Monsters I have known

[Here is the full text of the essay I wrote for The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, about my horror-movie love. It’s been long enough since the anthology came out, so I thought I’d put it up here. While I’m at it, a reminder that the book contains excellent pieces by many fine writers. More information here]

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It’s June 1988, a summer vacation in London, and I’m sitting in a darkened room with my cousins and their friends, watching a horror film called House. Ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds huddle together, murmuring, waiting for the scary scenes. One of the adults partying in the living room outside sticks his head in, rolls his eyes dramatically and makes a deep howling sound, but we aren’t impressed; we saw Silver Bullet a few days ago, we know what a real werewolf sounds like.

So one of us gets up and bangs the door shut again, and now the only light comes from the TV set, which isn’t much to speak of, because it’s a dimly lit scene. We hold our breath as someone on the screen (the hero? Is there a “hero” in this film? Or am I thinking in the language of Hindi movies?) slowly walks up to a closet, puts his hand on the knob and turns it. Hanging in the air for a few seconds is the question: will a slimy monster leap out at him (and at us)? Or will he heave a sigh of relief (our cue to do the same), then turn around and find the fiend behind him (in which case our screams will be even louder than if the creature had been inside the closet in the first place)? Or will the jolts be postponed to the next scene? There’s a limited set of options and we know them all, but that doesn’t make the process any less frightening.

Afterwards we chase each other around the lawns, taking turns to play the film’s chief predator Ben (“Big Ben”?), a walking skeleton still grotesquely dressed in the soldier’s uniform in which he died. We were playing in the same garden a few hours earlier, but something has changed since then. The late-evening darkness is stiller than it should be, even though lights are on and the adults are just a few paces away. The rustling of the leaves in the trees and bushes seems full of strange meaning. Distant bird sounds carry portents. My senses are heightened, intensified, the world is suddenly an unfamiliar place.

More than twenty years later, as an adult movie buff with more developed and varied tastes, my favourite horror films continue to have this effect on me. Even when the films themselves are much more diverse in subject matter, style and vintage than the simple label “horror movie” could suggest.

The categories include (among many others) silent films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (a movie about a madman’s nightmare that, thanks to its brazenly Expressionist set design, looks every bit like a madman’s nightmare) and Nosferatu, the creepiest vampire film I’ve seen. Psychological horror, as in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, about a painter visited by phantoms of the mind, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, in which a young girl left alone in an apartment slowly loses her bearings. Comic-gothic horror (Polanski two years later, with Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in my Neck, about an Albert Einstein look-alike and his bumbling assistant exploring castles in Transylvania) and portmanteau ghost stories, like Masaki Kobayashi’s dazzlingly shot Kwaidan. And yes, gore films too – properly speaking, a different genre, but one that occasionally intersects with the sort of horror I love.

Not all these films achieve their ends in the same way. Many of them don’t have a single jump-out-of-your-seat scene but they have something more invidious, something that crawls back into my mind at the most unexpected times, long after I thought I’d forgotten all about the film.

It has been a long relationship. A few months after that House viewing, back in Delhi, horror films became my major entry point into the world of non-Hindi cinema. Thrills aside, there was something very accessible about them: the accents in American movies were sometimes hard to follow, but horror didn’t depend on dialogue for its effect. When Freddy Krueger leapt out at witless teens in a dark alley, chased them down Elm Street and slashed them to witless teenie-weenies, the visuals – and my senses responding to them – were all that mattered. The camera tracking in on the sinisterly glowing pumpkin (accompanied by the brilliant minimalist music score) during the opening credits of Halloween spoke more forcefully than pages of writing. This was film at its most egalitarian.

And so I rented video cassettes of the Evil Dead and Friday the 13th films, and a low-budget series called Demons, as well as slightly more sophisticated “mainstream” movies (though I knew nothing about those distinctions at the time) like Gremlins and Poltergeist. An education began.

Around the age of 13 my attitude to movie-watching began to change in subtle ways, and this was in large part due to a film that is considered a seminal horror movie, but which I’ve never really been able to think of in those terms. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho encouraged me to take cinema seriously, as an art form with its own methods and a visual language distinct from the words being spoken by the characters on the screen. It led me directly to movie literature and some of its scenes became personal reference points for my subsequent movie-watching (as you’ll see later in this essay). But I was never scared by Psycho in an immediate way. Maybe this was because I already knew all the major plot twists – I had heard jokes about “mummification” from my own mummy, and a friend in the school bus had given me a shot-by-shot description of the final revelation of the embalmed corpse of “Mrs Bates” in the fruit cellar. (Sorry if I’ve spoilt the film for you, but if you’re old enough to be reading this you ought to know these things already; it’s primary-level stuff.) Besides, my first viewing of it was on videocassette, in a well-lit room.

Or maybe it was that I was too moved by the film, that I found a deep sadness in it – “we scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other,” says Norman Bates, “and for all of it, we never budge an inch” – and surely a movie that put sad thoughts in your head had to be “more” than a “mere” horror film?

Today, of course, I know better.

Anyway, in the early 1990s the most important book in my life was a fat video guide that had nearly 20,000 capsule “reviews” packed together. The films were classified by a rating system ranging from four stars to one star, with a special “BOMB” rating reserved for the bottom-of-the-barrel movies. (The “review” for a long-forgotten Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film called Boom was the single word “Thud”. Next to the film’s title was BOMB, in all-caps. Criticism at its tersest, and a good counterpoint to the lengthy film essays I was reading around the same time.)

I carried the guide around in a polythene bag each time I went to the neighborhood video library – in a modest, five-shop community centre in south Delhi’s Saket that would, years later, become the location of India’s first multiplex theatre – and it made many important decisions for me. With one exception. Horror movies were never allowed to fall under its hegemony.

The video-parlour bhaiya looks amused when I extract the thick book from my bag with my free hand – I’m holding open his catalogue with the other – and leaf through it.

“Iss mein duniya ki sabhi movies ka naam hai?” (“Does this have the names of all the movies in the world?”) he asks.

“Haan,” I say without looking up, not wanting to get into a prolonged conversation.

“Hum isska photo-copy karaa sakte hain?” (“Can I get it photo-copied?”) he asks, but I’m not listening. The film I’m looking for is a Hollywood classic from the 1930s. The cassette cover carelessly fitted into the catalogue shows Cary Grant and Irene Dunne – two of my favourite actors – and I tell myself that I’ll take the film if the guide gives it three or more stars. But then something else in the catalogue catches my eye.

Demons 3.

Which has the dreaded “BOMB” next to it in the guide.

The Grant-Dunne film won the best director Oscar for 1937, is rated three-and-a-half stars and considered one of the classic screwball comedies – a genre that I’ve just started to relish.

Irrelevant. Demons 3 it is.

Even at that impressionable age, eager as I was to listen to what the Critics had to say, I had accepted that horror films spoke to me in ways that no film scholar could understand.

If I had to name a single quality that marks my favourite horror films, I’d point to a near-ritualistic intensity, a sense of belonging to a very different world with its own, special set of rules: a good horror film, even one that’s located in a familiar setting and has no obviously supernatural elements, feels weirder and more self-contained (to me, at least) than a science-fiction/fantasy film that really IS set on, say, Middle-Earth or Narnia or the moons of Jupiter. My child-self experienced this in the garden after that House viewing.

(“So you’re saying House was a good horror film?”, you ask, backing away slowly [and thinking to yourself, ‘What’s HE doing editing an anthology of film essays?’] Well, yes, it was. For me. At that age. If I saw it today I’d probably laugh, or worse, yawn. But how is that relevant to anything? By the way, more than 20 years after that evening in London, I turned to the Internet to confirm that bony old Ben really did exist – within the world of the film, that is; that he wasn’t just a manufactured childhood memory. I was thrilled when I discovered a photo of him on a website, looking more or less as I remembered him.)

Opening scenes are always crucial to a film’s success in pulling me into its world. Consider the first five minutes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), where an everyday setting gradually turns into something lush and fantastical. As the credits roll, a solemn voiceover tells us that Suzy Banyon, a young American, has come to Germany to join a famous dance academy. We see Suzy walking to the airport exit, and a sense of menace is created by the most ordinary elements: the neon lights in the Departure terminal, a brief glimpse of a woman dressed in red in the distance, the sudden opening of the automatic doors through which Suzy walks (and our simultaneous realisation that a storm is raging outside the airport’s sterile, orderly interiors), the howling of the wind, the water flowing into a nearby drain, the initial obtuseness of the cab driver who takes her to her destination.

Contributing immeasurably to the mood of this sequence is the pounding, punk-rock soundtrack by the band Goblin, with whispers of “witch!” regularly punctuating the score. Suspiria is not especially discreet about the mysteries of its plot: you don’t have to be a student of the genre to figure out that Suzy will find a modern-day witches’ coven at the dance school.

Actually, for the most part this isn’t a subtle film. It’s very arresting visually, and it contains at least three grisly murders filmed with such imagination that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen (isn’t this the opposite of what a horror film is supposed to do?). But unusually for a movie with a lot of gore and blood, it also has graceful scenes that only hint at something unknowable. The barest suggestion of witchcraft, for instance, in the shot where a chambermaid momentarily dazzles Suzy with the light reflected from the silverware she’s cleaning. Or the prolonged nighttime scene in a deserted public square where a blind piano teacher and his seeing-dog sense something evil around them but don’t know exactly what it is (the viewer is given the privilege of a shot of shadows flitting across a building facade – witches? On broomsticks? Or just a flock of birds or bats?). These are the setpieces that stayed with me for weeks after I saw the film. In contrast, when the supernatural is explicitly presented at the end, it’s anti-climactic.

Suspiria would be unimaginable without its lurid colours, but Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (“The Devil Woman”) (1964) is shot in what is usually described as “stark” black and white. Set in medieval Japan, this film opens with an overhead view of a windy grassland, the reeds – more than six feet high – swaying in the breeze. The camera moves closer to show us a large pit in the ground and the next shot is from deep inside this hole, looking up at the sky. The image reminds me of another iconic Japanese horror film, the much more recent Ringu – and its American remake The Ring – apart from evoking the passage in Haruki Murakami’s immense novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where a man shuts the world out by sitting at the bottom of a well.

But now Onibaba’s opening credits appear on the screen – the Japanese script is menacingly distorted at the edges – accompanied by a soundtrack that’s as mood-setting as the Suspiria score, but more drum-based and minimal, and much more disquieting. In the film’s (almost wordless) first five minutes we learn that the pit is a secret maintained by a middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law, who live in squalid conditions in this large marshland. Struggling to make ends meet (the son/husband is away fighting in an army), they murder wounded Samurai who stagger into the grassland looking for shelter, and then sell the armour in exchange for meagre rations of food. Meanwhile they also get by with killing rats, dogs and whatever other creatures they can get their hands on, and generally live like wild animals themselves.

So claustrophobic and stifling is the mise-en-scene of Onibaba that one easily forgets it’s set in the same country and roughly the same period as Akira Kurosawa’s classic Samurai movies. Superficial details of time and place scarcely matter anyway; as in so many great horror films, the setting is really the human soul, and it’s always night-time. Atmosphere is created through hand-held camerawork, eerie aural effects (such as bird sounds in the scenes where the young woman, her face rapturous, races through the grass to meet a lover), and of course the setting itself. But for me the unforgettable image is the malevolent face of the old woman, a streak of white hair in her head making her look like a deranged simulacra of the Indira Gandhi photos I remember from the newspapers of my childhood. As the story progresses, my rational mind tells me that she’s a victim – terrified by the thought that her daughter-in-law will leave her to scavenge for herself – but when her piercing eyes fill the screen, the rational mind goes AWOL.

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In a lovely essay titled “Pictures and Secrets”, Ptolemy Tompkins recalled his father’s advice to him when movie monsters gave him nightmares. “Take them out of the context of the film,” said Peter Tompkins (co-author of The Secret Life of Plants), “and place them somewhere else. Control their actions with your own mind.”

At times I try similar mental games with my personal demons. So Onibaba’s “devil woman” reluctantly leaves her grassland at my bidding. I pull Gabbar Singh (bogeymen can come from far outside the genre) out of the sunbaked landscape that was the dacoits’ hideout in Sholay, then lure the rat-like Nosferatu out of his mansion and seat them all at a tea-party together, with a few zombies from George Romero’s films thrown in as foot-servants, and invitations sent out to Michael Myers from Halloween and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The background music is the sound of Darth Vader’s raspy breathing (I can only hear, not see, him – there was nothing scary about the cheesy black suit!). Unfortunately my mind refuses to take this scenario much further; I’m not sure this lot would have much to say to each other.

However, the films I love have no trouble conversing with each other, even when they are separated by decades, different styles and languages, and an unbridgeable divide in quality. One scene frequently recalls another, setting off a chain of connections in my mind.

As an example, take a randomly selected scene from a film that isn’t strictly a horror movie but which made me shrink into the rickety seat at Delhi’s Shakuntalam Theatre when I first saw it: Fritz Lang’s M, about the hunt for a child-killer in the streets of Berlin.

Early in the film we see a pillar with a notice announcing a reward for the killer’s capture. A little girl bounces her ball against this pillar. At this point the scene is clumsy – there’s no spontaneity in the ball-bouncing, you can tell that the girl is carefully doing what the director is telling her to – but then the shadow of a man comes into the frame from the right. “What a pretty ball!” he says in a childlike voice. Shortly afterwards there’s an aerial view of him buying the girl a balloon while she titters excitedly. Cross-cut to the girl’s mother, waiting for her child to return from school, slowly coming to realise that something is wrong. The sequence ends with a pair of poetic images: the ball slowly rolling out of a hedge, into a patch of grass; the untethered balloon brushing an electric pole and floating away.

So here are three broad constituents of the scene: the girl; the man who approaches her; the ball and the balloon at the close. Whenever I think about any of these elements, other scenes from other films swarm into my head, one scene invoking another, and another, and another, building a monstrous skein of references.

The ball and the balloon adrift. A visual cue for the viewer: something terrible has happened to the little girl, we realise. But what did the man do to her, exactly? A 1930s film couldn’t plainly tell us, but in a way that makes it scarier.

“My son was torn to pieces!” screams the father in the 1980s slasher film Silver Bullet, more than fifty years after M (or five years earlier, in terms of my viewing chronology). In the scene before this, we see a young boy flying a kite late in the evening, in a deserted spot. He hears strange sounds, looks around him nervously; we already know that a ravenous werewolf is on the loose, and we half-cover our eyes. In the next shot we see a policeman carrying the kite, torn, dripping blood. And then the father’s cry.

In most ways that matter, there’s nothing to link M and Silver Bullet (well, except for the important detail that they are both made up of strips of film). Yet, for me, the dual image of the rolling ball and the unrestrained balloon are forever linked to the image of the tethered kite, and to the idea of innocence wantonly destroyed.

The man. The nervous-looking character actor Peter Lorre played the unhinged killer, the shadow on the wall, in M. Ten years later, the same Lorre – a little balder now – played the most scared character in one of my favourite dark comedies. There’s a genuinely creepy scene in Arsenic and Old Lace (assuming you watch it in the original black-and-white, not the hideous colorisation) where a runaway criminal played by Raymond Massey – made up to resemble Boris Karloff as the stitched-together Frankenstein monster – and his doctor, played by Lorre, descend the stairs to a basement. The bodies of 12 men lie buried here, which in itself is not as gross as it sounds: Arsenic and Old Lace is about a pair of sweet, well-intentioned women who do away with lonely old men to put them out of their misery. But the scene with Massey and Lorre going down the stairs, the shadows falling across their faces, the light flickering beyond the closed door they are approaching, gives me the shivers.

The girl: She’s a distant cousin of another young girl playing with a ball, in Federico Fellini’s short film “Toby Dammit”, about a depressive British actor visiting Rome for a movie shoot.

At a press conference, Toby Dammit is asked a string of banal questions. He answers them half-heartedly, crabbily; he looks like he badly needs to sleep. He turns around, seems to see images and people from his past. Dream and reality are blurred – it’s the sort of thing Fellini does so well.

A reporter asks, “Do you believe in God?” “No,” replies the actor.

“And in the Devil?”

Now, for the first time, Toby Dammit looks interested. He leans forward. “Yes. In the Devil, yes,” he says.

“How exciting,” exclaims the questioner, delighted to have hit home, “Have you seen Him? What does He look like? A black cat, a goat, a bat?”

“Oh no,” says Toby, a faraway look coming into his eyes, “To me the Devil is cheerful, agile…”

Cut to an insert of a girl, her face occupying the left half of the screen, grinning diabolically at the camera

“He looks like a little girl.”

Why the actor is haunted by this image I’ll leave you to discover for yourself. But while the little girl in M was a cherubic victim, the girl in “Toby Dammit” is Beelzebub. A role reversal, and a reminder that in horror there are no rules, no character types. Anyone can be monster or prey, or both at once.

But already the connections are overflowing, like the swollen river of blood coming through the slowly opening door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. As I finished writing the last paragraph, I remembered that the British actor Terence Stamp played the lethargic Toby Dammit, and that my first ever viewing of Stamp was as the evil General Zod in Superman II. It was a supremely entertaining movie, with the inbuilt assurance (as in any Superman film) that things would turn out all right in the end, but it contained one scene that gave me many sleepless nights as a child: Zod and his two minions land on the moon, slay a human astronaut by tearing off his oxygen mask and then kick his dying body gleefully into the distance.

My chief memory of the film today is the utter helplessness of that poor moonstruck astronaut in the face of this assault by Godlike beings. It was so unfair, so far from a fight between equals. Even today, the scene makes it impossible for me to think of Superman 2 as a feel-good movie.

Other connections aren’t so obvious, or maybe they are obvious only to me. I mentioned Psycho being a reference point for much of my other movie-watching. Well, Suzy Banyon’s journey in the taxi at the beginning of Suspiria always reminds me of Marion Crane’s car drive in Hitchcock’s film – a voyage to the netherworld, with lightning heralding the way. It ends with a similar image too: a menacing building (the Bates Motel in Psycho, the dance school here) coming into clear focus through the rain-soaked night. Welcome to Hades.

“Take off your mask,” whispers Onibaba’s old woman to the young Samurai who has just told her that he has a beautiful face underneath the demon mask he is wearing, “I’ve never seen anything really beautiful in my whole life.” The words open a window to a lifetime of struggle and squalor, reminding us of the dire straits of the two women who need to hawk the armour of dead warriors to get food. But it also makes me think about the unhappy world that lies just beneath the surface horrors of Psycho: a world where the now-psychotic Mrs Bates was once a young widow, raising a little boy all by herself, vulnerable to the charms of a smooth-talking man who was after her money; a world where being left alone is the biggest fear of all.

But Onibaba’s Samurai mask is beautiful too, in its own way. It’s just as impassively beautiful as the smooth white face-cover worn by the young girl Christine in Georges Franju’s indescribably lyrical Eyes Without a Face. In this cult classic, the monster not only has a human face, he’s a loving father – a doctor who surgically removes the skin off the faces of kidnapped young women in increasingly desperate attempts to cure his disfigured daughter. Meanwhile she wanders the lawns of the mansion alone, wearing her white mask, communing with the birds and the captive dogs her father has been conducting grisly experiments on.

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Often, when I’m driving alone late at night, I catch myself humming a certain tune without realising it. Then I remember: it’s Maurice Jarre’s spooky score from the opening scene of Eyes Without a Face, in which a middle-aged woman drives a car through deserted streets, occasionally stopping to glance in the rear-view mirror at a shadowy figure in the back-seat. We don’t yet know that the figure in the back-seat is a dead girl whose body has to be disposed of, but the music, the camerawork, the worried but determined look on the middle-aged woman’s face, combine to tell us that something is very wrong.

Driving, I look into the rear-view mirror, half-expecting to see a body slumped in the back-seat, its face inadequately covered by a large floppy hat, but darkened by a trick of the light.

Other scenes from other horror films have similarly infected my life, so that in certain situations and settings I find myself playing out those very moments. While sightseeing, if I see something I want to photograph and reach for the camera around my shoulder, my own gesture makes me think of the split-second shot in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom where Mark Lewis – a disturbed young man whose camera is almost an extension of his personality – reflexively reaches for his shoulder, where the instrument would normally be, the one time his lady friend persuades him to leave home without it.

Or when I’m walking through a deserted car park on a Sunday afternoon, I think of the agoraphobia-inducing scene in Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis in a desolate neighborhood on a sunny day (who said a slasher movie’s scariest scenes had to be shot in the dark!), dozens of cars parked around her but not a human being in view – and the seemingly omniscient killer Mike Myers presumably watching her from somewhere. It’s a suburban setting – the old rational mind tells me there must be people around, possibly in their houses, looking out from behind the curtains or lolling on rocking-chairs on their porches – but the effect of the scene is just as vivid and intense as if this were Little Red Riding Hood walking alone through the jungle at dusk.

If I’m in a large hall with many exits and corridors, and just a few people moving in and out of the “frame” of my vision, I find myself in the glorious tracking shot from the museum scene in Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill, where a middle-aged housewife alternates between being quarry and pursuer to a handsome stranger. But then, if a flash of light – a reflection from someone’s glasses or cellphone – catches my eye, the scene quickly changes and I’m in a late scene from the same film, where another woman is momentarily blinded by the light glancing off the razor blade that a killer holds in his hand. Or there’s the chambermaid from Suspiria again, flashing her silverware at me.

Thinking about it, I realise that hardly any of my favourite scary scenes would be improved by better technology. No other genre can make such a virtue of being shot on a shoestring budget. Once in a while, even incompetence can be a useful thing. A jerky camera or careless editing can be unsettling in a certain context, and how many cases there have been – especially in zombie and vampire films – of mediocre actors unwittingly making a film more effective because their reactions seem so unnatural, so removed from regular human behaviour!

Which is not to say that good, low-budget horror films are “accidents”. Far from it. But finesse and money can spoil their effect. It’s no coincidence that the silent film was particularly well suited to this genre – horror and fantasy films from that era still hold up so well because their creakiness gives them an unmatched visceral effect. Watch the hero slaying an obviously papier-mache dragon in Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Siegfried, a smoky liquid flowing out of the creature’s ruptured sides, and you’ll know what I mean.

Improved technology can dampen the horror-movie experience in other ways, I realise, as I watch a 70-minute “Making Of” feature on my DVD of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Generally speaking, DVD Extras, with their audio commentaries and interview packages and outtakes, have been a boon to me as a movie buff. But the information overload can be deflating when it comes to films that I’d prefer to think of as belonging to a special, self-contained universe.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre exemplifies that sort of movie, and it would be so nice to be able to think of it as something that was made anonymously – perhaps by a cannibal family as a macabre home video – and then deposited into the mailbox of one of the studios, with a note asking them to distribute it. But here, 30 years later, are the crew members – respectably middle-aged, laughing and joking with each other, relating anecdotes. Director Tobe Hooper tells us he decided on the film’s title when his girlfriend at the time exclaimed, “Yuck, I’d never watch anything called that!” (Decided?! And here I was thinking that everything about that film just fell into place entirely independently of such banalities as human decisions.) One of the scriptwriters (this film needed to be scripted?) relates the story behind the dead armadillo we see as road-kill in the first shot. And here’s the actress Marilyn Burns, whom I’d have preferred to freeze into my memory-bank for all time as the screaming, blood-covered Sally trapped in a house of horrors; now she’s gazing into the camera with grandmotherly indulgence. Even Gunnar Hansen, who played the chainsaw-wielding, retarded monster Leatherface, participates in audio commentary.

And now here’s the Onibaba DVD, with colour footage (!) of the tents where the crew lived communally, cosily together during the month-long shoot. Those grasslands no longer look unfathomably creepy and alive, and the people are dressed in modern clothes, even T-shirts. Between shots, they were probably reading Manga or listening to their Sony transistors! For a fan of the film, that’s a blasphemous thought.

Of course, horror-movie DVD extras can be illuminating (as when Dario Argento relates a childhood memory of having to walk down a long dark corridor to his room every night, each half-open door on either side seeming to contain a threat) and I still watch them with enthusiasm. But when I’m alone at home and it’s dark outside and I see shadows and hear little noises (and it’s probably my years of experience in watching horror films that has made me conscious of all these things), at such times I return to the pristineness of those childhood days, the days before I started reading about cinema and discovering back-stories: sitting in a room with cringing children, watching a film that I knew nothing about beyond the images flickering the screen – images that were more real than most things in the real world.

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“Everything means something, I guess,” says a character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Could he be talking about the tendency of film buffs to read layers and layers of meaning into a movie that means a great deal to them (especially when the film isn’t widely deemed to be worthy of analysis)? Could this be the hidden message: if a film says something to you, touches something deep within you, listen to it, open yourself to it; don’t give in to the hectoring of those who dismiss it as “cheap entertainment”, even if you’re in a minority of one.

After all, horror film are especially vulnerable to genre-snobbery, with viewers routinely putting cerebra before instinct when it comes to assessing their worth. There’s the common phenomenon of people being genuinely affected by a horror film while they are actually watching it, but then emerging from the hall and laughingly dismissing it as nothing more than escapism. I suspect that my love for these movies provided me with a conduit for a basic open-mindedness towards all kinds of films: once you’ve given your heart to a genre that many people are snobbish about, it becomes difficult to be too judgmental about others’ tastes.

There’s the popular story from the earliest days of moving pictures, about the unprepared viewers of a Lumiere Brothers short film who ran out of a Paris theatre when confronted with the image of a train seemingly coming towards them. This is probably apocryphal, but there are other similar, less dramatic stories from that period, and even common sense tells us that the first movie viewers must have experienced quite a few shocks to the system. Today, even the most casual viewers unconsciously process such aspects of film grammar as cross-cutting between unrelated scenes. But in the earliest days, even basic cutting from one image to another (let alone rapid-fire splicing) must have felt otherworldly. To some, it must have been frightening, even demoniac. (Was that puffing train the first movie monster?) Only gradually must viewers have become inured to the violence of the cuts, learnt to stop being scared and love the new medium.

Some of us, though, never stopped wanting to be scared, even as our love for the movies deepened and grew.

The Mani shots: Baradwaj Rangan on his book of conversations

[A shorter version of this Q&A is in the new issue of Time Out magazine]

INTRO: In Conversations with Mani Ratnam, the National Award-winning critic Baradwaj Rangan has engaged the reclusive film director in a deeply reflective series of conversations about his work. A chat with Rangan about the book.

What was your first experience of Mani Ratnam’s cinema in the 1980s?

It was with this rather generic (and morbid) romance called Idhayakoyil, which was about a singer who pines for a lost love. Even Mani Ratnam agrees it’s his worst film. But in the sense of an actual Mani Ratnam movie, in his voice, it was Mouna Raagam.

What did he mean to you as a viewer? Did his films play a part in honing your critical sensibilities?

I think every film you see plays a part in honing “critical sensibilities”, if you want to use so lofty a phrase. There are two types of viewers, those who see a film and forget about it and get on with their lives, and those who carry it home and have it gnawing away at them for various reasons. For me, the real excitement of Mani Ratnam’s early cinema was in finding a voice so close and so much in sync with my own experiences as someone brought up in Madras.

You mention in your Intro that at some point – around the time he made Roja – the “Madras Movie” phase of Ratnam’s career ended and something very different began. Can you elaborate on this?

This was where he stopped making specifically Madras-oriented movies and moved on to bigger themes, and a more national platform. We tend to slot filmmakers, especially when they do one particular thing so well, and when they try something different, we resist it at first – especially if we are very close to what they did earlier. Some of that is what happened to me (and I suspect to a lot of others) when Roja happened. But this is also when he began to genuinely experiment within the mainstream format. Earlier, the subjects were new and the filmmaking was dazzling, but you wouldn’t call those films experimental films exactly, because they spoke directly to the audience. You laughed, you cried – that sort of thing. But with Iruvar or Dil Se, for instance, there’s a lot of innovation, whether it’s in the way the scenes are structured or the songs are employed. It’s very difficult to push the envelope while still being rooted in the mainstream, and his films in the post-Roja phase  stand out in this regard. They’re almost always interesting films, even if your emotional response to them varied according to your mileage.


How do you feel about his Hindi films vis-a-vis his earlier work?

I’m closer, certainly, to his Tamil work, because that kind of whiplash-smart sensibility no one else had (or has) in their cinema. In Tamil cinema, they depict modern women, for instance, as dressed in the most outlandish Western outfits and so forth. But Mani Ratnam’s cinema had these very ordinary, salwar kameez- and sari-clad women, who were modern in their outlook, in the way they spoke, in the way they dealt with things. He showed that the traditional girl from Madras was not somebody with a ton of jasmine flowers in her well-oiled hair, but someone who was modern in subtle (and not just superficial) ways. This is just one aspect, but I could go on. But I am also a huge fan of, say, Dil Se, which I feel is one of his most underrated works. That stretch in that barren landscape where nothing happens except Shah Rukh and Manisha just talking and getting to know each other is a brilliant bit of mood and dialogue in a mainstream film.

There has been a narrative about Ratnam’s art becoming somewhat “compromised” by commercial dictates after he became a giant. Do you feel there is something to this?

Actually no, because he has always been a commercial filmmaker. It’s not as if he was making Pather Panchali and suddenly woke up one morning and made Guru, so there’s no question of a “compromise” as far as the filmmaking is concerned. But that said, I think people feel this way because of two things. One, they grew up with a certain kind of Mani Ratnam movie and store that away as a nostalgic reference, so they want him to keep making the same kind of films, the kind that feels like home to them. Two, people have very strange and strong ideas about how such a subject should be made this way only and how songs and dances should not be there and so on.

It’s not as if I feel that every single film of his is a masterpiece. But every single one is certainly a commercial venture, targeted at a large audience, and if you have a problem with the tropes of that kind of cinema, then you shouldn’t be watching his films. Because if you feel Raavan is compromised because of commercial dictates, then you could say Anjali is too, because that’s the story of a differently abled child, and it has all these huge production numbers. It’s his way of telling a story, and that’s never changed. Yes, some films may work and some films may not, but it’s not because of these “commercial dictates”, which has always been a part of his DNA.

He has a reputation for being reticent and not very interview-friendly. How did you get him to participate in such an extended series of conversations?

When I met him first about the book, I just wanted to tell him I was doing a series of essays about his films. But he surprised me by saying: “You like cinema. I like cinema. Let’s just talk and see what happens.” So I guess at some level he wasn’t averse to talking. But still, the first few sessions weren’t easy, because I’m not the most open and friendly of people either. (Which probably explains why I’m able to speak more easily to people on my blog, rather than face-to-face.) The early chapters in the book are somewhat stiff and formal, you’ll see, because my questions were to the point and his responses too were straightforward. But gradually we became comfortable with what we were doing, and the tone of the book broadened. There were times I’d joke with him. There were times he’d get combative. So the book is as much a record of how such a series of conversations unfolded in real time as it is about what we talked about.

Why did you choose to write the book in the Q&A format? And what were the challenges in doing it this way?

I wrestled for a while with other options, but I settled on this format because he’s never talked at this length to anyone before, and it made sense to honour his participation in this project. It’s a terrible thing for a writer to do a book this way, because you have to suppress your writerly vanity and constantly remind yourself that this is not about your writing skills but about the back-and-forth of the conversation. But that said, I do feel that conversational books (as opposed to mere Q and A's; and I hope readers will come away with the impression of having read a series of conversations and not just a set of questions and answers) come with their own set of challenges. The preparatory work is no different from any other type of non-fiction: you still have to do your research, come up with a list of things the book is going to be about, formulate those into questions, be prepared for accidental discoveries, and so forth. But there’s the problem of catching someone in a mood to answer your questions even when they may not be the most flattering. It’s easy to write a book about someone by talking to those around him and putting facts together, but when you’re talking to the person himself, you have to balance your job as a journalist (i.e. getting the hard facts) and your job as a facilitator (i.e. creating an ambience that makes it comfortable for so reticent a creator to open up, even when your questions are somewhat less-than-complimentary about his work).

Where this type of book becomes easier is in the end, because once you’ve transcribed your recordings, you’re almost there. Though even afterwards, I moved things around, grouping different subjects under different films while still maintaining that “real time” sense. And I removed every trace of incidental emotion. You won’t find a sentence ending with "(he laughs)", for instance. Because I thought the reader should come to their own conclusions about the tone in which the answer was given, which, in some sense, empowers the reader as a “critic”. I wanted them to read into these conversations without me guiding their emotional responses from the sidelines with the writer’s equivalent of a music track.

One of the most enjoyable things about this book is that one gets a sense of Ratnam becoming more comfortable with you over time, and it turning into a conversation between equals. But essentially, the relationship between a director and a critic tends to be fraught and uneasy. At one point, when you make an observation about two songs coming very close together in Guru, Ratnam snarkily says “I think you watch films with a stop-watch”. Was there a certain edge to the discussions throughout? Did this ever impede your interaction?

I’m happy you got “snark” out of this, because someone else told me they found this a joke, as if he was ribbing me. Yes, that kind of emotional graph was built gradually over time. At first, I was a little intimidated, not just because this man was a god to a lot of us way back when, but also because of the fact that I am a critic, and I didn’t want him to think that I was criticizing him so much as asking him why he did this or that. But you can never keep your personal feelings away from art – which is what makes discussions about it so fascinating – and there were times, like when we discussed Roja, where that “edge” did creep in. But by that time, I wasn’t intimidated, and even he – despite his annoyance with certain things I was asking – had come to know that my questions weren’t accusations so much as coming to grips with certain choices in his films.

You have discussed the making of his films, but also conducted subtextual analysis and made connections between movies that might not, on the face of it, have very much in common. Your own criticism is characterised by indepth, deeply analytical and personal engagement with films – focussing on the tales rather than on the tellers. How did he respond to this?

He is not someone who’s comfortable with subtextual analysis, and I’ve seen (rather, read about) this with many filmmakers. But then, when he discusses some films, you’ll see that he has been thinking far beyond the text, or the image on screen. Different people have different attitudes about how far beneath the surface you dig for meaning (and in my opinion and experience, this is something at a completely subconscious level; I have no control over it), but again, I think he got to know this about me and I got to know that he’s not a fan of what he calls “intellectualisation”, so that was some place we agreed to disagree. Though if you read the conversations carefully you may find that there’s a lot of subtext here too. I think it’s more interesting when two people from slightly differing schools of thought talk about things, otherwise it’s like being in an echo chamber, and there’s no “edge”, as you call it.

In your view, what is Ratnam’s abiding legacy – what is his place in the history of Indian cinema?

He’s still making films, so I don’t know that we should hang an “abiding legacy” on him yet. As for his place in Indian cinema, he is easily one of the most important mainstream filmmakers. You may not have liked this film of his or that one, but no one can deny each one of them has been made to challenge himself and, in some ways, his audience. He’s never made a lazy film in his career. There’s always something exciting, something intriguing in the way he tells his stories. Today, in the multiplex era, we have people making ultra-edgy films for niche audiences, and there is something almost absurdly touching about a single man’s belief that he can carry along huge masses of viewers with spectacle, style and substance.

Philida, a tale of slaves, masters and other pieces of knitting

[Did a version of this for the Hindu Literary Review] 
 
The first voice we hear in Andre Brink’s new, Man Booker-longlisted novel is that of its protagonist, a young slave girl in a South African village. The year is 1832 and the legal emancipation of Cape slaves is on the horizon, but true autonomy is still far away. Philida’s narrative is wise, quietly resilient, full of sadness about the past – including unfulfilled promises by her master’s son Francois, with whom she has had four children – but also forward-looking. Her descriptions are based on personal reference points: distant mountains are “blue and pale blue and paler blue, like old bruises getting fainter on your body”; a peculiar-looking man is like “a piece of knitting gone wrong”. We will soon learn that Philida knows a good deal about knitting and also about bruising, external and internal.

At first it seems that the story will be told exclusively in her voice, but this is a book of many colours and perspectives - it also has first-person accounts by Francois (or Frans), by his father Cornelis Brink and by a former slave, Petronella, who now occupies something of an honoured place in the Brink household. And the effect is that Philida, though clearly the central character, also becomes a slate on which other stories are written: the stories of the Brinks, of Petronella and of other slaves including Labyn, who has – in defiance of Christian persecution – turned for succour to the “Slamse” religion with its belief in a God named Allah.

One obvious function of the multi-narrator device is to get the reader to see the points of view – or at least the personal imperatives – of people whose interests clash. Early on, one senses that the author is trying to portray the complexities of this social milieu by humanising the slave-owners: by depicting them as products of the beliefs of their age, and even making them vaguely likeable. Some of the passages involving the Brink family are self-consciously cute, with the corpulent lady of the house, Janna, being the subject of much broad comedy. Cornelis’s voice is endearingly droll at times, and he becomes an object of mirth when his son describes him as a small man, “strutting about the yard like a little bantam cockerel”. And Frans comes across as a sensitive young man: introverted, effete, genuinely concerned about Philida’s plight.

But reading on, I felt Brink was doing something more subtle. He could have made a facile point about the horrors of slavery by presenting the white masters as distant, forbidding figures, but paradoxically it is by making them accessible and even a little buffoonish that this story becomes even more disturbing (and at this point one should mention that Philida is partly based on a true incident and that the real-life Cornelis Brink was an ancestor of the author – which suggests that the white man’s inheritance of guilt is a running subtext of this book).

The Brinks have inner lives and idiosyncrasies; we hear their private banter as they play out a Hindi-movie-style family drama (son trying to rebel against father, mother sighing heavily in the background) and some of it has the texture of slapstick. But we can never forget that they are also people with unbridled power over the lives of their human “property”. There is no missing Cornelis's smug bigotry and his obsession with the literal truth of the Bible, no escaping the fact that he is capable of ordering and overseeing the rape of Philida by two slave-boys. Describing the hanging of a rebellious slave, he reflects that the other slaves didn’t seem to be bothered at all, “which goes to prove that they don’t have feelings like us”. (It is more likely, of course, that the “us” are subtly afflicted by conscience and that the other slaves have their own survival to think of, in addition to being conditioned not to show emotion.) Notably, as the story continues, even Frans goes from being a likable figure to becoming increasingly fickle, the sort of young man who might easily be distracted from nobler callings by a glimpse of the pleasing ankles of the high-born lady his family wants him to marry.

Whether multiple voices were necessary to achieve these effects is another question. Their use makes Philida seem a more formally complex work than it actually is: the device does little that could not have been realised with an omniscient narrator who allows us time with each character in turn. When such a narrator does emerge halfway through the story, it seems a random, belated decision, but it gives the book the grounding it needs, and lets us feel the full disturbing force of passages such as one set at a slave auction where the lashes on a dead man’s back must be counted and deemed to be not more than 39 (or not much more than 39) if his owner is to be held not guilty under law.

Philida does not have – nor does it reach for – the consistent dramatic intensity of a work like Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It is chattier, more informal and perhaps a little too loosely structured (the narrative makes occasional, inconsistent shifts from present to past tense to no real purpose). But it picks its dramatic moments well, contrasting the lives of slaves whose feet's soles are sometimes peeled right off with the lives of their privileged masters who get to wear shoes (but who are also dealing with their own minor hardships in a changing social climate). Through its tapestry of intersecting fortunes, one never loses sight of the girl who badly wants for her name to be written down in a family book – to be on the official record, as having existed – but who fears that her life is “a piece of knitting that is knitted by somebody else”.

By the book: more thoughts on adaptation

[A version of my latest column for GQ magazine]

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This is an unusually busy time for movies based on high-profile novels. Deepa Mehta’s film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is finally ready, as is Ang Lee’s adaptation of another Booker-winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Meanwhile the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s marvellous The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been given cinematic life by one of my favourite directors Mira Nair, and Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqi are in the process of adapting Amitav Ghosh’s sprawling historical novel Sea of Poppies.

Naturally the release of each of these films will be accompanied by much hand-wringing and cries of “but...but...but...” by viewers who have read the books (and by some who haven’t read them but have mastered the enviable art of speaking knowledgeably about them nonetheless). Each of us will at some point morph into a version of the comic-strip goat who, after chewing on a roll of celluloid, says ruminatively to his companion, “The book was better.” Questions of faithfulness to the original will be raised, omitted passages will be bewailed, shock will be expressed at the casting of this actor in that role. Midnight’s Children in particular will be closely dissected, since Rushdie’s novel is nearly as much of an Unavoidable Baggy Presence for Indian Writing in English as Ulysses was for 20th century fiction; even a flawless film might easily be weighed down by unreasonable expectations.

Personally I try to judge movies based on what they achieve with their medium's techniques, rather than as slavish illustrations of literary works. But I confess to a flicker of trepidation about the adaptations mentioned above, because some of the things I most like about these books don’t seem easily translatable to film. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for instance, is marked by a distinctive first-person voice: the protagonist, a Pakistani man named Changez, addresses an unnamed American tourist in a courtly, almost ingratiating style. (“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.”) This narrative has a stylised, off-kilter quality that makes it difficult for the reader to know exactly what Changez’s intentions are (in an interview, Hamid told me the effect he was reaching for was “that you’ve walked into a darkened theatre and there’s one actor on the stage taking you through the play”) and what effect he is having on his listener - so that even the simple description of someone putting his hand into his jacket pocket is laced with the possibility that he might be reaching for either a business card or a weapon.

With Life of Pi, the potential pitfall is one that is especially relevant to the fantasy (or part-fantasy) genre: a book lets you imagine its characters and incidents for yourself while a film gives them immutable shape. (I mostly loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but its depiction of the flaming Eye of Sauron in the final sequences was problematic; presented as a roving, Twentieth Century Fox-style flashlight, Tolkien’s bodiless villain lost the chillingly abstract quality he - it? - had in the books.) Martel’s novel – about a teenage boy adrift on a lifeboat with a fearsome Bengal Tiger – gets much of its force from the irresolvable ambiguity of the narrative: is Richard Parker the tiger a real presence or is he an invention, a wish-fulfillment device that allows young Pi to focus his thoughts and survive a difficult ordeal? But the movie, by its very nature, has to literalise the book's central voyage, and if you see a large tiger on the screen once, it is difficult to be subsequently convinced of his unreality.

The adaptation that most intrigues me though is the Sea of Poppies one. Rizvi’s film is provisionally titled Afeem (19th century opium trade being central to Ghosh’s story) and anyone familiar with her debut Peepli Live knows she can bring the required sensitivity to this tale of people from various backgrounds journeying across the ocean, driven more by despair than expectation. ("Both Peepli Live and Sea of Poppies are stories about the psychological effects of migration," she told me during a recent chat.) But the most riveting thing about Ghosh’s novel wasn’t its plot – it was its use of language. Its lascar sailors (“who came from places that had nothing in common except the Indian Ocean”) speak a dynamic hybrid of tongues, made of words picked up from various countries, and the European characters who have been living in India for generations use phrases such as “He turned a ship oolter-poolter” and “It would never do to be warming the coorsey when there’s kubber like this to be heard”.

To my mind at least, such details work better on the printed page than on the screen (where, if not handled exactly right, they might too easily devolve into tedious slapstick). However this is, as always, dependent on the quality of the treatment, the casting and the performances. During our conversation, Rizvi mentioned that most of the script would be in Bhojpuri – something that is singularly appropriate for this book – and it was nice to read a blog entry by Ghosh expressing enthusiasm for the project. Authors aren’t always the best judges of movies based on their work, of course, but of the adaptations mentioned above Afeem sounds like the one that is most worth warming the multiplex coorsey for.

[Earlier posts about book-to-movie adaptations: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; notes from the Times of India lit-fest; A Kiss Before Dying; R K Narayan on a movie set]

A "new" Pamuk from 30 years ago: The Silent House

This may be a strange thing to say about a Nobel laureate who is also among the world’s highest-profile writers (the two things don’t always go together), but Orhan Pamuk’s career is still – for the English-language reader, at least – a jigsaw with missing pieces. Pamuk became internationally famous when the English translation of his brilliant My Name is Red, a metaphysical murder mystery set in the Ottoman Empire, was published in 2001 – a year when the Anglophone world had special reason to become interested in literature about the differences between Eastern and Western thought, written by someone from a city situated on the cusp of Europe and Asia. In the decade since, there has been a line of celebrated works including the great tragi-comic novel Snow, the lovely but rambling The Museum of Innocence and the plaintive memoir-travelogue Istanbul, as well as reappraisals of older books such as The White Castle. Yet, as the appearance of The Silent House reminds us, much still remains to be discovered about Pamuk’s early work.

Published in 1983, Sessiz Ev was among his most popular novels in his own country, but it has taken three decades for its first English translation (by the lecturer and diplomat Robert Finn) to reach us. This would have made The Silent House an important event almost independent of its literary merits; happily, no such concessions are needed because this is a powerful, multifaceted book with many pointers to what lay ahead for its author.

Set in a small seaside town not far from Istanbul, it employs the multi-narrator technique that Pamuk would later famously use in My Name is Red, though the structure is more straightforward: voice is not, for instance, given to a corpse (which Pamuk might have chosen to do, since one significant death takes place here), much less to coins or to trees. The story is propelled by the alternating narratives of five principal characters, notably a 90-year-old woman named Fatma and her housekeeper Recep, a middle-aged dwarf, and it centres on a visit by Fatma’s three grandchildren Faruk, Nilgun and Metin; watching the family from the sidelines is a young man named Hasan, who is attracted to Nilgun.

Though the main plot progresses in a neat, chronological way, the five narratives artfully link into each other so that bits of information are withheld from each character in turn (even if it is something as apparently trivial as the proprietorship of an Elvis Presley record), and this creates a web of misinterpretations. Much of the book’s power comes from its gradual revelation of character-defining details: how we come to learn the secrets of the jewellery box that Fatma is so paranoid about, for example, or about her unhappy relationship with her long-deceased husband and her treatment of his illegitimate children. Or how, immediately after an emotionally intense passage involving a visit to a cemetery, we get someone else’s detached, comical perspective on the same thing.

The period depicted here is a very specific, politically charged time in modern Turkish history, which would culminate in the military coup of September 1980. Though these politics are not explicitly addressed, they cast a shadow over the characters, especially the young people – divided between bored kids who fantasise about going to America, revolutionary manqués who denounce money even as they continue to lead relatively privileged lives, and right-wing nationalists who use the threat of violence. And an important subtext here is that the imperatives of youth - the headiness, the hormonal urges - can both work with and clash against ideology; this emerges, most disturbingly, in Hasan’s feelings about Nilgun, whom he idealises but also comes to fear and hate when he discovers she may have Communist leanings. More than once, I was reminded of other conflicted young people in Pamuk’s work, such as the boys in Snow who begin weeping when they suspect they might really be atheists.

The many possible futures of these youngsters are set against the long life of a woman who has barely lived at all: Fatma, who left Istanbul 70 years earlier and eventually retreated into herself – into the womb of her silent house, haunted by the memory of her doctor husband Selahattin who voiced “blasphemous” thoughts and futilely tried to acquaint her with a larger, more modern world. Like Robinson Crusoe (whose story is alluded to here), she lives as if on a private island, with Recep as a faithful Friday who understands her well enough to know that she “frowned to show her disgust, and her face stayed that way out of habit; the face of an old person who had forgotten why she was annoyed but determined never to forget that she was obliged to be”.

The chapters in her voice are the book’s highlights – a narrative tour de force that builds in intensity as it cuts between her own musings and her grandchildren’s attempts to small-talk with her. Here one also sees an early glimpse of Pamuk the stylistic experimenter: there is stream of consciousness and there are traces of the meta-fictional duality that he would later bring to more abstract novels such as The New Life. At one point one of the grandchildren asks “What did it used to be like around here?” and Fatma’s narrative continues: “I’m lost in my own thoughts and sorrows and I don’t hear what you’re saying, so how can I tell you that this used to be one garden after another, what beautiful gardens, where are they now...”. She is both absent and present; hearing and not hearing; participating in the current moment and obsessively reliving her past. Here and elsewhere, The Silent House is – like much of Pamuk’s other work – a self-reflective examination of the nature of storytelling, its possibilities and limitations; an account of the writer’s compulsion to create narratives even as he questions their usefulness. The theme recurs constantly, whether in Faruk’s scuppered attempts to seek order in history (“The passion for listening to stories leads us astray every time, dragging us off to a world of fantasy even as we continue to live in one of flesh and blood”) or in Selahattin’s ultimately tragic conceit that his 48-volume encyclopaedia might bring Western “enlightenment” to the antiquated Eastern world. (“I’ll fill that unbelievable gulf in thought in one fell swoop [...] There are millions of poor Muslims chained in the dungeons of darkness, millions of poor benighted slaves waiting for the light of my book!”)

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In an essay published in the anthology Other Colours, Pamuk admitted that My Name is Red “was a huge labour, designed as a classic that would speak to the whole country ... I wanted the whole country to read it and each to find himself reflected in it; I wanted to evoke the cruelty of history and the beauty of a world now lost.” Was he less self-conscious when he wrote The Silent House, and is it possible to suggest that this is to its advantage? I think so. This book has thematic complexity, raw skill and verve; it achieves many of the things he sought to do in his more mature work, while also working at the level of an episodic story. Despite the particularity of its setting and its period (Pamuk himself had hardly been out of his city at that point in his life), it is possible to make universal claims for it.

Among other things, it is a book about aging – one that should appeal to different readers in different ways, depending on the life-stage they are in – and one of the most impressive things about it is that the 30-year-old Pamuk so adeptly caught the inner states of three generations of people, all in their own traps. The thing to wait for now is a translation of a book written when he was even younger – his first published novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons – so that our fascinatingly anachronistic process of discovery can continue.

[Did this review for The Hindu]

'Screen savers' in Vogue

The bulky October issue of Vogue India – the fifth-anniversary issue – has 10 short profiles I have done on interesting young "experimenters" in contemporary Hindi cinema, across categories (e.g. Music Director: Sneha Khanwalkar, Film Editor: Namrata Rao, Casting Agent: Nandini Shrikent, Actor: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Wild Card: Qaushiq Mukherjee a.k.a. Q). Nothing very indepth – these are just 200-250-word pieces, written to a specific brief – but it was nice to speak with these people and collect a few notes on their work. (This was also the first full-length assignment I said yes to after Foxie died, and it’s really the only sort of assignment I could have done during that time: conducting short interviews on the phone or on email, and writing snappy pieces that didn't require too much concentration.)

Apart from those mentioned above, the others in the list are writer-director Anusha Rizvi, scriptwriter Juhi Chaturvedi, documentary filmmaker Faiza Ahmed Khan, cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis, and Anurag Kashyap (featured here not as a director but as a mentor to younger filmmakers). Do keep an eye out for the magazine.

Ghost-da ka ghosla (a haunted-house tribute to cinema and the past)

The title of Anik Dutta’s Bhooter Bhabishyat – a massively popular Bengali film from earlier this year – translates as “Future of the Past”, and appropriately enough it begins with juxtapositions between what we think of as “old” and “new”, “modern” and “traditional”. The very first shot is a close-up of a woman, dressed in an elegant sari, heavily made up and bejewelled, who appears to be from a non-contemporary setting (or at least a very orthodox one). But the frame is held for barely a couple of seconds before she raises a cigarette to her lips and a cellphone rings off-camera; she picks it up and goes “Hi! Ki Khobor? What’s up?” while a girl in casual shirt and jeans appears behind her to attend to her hair. A film, probably a period drama, is being shot – the woman is the lead actress and the crew bustles about a crumbling 250-year-old north Calcutta mansion with modern cameras and other equipment.

There will be many such contrasts throughout Bhooter Bhabishyat, the main plot of which begins with young people scouting the same old house for another film. A writer-director named Ayan (Parambrata Chatterjee, who was so good as Vidya Bagchi’s courtly “saarthi” in Kahaani) works on a script – in English – on his Apple laptop, then gets distracted and plays some classical music on the same device. Sounds from different eras run into each other continually: there is a transition, later in the film, from "Auld Lang Syne" to Rabindrasangeet to contemporary pop music; the ringtone on Ayan’s phone is the otherworldly voice of the bhuter raja that Satyajit Ray himself recorded for Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. (Incidentally Ayan refers to his hero Ray as “Joy Baba Manik-nath” – the first time I had heard this term of endearment, though for all I know it's popular in Bengal.) And a 360-degree pan shot of the desolate house is accompanied by an incongruous soundtrack that brings its former days of glory – festivals, entertainment shows – to our ears.

The idea that the past and the present are constantly interacting with (or brushing abrasively against) each other is central to this tale of the supernatural, which is also a light commentary on inexorable “progress” and on modernity’s neglect of old things. This premise is spelled out with delightful economy during an opening-credits sequence that involves animated ghostly eyes and background music in the electronic-distortion mode of the ghost scenes in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.

“Calcutta is now a concrete jungle,” the ghost-voices sing as the titles appear. “Heritage is disappearing, promoters are taking over the land, even the intellectuals are silent. Where will all the ghosts go?” And then, in a neat meta-touch, “We have made this film to protest.” The appealing conceit is that the movie we are watching is a sort of magical projection, financed and sponsored by marginalised spirits to raise awareness of their plight.

Over the next two hours we see how this idea plays out. It involves Ayan, the young director, encountering a genial middle-aged man (played by Sabyasachi Chakraborty) who tells him a possible story for his next film – a story about a group of ghosts who live in this very mansion. Most of what we see from here on is a visualisation of this tale: we are introduced to these relics of the past, including an 18th century zamindar, a gora sahib from the East India Company, an actress-singer from the 1940s and a generic buffoon who continues visiting the local fish-market in his spectral state because he can’t overcome the Bengali habit of bargaining. There are also two young people who died very recently – a musician named Pablo who wears a Che Guevera T-shirt and a bubbly girl named Koel (Mumtaz Sorcar, granddaughter of PC Sorcar) who killed herself in the name of love. As someone says late in the film, “Ojeeb collection hai.”

The back-stories of these ghosts – originally from different time periods and socio-economic strata, now living in a shared purgatory – facilitate references to environmental and social issues, from global warming to rich youngsters mowing down pavement-dwellers in their SUVs. The relentless destruction of flora, we learn, has left a tree-dwelling ghost as much of a refugee in death as he was in life. An ancient ghost recalls his granddaughter who had died of the “black fever”. But this lot certainly knows how to live it up, and their jollity emerges in full force during an anachronistic fashion parade where they dress up in outfits they wouldn’t have got to wear when they were alive.

Entertaining though this set-up is, it also leads to a slack midsection containing a little too much tomfoolery and the sort of ensemble comedy that actors must dread – where they have to stand around in a group, speaking in turn, while those saddled with the task of listening struggle with the appropriate reaction shots, nodding their heads or rolling their eyes meaningfully; the effect can be like a hurriedly prepared college play. Also, don’t expect this “ghost world” to be a properly worked out universe with rules that clearly distinguish it from our own. Apart from their ability to teleport and walk clean through walls, there is little to separate these spirits from regular people: they go for picnics, they have cellphones, they use a social-networking site called Spookbook to contact other members of the living dead, and – most puzzlingly – they can get out and interact with real-world people whenever they want to (though they continue to shed the occasional tear when they recall those whom they have left behind).

All these qualities come into play when their existence is threatened by a mall-builder who we know must be evil because he – gasp – quotes Tagore in a dubious, self-serving context; this terrible man plans to erect a “Five-Star Plaza”, a mini-Singapore, where the haveli now stands. Personally I failed to understand why the ghosts are so troubled by this development (why can’t they just live in the mall like millions of real-world zombies everywhere do?) but such questions are beside the point because this plot turn leads to more fun and games. Feeling just as bullied as Mr Khosla cheated of his precious plot of land in Khosla ka Ghosla, the ghosts must – like the characters in that film – perform a subterfuge to foil the builder’s plans. This involves the participation in a guest appearance of Saswata Chatterjee – Kahaani’s Bob Biswas – as another, much more flamboyant hitman.

****

Most of these shenanigans are enjoyable enough, but what I found more interesting about Bhooter Bhabishyat is that it is also a homage to a cinematic past, sprinkled with filmic references, many of which I’m sure I didn’t get given my weak knowledge of non-Ray Bengali films (I did get that the frequently rhyming dialogue was a tribute to Hirak Rajar Deshe). A ghost extols the virtues of Truffaut, Fellini and Bergman but admits to not knowing anything about contemporary brats like Wong Kar Wai and Tarantino (ghosts can’t watch new films on their cellphones or laptops?). Taking Ayan through the ghost story and its protagonists, the storyteller uses phrases like “Now cut to 1970s Calcutta.” They ponder the technical challenges of recreating different periods and settings: I might have to use a sepia tone for this sequence, the young director muses, and we could do that one in classic black-and-white.

Through all this, one sees a deep love for a medium that can accommodate vastly different modes of storytelling, from the politically charged cinema of Mrinal Sen (“with handheld cameras and jerky movements”) to the magnificently imaginative ghost dance in GGBB to commercial elements that many of us reflexively dismiss as vulgar – comedy that takes the form of crude puns or stand-alone “humour tracks”, for example. And Bhooter Bhabishyat affectionately draws on these many modes by incorporating them into its own narrative. Thus one scene simulates a moonlit romantic song from a 1940s movie while another shows stark footage of police-Naxal encounters in the early 1970s, and there is even a head-banging rock number filmed in the frenetic style of a modern concert. There is lowbrow wordplay (“massage” used for “message”, a secretary who says “hard-dicks” for “hard-disk”) and there is an item number with lyrics that may or may not contain sexual innuendo (if a seductress sings “Mere ang ang mein aag lagaai diye” to a horny man, it might seem like it can only mean one thing – but what if she is the ghost of a woman he had set fire to?).

All of which means that this film about a bunch of happy-go-lucky spooks can also be seen as a film about its own conceptualisation and execution. Near the end, Ayan says that though he personally finds the ghost story very interesting, it would be difficult to pitch such an “absurd” premise to a producer. Within the narrative, this problem is sorted out through the convenient appearance of priceless coins from the East India Company days. But let’s hypothesize that the real-life director Anik Dutta faced the same problem as the fictional Ayan, and didn’t have access to hidden treasure. Perhaps, then, the solution was to shoot his film not as a straight (therefore square) ghost story but as a meta-movie that constantly acknowledges its own craziness. If so, it was a terrific idea, and though the ghost sequences have their ups and downs there is much else in Bhooter Bhabishyat for a movie-buff to appreciate.

P.S. As a viewer who has had some ghastly experiences with subtitles in the past, I was relieved to find that the subtitling on this DVD was done with care and some wit. Even to the extent of discerningly playing about with word-meanings so that a joke or innuendo would translate across languages. At one point the dialogue involves a confusion between the words "antar-baash" (undergarments) and "antar-jaash" (which, a Bengali friend tells me, can be roughly translated as "inner concerns"). The English subtitles use "lingerie" and "lingering doubts".

[A post on Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is here]