Links for Movie buffs

Almost anyone with an interest in the history of film criticism knows about the great debates that took place around the auteur theory in the 1960s, with publications like Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight at Sound, and individuals like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, in the eye of the storm. But one journal that doesn’t get mentioned as much these days – though it was central to those conversations and provided some of the most intelligent, passionate film writing of its time – is Movie, the little magazine started by Ian Cameron in 1962.

I didn’t know much about Movie myself until a few years ago, but I came to feel a distant kinship with it when I learnt that two of the film writers who had most influenced me – Victor F Perkins (author of Film as Film) and Robin Wood – were part of the magazine’s core group in its early years. I knew of no connection between Wood and Perkins when I first read them, but I knew both stressed the importance of assessing film as a form with its own distinct language – subject to careful visual analysis that goes beyond the bare bones of story or plot – rather than as an underling to literature. Naturally, this meant according serious attention to works that lay outside the circles of cultural respectability at the time. (Wood’s path-breaking study of Hitchcock began with this now-famous passage: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously? It is a pity the question has to be raised: if the cinema were truly regarded as an autonomous art, not as a mere adjunct of the novel or of drama – if we were able yet to see films instead of mentally reducing them to literature – it would be unnecessary.”)

Anyway, I mention this because I just came across this website with content from a recent revival of the journal, with Perkins – now in his mid-70s – still involved. There are older articles as well. Some of the writing is intense (and needless to say, requires familiarity with the films being discussed) but do bookmark and take the plunge once in a while; it’s worth it.

Some recommendations (the links are all PDFs):

“Films, Directors and Critics” – an important 1962 piece by Ian Cameron, which responds to charges of “over-analysis” in the first issue of Movie, spells out some of the journal’s main concerns, and takes a jab at the cultural conservatism of Sight and Sound (while also rejecting the most extreme definitions of auteurism proposed by the French critics). I think this piece should be read in conjunction with two other famous essays: Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares” and Andrew Sarris’s “Towards a Theory of Film History”. (Kael berated the Movie critics in her piece, even asking the – in my view bizarre – question “If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their ‘detailed criticism’ of movies like River of No Return?”)

A 2010 editorial by Perkins, with context for the Movie revival and a reminiscence of the winds of change in the early 60s. (“1958 was the key year. It was the year of The Tarnished Angels, Touch of Evil, Party Girl and Vertigo, films to revere, to see and see again, but loftily dismissed by the critical establishment … The depth and eagerness of [Orson Welles’s] response to admiring interrogation about Touch of Evil did two things. It showed us that film makers might rise to the level of the questions put to them, and it stoked our fury at the blinkered terms of this film’s and others’ reception in the English-writing world.”)

A detailed piece by Alex Clayton about “the texture of performance” in Hitchcock’s Psycho and its “shot-by-shot remake” by Gus Van Sant. Probably best read with DVDs of both films handy, but there are useful insights of a general nature here too. I particularly like Clayton’s observation that the concept of a shot-by-shot remake is inherently flawed, being based on the idea that “the figures who populate film shots are not essentially constitutive of them, except as hominid-shaped design elements”. (In other words: casting Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche in iconic roles formerly played by other actors is one thing; but confining them in a pre-determined pattern of shot compositions and gestures that requires them to exactly mimic the original performers is another thing altogether.)

Andrew Sarris's essay on Luis Bunuel and Viridiana, from the first issue of Movie. ("There is a danger in attaching an explicitly political moral to Bunuel's career [...] His camera has always viewed his characters from a middle distance, too close for cosmic groupings and too far away for self-identification. By focusing on the abnormality of life, Bunuel forces his audience to accept man unconditionally.")

Also: two long pieces about Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Lang’s You Only Live Once, which I will read after watching the films again, but which look interesting if you have the films in recent memory.

Full table of contents here and here. Also, here is a listing of contents of old Movie issues. Wish all the pieces were available to read online.

[Related posts: Perkins on subject and treatment; a tribute to Robin Wood; thoughts on story and storytelling]

DVD Classic: Shaitani Anand (or Return of Zombie Rajesh)

[Did this piece on a long-forgotten - but now restored - Hrishikesh Mukherjee film for the April 1 issue of Sunday Guardian. Do also see this explanation in the pages of that paper]

Hindi cinema’s tradition of zombie-love, vampirism and necrophilia has been well-chronicled over the decades, which is understandable, for nearly every major film has splashes of surreal, unexpected horror. The hospital scene near the beginning of Amar Akbar Anthony where Nirupa Roy, in need of a blood transfusion, rips away the tubes and sinks her fangs into the throats of her three sons lying on nearby beds, has been the subject of more Ph.D theses than anyone can count (including a celebrated one titled “Mommie fiercest: the hermeneutics of maternal love and vampirism in popular Hindi film”). Much has similarly been made of the resurrection scene in the climax of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa where the undead poet Vijay escapes his coffin, strikes a crucifixion pose at the entrance of a hall and sings “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai?” (“Who cares about the world of the living? It's cosier underground.”)

For decades, heroes and villains have smacked their chomps and droned “Main tera khoon pee jaoonga” at each other, but the word “khoon” has subtler resonances too: our films are full of people betrayed by their blood (hard-hearted relatives) or by their blood cells (prolonged death by cancer). Narcissistic male stars with crumbling faces play characters one-third their age, suggesting a Mephistophelean trade-off. Entire acting careers (Jeetendra? Mala Sinha?) testify that zombies, if they pick their disguises well, can get high-paying jobs. And has any national cinema anywhere in the world – even the Japanese, with their talent for visceral creepiness – offered horrors to rival the sight of Sanjeev Kumar playing nine roles in a single film? No.


One director steered clear of this ghoulishness for much of his career: in the 1970s, Hrishikesh Mukherjee specialised in gentle, character-oriented scripts and a somewhat narrow definition of “realism” that precluded werewolves and icchadhaari naags. But this is precisely why Mukherjee’s 1980 film Shaitani Anand, lost in the eerie mists of time and recently recovered from film vaults, is such a significant work.

The back-story is as intriguing as the film itself. It began life as a straight sequel to one of the director’s best-loved movies, Anand, but it developed a zombie twist when a young executive producer named Bhootpret Ramsay brought his own ideas to the table. Consequently, the story begins with the beaming cancer patient Anand rising from the grave and setting off to convince his old associates that death, like life, must be lived to the fullest.

This is not typical Mukherjee terrain, but there had been hints of an appetite for morbidity in his earlier work. As the American critic Pauline Kael shrewdly noted, his 1972 film Bawarchi – in which a cook teaches a well-needed lesson to a family intent on devouring each other – anticipated the cannibalistic clan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by two years. What exactly was in those innocent-looking pakoras that Raghu the bawarchi was serving the Sharmas?

Raghu and Anand were both played by the same actor, the superstar Rajesh Khanna, whose early filmography – sanguine and twinkling though it appears from a distance – was marked by reflections on life, death and the hereafter. (“Zindagi kaisi hai paheli haaye,” he sang in Anand itself, but there was also “Maut aani hai, aayegi ek din”, crooned in a deceptively upbeat song in Andaz – shortly before the death of his character. And the melancholy number “Zindagi ke safar mein guzar jaate hain joh makaam / Woh phir nahin aate”, which loosely translates as "There's no going back / When you're in zombie land".) By the late 70s Khanna’s career was in free-fall; ironically, his replacement as Bollywood’s most successful star was the lanky Amitabh Bachchan who had played a supporting role in Anand. It is perhaps no surprise then that Shaitani Anand developed into a meta-commentary on the star system. There is profound human tragedy in the story of the sweet-natured Anand becoming a vindictive fiend and stalking his friend Bhaskar – who has changed his hairstyle and no longer recognises him – through Hindi-film studios.

Personally I regret the scrapping of the planned ensemble song that had a number of actors turning into zombies and menacing Bachchan: when an assistant writer jumped ship for the Manmohan Desai camp, a “borrowed” (non-zombie) version of the idea was used in the “John Jani Janardhan” number in Desai’s Naseeb. This omission notwithstanding, Shaitani Anand is a fine horror film as well as a remarkable meditation on stardom as a monster that can suck the life-blood out of you until your wax statue in Madame Tussauds looks more alive than you do. In this sense it’s a movie years ahead of its time (as anyone who has watched Shah Rukh Khan in Ra.One will know) and it’s easy to see why vigorous efforts were made to keep it out of sight. Watch it now!

Postscript: The American film Shadow of the Vampire tells a fictionalised account of the making of the horror classic Nosferatu, built on the idea that the enigmatic leading man Max Schreck was a real-life vampire who feasted on the cast and crew during the shooting. One doesn’t wish to cast similar aspersions on a star of Rajesh Khanna’s magnitude, but it may be noted that the credits list of Shaitani Anand includes several names who never again worked on a Hindi movie. One can only politely wonder about their fate. But perhaps they were Mukherjee and Ramsay’s acquaintances who agreed to help out on a low-budget project and went back to their day jobs afterwards. Yes, that must be it.

On movie technique, criticism and Kael

One wants very much to talk about what makes Tolstoy uniquely Tolstoy and Renoir uniquely Renoir -- and that's their technique, their vision -- not just their stories or their themes. You can't "distinguish form and content for the purposes of analysis," because (as we all know) the form is the content, and what the artist has done is how the artist did it. You can't perceive the whole without taking notice of the specifics, any more than you can absorb a novel without reading the words or see a movie without looking at the images.

Almost dislocated my neck while reading this piece by Jim Emerson, because I was nodding so vigorously. If you're at all interested in films and how to think or write about them, do take the time to read it. Also read the footnotes. And the links to earlier posts he has provided at the end.

[Slightly related: here's a piece I did about Pauline Kael a few weeks ago]