100 Years of Indian cinema, & ‘Raja Harishchandra’ (1913)

100 years of cinema; 1002 nights at the movies.

One of the gleeful experiences I had recently, when watching movies in the cinema, was seeing a little “100 Years” banner below the logos I’ve been taking for granted all my life: 100 Years of…Paramount Pictures! Universal Studios! MGM! One day I finally clocked, with a jolt, that this was 100 years of names I’ve practically grown up with. The big Hollywood studios; the ones that gave us Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart and continue to give us glorious things – they were celebrating turning 100! And it made me remember that although life is unimaginable now without the movies, that it is still a fairly young art-form.

On 3rd May this year (so – three days ago!) – another film industry turned 100: the Indian film industry! On May 3rd 1913, the first Indian feature film was released. This is widely held to be so by scholars, although there have been disputes about whether or not other films could be considered, in fact, the ‘first’; they’re discounter though, largely because they were recordings of stage-plays (so no camera movement etc.) People trace the birth of cinema to the Lumière films of 1895, and in 1896 they were screened in Bombay, becoming as sensational as they did in Europe & America. Cue the start of a love-affair that brings us to today, with Indian cinema being the largest film industry in the world (although when one says “Indian cinema” the reflex is to think of Bollywood which dominates the scene, Indian cinema actually encompasses films in multitudes of Indian languages: from Kollywood – Tamil movies – to Ollywood – Oriya films). I remember reading somewhere that film was an egalitarian artform: even during the Great Depression, people flocked to the movies because they were affordable and accessible. It didn’t have the hang-ups of ‘fine art’ that so many other art-forms did (though there was and is room for that too). Perhaps that same egalitarian force comes into play when it comes to India and the movies; vast inequalities, extreme poverties – these are all features of the Indian social landscape, ever-dwindling perhaps, but there for the present nonetheless. But the movies again are loved by all, & affordable for many; panacea for depressing circumstances.

One of the things I wonder about when watching old Hollywood films is – how was there so little dialogue or exchange between these two booming film industries? Maybe Indian cinema wasn’t a booming industry back then; I’m not sure. But this query stood true right up till this decade almost; there has been, in the history of cinema, very little exchange between Holly- & Bollywood. Maybe with legitimate reasons: where the former industry is favouring its big booms and actionpackedtwohours’worth, the latter still clings on to its song & dance, musical numbers that Hollywood largely dispensed with after the ’50s! But the times they are a-changin’, as Dylan once said, and the exchange between Western film and Indian film is ever-increasing. Partly, perhaps, this is a sort of Slumdog-effect, because really that movie brought Indian actors and composers to the fore at the Oscars as never before. Famous Indian names are slowly moving into Hollywood roles (not just folks like Freida Pinto – we recently got Anupam Kher in Silver Linings Playbook and we’re getting Amitabh Bachan in The Great Gatsby), and conversely big studio corps are moving into India to try and get a slice of big bucks pie (as this CNN article outlines so nicely).

Bollywood turns 100?

Not quite: the first Indian feature-film was actually a Marathi production. True, Bollywood is near-synonymous with Indian cinema these days, but it’s good to remember that the Indian film industry is much bigger and more diverse (linguistically and otherwise) than the blockbuster Hindi films we reflexively associate with the phrase.

Where for English-language productions folks at the AFI and BFI (amongst others) have done a swell job of saving rare old highly-flammable celluloid (thanks for fact, Tarantino!), Indian film-archiving has not been so great, as this piece in CNN-IBN can outline in greater detail. Only approximately 11-12 minutes of the first ever Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, exists for us to watch today. Fortunately, a nice man has put it up on Youtube, so here it is! Happy watching.

Gorgeous advertisement: Sony Xperia™ Z TV Advert.

There’s something really nice about sitting in the cinemas and, amidst all the godawful advertisements trying to sell you chewing gum & DSLRs, seeing a really beautiful advert. That’s what I felt yesterday with this Sony Xperia ad – the song (a remix of David Bowie, which tragically isn’t available for download but seems to be uploaded here in Youtube form ) is wonderful. The colours in the ad. are breathtaking: all vibrancy and pop and 1950s etherealism. It’s also a lovely nostalgic wander through the various Sony things that have been part & portion of many lives for the past however many decades; from old Sony TV sets to the Sony Walkman (remember those?) to the Playstation 1…. it’s a walk down memory-lane, a lane that seems to lead straight to their Xperia!

Directed by: Tarsem Singh
Music: ‘Sound & Vision’ by David Bowie (Remixed by by Sonjay Prabhakar)
Date: Feb. 2013 (according to Youtube details!).

 

Quotes from Nathanael West.

Nathanael West, sadly, didn’t write as much as he should have – in his lifetime he wrote reviews, essays, screenplays (for he wrote in the 1930s glory-days of Hollywood biz), short stories, novellas, novels – but he died at the young age of 37 in a car crash, possibly because he was distraught at learning about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death the day before.

His writing has won him many famous fans, from Auden to Johnny Depp (!) to Dorothy Parker (who famously said: ““Wildly funny, desperately sad, brutal and kind, furious and patient, there was no other like Nathanael West…”). But for some reason I get the impression that he’s still fairly underrated in terms of the public consciousness; he seems to be quite a niche part of modernist studies on English Literature courses, and oftentimes missed out even there in favour of the heavyweight modernists (naturally).

Book Cover, Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West – Cover design by Alvin Lustig.

Well, whatever it is – Nathanael West is pretty extraordinary. He writes about the shallow glitz & glamour of LA and Hollywood, focusing not on the starshine though but instead on its seedy, ugly, underbelly. Writing soon after the Great Depression, the little stick figures who dot West’s LA or New York are the unemployed and the overworked, the harried and the hopeless. It is bleak, but – and this where West’s genius lies – it can also be very funny in a blackly comedic sort of way.

Some quotes from West’s two most famous novels, The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts (this latter may count as a novella, I’m not sure.)

From The Day of the Locust (1939):

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty & romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

***

She wasn’t hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.

***

One evening they talked about what she did with herself when she wasn’t working as an extra. She told him that she often spent the whole day making up stories…..She would get some music on the radio, then lie down on her bed and shut her eyes. She had a large assortment of stories to choose from… While she admitted that her method was too mechanical for the best results and that it was better to slip into a dream naturally, she said that any dream was better than no dream and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

***

…They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks & counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine & oranges?

Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? 

***

Their boredom becomes more & more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked & burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds & bodies. They have been cheated & betrayed. They have slaved & saved for nothing.

***

From Miss Lonelyhearts (1933):

His friends would go on telling these stories until they were too drunk to talk. They were aware of their childishness, but did not know how else to revenge themselves. At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money & fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.

***

He fled to the street, but there chaos was multiple. Broken groups of people hurried past, forming neither stars nor squares. The lamp-posts were badly spaced and the flagging was of different sizes. Nor could he do anything with the harsh clanging sound of street cars and the raw shouts of hucksters. No repeated group of words would fit their rhythm and no scale could give them meaning.

***

He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature… the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.

***

Prodded by his conscience, he began to generalize. Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst.

***

 

On writing, distractions, & modern technology.

It’s only fair to make the first scrap in this hodge-podge blog the very piece that inspired it, so here goes….

Matthew Battles writing for The New York Times on “How Writers Interact With the World” (April 22, 2013). 

It’s a lovely little meditation on how the traditional ‘stereotype’ of writers as hermits and recluses is incorrect, if you will – and about how the distracting capabilities of the Internet might actually be just the thing writers need, affording them quick & easy access to the ‘real’ world — something writers have always needed!

He refers to the commonplace book, and his description almost makes it sound like the Renaissance equivalent of our bookmarks bar: where we ‘favourite’ tabs & add links to it, early-modern folks would painstakingly copy out things as diverse as fine poetry, recipes, shopping lists, financial notes, news items, important dates/events etc. into their commonplace books. And yes, many famous writers have had their commonplace books – both in early-modern times (Milton) and later, too (Emerson, Mark Twain, E. M. Forster, Auden…!). The Internet chucks a veritable deluge of information at us, on an almost impossible scale, so – perhaps the reference to commonplace books is an important and timely reminder of the ways in which we can collect and collate all this diverse information we get each day! (Albeit, perhaps, in a more updated form…to keep up with the times. Like, say, a commonplace blog. ;)!)

Writers have always welcomed this intervention and inspiration of the world in the work of composition. Early-modern European authors had their commonplace books: journals they filled with excerpts from classical and modern works, snippets of journalism and reflections gleaned from daily life. More than a mere journal, the commonplace book can be thought of as a paper-based interface for the social world of letters, in which Enlightenment-era writers continuously added, combined and swapped out snippets of found text gleaned from such new media as newspapers, broadsides and learned journals. – Matthew Battles (Apr. 2013)

(Now, if that doesn’t sound like what bloggers do almost all the time, I don’t know what does!)

Battles brings these historical overviews of how writers worked and lived in the world (not in seclusion is the conclusion – indeed, some of them are highly sociable and fashionable, like Virginia Woolf & her Bloomsbury group) – back to the present, specifically back to the Internet and social media. Just what exactly can things like Twitter & Facebook do for writers? seems to be the question. (Blogging surprisingly doesn’t come under too much direct scrutiny; perhaps the links between blogging & writing are too self-evident for him to bother asking questions like that!).

Not unlike those earlier literary networks, the Internet now furnishes vivid and shifting interfaces for writerly composition, collection and competition.

Yep indeed: ‘connections’ is a key word, as is ‘networks’. Writers write, and not necessarily for publication; there is a rich history of literary correspondences that continues right up to today (a recently published book of letters exchanged between Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee attests to that!). But not only that; the web also gives people access to vast swathes of the world that previously could only perhaps be found, seen, and understood through/in books or (somewhat more recently, circa late 19th/early 20th centuries) in movies or photographs, if one wasn’t able to experience them directly. The Internet increasingly does everything to approximate direct experience, with the live streaming of events and Google Maps that can give you a street view of pretty much anywhere; with online courses being taught and online webinars and discussions and debates… if one isn’t able to experience something directly, the Internet will try damned hard to make it as direct and as experienceable as possible, it seems. And nowadays in-depth research into any topic involves only a few clicks, not hours at the library. Surely this makes both source-materials & narrative possibilities immensely richer!