socialist–Marxist influence in China prior to 1917. Even at the foundation congress of CCP in 1921, the number of delegates was twelve, and the total membership was only fifty-seven, including Mao.23 If China had been seething with anti-imperialism and agrarian revolt much earlier, the movements and secret societies involved in the risings and revolts were all traditional in character and based on ancient religious cults. But Maoism had acquired the characteristics of a cult by the time of the Cultural Revolution, and political rhetoric had acquired the characteristics of incantation.

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Chinese Cinema after Mao Chinese cinema took a while to stabilise after Deng’s ascent, but by the 1980s we begin to get a sense of where Mao had left culture politically through his interventions in the life of the nation. It must be brought to the reader’s attention that Chinese cinema before the revolution had been influenced deeply by leftist ideas. The first big success in Chinese cinema was Zhang Shichuan’s Orphan Rescues Grandfather (1923), produced by Minxing Film Company. This film, like many others that followed, took its social responsibilities seriously and engaged in moral didacticism. The struggle in most of these socially conscious films was between the good as represented by motherly love, philanthropy and education and evil by hoary social customs, the tyranny of traditional family and warlords. Both Minxing and a newer studio Lianhua Film Company (founded 1930) were progressive in outlook. The latter company, mindful of its social responsibilities, staffed itself with educated people with Western outlooks.24 In fact, the social consciousness of Chinese cinema was credited with driving pure entertainment genres like martial arts films and ghost films out of the market. Although the Kuomintang (KMT) government was cracking down on communists, leftist titles were considered compatible with KMT policies and the censors picked leftist films to represent China at international film festivals; this has been attributed to the plurality of political interests within the KMT. Class struggle was a common theme in the films of the 1930s in which the villains are capitalists and landlords, while the heroes are from the working class.25 Although other genres like the ‘soft film’, which provided tasteful entertainment, and the patriotic war film, flourished thereafter, the leftist film did not lose ground even after the war was over and Japan defeated. Their political discourses are, in fact, more reasoned out than in cinema under Mao. The earliest films to re-examine the Mao era came at the end of the 1970s, and naturally looked at the scars left by the Cultural Revolution; they have been referred to by critics as ‘scar’ films.26 Two of the most

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important scar films were Bitter Laughter (Yang Yanjin and Deng Yimin, 1979) and The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (Xie Jin, 1980), the latter film tracing the commencement of political repression to the Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 1950s. Xie Jin had earlier made Stage Sisters (1964), which was one of the first casualties of the Cultural Revolution. This film has perhaps the same position with regard to the Cultural Revolution that The Life of Wu Xun had with regard to the Anti-Rightist campaign. Stage Sisters had been encouraged by Xia Yan, vice-minister for culture with whom Jian Qing (Madame Mao) had a running feud. This may have been the cause for the film being denounced as being a ‘typical, decadent pro-bourgeois drama’ and banned.27 The Legend of Tianyun Mountain is about people in key positions using their power for personal ends in the guise of following party policies. Song Wei is in love with her team leader Luo Qun, but the latter is accused of being a rightist and condemned to hard labour through the machinations of Wu Yao, who marries Song. Luo Quon marries Song’s best friend Feng Qinglan instead and the two live a hard life for two decades while Song and her husband are comfortable as senior party officials in the same province. An important aspect of the film is that Song and Luo Qun are shown to be living meaningful lives amidst the rural populace, and it does not merely lament their lot. Rather than take issue with the justice of Anti-Rightist campaign, the film deals with how it was misused locally—for example, the decisions of the party was consistently treated as beyond questioning. Song dies eventually but we are made to draw satisfaction from Feng and Wu Lao getting divorced because of Feng’s efforts to rehabilitate Luo Qun being resisted by her husband. If the impenetrability of the party’s political decisions is a characteristic informing virtually every film of the two decades after Mao, it manifests itself in two basic ways. The Blue Kite (Zhuangzhuang Tian, 1993), made thirteen years after The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (and banned), has virtually the same political discourse as Xie Jin’s film.

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The film covers many more campaigns than Tianyun Mountain and ends with the Cultural Revolution, but while it is more explicit in its brutality, it does not shed more light on party policies and political decisions. Its implication is that political decisions—coming from ‘above’—can neither be questioned nor understood. In the other kind of film, which is set in pre-communist China—Stage Sisters and Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1985)—communism only just arrives or is approaching and it becomes an emblem of hope. But there is still nebulousness in what communism represents to the people at large. Before I go on to examine Zhang Yimou’s films, which are what this chapter is actually about, the ‘impenetrability’ of the party dictate suggests that policies were imposed without transparent debates. This should make the Chinese films comparable to those from the Soviet Bloc before 1989, when communism was still intact but the history of policies was being covertly criticised. But when we make the comparison, we find significant differences between the Chinese films and those from Poland or Hungary. Andrez Wajda’s Man of Marble (1975) and Pál Gábor’s Angi Vera (1979) are both examinations of the Stalinist period. Wajda’s film looks at the Stakhanovite movement while the latter examines the communist notion of self-criticism and how it was employed. There is a rational discourse around Marxist political principles and how politics played out in practice. In Tianyun Mountain we do not know why someone should be chosen for ‘rightist’ rather than another, while The Blue Kite shows a party official in abject fear when the Cultural Revolution breaks out. It would seem that party decisions and the identification of victims during each political campaign are as mysterious as imperial missives are in Kafka’s story The Great Wall of China.

Categorising Zhang Yimou’s Films Zhang Yimou, as already indicated, belongs to the Fifth Generation of filmmakers from mainland China. The term applies to film directors who began making films in the mid-1980s. Most of them

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are members of the first graduating class of Beijing Film Academy in the post-Cultural Revolution period. As a group, the Fifth Generation filmmakers were all born in the 1950s and grew up in the political turmoil of the 1960s. As may be expected, none of them had an uninterrupted pre-college education. Their successes also follow a similar pattern: all had their directorial debuts in minor studios in interior China and established their names through international media.28 Unlike the Fourth Generation that grew up in an ideological charged atmosphere, and is, therefore, Marxist–humanist in its leanings, members of the Fifth Generation (to which Chen Kaige also belongs) are regarded as rebels. They eschewed the melodramatic and overly theatrical elements of the earlier cinema29 and tried to make their films more cinematic. A charge made against them is that they ignored local audiences and present a dark view of China—both of tradition and political life—specifically for film festivals in the West. But since they experienced Maoism at its most virulent in their formative years, it is reasonable to expect it to be registered in some subliminal or covert form, although they are considered ‘Western’ and have been increasingly removed from mainstream filmmaking within China. Zhang Yimou is an enormously versatile filmmaker who began as a director with Red Sorghum (1987), an exuberant film set in rural China during the war. The film won the Golden Bear in Berlin. This film has since been assessed as part of a trilogy about feminine sexuality that also protests the patriarchal system in pre-communist China. The trilogy includes films that are about young women forced into marriage or servitude as concubines with much older men. The other two films of the trilogy are Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991). Zhang has also made films of contemporary life that critique the state of affairs in China and the administration—like The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and Not One Less (1999). He has directed historical/mythological epic with martial arts as a key component. Hero (2002) was an international

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sensation but he also made House of the Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). Apart from these, he has recreated Maoist times, the best-known film being To Live (1994), which is partly set in the Cultural Revolution. It will be appropriate for my study of Zhang Yimou to begin with the earliest films, those like Red Sorghum— films about feminine sexuality in patriarchal society.

Sexuality and Patriarchy All three films in Zhang’s first trilogy begin with an older man acquiring a young wife or mistress. Red Sorghum (1987) begins with a voice-over of the protagonist’s grandson who recollects his grandmother Jiu’er, a poor girl forced into marriage with Big Head Li, the leprous owner of a distillery. On her way to her husband’s house, she catches the attention of one man, a sedan carrier, who later becomes the narrator’s grandfather. This man is instrumental in chasing away the bandit who accosts them. Shortly after marriage, the girl returns to her parents’ home as is customary, when she is abducted and raped by the same man (initially masked). Shortly thereafter, Big Head Li is found murdered and the murderer is never found, although it is later hinted that it was the sedan carrier. The distillery is now fated to be closed down, but Jui’er is a spirited woman and decides to run it with Li’s deputy Luohan as her principal assistant. The sedan carrier now returns there drunk, makes his claim upon Jui’er and after a stormy interlude, becomes her husband. Luohan, naturally, finds this unbearable and leaves. The distillery prospers and Jiu’er’s husband is able to show his mettle with a feared local bandit. The invading Japanese forces arrive and they are constructing a road, an activity in which the locals are forced to participate. The invaders are brutal; the first casualty is the bandit and the next is Luohan, who is a captured communist. The villagers now decide to attack the Japanese with explosives, and wait for them at dawn. But Jui’er is killed when she brings food for others.

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Although the story of Red Sorghum is nominally about a strong woman, it is a man’s story about her life in which she yields to him at every turn. Apart from being abducted and seduced by him, the sedan carrier makes his claims upon her casually and her resistance is ineffectual. Luohan, who plays a gentleman, is shown to be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis this brutally masculine suitor. Jui’er’s choice of man for her husband has been interpreted as a choice that ‘liberates her from patriarchy’,30 but one finds oneself wondering at the interpretation. The man forces himself upon her and it is the man who survives after Jiu’er dies a pointless death. The story that survives the events is carried forward by men from mouth to mouth—grandfather to son to grandson. The gentle Luohan joining the communist cadres is perhaps also significant. After Li’s death, the distillery becomes a collective endeavour, with Luohan being the selfless guiding spirit. Although this aspect is not problematised, with Jui’er’s second marriage and the birth of her child, the distillery seems less a collective enterprise run on classless lines than a family run business of a feudal/ patriarchal society. The question that begs an answer is whether patriarchy is more durable than egalitarian principles embodied by ‘gender-neutral’ communism.31 In the second film of the trilogy, Ju Dou (1990), Yang Tianquing works for his adoptive uncle Yang Jinshan who is a silk dyer. The cruel Yang has been taking wives with the hope of fathering a son, but is unsuccessful because of impotency. Yet he blames the women for his shortcoming—even killing them. When Tianquing sees his uncle’s new wife Ju Dou, he is immediately enamoured by her and she responds passionately. The result is a son, Tianbai, who carries Jinshan’s name and not Tianquing’s. But Jinshan is one day paralysed; he attempts to kill the child when he finds out about the affair, but without success. The two lovers discover his intent and confine him to a barrel. The surprising aspect of Ju Dou, however, is that the child grows up sullen and unmanageable, with loyalty to Jinshan rather

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than his real father. He is eventually also responsible for his real father’s death because he cannot bear Tianquing and Ju Dou being in an illicit relationship. There is no doubt that Zhang is sympathetic to the lovers and Jinshan is shown as despicable. This being the case, the ‘poetic justice’ that the lovers suffer is strange. Ju Dou bears some resemblance to ‘noir’ and noir is usually about moral retribution. Those who transgress the moral code are punished and there is never any ambiguity about the acceptability of the code itself. Murder and betrayal of trust deserve punishment, noir implies. Ju Dou is unusual in as much as the transgressed moral code is elusive. Looking at the lovers from a humanist perspective of today, they do not transgress, and it is only the strictly patriarchal code invoked by the story that finds them guilty. Once this is conceded, where Zhang stands morally in relation to the story material is perplexing. When the film begins the husband is made to appear hateful and the relationship between the lovers appears like justifiable relief within a hateful system. This is subsequently strengthened when the paralysed husband tries to kill the child. But the turning point is when the child begins to look upon the old man as his father and the old man returns his love and treats him as his own son. Ju Dou tries to tell Tianbai that his real father is Tianqing but the boy hates Tianqing stubbornly. With Jinshan’s death, his property passes on to the boy, who also then becomes the ‘moral’ agency punishing his mother and his biological father. Tianbai is ungainly and monstrous, but since we still do not have a grasp of where Zhang Yimou stands in relation to his material, it may be useful to compare Ju Dou with another well-known film about sexual transgression in a rigidly patriarchal society—Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Lovers (1954). In that film a loyal employee of a rich printer is accidentally brought into a relationship with his employer’s wife. The two are taken to be adulterous although they are innocent. When they finally decide

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to kill themselves, the man confesses his love for the woman. She is shocked but indicates her reciprocation of his feelings and their relationship is transformed. Where the man was only the husband’s employee, he is now Lord and Master and their loyalties take on another hue. When we compare the two films, we find Zhang Yimou’s view to be much more ambivalent about the society it is set in. The most important comparative aspect of the two films is that where The Crucified Lovers denotes the emotion dominating the relationship as ‘love’, given their willingness to die for one another; Ju Dou is consistent in dwelling on the relationship between Ju Dou and Tianqing as carnal obsession. The fact that Tianqing is much older than Ju Dou—although younger than his uncle—also gives this emphasis. The emotion that Tianbai feels towards his parents is one of disgust, partly brought on by the ugly rumours in the town about their observed physical conduct. I, therefore, propose that while Mizoguchi describes a rigidly patriarchal society starkly and shows its victims with evident sympathy, Zhang is divided between his humanist side—suggested by his sympathy for the victims—and his support of patriarchy. The third film Raise the Red Lantern (1991) is perhaps the most celebrated one in Zhang’s oeuvre. While discussing Ju Dou, I did not comment upon Zhang’s use of interiors but he makes an association between the structure of an ancient dwelling and social dictate/feudal structure. The transgressions, for instance, tend to happen in the open air away from Jinshan’s family mansion, making their conduct seem more wanton and frenzied. This sense becomes much stronger in Raise the Red Lantern, set in the home of a wealthy man in the 1920s, a period called the Warlord Era. The only time the heroine is seen outside the structure of the mansion where she is housed is when she makes her way there for the first time, as a single girl just out of college.

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In the film, Songlian, whose father recently died and left the family bankrupt, comes into the wealthy Chen family, becoming the fourth mistress of the household. Arriving at the palatial abode, she is at first treated like a queen. Gradually she discovers that all the mistresses are not treated equally and those most favoured, usually the youngest, get the best treatment. The favoured wife for the day receives a foot massage; the day’s menu favours her and a red lantern is hung outside her quarters at night. Songlian also discovers that there is much rivalry between the wives and, after initially suspecting the third mistress (a former opera singer) to be her chief adversary, she finds the second mistress to be more dangerous. Songlian has a servant girl named Yan’er, but this insolent girl, she discovers, harbours the ambition of becoming the fifth mistress. A favoured wife is allowed to take liberties with the man, but she also risks losing her place to a rival. Overall, the life of a favoured wife is a good one but transgressions are dangerous. A pregnant wife is favoured but if the intimation is false, she stands to be punished.32 Songlian, on her explorations of the mansion, discovers a secluded room on the roof where an adulterous wife was hanged in the earlier generation. Zhang uses many of his characters as emblems for patriarchy. Songlian, for instance, is persuaded by her mother to consent to becoming Chen’s fourth mistress but we do not see her mother who is doing the persuasion. Similarly, Chen is never shown except in long shot or as a shadowy figure in the bed with the women.33 His arrival and the bestowing of his favours are only announced through the ceremony conducted by servants. At the climax, the drunken Songlian betrays the third mistress, who is having a relationship with their doctor. The girl is carried off into the room at the top where Songlian later discovers her hanging. The doctor is outside the purview of these brutal dispensations and Chen himself never makes an appearance. One could propose that the film is about a stable and oppressive system that is symbolised by the structure of the Chen family mansion.

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One observation made about the difference between the novel and the film is that while the novel caricatures Chen’s body as the site of female erotic fantasy, the film makes Songlian’s body the focal point of all viewing subjects,34 and it becomes the site of Chen’s masculine conquest. My own proposal here is that since the ‘master’ is turned into an abstraction not residing only in Chen’s person but in the family structure complete with its servants and traditions, Songlian’s body is being commodified for public/patriarchal appeal. At the conclusion of the film, Songlian becomes demented as she blames herself for the death of the third mistress. This can be interpreted as a lament at the status of women in China, but I suggest that it is more ambivalent than such an interpretation would allow. There are numerous rooftop level sequences that dwell on the architectural beauty of the house, and given the political significance of the structure, it appears to be a celebration. The extraordinary visual beauty of the film (in dwelling on the interiors), I contend, makes the film a celebration of patriarchal structure and this finds support in my reading of the other two films. Before moving on to next group of films by Zhang Yimou it would be helpful to examine a much earlier women’s film made before the communists came to power in 1949, to get a sense of women’s position in Chinese cinema before the revolution. As already indicated, leftwing influence was strong in Chinese cinema, and this suggests that the issue of women’s emancipation had been debated extensively. The film in question is Fei Mu’s Springtime in a Small Town (1948), and it is highly regarded.35 This film is about a love triangle. Zhou Yuwen is married to a delicate man Dai Liyan, perpetually in ill health. One day, Dai’s friend Zai Zhichen, now a doctor, arrives to stay with them. But Zai was once in a relationship with Zhou; the flame of passion is now rekindled and the two find themselves wishing that Dai is better off dead. But Dai gradually learns about the intruder in his home and attempts to kill himself. This brings the two to evaluate their positions and understand the moral choice they are confronted with.

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The film has several aspects in common with Zhang’s three films, which have just been discussed. It begins with a voice-over as does Red Sorghum, but the narrator is the woman Zhou. The film deals with a relationship outside marriage, just like Ju Dou, and the plan to murder the husband is also contemplated by the lovers. The woman desires another man rather than her husband (as in Red Sorghum and Ju Dou). When her husband Dai tries to claim his conjugal rights with Zhou, she spurns him gently. The woman feels jealous when a younger woman is drawn to her lover—Dai’s younger sister in this film and the maid Yan’er’s aspiring to become the fifth mistress in Raise the Red Lantern. Lastly, Springtime in a Small Town treats tradition through the metaphor of ‘structure’. Zhou and Zai meet frequently on the crumbling city walls of the town, which comes to represent threatened tradition. The similarities between Springtime in a Small Town and Zhang Yimou’s film pertain to the issues problematised rather than the resolutions opted for—repressed feminine sexuality, competitiveness among women over a man, patriarchal authority and tradition as a walled structure. At first glance we are led by the violence in Zhang’s film to believe that his critique is the more radical one because Fei Mu always opts for ‘compromises’. The husband is understanding and tries to remove himself from the scene and this leads the lovers to understand their transgression. The younger woman understands the older woman’s desire, and the husband’s claims upon his wife eventually take precedence over those of the lover. But when we look at all the films more closely, we find that the violence in Zhang’s films does not arise out of a more radical critique of tradition, but out of transgressions going the distance and then being punished brutally, instead of a ‘compromise’—where the justification for transgression is acknowledged but the presented opportunity forgone. The difference between the two filmmakers is not that one is more critical of patriarchy. Both essentially accept it,

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although they acknowledge its iniquities. Zhang portrays it as more fearsome—but this also tantamount to celebrating its strength. It can be argued that in portraying the individual’s response to patriarchal tradition, Springtime in a Small Town allows her/him more agency than Zhang Yimou’s films do. Seen from another perspective, Zhang finds feminine sexuality to be more disruptive and threatening to patriarchal structure, thus necessitating its brutal suppression.

Critiquing Contemporary Society The two films I examine in this section, The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and Not One Less (1999) are both set in contemporary China. The first of the two films is apparently based on a true life incident. It is about a rustic woman whose husband, Quinglai, has been kicked in the groin by the village chief, Wang, on account of an altercation. Qiu Ju’s husband has offended the village head by ridiculing the man’s propensity to produce only daughters, not a son. After Qinglai is treated medically, Qiu Ju complains to the local policeman Li about the incident. Li mediates and arranges it so that the husband receives compensation for the cost of treatment and the wages lost. But when Wang makes over the money to Qiu Ju, he does it rudely and the woman feels insulted. Qiu Ju is clear that it is an apology she wants and not the money. Although she is in an advanced state of pregnancy she travels to the city with her sister-in-law, going to a higher authority on each occasion but the damages awarded are the same—money but no apology. She, on the advice of a sympathetic official, employs a lawyer and goes to court but even that is futile. The advice Qiu Ju now receives from policeman Li is to have Qinglan X-rayed. If the X-ray reveals injury, Wang can be charged with assault. At this moment, however, she enters labour and it is only with her adversary Wang’s personal assistance that her child survives. Festivities are now held and she personally invites Wang, but he declines to come. At that moment, the results of the X-ray

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arrive and a broken rib is indicated. Wang is charged with assault and sent to jail for 15 days, a development Qiu Ju regrets; all she wanted was an apology and Wang also saved her life. The first thing we notice about The Story of Qui Ju, especially after the earlier films is Zhang’s move towards ‘minimalism’. Where the earlier films dealt with violent emotions and conduct flamboyantly, Qui Ju is gentleness itself. At first, it looks as though Zhang is following a new aesthetic because his heroine’s stubbornness appears to go beyond the bounds or reason and merit irony but there is apparently more. Early in the film when Qui Ju gets a professional letter writer to draft her complaint, he asks her whether she wants a mild or a ‘merciless’ tone because the latter costs more. When she wishes to know what the difference is, he tells her that out of the seven ‘merciless’ complaints he penned, two led to executions and three people got life sentences. This seems like black humour but as we proceed, we understand that a ‘complaint’ is a serious matter. It is the basis on which people are charged with crimes; if the crime named is serious, the consequences could also be grave. One imagines what such ‘complaints’ against officialdom might have achieved during the Cultural Revolution. The Story of Qiu Ju is made almost in a documentary style but it comes across as a considerably softened up version of political/social reality, not because it is untrue to the situation in 1990s China but because of the studied simplicity of those it is about. Qiu Ju is assisted at every step by people and officials. The manager of the place in which she stays offers her advice for free, a senior official in the city has her sent back to her lodgings in his car, a passer-by advises her to dress like a city person to not to be taken advantage of by ‘crooks’. She goes to court against the state on the advice of a state official, such a nice person that Qiu Ju is upset at having to sue him until he assures her that no harm can come to him. When policeman Li’s efforts are of no avail and Qiu Ju goes above him, he admits his ‘incompetence’ without rancour.

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On reflection we understand why the people in this film are so different from the three dealt with in the last section. If the people in Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern act largely in their own personal interests, those in The Story of Qiu Ju are fulfilling the social roles assigned to them—their actual persons being scrupulously kept out of the transactions at all times. We gradually realise that the film is really an allegory of collective life and its drama lies in the exception of two people acting ‘personally’. Qiu Ju pursues ‘justice’ but fails because the state recognises the chief only as the state embodied while she sees him as Wang. The resolution, therefore, consists in Wang righting a wrong by going beyond what is required of him as a functionary of the state, and getting acknowledgement from Qui Ju. Qiu Ju’s own error consists in acting as an ‘individual’ rather than a ‘citizen’, in other words, exceeding her part in the collective life of the community. The difference between the world of The Story of Qiu Ju and the worlds of three films from the last section, it can be proposed, lies in the former contending with the government as an omnipresent (yet invisible) structure. While ‘collective life’ involves the state at every juncture in the shape of officials, the political government (the party) itself is absent except as an invisible prevailing order. It may be noted here that Raise the Red Lantern has been read as a veiled critique of communism as a dictatorial community—Songlian as the individual and master Chen as the government, the laws of the household paralleling those of the country.36 Although the government frowned upon Raise the Red Lantern, there is little evidence that Chen’s household represents Zhang Yimou’s view of contemporary China. When Zhang does deal with contemporary China, the individual is not the issue he is concerned with as much as the citizen, with the government itself being entirely invisible except as ‘order’, which— judging from The Story of Qiu Ju—might even be metaphysical.37 Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, it may be noted, hardly convey the

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sense that life is governed by a scrupulous, omnipresent order. There is structure and authority but no sense of order. The second film from the same category as The Story of Qiu Ju and also employing a quasi-documentary style is Not One Less (1999). This film is perhaps more sentimental although it offers the same discourse about the citizen, the state and the government. The film is about a teenage girl Wei Minzhi who is entrusted with keeping a class of schoolchildren engaged during the teacher’s absence. She is given the instruction by the mayor that she must hold on to all of them and there must not be even one less when the regular teacher returns, but it so happens that she loses two children. The first loss is acceptable because the girl was selected for a specialist sports school. But the second—a boy—left because his family is in debt and he has to move to the city and earn a livelihood. Wei now enlists her pupils to help her raise money to go to the city, but cannot find the boy. But, after several encounters with officialdom—in which those she meets are always considerate and scrupulous in doing their duties as officials or citizens—Wei gets a slot on a TV broadcast and her tearful appeal sees the lost boy making contact. This publicity draws the muchneeded attention of the authorities to the condition of rural schools. Not One Less is a ‘feel good’ film apparently made under censorship and it will be useful to compare it with another film about school children from a country with severe censorship issues—Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is My Friend’s Home (1987) from Iran, which also uses a quasi-documentary approach. Both films have been internationally well-received with Not One Less winning the Golden Lion at Venice and Kiarostami’s film getting awards at Locarno. In both films there is an educational authority issuing directives. In Kiarostami’s film it is the teacher warning his pupils against not doing their homework while in Zhang Yimou’s it is the mayor, telling the temporary teacher not to lose even one child. Kiarostami’s film can be read as an allegory against authoritarianism: the protagonist

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has accidentally kept his friend’s notebook and the friend cannot, therefore, do his own homework, making him vulnerable to the teacher’s wrath. The boy, therefore, does his friend’s homework so that the latter is able to pass the teacher’s scrutiny. This resolution can be understood as implying the need for individuals to help each other out guilefully when confronted by a common tyranny of authority. Not One Less, in contrast, is about the citizen obeying authority in such a complete way that it transforms the present. Where Kiarostami’s film is about the individual coping with authority, Zhang Yimou’s is about the citizen assisting authority to make collective life better. The state may have been lagging behind in achieving its aims but the citizen’s involvement helps it improve, is the discourse. Zhang’s film does not have a message that can be understood as a critique, and is an open endorsement of the state. It is not a film that is trying to get past censorship. As in The Story of Qiu Ju, politics and the government are invisible in Not One Less. All that is visible is the state, which is an administrative collective engaged in improving the conditions of the citizen with her/his involvement.38 The two films dealt with in this section were made when China was going through a period of ‘consumerism, commercialisation, de-politicisation and de-ideologisation’ at a time when people had lost faith in grand ideologies39 and that may account for their tendencies. But as we shall see, Zhang’s remaining films reflect the same characteristics and there is consistency in all his work.

Revisiting China under Mao Zhang Yimou’s two films dealing with life in Mao’s China that are of pertinence here are To Live (1994) and The Road Home (1999). To Live is a sprawling film that begins in the KMT period and ends in the decade of the Cultural Revolution. Xu Fugui (Ge You) comes from a rich family but is a compulsive gambler and loses all his property to the puppetmaster Long’er. Since he has knowledge of puppetry, the puppet-master

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gives him a set of shadow puppets with which he earns his livelihood, giving performances. He and his friend Chunsheng are conscripted by the KMT but with their defeat by the communists, Xu begins to perform for the revolutionaries. With the final victory of the communists, Xu returns home to find that Long’er burned his house down and he is being shot as a saboteur. The story now moves a decade forward into the frenzy of the Great Leap Forward, when his son is accidentally killed by the local party chief. When this man comes to give his heartfelt condolences, Xu discovers that the man is his old friend Chunsheng. A singular fact about the film that has been ignored is Xu’s transformation under communism. Under KMT rule Xu is shown to be a profligate, squandering his last penny in the pursuit of pleasure. If Ge You plays Xu quite brilliantly and with a carefree swagger in the early parts of the film, after the revolution Xu is a different man, and it is as if psychology abandons him. He is, to be accurate, transformed from an individual (with agency) to a citizen upon whom history acts. In fact, the only one in the communist era who betrays a sign of psychology—acting in private interests and not only being an ‘agent’—is Long’er, who is executed. The film is ‘critical’ of the violent political developments under Mao, but misfortunes that happen are accidental and, as in Not One Less, people ‘mean well’ because they scrupulously live the collective life. They are never individuals pursuing private ends but citizens or agents of the state and part of the collective. There is no evidence of people acting as politics did not intend them to act—which is contrary to what The Legend of Tianyun Mountain and The Blue Kite conveyed. When the Cultural Revolution arrives at the end of the 1960s, a Red Guard Wan Erxi—with a physical handicap—courts Xu’s daughter Fengxia. One day, Xu receives information that Red Guards are tearing down his humble home, but when he goes there he finds it is Wan Erxi and his comrades repairing the roof and painting it. Chunsheng, still in the government, has now been branded a reactionary and a

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capitalist for reasons unknown. He visits immediately after Fengxia’s wedding to Wan to ask for Xu’s forgiveness, and to tell him his own wife has committed suicide and he also intends to. It is as if suicide is the natural course for those out of favour, but at the same time there is no indication that what awaits them otherwise is worse. Wan and Fengxia love each other and she becomes pregnant. Unfortunately, there are complications and a doctor cannot be found because they are persecuted for being ‘intellectuals’. When a doctor is located, he is starving and they feed him buns to give him strength. But he drinks water thereafter and relapses into a semiconscious state. The water has expanded the seven buns to occupy enough space for forty-nine in the doctor’s belly. Fengxia, therefore, dies although her son survives to be taken care of by Wan and to carry the family forward into happier times. Before going on to examine the other film The Road Home, a little more needs to be said about To Live. The first has to do with the continued absence of ‘politics’ in the film, because the sense we get is of unexplained political commands being obeyed and rhetoric employed, with no correlation between the action and the rhetoric. As an instance, the rhetoric invokes ‘rightists’, ‘intellectuals’, ‘capitalist roaders’ and ‘reactionaries’ but since everyone is only an ‘agent’—either a lawabiding citizen or an official performing his assigned role—there is an absence of category distinctions along the lines indicated by the labels.40 At the same time, there no questioning of the rhetoric either, or a sense that it is only instrumental. Where The Blue Kite allows for villains, To Live does not. The Cultural Revolution is treated as a mass affliction for which no one is responsible, and which passes. The happenings in the Cultural Revolution—as depicted—have the status of ritual that cannot even be described as ‘political’ because the supposed ‘political decisions’ are so randomly applied. Party decisions are so unfathomable but their consequences so extreme that politics might even be understood as the handiwork of the gods.

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The Road Home (1999) does not, at first sight, appear to have anything to do with Mao and the party. It begins in the present as in Red Sorghum, with a male voice telling a story. This time the occasion is the death of his father, who died some distance from his home and has to be brought back. The story the narrator tells is the love story of his father Luo Changyu and mother Zhao Di. Luo Changyu was an unemployed city boy who was ‘signed up’ to serve as teacher in a village and was looked up to by everyone. Zhao Di fell in love with him but, after a brief courtship, Luo was summoned by the government and he went away, promising to return. Zhao, being heartbroken, fell grievously ill until Zhao retuned. But Zhao had returned without permission and the two are not allowed to be married for two more years. In the present, the father has to be brought home on foot as is the custom in these parts, so that the father’s spirit will always know the way back home. There are several significant features in the film; the first has to do with the village being idyllic and set in the ‘mountains’. Life is not particularly hard and the folk adore the schoolmaster, competing with each other to invite him home for a meal or two. There is no conflict within the village—everyone is a citizen transacting directly with the city boy ‘signed up’. There has been some speculation about what the schoolteacher and his recall by the government may represent politically and one viewpoint is that it refers to the Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 1950s. But let us consider when the events might have been set. The film begins in the present with the narrator, who drives an expensive SUV, apparently in his mid-thirties. Assuming that his parents married around thirty-five to thirty-eight years back, this puts their romance in the early 1960s. This, and the circumstances of the city boy in the village, suggests that the schoolteacher Luo Changyu corresponds to one of the ‘Rusticated Youth’ or ‘Sent down Youth’ (zhiqing) about whom much was written.

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After the People’s Republic of China was established, in order to resolve employment problems in the cities, starting in the 1950s youth from urban areas were organised to move to the rural countryside, especially in remote towns to establish farms. In 1955, Mao asserted that ‘the countryside is a vast expanse of heaven and earth where we can flourish’, which would become the slogan for the ‘Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement’. Liu Shaoqi instituted the first ‘sending-down’ policy in 1962 to redistribute excess urban population following the Three Bad Years and the Great Leap Forward, but Mao later modified its intent. In 1966, under the influence of the Cultural Revolution, university entrance examinations were suspended and until 1968, many students were unable to receive admittance into university or become employed. The chaos surrounding the revolution from 1966 to 1968 caused the communist party to realise that a way was needed to assign the youth to working positions, to avoid losing control of the situation that Mao had initiated. On 12 December 1968, Mao directed the People’s Daily to publish a piece entitled ‘We too have two hands, let us not laze about in the city’, which quoted Mao as saying, ‘The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated by living in rural poverty.’ From 1969 onwards many more youth were rusticated and the total number rusticated between 1962 and 1978 is estimated at seventeen million.41 These young people—most of whom had received little education—suffered great hardships and were often met with local hostility. Only after 1978 were they and their families permitted to return to their original homes. It would appear that Luo Changyu is a rusticated youth, although the circumstances arranged for him by The Road Home are less harrowing. The word ‘home’ is deliberately imparted a different significance in the film but it also suggests the post-1978 return of Rusticated Youths. Judging from the films not only described in this section but also in the last one, Zhang Yimou seems more a propagandist for the

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state rather than a dissenting artist; his films set post-1949 suggest implicitly that the objectives of the communist party were largely achieved. If a social utopia is a system in which everyone performs her/ his role neither deficiently nor excessively, but correctly, communist China is a collective utopia42—with the only obstructions to universal happiness being ‘epidemics’ like the Cultural Revolution—and Zhang is virtually ‘willing’ it. Since some of his other films, like Raise the Red Lantern, have been understood as works of dissent, a reconciliation of the two Zhangs is evidently needed. In discussing Raise the Red Lantern, it was observed that the film was more ambivalent than was generally supposed; while dealing with the oppression of women by patriarchal tradition the film employed an aesthetic that tended to be celebratory. This reading was supported by Ju Dou in which the punishment of the lovers for sexual transgression is treated ambivalently and Red Sorghum, in which it is the grandfather’s story which is heard and transmitted, although the grandmother is nominally at the film’s centre. As already indicated, Red Sorghum finds an echo in The Road Home, in which it is a male voice that relays the central love story. In To Live the history of the family is also continued through its male line. All these films conclude with the restoration of social order and this provides us with a clue as to how to read them—regardless of when each of them is set. Overall, the sense to be gathered is that under KMT administration social order is implicitly patriarchal and feminine desire is, effectively, a disruptive force. In Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou, feminine desire causes the ‘disturbance’ that gets the narrative moving. But when the communist utopia is ushered in, the resultant order is still patriarchal and feminine sexuality remains a threat. In The Story of Qiu Ju, the woman’s implacability43—rather than the chief’s act of violence—is connoted as the disturbing element. It is the heroine’s desire for the schoolteacher in The Road Home that the government keeps at bay in the service of order/discipline. Raise the

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Red Lantern was banned but this was apparently not because of any explicit political content but because of interpretations, in which the filmmaker has alleged exceeded the film’s intentions.44 Zhang’s films in which the sexed woman is punished pertain to the KMT period, before the utopian communist state was ushered in. In the communist period, there is no discernible punishment of this kind because collective life is quickly re-established in every case. I, therefore, propose that a relationship can be detected between Zhang’s sense of a utopian order and the suppression of the feminine. The disruptive power of feminine sexuality is the issue under the KMT, but even under the communist it refuses to go away. This proposition can now be examined in the context of Zhang’s historical/mythological extravaganzas.

The Empire Strikes Back The last films to be looked at in this chapter are fanciful recreations of China’s imperial past, the first of the films examined being Hero (2002). This film tells a story from the warring states period in the 3rd century bce, and involves the first Qin Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who finally unified China, and the assassins who tried to kill him. The film, which was a worldwide hit, is less a historical film than a mythological, with martial arts (wuxia) as a major component. The Emperor, who has survived an attempt on his life from three assassins named Long Sky, Flying Snow and Broken Sword allows no one within a hundred paces of himself, but he now grants the privilege to ‘Nameless’, the prefect of a small jurisdiction who claims to have killed the three assassins and produces their weapons as evidence. The rest of the film is largely in a series of flashbacks pertaining to Nameless’s encounters with the assassins, the assassins’ relationships among themselves and interludes in which the Emperor and Nameless talk to each other. Gradually, it comes out that Nameless himself is an assassin to whom the others submitted because he was felt to

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possess the greatest skills. This submission was essentially to get him to within striking distance of the Emperor, which is where he finds himself now. These facts are not revealed by Nameless but discovered by the Emperor who confronts his would-be assassin and offers to die. Nameless now reveals that Broken Sword and Flying Snow, who were lovers, are now both dead. Broken Sword had finally arrived at the view that the Emperor should not be killed since only he could unite China (‘all under one heaven’). This led to Flying Snow fighting and killing Broken Sword accidentally, thereafter taking her own life. Nameless can now kill the Emperor but the latter’s willingness to die for the cause of national unity convinces Nameless of his vision and he forgoes the opportunity presented. The Emperor—at the behest of his courtiers—now reluctantly orders Nameless’s execution and his would-be assassin is granted a hero’s funeral. There are several factors that invite attention in the film and the first has to do with there being no villains. Everyone is fulfilling a moral purpose based on his/her convictions and self-interest is never a consideration. Codes are strictly followed at all times even when enemies deal with each other and the single purpose towards which the story moves inexorably is the unification of the nation in the will of the Emperor. As this might suggest, the Confucian notion of selfimprovement through emulating the teacher—which is central to a martial arts film from outside the PRC like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)—is conspicuous by its absence.45 All heroes are given near equal capability as a way of not valorising individual achievement, but the heroes choose to acknowledge the Emperor— except Flying Snow, who dies by her own hand. She wished to avenge her father, a victim of Emperor but she killed her lover mistakenly, engaging him in combat when he wished to submit to the Emperor but also tried not to harm her. The division of characters into heroes and kings is also true of the epics like The Iliad, but where the hero is usually greater and favoured

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by the gods in the epics, Hero does differently by making the Emperor supreme. A hero can decimate an entire Emperor’s army but, when brought up against the Emperor’s will, he submits to it because the Emperor is the agent of the only acceptable order. The Emperor’s will is so omnipotent that each arrow of every soldier obeys his command. The arrows shot at Nameless by hundreds of soldiers are so accurate that they make a ‘shadow’—a bare spot marking out his shape—on the wall before which he stands. There is little doubt that Hero was undertaken as a nationalist project, a eulogy of China’s first nation-builder. The first Qin Emperor has often been castigated by historians for his brutality but he was also responsible for introducing the characteristics of government, economics, commerce and culture that we associate with modern China, including the centralisation of state power. The Qin emphasis on legalism challenged the Confucian moral and political order and was resisted by the Confucians. There are also parallels between the first Qin Emperor and Mao because he ushered in a ‘Cultural Revolution’ by burning classical texts, notably to abolish the tendency to disparage the present by praising the past.46 Like Mao, he placed his emphasis on practical learning rather than theory, which is why he burned classical texts. Despite the obvious political implications, critics have been divided on the film. While some—like those in Taiwan—have seen it as a ‘selling out’ on Zhang’s part,47 others find the film to be too complex and multi-layered to be thus interpreted. An argument in support of this ‘complexity’ is that the Emperor being pressurised to execute Nameless is a sign that the Emperor himself has little freedom.48 This is dubious because autocratic political leaders— Stalin and Mao included—often used the pretext of ‘public demand’49 to mitigate their own responsibility for their most brutal acts. The ploy of the Emperor’s regret—as his willingness to die—is being used by the film to make him more worthy of eulogy.

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Rather than being a departure for Zhang, one finds much continuity between Hero and his other films. First, every character in the film is identified with his/her role, be it rebel or Emperor, that is, implicated entirely in collective life, although this is in the future nation. No one acts except for the most self-effacing reasons, and this naturally rules out villains. Second, the King’s inaccessibility finds correspondence in the invisibility of the government in films like The Road Home and the impenetrability of party decisions, a characteristic noticed even in films by other filmmakers in the 1990s. Third, each arrow submits in its trajectory to the Emperor’s will, which is comparable to every aspect of social life turning out exactly as the party ordains it—a utopia already achieved, as contemporary China is portrayed in Not One Less. Lastly, the single element that declines to submit to the Emperor and his vision is Flying Snow, who also exhibits jealousy, and acts out of it. Flying Snow and another woman character Moon introduce a motif outside that of the ‘nation’, which is feminine sexuality, once again disruptive. This, as is apparent, finds correspondence in The Story of Qiu Ju, The Road Home as well as the films set in the KMT era. The second film House of Flying Daggers (2004) is set in a ‘corrupt’ period in imperial Chinese history, the last days of the Tang dynasty (9th century

ce)

but, as if it would be improper to portray

imperial China as ‘corrupt’, agents of the Empire perform their tasks scrupulously. While the story of the film is a web of complications, we can nonetheless identify a few characteristics. There are two opposing sides in the film, the Empire and the rebels with Zhang taking sides with the Empire since his protagonist is in pursuit of the rebels. Second, while the introduction of two sides means that there is no eulogy of the Emperor as in Hero, the protagonist is unwavering in his duties—laid down as part of a larger design—until he is distracted from the path by his love for a woman who is on the other side. When love plays a part in the story, therefore, its purpose is disruptive.

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Love is an obstruction in the path of the Empire because agents of imperial design are distracted by it. Both House of Flying Daggers and the last film Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) allow the protagonists more agency than Hero, but they are both set in the declining years of the Tang dynasty. This is significant because the Tang dynasty broke up into five dynasties and ten kingdoms in the early part of the 10th century ce. If we say that Hero is about individual heroes submitting to the monarch in the service of a unified China, these two films suggest its converse: intrigue and individual heroism as a prelude to a divided China. Curse of the Golden Flower is a costume drama that is based on a play by Cao Yu from the KMT era, a family melodrama involving incest named Thunderstorm (1934) that created a scandal. Zhang’s film transposes this story to the last years of the Tang dynasty and it now involves the happenings in the royal household. It introduces some ‘Shakespearean’ motifs because the sons are plotting against the Emperor but, perhaps characteristically, they are motivated less by a desire to usurp the Crown than by their love/desire for the Empress, who is in an incestuous relationship with her step-son and is being slowly poisoned on the Emperor’s orders. The princes are all eventually killed and the Emperor reigns supreme. Order is restored on the day of the Chrysanthemum Festival when the blood-soaked palace grounds are cleaned up swiftly and they reacquire their customary dazzle. House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower are apparently not intended as nationalist projects because they deal with periods of imperial decline but Zhang Yimou’s approach remains consistent. In the first place the films unfailingly uphold the Empire; in the latter film it is the ruthless Emperor Ping who rules supreme although the domestic melodrama Thunderstorm (on which it is based) does not conclude with the patriarch’s triumph. Although the Emperor is ruthless, brutal and a degenerate in Curse of the Golden Flower his victory over the others is celebrated because his rule means ‘order’.

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If thousands die in these films, the mass annihilation is choreographed as ballets dedicated to order.50 The deaths on-screen in Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower are as trivial as those offscreen are in To Live—since half a million people died in the Cultural Revolution. Second, there is the sense in both these extravaganzas of imperial will being so omnipotent that not only the Emperor’s servants but also the projectiles hurled/shot by them follow his commands unswervingly. In Curse of the Golden Flower, for instance, it is the Emperor’s expressed wish that his son Prince Jai be taken alive when his army attacks the palace. The Emperor’s archers shoot their arrows at the Prince’s charging army and the sky is full of arrows. Yet, when it all clears away and there is one survivor, we discover that he is Prince Jai. Third, the constant element seen as disruptive is feminine sexuality and that finds correspondence not only here but in the other films as well. I earlier drew the attention of the reader to the ‘propagandist’ elements in Zhang’s films, but the extravaganzas yield their messages subliminally. Considering the common aspects, one could even conclude that communist China to him is a legitimate continuation of the Empire rather than a decisive break with it. Virtually every motif in Zhang’s reconstructions of the ancient past finds a recent or contemporary parallel.51

A Continuation of the Imperial Order Judging from Zhang’s films, one is led to conclude that he works in a patriarchal society which communism has not done much to transform. Zhang Yimou is China’s most celebrated filmmaker but rigidly patriarchal societies like Japan produced filmmakers like Mizoguchi and Ozu who, while being deeply implicated in Japanese tradition, managed to keep their distance from patriarchy. Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu (1952) is a harrowing portrait of the life of a woman not because the director attacks patriarchy vehemently but because he is sensitive to ugly aspects that can neither

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be contained nor admitted by a society preoccupied with order. Zhang’s films portray a society still dominated by patriarchy but as a utopia achieved. When he attempts to portray oppressive patriarchal society—before communism—as in Raise the Red Lantern, the ruling order is still treated reverentially. The visual impeccability of this film celebrates it and effectively works against its professed concern, widely interpreted as a castigation of patriarchy. After examining the various categories in Zhang’s oeuvre, one comes to the unavoidable conclusion that order is the primary concern in his films rather than issues like equity, justice or freedom. Despite their ‘documentary’ look, his films set in contemporary China are social fantasies in which an aimed for utopia of order already exists. Since there is enough evidence that the communist order in the PRC is to Zhang Yimou only a continuation of the imperial order, we may also conclude that Zhang’s dissatisfaction with the KMT interlude is the weakness of the prevailing social order, attributable to the cautious and brief workings of democracy.

Notes and References  1. Stephen Crofts, ‘Reconceptualizing National Cinemas, in Film and Nationalism, ed. Alan Williams (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 25–51. The eight identified categories are: (1) United States cinema, (2) Asian commercial successes, (3) other entertainment cinemas in Europe and the Third World, (4) totalitarian cinemas, (5) art cinemas, (6) international co-productions, (7) Third Cinemas and (8) sub-state cinemas.   2. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), 194.   3. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese, 195–198. Yan’an was where the CCP had its headquarters in the 1930s and 1940s before the Long March   4. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese, 198. The author quotes the director Yu Sun’s own reminiscences. Yu Sun Sun, Dalu Zhige (Song of the Big Road), eds. Shu Qi and Li Cheuk-to (Taipei: Yuanliu, 1990), 193–195.

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 5. Zhiwei Xiao, ‘Chinese Cinema’, in Encyclopedia of Chinese Cinema, eds. Yingjin Zhang and Zhiwei Xiao (London: Routledge, 1998), 24. Between May and late July 1951, an overwhelming number of articles were published in major newspapers and journals. In June, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, led an investigative team to Wu Xun’s home town with the aim of collecting evidence in support of Mao’s denunciation. A report, published in People’s Daily between 23 and 28 July 1951, claimed, amongst other things, that the real Wu opposed peasant revolution, that his attempts at building schools were futile and even helped ‘repair’ the feudal establishment, that he had ties with the local underworld and extorted money from people, and that his school was never exclusively for the children of the poor.  6. Zhiwei Xiao, ‘Chinese Cinema’, 199. Also see, Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 55.  7. Huangmei Chen, Dangdai Zhongguo Dianying, 1 (Contemporary Chinese Cinema) (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 1989), 116. Zhou Enlai was often the conduit through which official cultural policy found expression. In 1953, Zhou explained, ‘socialist realism is the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary idealism’. In 1959, Zhou praised socialist cinema for creating ‘new styles that combined revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’. Zhongguo Dianying Yishu Yanjiu Zhongxin, Zhongguo Dianying Guzhi (Illustrated Annals of Chinese Film) (Guangxi: Zhuhai Chubanshe, 1995), 234. Cited by Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 202.  8. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 203. For a useful study, see Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 163–195.  9. Alexander Timofeevsky, ‘The Last Romantics’, in Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, eds. Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 26–27. 10. Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 163–195. 11. Huangmei Chen, Dangdai Zhongguo Dianying, 130. See Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 202. The Hundred Flowers campaign brought out some worrying information. Seventy per cent of the 100 films

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released between 1953 and June 1956 did not recoup their production costs. This information was made available by a critical article written by Zhong Dianfei in December 1956 in Literary Gazette (Wenyi Bao) which was in response to a Shanghai newspaper forum entitled ‘Why Are There So Few Good Domestic Films?’ 12. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 217. 13. Chris Berry, Post-Socialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2005), 26–28. The Yan’an films usually followed the principles laid down by Mao in his talks on literature and art at the Yan’an forum around 1942 strictly and were often produced at studios like the Northeast Film Studio, staffed heavily with Yan’an veterans. Since Shanghai had been the centre of Chinese cinema earlier, The Shanghai films owed more to Chinese cinema before the revolution. 14. Evgeny Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 20. 15. Chris Berry, Post-Socialist Cinema in Post-Mao China, 25. 16. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 303–305. 17. Mao Dedong, ‘Attention Must be Paid to the Discussions of the Film The Life of Wu Xun’, in The Works of Mao Zedong (1949–1976), 1 (New York: ME Sharpe, 1992), 196–198. 18. Chris Berry, Post-Socialist Cinema in Post-Mao China, 67. 19. Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art’: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Anne Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1980), 79–83. 20. Chris Berry, Post-Socialist, 67. 21. Chris Berry, Post-Socialist, 73–75. 22. There is perhaps some theoretical significance in the fact that under Deng, the Gang of Four were dubbed ‘ultra-leftists’ rather than ‘ultra-rightists’ signalling that being ‘leftists’ was not such a good thing any longer. 23. Isaac Deutscher, ‘Maoism, Its Origins, Background and Outlook’, in The Social Register, 1 (1964), 12–13. http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/ archive/deutscher/1964/maoism-origins-outlook.htm. Accessed on 15 September 2013. 24. Zhiwei Xiao, ‘Chinese Cinema’, in Encyclopedia of Chinese Film, eds. Yingjin Zhang and Zhiwei Xiao, 1–13.

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25. Zhiwei Xiao, ‘Chinese’, 14–15. The KMT was so unable to stop the leftist cinema antagonistic to its rule that armed nationalist workers were sent out to attack the studios in November 1933. 26. Chris Berry, Post-Socialist Cinema in Post-Mao China, 6. Term used by Rao Shuguang and Pei Yali in the title of the opening chapter of their book Xin Shiqi Dianying Wenhua Sichao (Thoughts on the Film Culture of the New Era) [Beijing: Zhongguo Guangbo Dianshe Chubanshe (China Radio and Television Press), 1997]. 27. Gina Marchetti, ‘Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetics’, Jump Cut, 34 (March 1989): 95–106. 28. Yingjin Zhang and Zhiwei Xiao, ‘The Fifth Generation’, in Encyclopedia of Chinese Film, eds. Yingjin Zhang and Zhiwei Xiao, 164. 29. Bai Jingsheng, ‘Throwing Away the Walking Stick of Drama’, and Zhang Nuanxin and Li Tuo, ‘The Modernisation of Film Language’, eds. George S. Semsel, Xia Hong and Hou Jianping, in Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the Modern Era, trans. Hou Jianping, Li Xiaohong and Fan Yuan (New York: Praeger, 1990), 5–9, 10–20. 30. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 126. 31. Berry and Farquhar, China, 127. The women in Zhang Yimou’s films with Gong Li have also been interpreted as symbolising the nation and carrying the primary spectatorial involvement. 32. Dai Qing, ‘Raised Eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern’, in Public Culture, trans. Jeanne Tai 5, no. 2 (1993), 333–337. There have been indignant attacks on the film for its lack of authenticity, that is, that the customs depicted (like the red lantern being lit up outside the favoured woman’s quarters, the foot massage, etc.) are all not factual but exoticisation. 33. Su Tong and Zhang Yimou, ‘Women’s Places in Raise the Red Lantern’, in Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film, ed. Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, (Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 42. This turning of the male presence into an emblem of patriarchy is different from the novel on which the film is based—Su Tong (Wives and Concubines, 1990)—that eroticises male body. 34. Tong and Yimou, ‘Women’s’, 41–43. 35. Cheuk-to Li, ‘Le printemps d’une petite ville, un film qui renouvelle la tradition Chinoise’, in Le Cinéma Chinois, eds. Quiquemelle Marie-Claire and Passek Jean-Loup (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985), 73–76.

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36. James Berardinelli, ‘Raise the Red Lantern: A Film Review’, Reelviews. http://www.reelviews.net/movies/r/raise.html. Accessed on 30 September 2013. 37. Zhang is not alone here since one finds a parallel in other films. The impenetrability of political decisions in films like The Blue Kite and The Legend of Tianyun Mountain is only extended further here when politics and government become invisible. 38. Haizhow Wang and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley, ‘Hero: Rewriting the Chinese Martial Arts Genre’, in Global Chinese Cinema: The Culture and Politics of Hero, eds. Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 91. The director of the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob, accused Not One Less of government propaganda perhaps because the film portrayed a ‘strong residual moral seriousness in the Chinese popular consciousness’, which is opposite to the Chinese mentality thought to be prevalent in the 1990s. Jacob’s comment angered Zhang and prompted him to withdraw the film from the festival. 39. Sheldon H. Lu, ‘Chinese film culture at the end of the twentieth century’, in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds. Sheldon H. Lu and Yueh-Yu Emilie Yeh (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 121. 40. Not only did rabidly Stalinist films like Fridrikh Ermler’s The Great Citizen (1938) take pains to create types corresponding to the categories named in their rhetoric but so did films during Khruschev’s thaw—like Marlen Khutsiyev’s Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), in which there are differences between educated teacher and worker. 41. Helen K. Rene, China’s Sent Down Generation: Public Administration and the Legacies of Mao’s Rustication Program (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 1–13. 42. The absence of villains in these films confirms this because one cannot imagine ‘social miscreants’ in a utopia. This is perhaps where Stalinist propaganda is different—because in Stalinist films, a utopia, while being on its way, is not yet achieved. 43. Significantly, the chief’s kicking of Qiu Ju’s husband is only reported and not shown. Qiu Ju’s anger is traced to the harm caused to her man’s genitals—which cannot be unrelated to her sexuality.

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44. Gary D. Rawnsley, ‘The Political Narrative(s) of Hero’, in Global Chinese Cinema: The Culture and Politics of Hero, eds. Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 15. 45. Rawnsley, ‘The Political’, 21. There is a master introduced somewhere in the middle of the film but he plays a small part and is essentially there to demonstrate the prowess of the heroes. The fact that Hero puts aside the traditional Chinese codes associated with warriors and chooses legalist narrative to judge the moral health of the nation has been commented upon. 46. Rawnsley, ‘The Political’, 16–17. 47. Rawnsley, ‘The Political’, 23. The author cites Mo Chen, The History of Chinese Martial Arts Films (Zhongguo wuxia dianyingshi), (Taipei: Fengyun Shidai, 2006), 324–327. 48. Rawnsley, ‘The Political’, 23. 49. An instance is the ‘shoot the mad dogs’ cries associated with the Moscow show trials after which death sentences were handed down to leaders like Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. 50. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Vintage Books, 2006), 308–313. Some of the intrigues reflect those under Maoism. The Emperor and the Empress are adversaries in Curse of the Golden Flower and the Emperor is having her submit to medical treatment to have her poisoned. It has been alleged that Mao got rid of his adversaries similarly by having them submit to medical treatment and then poisoned. This was a strategy apparently used on rival Wang Ming in 1941. 51. Killing as choreographed movement is very different from killing as brutality in Hollywood films dealing with ancient wars like Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004). There is a tendency by Western critics to see any portrayal of military and bloodshed as necessarily pacifist because war is by itself ‘bad’. For instance, see ‘Subliminal Political Subversion in Zhang Yimou’s Hero’, YouTube, uploaded by Akiration 26 May 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYEbcpkCf2g. Accessed on 9 October 2013. This short film tries to see the martial sequences of Hero as reflecting upon China’s ‘brutish military power’. But there is little evidence that Hero’s showcasing Qin’s military power is not celebratory.

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About the Author M.K. Raghavendra is an Indian film critic. He received the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997. He has authored three volumes of academic film criticism—Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (2008), Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film (2011) and The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation (2014). He has also written two books on cinema for the general reader—50 Indian Film Classics (2009) and Director’s Cut: 50 Film-makers of the Modern Era (2013)—and edited an anthology of writing on South Indian cinema in 2017, Beyond Bollywood: The Cinemas of South India. His book The Oxford Short Introduction to Bollywood was published in 2016. His academic writings have been anthologised in books by reputed publishing houses. Raghavendra is a member of International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) and has been on the juries of several international film festivals, including East-West: The Golden Arch, 2018 and 2019.

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