What Happens Next - on Hollywood's earliest adventures in screenwriting

One of the most common ways of denouncing a film is to scoff “There was no script.” Casual viewers say this all the time – witness the news-channel coverage of people exiting movie halls on Friday afternoons, wiping the popcorn kernels off their shirts, looking intently into the camera and going “Gaane acche thay, par koi story nahin thi” – and so do professional movie writers. (Most recently, I was so flabbergasted by the sketchiness of the second half of Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar that I wondered if someone had lost the only copy of the screenplay midway through shooting and if the crew had been forced to ad-lib the rest of the film.)

Of course, no one is being literal-minded when they say these things. Everybody (I hope) knows that even terrible movies did have hardbound screenplays – often multiple drafts put together by a number of people (in collaboration or at different points). This is something we take for granted today. And so, it’s instructive to read about the early days of Hollywood in Marc Norman’s book What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting.

Norman is an Oscar-winning screenwriter himself and he obviously went to a writing school that taught its students “Begin with colour. Pull your readers in right from the first sentence”, because his book opens with the words “It’s July 1914, and here’s D W Griffith, striding across the Hollywood Hills”. (The Great War began that same month but Norman makes no reference to it, and I’m fairly sure the single-minded Griffith wasn’t thinking about it either.) This short opening section concludes with the line: “America’s greatest director is making the greatest American film to date, and there’s no screenplay.”

The “greatest American film to date” is Griffith’s epic The Birth of a Nation, unprecedented in the scale of its ambition and revolutionary for the way it helped develop the medium’s grammar and bring it new respectability. But as Norman tells us, The Birth of the Nation, while based on the popular novel The Clansman, never had an actual script. One of Griffith’s associates may have prepared a rough scene break-up of some sort, but the director essentially carried the structure of the film in his head; camera angles, movements and gestures were improvised on the set. Karl Brown, an assistant cameraman who made his own notes during the shooting, was dismayed by the apparent shabbiness of some of the on-set decisions (“Nothing seemed to go together, nothing seemed to fit...I could not see how that mixed-up jumble of unrelated bits and pieces of action could ever be made into anything”). He expected the premiere to be a disaster, but like everyone else he was blown away by what finally unfolded on the screen.

The first few chapters of Norman’s book chronicle the progression from the earliest “films” – 30-second shots of waves lashing a beach or trains pulling in at a station that startled their first audiences but soon lost novelty value, creating the need for proper stories to be told – to puerile narratives inspired by the cheaper newspaper comics, andthence to the radical idea of hiring and paying people to write scenarios in advance. (Many of the first writers were women – Gene Gauntier and Anita Loos among them – who supposedly had a better sense of narrative flow because they read more fiction than men; besides, they could be underpaid.)

For years, copyright wasn’t an issue and filmmakers freely dipped into whatever material was available. Then, in 1907, the estate of author Lew Wallace sued the makers of Ben Hur (a version made nearly 20 years before Charlton Heston was born) – and this opened the gates for new standards of professionalism, but there were many stumbling blocks ahead yet. Even as late as the 1920s, there were humorous stories about silent-movie inter-titles being subject to manipulation, so that it was possible to alter the dialogue – and perhaps the entire meaning of a scene – simply by cutting away from an actor as he was about to speak, inserting a new title and then cutting back just as the actor’s lips stopped moving. Later, sound brought new complications for everyone, not just for the screenwriters. (Norman mentions the actress ZaSu Pitts saying that she had to go home “and learn my titles”.)

With much history and trivia of this sort, What Happens Next is an entertaining account of a period that is in some ways as distant and unfathomable for a modern movie-buff as the Epic of Gilgamesh would be for a contemporary novel-reader. But at the same time, one is reminded that the recipes for incompetence don't change much over the decades. Who would deny that it’s just as possible to make a thoroughly incoherent film today as it was a century ago? The evidence is all around us.

P.S. I have some reservations about Norman’s book (which I haven’t finished yet). His (understandable) bias towards Hollywood’s countless undervalued writers leads him to be fairly disdainful about the relative role of directors. (“Of course, the auteur theory was painfully wrong” he informs us, thus summarily dismissing an idea that may have been overzealously expressed in its first incarnation but which, in its more nuanced forms, offers a useful and meaningful way of analysing many great movies and filmmakers.) I think he also under-appreciates the technical side of moviemaking in general.

[Much appreciation to Uday Bhatia at A Fan Apart for lending me the book. Also see: Garson Kanin's Hollywood]

Ambedkar and caste, in Gond art

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

At the first edition of Delhi’s Bookaroo festival a few years ago, I was very taken with a picture book titled The London Jungle Book, beautifully drawn by the Gond artist Bhajju Shyam. It was his perspective on a three-month stay in London, which had been a difficult time for him given his lack of familiarity with the culture and the language. But Shyam used his art as catharsis, making alien things familiar and comforting: in one picture, for instance, he combined Big Ben with a rooster (“In the village I come from, the rooster is the only time-teller,” he explained). In another, the red bus he took every day – a reassuring sight for him – was depicted as having the body of a dog, “a creature that is warm and dependable”.

This gentle anthropomorphising, not just of other living beings but also of inanimate objects, is a characteristic of the Gond art I’ve seen so far, and it suggests a worldview where everything is interdependent and there is a certain harmony in nature. Consider the very first page of Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, a stunning illustrated book about caste discrimination, drawn by Gond artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam and co-written by Srividya Natarajan (who authored one of the funniest Indian novels of the last few years, No Onions Nor Garlic) and S Anand.

A man and a woman are at a bus-stop; their conversation will become the book’s framing device, as the man rants about the unfairness of quotas and reservations and the woman responds by relating incidents from B R Ambedkar’s life and stressing that caste-related intolerance is still very much a reality. But part of the bench they are sitting on is depicted as a smiling person – arms spread out as if inviting the weary to sit, long hair extending to represent the roof of the shelter. Nearby, a winding road merges into a giant peacock head, and flocks of (more realistically sized) birds keep vigil from the rooftops of houses.

There are hundreds of such details scattered through Bhimayana: the train in which young Bhimrao Ambedkar travels to his father’s house has carriages with disproportionately large eyes filling the windows, wheels that resemble serpents’ heads and large snails curled up outside the compartments; a water tank is given the shape of a fish; an animal head protrudes from a man’s trouser legs. Some juxtapositions and artistic flourishes are just as startling in their own way as anything done by the Surrealists. People walking across a green field are represented only by their heads and feet. A group of men threatening Ambedkar are depicted as heads placed atop the sticks they are wielding (as if to suggest that their prejudices have reduced them to symbols of pure violence). The “panel” format of most graphic novels is eschewed in favour of a much bolder, unfettered use of space on each page.

The “story” does of course continue through all this. The woman’s narrative is usually chatty and informal (typical sample: “The Brahmins decided to ‘purify’ the ‘polluted’ tank by pouring into it 108 pots containing a mixture of cow-dung and cow-piss, milk, ghee and curds – I kid you not – to a soundtrack of Vedic chanting...”) but there are also transcripts of newspaper reports – grim reminders that the spectre of caste is still alive even in big cities like Delhi, much less the tiny, cut-off villages to which the hand of justice rarely stretches.

Still, it's the artwork and the page layouts that are really mesmeric; they compel you to return to each illustration, searching for details you had earlier missed. And therein lies the minor problem I have with Bhimayana (in fact, I’m not completely sure it IS a problem). Reading – or rather, experiencing – this book, I wondered: given that the writing is clearly meant as a primer for the relatively uninformed reader (there is a textbook feel to it), is there a danger of the book’s dazzling form utterly overwhelming its workmanlike content? When I revisit Bhimayana – and I know I will – it will mainly be for the art. I don’t know if its impact as a conscience-raiser is equally strong.

It's Children's Day...

...so please listen to Samuel L Jackson's beautiful rendition of one of the most popular children's books of the past year, Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck to Sleep (also sold under the more ambiguous title Go the F**K to Sleep). Highly therapeutic for sleep-deprived parents.

Savio de Souza's last song

[Preamble to a review: I did a version of this piece for the Sahitya Akademi's journal Indian Literature. It was one of those rare instances where I said yes to reviewing a book that I hadn’t yet read, and I regret it now: reading the novel and then writing this review took a few weeks off my life, or so it felt. It was also a difficult experience because in writing the piece, it was important to clarify that I have no problem with ornate prose in itself – unlike many readers I know, I don’t think language must only be used as cleanly and functionally as possible. But the writing in this book simply didn’t work for me, and I’ve tried to convey why. There’s a certain type of Indian-English writing where big words get used indiscriminately, with little regard for the rhythm of a sentence or the compatibility between a particular adjective and a particular noun, and I thought this was one of those cases.

Also, I've tried to include as many short excerpts as possible so that readers can decide for themselves if this sort of writing appeals to them. Needless to say, if it does, just ignore my assessment.]

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For a convoluted, overwritten novel with many narrative detours, it’s surprisingly easy to summarise the plot of Binoo John’s The Last Song of Savio de Souza. Set over nearly three decades in a fictional Kerala town named Puram, this is a story about a man with a golden voice who divides his time between singing for a church and playing basketball and football tournaments, while friends, lovers and various colourful people flit in and out of his life.

The world of Savio de Souza, his beloved sister Silvy and their parents Simon and Tessy is one where science and faith, poverty and technology circle each other uneasily. As the book opens we learn that Simon is a long-time driver for a convent and that Silvy’s fate is to join the Order of Benedictine Sisters. With religious authorities along the coast contending furiously for miracles and believers (“the stink of competing evangelism” is one of John’s catchier phrases), poor people trying to eke out a living are caught in the middle. A launching station changes the lives of fishermen because it provides jobs for their children – but for the local priests, the sight of a rocket rising towards the sky is like “a big question mark thrown by science at the Gods”, a rude intrusion in a place where prayers were once the only things sent up to the heavens.

These details are promising in themselves, as is John’s attempt to evoke the many aspects of Savio’s largely provincial life: the slow disintegrating of his family, the inevitable changes that occur in Puram over the years, the sense of loss and resignation. And in the subplot about Silvy being separated from her parents and brother, there is the seed of a moving story about lives sundered by tradition. But unfortunately these themes aren’t given a chance to play out, for the book’s prose is so florid and meandering that one rarely manages to invest in these characters. More often than not, John’s self-consciously bombastic writing drains the energy from the storytelling.

Almost from the first page, there are awkward phrases and facile jokes. (“In general, there was a constipated atmosphere in church,” we are told when a proposal for a Western toilet – because an ageing vicar can squat no longer – is kept pending.) Occasionally a good quip does come along, as when a priest recruiting for the Vatican is called a “nun-runner of the Catholic Church” – but even here, what could have worked very well as a throwaway joke is carelessly repeated in the same paragraph.

There is too much clutter: too many side-characters, too many superfluous little incidents, and unnecessary detail that is often so much at odds with the main thrust of the narrative that it has to be put in parentheses. Thus, a description of Savio playing basketball begins well (“When he reached the apogee of his jump, he froze for a fleeting moment, stretched like a Byzantine sculpture…”) but then halts mid-jump to give us a distracting piece of information (his jersey “had ‘St Joseph’ written at the back, without an apostrophe and terribly misaligned”), so that the effect is diluted. It’s a bit like watching the handsome protagonist collapsing in a heap, instead of completing his throw with the same grace that he began it.

The cumbersome sentences keep adding up. It isn’t enough, apparently, to say “Savio resisted the urge to jump the wall and hug his father and bring him back home” when you can instead come up with a rambling “Savio resisted the urge, that genetic urge, that primordial surge of love, to jump the wall and hug his father and bring him back to the home of their childhood, of their tinkling laughter, their sorrows, their surrenders, deaths and farewells”. I’m not trying to make the case that novelistic writing must always be short and to the point, but there should at least be some elegance in word arrangements. With its clumsy juxtaposing of "genetic urge" and "primordial surge", and the banal finish ("tinkling laughter, sorrows, surrenders, deaths and farewells"), the above description lacks the rhythm that one expects from a well-constructed long sentence.

Another sample, which I offer without comment:

When this goddess led his finger to her legs, the marble smooth legs of many cataclysmic nights, dreams and disasters, when he had all the chance in the world to enter that tabernacle of desire, that alcove held together by her thighs which drove nursery kids to rebel against their mothers, when he could wash off the sin and stain of the whore by dousing himself with the moral detergent of angelic Silvy, Savio at that moment, got up.

The narrative is also characterised by a recording of events, so that the characters are constantly explained to us, instead of gradually revealing themselves through conversation. And when conversation – or interior monologue – does occur, it usually takes a dramatically exaggerated form, as in the stream-of-consciousness passage where Silvy addresses her father:

“Appa, are you leaving me here, friend and guide of my childhood, are you leaving me here? … How many times have you picked me up, Appa, father of my childhood, father of my youth, father of my sorrows, my prayers, my joys? Don’t you remember the time when you first bought a ball for Savio and I took it and hid it, Appa? How unbridled was that joy! Are you leaving me here, Appa?”

This goes on for another half-page. The repeated use of “Appa, are you leaving me here” seems intended as a poetic refrain, but good poetry is usually not what results when you string together a lot of sentences like “When will we go again, Appa, to the beach of my childhood to skip and hop, when the naughty waves come all the way up?” This is a case of affected language substituting for real emotion instead of expressing it.

****

The immediately identifiable literary mode in The Last Song of Savio de Souza is that of magic realism. There is a view that this form is now dated or irrelevant – that it was an expression for the social complexities of regions that hadn’t yet found a distinct novelistic voice for the world stage, and that its ability to startle readers has worn off. In itself, this is a suspect idea: there is no reason why a particular type of writing shouldn’t continue to flourish as long as there are authors up to the task of using it meaningfully. The real problem is that magic realism seems especially susceptible to misuse, often becoming a tool of convenience. Want to convey a general sense of an exotic setting where unusual things happen (or where people yearn to have unusual things happen to them)? Well, just throw in a few obviously supernatural incidents at irregular intervals, and call it “heightened reality”. Anything goes.

There’s something very random about the magic-realist bits in John’s novel. Among them is a prolonged episode where Savio’s friend Hamid stabs an eve-teaser named Camel, who then transforms, literally, into a dead man walking – his bleeding carcass saunters through the town’s streets until it reaches Camel’s room (by which time it has turned into a skeleton). There is also a moderately engaging description of monkey slaughter that results in a biology teacher and two macaques laid out together on the ground in an “evolutionary tableau of the dead or the dying, the half-dead and the fully alive”, and a gratuitous account of a “satyagrahi” named Sumati protesting outside a secretariat for the return of her land. She quickly becomes a prostitute, servicing just about every man in the region, and eventually destined for “communal rape” (her “valiant vagina, that mute uncomplaining receptor of many Puram phalluses” is evidently meant to be a symbol of something, but I couldn’t figure out what).

On view throughout is a massive Gabriel Garcia Marquez complex, what with meta-references to things that will happen in the future (“In the ecstasy of that moment, when Savio bent to nibble at the offering, Regalia saw the python slithering in front of her and choked in exactly the way she would, many years later, when the sea swelled with a deep cosmic upheaval and became a rising wall just a few feet from her, when everything was to end”), and more specifically, to fluids which gather in improbably large quantities. Tessy’s tears formed a little rivulet in the house, it is revealed; they “flowed along the baked brick floor, touched the rolled-up sleeping mats, flowed past the easy chair which Simon had picked up from a waste shop in Chalai, before making a reflective puddle in the corner”. Later, the “rivulet of blood” from Camel’s wounds will trail slowly behind him on his long death-walk. Apart from being highly derivative of Marquez, these soggy interludes add nothing to our understanding of the story or its characters - they exist purely to create eye-popping moments.

In any case, the book may as well have been titled “Chronicle of a Tsunami Foretold”; from the start, it’s obvious that everything in Savio’s life and the life of Puram is leading up to the tragedy of December 2004. Ironically, it’s when the apocalyptic wave arrives (and here is a real-life event that can make even the excesses of magic realism seem feeble) that John’s writing becomes a little subdued, as if constrained by the graveness of the occasion. The climactic passages are an odd mix of two very different writing styles – one characteristically baroque, the other the prosaic style of reportage. There is surreal imagery (notably in an account of Savio and a former girlfriend playing amidst the flying fishes, crabs and octopuses that have washed up on the beach), but there are also descriptions that tread close to conventional journalism: “A few miles down the Velankanni coast in Nagapattinam, Arko Datta captured raw tragedy and death as few have, either before or after. The desperate mother, her palms turned helplessly towards the heavens...”

This makes for an uneven end to a very ambitious, busy but frustratingly laboured novel. On this evidence John clearly has many stories to tell – perhaps too many – apart from a certain knack for observation and empathy. But for the human element of his stories to come through, his prose needs to be tidier and more discerning.

Chronicle of a solitary man: Teju Cole's Open City

[Did a version of this review for The Sunday Guardian]

At one point in Teju Cole’s novel Open City, the narrator Julius – a Nigerian psychiatrist in his early 30s, living in New York – visits the American Folk Art Museum and contemplates the work of the deaf painter John Brewster. Some portraits are of children who were hearing-impaired themselves, and the effect is that of artist and subject each wrapped in a cocoon of silence, regarding one another. “I was the only person there,” Julius tells us:

This heightened the feeling of quietness I got from almost all the portraits. The stillness of the people depicted was certainly part of it, as was the sober colour palette of each panel, but there was something more, something harder to define: an air of hermeticism. Each of the portraits was a sealed-away world, visible from without but impossible to enter.

“Quietness”, “stillness”, “hermeticism”, “sealed away”... these are words that might just as easily describe Julius’s own narrative, which is so full of careful introspection that at times it threatens to weigh down this powerful novel. He is one of the most solitary narrator-protagonists I’ve encountered in fiction. This book contains a reference to Robert de Niro playing the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, but Julius’s isolation reminded me a little of another key De Niro role, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver – a lonesome man of the streets who looks straight into the camera and says “I’m the only one here.”

Open City is fueled not by a conventional plot but by the ruminations of this intelligent, cultured, possibly depressive man. Walking the streets of NYC, Julius thinks about the history of his family (his mother – from whom he is estranged – was born in Germany just as WWII ended, his father was African) and his dim childhood memories of Nigeria; about the city he now lives in, its past and present, and the waves of immigrations that shaped it; and about his patients, including a member of a Delaware tribe who wrote a book about colonial atrocities but remained tormented by her personal connection with what she was writing about. (“I can’t pretend it isn’t about my life, she said to me once, it is my life. It’s a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past.”) He spends time with a former professor, an octogenarian Japanese man who had himself faced questions of identity six decades earlier. Later, during a visit to Brussels, he finds himself in an unexpected conversation about “victimized Others” – as well as the Palestinian question, the war against Al-Qaeda and the history of suffering – with the Muslim owner of an Internet shop.

Thus the book’s themes slowly emerge and flow into one another, and we also become aware of Julius’s internal conflicts: he is indignant about the Hollywood movie convention of “the good white man in Africa” ready to bring about the salvation of a continent, but he is also disquieted by encounters with other Africans who try to “lay claims” on him. He is melancholy and ill at ease – and there are subtle indicators that he might be an unreliable narrator too.

In one vivid passage, watching a scuffle from a distance, he is frightened by a vision of “a lynched man dangling from a tree”, only to realise that it was a canvas sheet twirling in the wind. Of course, an optical illusion of this sort can hit anyone (not just a dark-complexioned man conscious of a history steeped in violent racism), but other things in Julius’s narration seem a little off too. When someone who has lived in New York for years is spellbound by the sight of people hurrying into “underground chambers” at subway stations (“I felt that all of the human race were rushing, pushed by a counter-instinctive death drive, into movable catacombs”), it suggests a dissociation from even the most quotidian aspects of the world around him.

Then there are his encounters – such as the one with a Haitian shoeshiner – which often take the form of long monologues spoken by the other person; here, one gets the impression that our narrator is a passive receptacle for (or even a fabricator of) other people’s stories. (Cole’s refusal to use quote-marks heightens this impression – there is no visual separation between Julius’s thoughts and the conversations he participates in.) This comes into clearer relief towards the end of the novel, with a revelation that reminds us to be wary of the tales we make up about ourselves and others, and to not take everything about Julius’s story at face value.

The first sentence of Open City (“And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall...”) suggested a continuation rather than a commencement, as if we had been deposited right in the middle of one of Julius’s private musings. At the end, as he returns to the subject with which he began – migratory birds – and the narrative comes to an equally abrupt close, there is a sense of a life moving perpetually in a loop. This book's sombre subject matter and tone, along with its many references to high culture (Dutch paintings, the music of Mahler, the poem “Piers Plowman”, even the slow-moving Victor Erice film The Spirit of the Beehive), make it an occasionally dense read. (Even when Julius describes being beaten up by muggers, it takes the shape of introspection: “We find it convenient to describe time as a material, we ‘waste’ time, we ‘take’ our time. As I lay there, time became material in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent tufts, and at the same time spreading, like something spilled, like a stain.”) As such, I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who is just starting a relationship with literary fiction. But if you do manage to sink into its narrative, this is a layered, deeply rewarding story about a man trying to make sense of an alienating world.

The Greatest Show on Earth - on all-inclusive, opportunistic Bollywood

When you’re reading the Introduction to an anthology, certain words can set off alarm bells. For instance, an editor’s claim that he wanted his collection to be “eclectic” is sometimes shorthand for “I didn’t want to spend much time on a careful selection process. Pretty much anything I found went in.” If you merely flip through the Contents pages of The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood – with 37 pieces divided under such headings as “The Stars”, “The Music and the Music-Makers” and “Ringside Views” – you might be tempted to level this charge at Jerry Pinto.

Once you get down to reading these excerpts, though, you're reminded that few people know the pulse of the true Hindi-movie enthusiast better than Pinto does; there’s little arguing with his claim that these pieces jointly reflect Bollywood’s “all-inclusive, opportunistic, outward-looking” identity. Were the subject of this book anything else, it would be difficult to imagine a reader who would be equally interested in two essays as tonally different as Susmita Dasgupta’s scholarly “The Birth of Tragedy” (in which Amitabh Bachchan’s career arc from rebellious anti-hero to symbol of order is discussed in terms of Dionysian and Apollonian values) and Ram Kamal Mukherjee’s shabbily written and edited trifle “Marrying Hema” (sample sentence: “This was the time when Dharmendra went out of his way to explain it to the industrywallahs, that people was reading more than they are expected to”). But a full-blooded lover of Hindi cinema can embrace both these pieces, and the many others that fall somewhere in between.

This assortment of previously published writings includes Kishore Kumar’s brilliantly surreal 1985 interview to Pritish Nandy (“I tried to dig a canal all around my bungalow so we could sail gondolas there...Why can’t I hang live crows on my wall?”) and R K Narayan’s almost equally surreal account of his experience as an irrelevant onlooker during the filming of his novel The Guide (“I began to realise that monologue is the privilege of the filmmaker, and that it was futile to try butting in with my own observations”). Mukul Kesavan’s essay on the “Islamicate” roots of Bollywood (“Urdu didn’t simply give utterance to the narratives characteristic of Hindi cinema, it actually helped create them”) rubs shoulders with Naresh Fernandes’ poignant journalistic feature about a real-life Anthony Gonsalves and other Goan musicians who had an impact on Hindi-film music. Javed Akhtar discusses screenplay-writing in an engrossing interview with Nasreen Munni Kabir, and in a short story by Salman Rushdie we meet a rickshaw-wallah with Bombay dreams. Khushwant Singh is mildly haughty about Bollywood stars while Bhisham Sahni describes his brother Balraj (today acclaimed as one of Hindi cinema’s first great actors) having to shake off his stiffness before the camera.

Most of the pieces mentioned above are very well written, but in other cases literary quality is beside the point. And on at least one occasion, banal writing is the point: the “Fiction” section includes a dreary excerpt from Khwaja Ahmed Abbas’s novelisation of Raj Kapoor’s film Bobby, which (going by Pinto’s note accompanying the piece) seems to have been included to demonstrate how flat such an endeavour can be compared to the actual experience of watching the movie. Reading the excerpt, I couldn't help recall Rishi Kapoor's expressive face register embarrassment, mild alarm and anticipation in turn during the birthday-party scene, and the words on the page seemed clunky and inadequate in comparison.

It’s natural to read such a collection in fragments rather than linearly, and this allows one to discover, in quick succession, essays that provide contrasting takes on the same person or incident. Thus Madhu Jain notes that “people forget Lata Mangeshkar was a sensual being and not just a disembodied, ethereal voice” (and that “she was the only woman to make Raj Kapoor dance to her tunes”), but Ashraf Aziz in “The Female Voice in Hindustani Film Songs” suggests that “Lata’s laundered voice appeals to the spirit rather than the senses – she infantilized the female voice”. And as if that weren't enough, Dada Kondke presents a pleasingly improbable view of the singer as Annie Oakley. (“Placing the gun on her shoulder and looking at the reflection in the mirror, she started drilling more holes into the tin can”.) But what the pieces reveal about their authors is often equally striking: note how a respected writer like Saadat Hasan Manto can display a bitchy and voyeuristic side when writing about a Bollywood figure (in this case Sitara Devi, portrayed as a sexual predator constantly sucking the life-blood out of the men who came under her spell).

Some of the excerpts are from high-profile publications such as Anupama Chopra’s Sholay book (the chapter that begins with the frisson-creating “Sholay flopped”), but there are also little treasures that you’d be hard-pressed to find in print these days. One of my favourite inclusions is from Vinod Mehta’s 1972 biography of (and unabashed fanboy ode to) Meena Kumari, which suggests a rare form of intelligent yet personal writing on popular Hindi cinema that I had little idea existed at the time; it made me want to rush to a rendezvous with Mumbai’s raddiwallahs (which is where Pinto got the book from). I particularly enjoyed the way Mehta refers to the deceased actress as “my tragedienne” and “my heroine”. Anyone who has ever had similarly proprietary feelings about a Bollywood star or film will find The Greatest Show on Earth hard to resist.

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review. An old post about Pinto's book on Helen is here]

A small, unseen film

In all the online discourse I’ve seen around Ra.One, what makes me want to tear my hair out is when its apologists say things like “Okay, it isn’t a great film – but you have to respect all the hard work that Shah Rukh and his team have put into it.”

In other words: so what if this is a cringe-inducingly uneven, appallingly written and imagined movie that offends the intelligence of anyone who knows anything about good science-fiction/fantasy or video games – we are STILL dutybound to scrape at the altars of the obscenely rich Bollywood deities who condescended to bring it to us.

To clarify, I have no real problem with anyone honestly thinking Ra.One was a good film (though I wouldn’t want to spend much time talking about movies with them). But whenever I hear the “respect the money and effort” plea, I think about the many people I know who have been struggling just as hard to realise their cinematic visions – and to bring them to an audience a tiny fraction of Ra.One’s – in more difficult circumstances.

I think, for example, about Shekhar Hattangadi, the associate director of a little film called Teen Behenein, which was directed by Kundan Shah for Zee Telefilms six years ago, and which you won't even find listed on IMDB. For the past few weeks, Hattangadi – who is in his mid-50s – has been in Delhi on his own initiative with a single DVD of the movie, screening it at colleges, trying to spread word about it through his contacts. For reasons that are unclear to me, there is no expectation that this film will get a commercial release or a DVD release anytime soon. This is a pity.

Teen Behenein, inspired by countless tragic stories from across India, is about three young sisters from a lower-middle class family who decide to commit suicide to relieve their parents from the burden of dowry demands (and the social derision when they are unable to meet them). It isn’t a great film – it occasionally struggles to balance the requirements of gritty, issue-oriented cinema with the need to simplify an issue for a general audience. It’s also a little tacky in places: a key fantasy scene near the end involves a particularly unfortunate costuming decision (Death in a crotch-less tin suit?) that might throw off even the most sensitive, invested viewer. But it works well when it focuses – as it usually does – on the interactions between the three girls on the last day of their lives: their personal equations, their responses to the little interruptions that keep delaying their plan, the slivers of hope and optimism filtering in through their despair.

At a screening I attended, the audience didn’t seem to care for the inclusion of songs in what they probably expected to be a strictly “realist” film. But I liked the way the musical interludes (mostly gentle, tuneful and convincingly acted) punctuated the narrative and caught the girls’ vacillating moods. One of the songs even facilitates Shah’s famous knack for injecting morbid humour into a seemingly cheerful situation: there’s a shot where the sisters – singing, skipping about, feeling temporarily sanguine about things – playfully don black veils, hang their heads and swing their arms limply to mimic a post-hanging posture. In hindsight it’s one of the film’s most vivid images, a representation of three spirited young people suddenly turned into corpses. Time and again, we see that these girls have potentially bright and meaningful lives ahead of them, but that they have been conditioned to believe there is no future, no way out. (At the beginning of the film, the feisty youngest sister insists on writing her own - presumably sharply worded - suicide note for their parents. Near the end, we see her tearing this note up – it’s a distressing but inevitable moment in a story about the crushing of individuality.)

The three central performances (by Amrita Subhash, Shiju Kataria and especially Kadambari Kadam as the youngest sister) are very strong, which brings me to something worth mentioning about the making of this film. If you see the discipline of good theatre acting here, that’s because Shah and his team extensively rehearsed every sequence in long takes – choreographing the characters’ movements and conversations within the small space that the story is set in – before they ever switched on the cameras. The result was that very little film stock was wasted on multiple takes and the shooting ratio was very low – which is important for a low-budget production. Given some of the crud that not only makes it to multiplexes these days but also gets ridiculous amounts of media coverage, I think it's a pity that films like Teen Behenein – low-key, well-intentioned, flawed in some ways but with strong points too – aren’t assured even a TV screening.

[Also see: this post by someone who attended a JNU screening and was disturbed by how disconnected some other viewers were from the types of lives depicted in the film. Tehelka has this interview with Shekhar Hattangadi. And Trisha Gupta’s Sunday Guardian review is here]