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Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro

Excerpted and adapted from “The Critical Event of Yasujiro Ozu” in Ronshuu: Hasumi Shigehiko (Hasumi Shigehiko Essay Collection)
Edited by Kudo Yuko
Hatori Shoten, 2016

To understand the power of Hasumi Shigehiko’s book Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro (Director Ozu Yasujiro) for a Western readership, it should be remembered that the view of Ozu in the West has been shaped by three writers, Paul Schrader, Donald Richie, and David Bordwell. (The impact of Noel Burch on the Western reception of Ozu has been less decisive, partly because of Burch’s commitment to a reading that completely dismisses the director’s postwar work, which includes his most widely seen and highly regarded films.)[1] Schrader’s account of Ozu as one of the models of “transcendental style in film”, Richie’s reading of Ozu’s films in terms of the grand narrative of the decline of the traditional Japanese family, and Bordwell’s detailed examination of the stylistic procedures that set Ozu’s work apart from the norms of classical cinema continue to influence the way Ozu is viewed and discussed.

By putting the question, ‘What is it to watch an Ozu film?’, into the foreground of his concerns, Hasumi challenges the dominant constructions of Ozu in the West. Reproaching Richie for using a kind of “negative discourse” that defines Ozu in terms of absence and lack (e.g., the camera rarely or never moves), Hasumi asserts that “the view that is applied to his films is what suffers from an enormous lack” and that, in fact, Ozu’s “fecundity” is “incontestable” (25 F/13-14 J).[2] Against Schrader, Hasumi argues that it is mistaken to see Ozu’s films as the reflection of a “transcendent” spirituality imbued with the values of Zen and Japaneseness.

In discussing the contradictory interpretations of the famous “image of the vase” in Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), Hasumi insists on the poverty of those interpretations that are based on cultural prejudices: “when the meaning of an image is not deployed fully, the interpretation belongs to the cultural domain” (221F/246J). He further remarks that “To the extent that seeing is a cultural gesture, the look is not free” (217 F/241J). These remarks have a broad significance, since a concern for the cultural dimension of seeing distinguishes the approaches of academic film studies, as directed and dominated by cultural studies, from film criticism.

Hasumi writes that Ozu’s “thematic system” is responsible for displacing the critic’s interest in Ozu’s films from the narrative to a different level characterized by a rich fusion of elements. On this plane, Ozu’s work “accords with the cinematographic sensibility of our look, as a movement internal to the film. This is what happens when we are moved by a film” (38F/28-29J). The thematic system is of tremendous importance: it is what makes the cinema a cinema of authors. “Let’s say that the place where all authors – and not just Ozu – give free rein to their imagination is precisely the thematic system” (119F/102J).

In a characteristic inversion, Hasumi calls the sign (“Don’t feed him, he has a stomach ache”) a mother puts on her child’s back in I Was Born But (Otona no miru ehon – umarete wa mita keredo, 1932) “a real document of the history of the city of Tokyo” (45F/35J). Ozu’s films are documents of their times not because of the grand symbolic themes so often invoked to interpret his films (such as the postwar collapse of the multi-generation family) but because of a visual detail that belongs to what Hasumi has identified as the Ozuian thematic system of eating/not eating. Similarly, the social problem posed by the conditions of the lowly office worker is made manifest in I Was Born But because of the children’s decision to go on a hunger strike, which expresses the situation in terms of the same thematic system (45-46F/35-36J).

Hasumi’s criticism is directed toward and seeks to account for the experience of being moved by an Ozu film. To proceed in this direction, Hasumi starts from a willfully simple level of inquiry into the minimal structural constituents of film viewing: looking and time. Seeing cinema reduced to these terms, it is quite possible to say, as Hasumi has in another context, that “all movies are but variants on the silent film.”[3]

 

[1] Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Donald Richie, Ozu: His Life and Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, revised and edited by Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

[2] Page references to the Ozu book are given in parentheses in the text. A number followed by “F” refers to the French edition, Yasujiro Ozu, translated by Ryoji Nakamura, René de Ceccatty, and Shiguéhiko Hasumi (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile/Cahiers du cinéma, 1998). A number followed by “J” refers to the Japanese edition, Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro (Definitive edition) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2003).

[3] “Fiction and the ‘Unrepresentable’: All Movies are but Variants on the Silent Film,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, Nos. 2-3 (2009), pp. 316-329.

 

The Mystery of the Remake / The Power of the Rip-Off

Notes on Contributor

Professor Dina Iordanova

Originally from Bulgaria, and having worked in Canada, the US and England, my background is in philosophy and aesthetics. I joined the University of St. Andrews as the University’s first Chair in Film Studies in 2004 and led the start of that Department’s dramatic climb up the research league tables to the best score achieved by a department in Scotland in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. I am the founder of the Centre for Film Studies and the publishing house St Andrews Film Studies. I have served as Head of Department, as Director of Research for the top performing School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies, and as Provost of the ancient St. Leonard’s College/Dean of Graduate Studies, with responsibility for doctoral students.

My research interests are in global (and particularly non-Western) film cultures, transnational cinema, and global film circulation. I have also published extensively on Eastern European and Balkan cinema. In my work, I investigate film history in its socio-historical and mediatic context, paying particular attention to issues of comparative critical analysis of cross-cultural representation, cultural sensibilities and diverse identities. Starting in, 2008 I pioneered research into international film festivals and the dynamics of global cinema. I am active on the international speakers circuit, have been a distinguished visiting professor at Universities in the USA and across Europe and Asia, and I am recipient of multiple awards from organisations such as the Rockefeller, Leverhulme and Carnegie Trusts. My work has been translated into twenty languages and has been adopted for teaching around the world.

 

A Lazy Form of Betrayal: The ‘Remake’ and ‘Reboot’ in American Television Animation

I have always considered remakes a bad idea.

This is the result of a number of converging concerns with the concept. When we “remake” or “reboot” something, the implication is that something was “wrong” with the original version, which the makers are implying that they wish to “fix”. It doesn’t matter how old it was- it needs to be done again because they didn’t do it right the first time. Regardless of how successful it was, commercially or artistically, the first time.
Because, when the potential for money to be made from an actual or potential franchise, in any form of artistic endeavor, money matters more than art. We’d be deluding ourselves if we thought otherwise.

The baby boomers, my parents’ generation, seems to have a particularly fatalistic obsession with the “remake”. They pretend to “honor” the popular culture of the past by presenting “faithful” and “new” versions of the films and television shows they admired as children, but all they are doing is discrediting and marginalizing the importance of the source material. And, in nearly every instance, the original version of the material is infinitely superior to any mercenary attempt to do the material “over” ten or twenty years after. By, it should be said, people who do not have the emotional and artistic commitment to the work the original producers had, and are doing only for the money and/or because they were told to do so by the people who hold their jobs by a thread upstairs.

I come to this debate as someone who was taught that the most valuable contributions to society, particularly in the arts, are original ones. People who follow their own instincts, present their own ideas, and deliver them to the public with unique personal verve and brio will always matter in my mind more than the vast mob of people who make those same things just to fill screen space.

My particular interest as a popular cultural historian- and, loosely defined, a “fan”- has been animation. Specifically, animation produced for consumption on television in North America. I came to this subject firstly because I admire the characters and producers of the work and greatly, but also because there is a vast lack of scholarly materials, and thus academic knowledge, study and respect, on the topic. For the past decade or so, I have tried to create objective public knowledge of the topic as a writer on the genre. In 2014, I published America ‘Toons In, a comprehensive historical study of television animation in the United States, and I am currently working on an encyclopedic study of the same topic. I say this not to boast about credentials, but to indicate that I have acted out of the same concerns as other non-fiction writers have on their topics: so that others will understand the topic and why it does and should matter to people besides ourselves.

But how can this possibly done when you are dealing with an entertainment genre that, for better or worse, tends to cannibalize its best ideas in “remakes” and “reboots” because it lacks the resources and courage to produce original material?

Cartoon Network displayed this brazenly when it chose to a “new” version of The Powerpuff Girls, which, artistically, is one of the great holy grails of the genre. The original series idea of making kindergarten-age children superheroes was brilliant to my eyes when it debuted in 1998, and that they were girls was doubly brilliant. These remain underprivileged and voiceless parts of our community, and to give them the kind of hope for improvement that both super-heroics and animation was a masterstroke in a media empire that often ignores their very existence. But the idea might not have worked nearly as well had Craig McCracken, the series’ skilled but enigmatic creator, been willing to devote himself so fully to challenge the production and dramatic clichés of television animation to produce something that had never been seen before there, and has only rarely been seen since. There are not many series that have created such change in a genre often unwilling to do so, and few producers with McCracken’s courage to do such things in a uniquely personal and identifiable ways, as his later productions, Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends and 1, have further underlined.

In the case of the “new” version, a production is being done only on the worst possible terms for a media property. A very personal and extremely emotional version of the world has been tarnished for the simple expedient to make money by those who “own” the copyright in a legal sense, and not a moral one. In that sense, it becomes like any remake: a creatively weak endeavor undertaken only to fill space on a schedule where only its esteemed predecessor should be shown.

This is the great catch-22 of television animation. Animators can only produce material if they have access to the means of production, but, even if they have the means to produce brilliant things, they find they cannot control the destiny of their work after the work ceases to be done because, unlike other creators, they are denied control of the copyrights on their work. The people who have the least to benefit from exploiting the work benefit the most, and those who have the most suffer.

Television animation has been full of wonderful, one of a kind programs over its existence, which came into existence often against the opposition of those who hated their central ideas. And it still is. Those who operate the finances of the television industry should be made aware that profit is not the central motivating force of the business. It never has been. If we deny individual artists the chance to pursue their particular goals in this genre, in favor of always doing zombie-style resurrection of other people’s old ones, we risk turning the genre’s lifeblood cold and dead forever.

The characters of television animation, so full of life and spirit and defiance as they are, deserve better than that. Much better.

 

Notes on Contributor

David Perlmutter is a freelance writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The holder of an MA degree from the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg, and a lifelong animation fan, he has published short fiction in a variety of genres for various magazines and anthologies, as well as essays on his favorite topics for similar publishers, including SFF World.com. He is the author of America Toons In: A History of Television Animation (McFarland and Co.), The Singular Adventures Of Jefferson Ball (Chupa Cabra House), The Pups (Booklocker.com), Certain Private Conversations and Other Stories (Aurora Publishing), and Orthicon; or, the History of a Bad Idea (Linkville Press, forthcoming). He can be reached on Facebook at David Perlmutter-Writer, Twitter at @DKPLJW1, and Tumblr at The Musings of David Perlmutter (yesdavidperlmutterfan).

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896 – 1937

By Zhang Zhen
University of Chicago Press, 2005

It is invidious to have to pick one book when there are so many great books out there. So, first, my apologies to everyone else writing in my field of Chinese Cinema Studies. But Zhang Zhen’s An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 (University of Chicago Press, 2005) is the watershed book for me. When I read it, the penny dropped that things had changed, and in a number of ways. First, it showed that you could study cinema even if most of the relevant films had not survived. Second, that possibility brought home that the days of understanding cinema-as-text were over. Third, the sheer quality of the scholarship made me see that research conditions had taken a great leap forward – to coin a phrase – and we were in an era of new possibilities.

Zhang’s book examines Chinese cinema before 1937, when the eight-year war with Japan, which had been bubbling up for a while, finally broke out. People had already written about the so-called Left Wing cinema movement of the 1930s, canonized after 1949. But the very low survival rate of films from the earliest days of Chinese cinema had the earlier period off limits. An Amorous History used magazines, posters, diaries and various other materials to write the history that had seemed off limits.

By taking this approach, Zhang’s book joined the move away from understanding cinema as a collection of texts and towards seeing cinema as culture. In the case of An Amorous History, Zhang effectively argued for the “vernacular modernism” approach pioneered by her mentor at University of Chicago, Miriam Hansen. Understanding cinema as culture seems to me a much more important shift than the ontological fuss over celluloid versus digital and the question of the indexical. Indeed, looking at cinema as a culture rather than as a technology or a material form brackets the importance of those issues and reorients our attention away from questions of essence and towards power relations and social practices again.

Finally, as soon as I started reading An Amorous History, I realized this kind of work could not have been done even fifteen years earlier, when I began working on my doctoral thesis. At that time, it took me almost two years to gain any effective access to the China Film Archive. Although there is hardly a full ethos of public access in the People’s Republic of China today, a variety of libraries and archives there, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan, are available now. Furthermore, as someone working in an educational culture that imposes arbitrary but rigid completion times on doctoral theses – four years maximum – the magisterial sweep, the incredible detail, and the overall richness of An Amorous History bore witness to a golden age of scholarship in the leading universities of the United States, where relatively long term projects can be and are sustained today in a way that was much more difficult before and does not exist elsewhere. Chinese cinema scholarship has been elevated to a whole new level, and An Amorous History marked the point where that become visible to me.

Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media

Written by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
Routledge, 1994

 

“Unthinking Eurocentrism was a hugely influential book, and remains so twenty years later. It informed my approach to the study of film from early on, in conveying how film and media countersign ideology and the subtle workings of social consciousness. It taught me to approach film not solely as text, but first and foremost as context; to focus on film culture and mediated discourse. Unthinking Eurocentrism’s utter exuberance of referencing was particularly inspirational. Confidently flowing and cutting across cultures and discourses whilst revealing patterns of othering and orientalisation that work throughout the world, both outside and within Europe, it motivates and excites. This is how I want all writing on film to be: rich and intense. It is a book that shaped, and continues shaping, all my work.”

I provided this endorsement to Routledge in 2014. It appears on the back cover of the second edition of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism, a book that was re-released with an additional extended commentary by the authors two decades after its initial appearance.

But it had all started much earlier. Even though published originally in 1994, Unthinking Eurocentrism first entered my life in the fall of 1996, at the University of Chicago campus. I had recently arrived from Austin, Texas, to take up a Rockefeller fellowship at the interdisciplinary Humanities Institute here, under the guidance of Arjun Appadurai. And I was just learning my way around Hyde Park when, on an autumn afternoon, I found myself marvelling at the remarkably stocked basement of the Seminary Co-op Bookshop, on Woodlawn just off 57th street.

There was a relatively slim film section, mainly of books on American and French cinema – a landscape that I had grown familiar with during my preceding three-year stint of teaching at UT-Austin. Nestled among those, however, was a book that was completely different. Unthinking Eurocentrism claimed that all cinematic traditions in the world mattered equally and ought to be known and respected. It was providing a sweeping discussion of cinematic texts, from across the world, in a context where American and European classics figured alongside films from Latin America, Asia, and Africa but did not rank any higher. It was all blending in a perfect discourse, which elegantly cross-referenced media, public opinion, ideology, and education.

My few years of immigrant experience until then had left me with the impression that in the US context knowing American film was hugely respected whilst everything else was marginalised and overlooked. One type of culture was scrutinised and privileged at the expense of others. It was a situation that had made me feel uneasy and insecure about my own choices and interests. Now there was a framework, provided by Unthinking Eurocentrism, which operated on the premise of equal value of cultures and excitingly demonstrated how an approach that respected the multiplicity and diversity was consistently possible.

The way the book was done overstepped all entrenched national cinematic traditions. The discussion dropped borders to meander as it saw fit, bringing in references and examples from wherever it suited to build the argument. It was so liberating! It was one of the first truly transnational texts that I came across. By allowing itself to be playful and even whimsical with the examples, the text was able to foreground issues and concerns that otherwise could have remained unnoticed.

Somehow I immediately knew that I would adapt this method to the project I was starting at that time and that it would eventually become my first English language book, Cinema of Flames (2001). I would drop national borders and would use examples from whichever Balkan country suited me to build the argument, because I felt the line of reasoning I could develop this way was by far more important than sticking faithfully to a historiography of a country or a region. In a way, Unthinking Eurocentrism gave me a template for all my future work.

Later that year I read Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, published in 1989 by the University of Texas Press. It also left a great impression on me, mainly with its dynamic dissection of the complex agendas that rule the Israeli society. It opened my eyes to the dialectical relationship of representation and perception. Like Unthinking Eurocentrism, it was a book that dealt with a large number of films. Rather than scrutinising a single canonical text, it weaved filmic references together into one large discursive canvas. Most of all, however, I was impressed by the elegance with which Ella Shohat was writing herself into the text, acknowledging her specific background and personal point of view (rather than hiding behind some artificially constructed objectivity).

When I look back now, I realise that I have modelled a lot of my own writing after things that I learned from Unthinking Eurocentrism, but also from Israeli Cinema.

Unthinking Eurocentrism empowered me to create a text that would embrace the abundant and varied cinematic material that was available to me without succumbing to the pressure to analyse singular texts. It emboldened me to favour a contextualising approach over close textual analysis, as this was how I could show the way multiple cinematic works contribute to a general discourse that shapes the narratives related to cultural configurations.

Israeli Cinema gave me a model on the basis of which I could write myself into the investigation and reveal my specific background and point of view, with its advantages and disadvantages. It was the book that taught me to always acknowledge my own position in regard to the material I would investigate. It allowed me to act on my belief that scholars should not pretend to be above and beyond things like class stratification and ideology.

In May 2014 I was invited to speak at a transnational cinema conference at the NUY campus in Abu Dhabi (UAE), organised by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam who had taken up professorships there. The event was to take stock of where we were now as well as mark the 20th anniversary since the publication of Unthinking Eurocentrism. Along with the other conference guests, I had become part of the family of people who were continuing the formidable work that the book had launched. The study of cinema as a transnational phenomenon had become an acknowledged and respected discipline. I could not have known any of this back then, when I first picked up the book at the Seminary bookshop.

The Documentary Tradition

Selected, Arranged and Introduced by Lewis Jacobs

W.W. Norton and Co. 1979.

I’m a bit of a traditionalist, particularly when it comes to documentary film, a field I’ve been researching for about 25 years now. This is not to say that I’m a conservative but that I learnt quite early on to pay respect to tradition. I learnt, in the main part from my PhD supervisor Bill Routt, to temper my enthusiasms for the latest and the cutting edge with precedents and qualifications, reminding myself that any given film, or movement, can be understood in relation to the tradition to which it belonged.

In the late 1980s it was with much reassurance that I also came across Lewis Jacobs’s classic anthology The Documentary Tradition, the title of which dovetailed neatly with my interest in documentary, the arcane and lineages in the sub-genre. Speaking of lineages, Jacobs himself emerged from the left cultural networks of the 1930s, founding the Hollywood located journal Experimental Cinema and later joining New York’s Film and Photo League. The Documentary Tradition sits alongside Jacobs’ other books such as and Introduction to the Art of the Movies (1960) and The Rise of the American Film (1968) but it is The Emergence of Film Art (1969) that was, for me, the companion piece to The Documentary Tradition.  The Emergence of Film Art brings together a large number of articles from some of the best critics to every write on film; Jacobs, Seymour Stern, Dwight Macdonald, Sergei Eisenstein, Alberto Cavalcanti, Peter Cowie, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Colin Young, Jonas Mekas and many more.

Similarly, The Documentary Tradition draws on Jacobs’ international left networks to bring together critics such as Richard Griffith, Siegfried Kracauer, Herman G. Weinberg, Harry Alan Potamkin, Parker Tyler, Manny Farber, Peter Biskind, Gary Crowdus and Walter Rosenblum as well as filmmakers such as John Grierson, Joris Ivens, Boris Kaufman, Sidney Meyers, Robert Gardner and Satyajit Ray. These writers represent their respective traditions, from Soviet cinema, the British Documentary Movement and Humphrey Jennings, to Sidney Meyers’ The Quiet One (1948), Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle’s The Silent World (1956), Chris Marker and Pierre L’homme’s Le Joli Mai (1963), Cinema Verite, Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and women’s and political documentary.

The book follows a chronological order divided into epochs such as1922-1930, 1930-1940 and so on, including recommended films from these periods. 1940-1950, one of my favourites, includes Jennings’ Fires Were Started (1943), Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948), Henwar Rodakiewicz’s People to People (1944), Henri Cartier Bresson and Richard Banks’ Le Retour (1946), Willard Van Dyke’s Valley Town (1940) and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1945).

In retrospect, I am particularly fond of Jacobs’ The Documentary Tradition because I was able to interview two of the volume’s contributors, Ken Coldicutt and Cecile Starr- two seemingly different scholars and filmmakers brought together here. Coldicutt was the leader of the Melbourne based Realist film Unit, a communist party aligned group making films in the post-World War Two period. Coldicutt’s “Turksib—Building a Railroad” is a sophisticated reading of Victor Turin’s film in relation to Pudovkin’s writing as well as Grierson’s criticisms of the film. Cecile Starr’s contribution in the 1950-1960 section, is entitled “Through the Psychiatric Looking Glass” and is taken from a 1951 edition of New York’s Saturday Review of Literature. Starr reviews Irving Jacoby and Alexander Hammid’s Angry Boy (1950), Helen Levitt, Ben Maddow and Sidney Meyers’ Steps of Age (1950) and Stanley Jackson’s Feelings of Depression (1950).

I still use certain writings from The Documentary Tradition in my Documentary and Realism in Film and Television subject at Monash University, such as Jacobs own section introduction “Documentary Becomes Engaged and Vérité”, Robert Flaherty on “Filming Real People” or Arthur Schlesinger Jnr. on “The Fiction of Fact— The Fact of Fiction”. Importantly, the way that Jacobs’ book insists on contextualizing each film (each piece of writing within its era, respecting its place in the history of documentary including the critical work that supports any cultural formation and network) goes to the heart of what I appreciate about the documentary milieu, making the collection an important touchstone for my own work.

Dream Machine: Realism and Fantasy in Hindi Cinema

Written by Samir Dayal
Temple University Press, 2015

Reviewed by Amber Shields

Hindi language cinema, taken here as not only the dominant industry within India but also Indian diasporic cinema, presents an area of growing interest for scholars around the world not only looking to understand the fascination of this vast production, but also how it can be read to understand the nation itself. In his new work Dream Machine: Realism and Fantasy in Hindi Cinema (Temple University Press, 2015), Samir Dayal proposes to investigate Indian identity both in the nation and abroad through Hindi cinema. Acting as a “mirror and lamp”, these films, he argues, not only reflect “‘Indianness’”, but also shape it (1). His readings thus propose to offer both insight into the “dream machine” and its techniques in shaping an identity and the identity that it shapes.

Though not out of place among other national oriented cinema texts that look to how cinema contributes to individual and collective identity, the premise and range of the book is an ambitious pursuit as even on the surface India presents a complex case study. Its creation into a nation state in 1947 after a period of colonial rule was marked by the violence of partition that has had a great affect on identity images. Questions of religious and national tensions, citizenship, gender, terrorism, modernity and tradition, tremendous disparity, and large diasporic communities are all issues that have continued to be at the centre of debate in discourses on Indian identity and are all touched upon in Dayal’s readings.

While all important factors in identity, and his readings of selected films do offer some interesting insights into how they can be read in terms of their “Indianness”, the scope of identity is so broad and assumptive of a certain language, class, etc. that it is overwhelming and in the end offers more questions as to how one must define and specify an identity as opposed to enlightenment on any particular identity. This feeling is fortified in the conclusion whose turn to more identity theories in the final pages leaves the book with the unsatisfactory ending that seems to be rather the beginning of what the work was trying to explore.

In connecting these disparate films and the social issues and identities they represent, Dayal offers the overarching framework of reading the use of fantasy in juxtaposition to the more realist diegsis in these films. In his introduction, Dayal is insistent on how his focus and sustained inquiry into this question of fantasy distinguishes his work from other respected Hindi cinema scholars such as Vijay Mishra or Lalitha Gopalan. His defence of his approach, however, subsumes his argument, which at the end of the introduction is still in its own hazy dreamlike state. As a scholar interested in the uses of fantasy in cinema, the lack of development of this argument not only in the introduction but throughout the book was a disappointment; Dayal proposes to follow this separate path but is perpetually distracted by other avenues of discourse.

Going through his examples of the Angry Young Man or the Terrorist, Dayal offers several examples of films that are read to show how they mainly mirror, and in some cases perhaps shed light on, the issues at stake (in the case of the terrorist film this can be seen as the double desire to both “neutralize or redeem the terrorist by undermining his or her ideological ‘cause,’ and simultaneously prove the superiority and liberality of Hindu ideology”(103)). In these readings there are references to the alternative “fantasies” that these films present, however these references are never fully explained. It is taken for granted that, as film, they are depicting some type of fantasy, yet what these fantasies depict and how they are articulated is left vague. This lack of critical engagement highlights the danger that the use of fantasy presents being that, as a hard to define term, it can be used to describe anything that exhibits some element of the imagination, lending all fiction to this definition.

In lieu of readings of fantasy, the chapters are more organized around particular themes such as citizenship and patriotism. This turn to issues or categories can make some of the readings repetitive; for instance, the section on the Avenging Women films turns into a detailed description of the similarities of plots between several films (which is in itself interesting to see the pattern), but the lack of analysis makes the section overall superficial. Further the intense focus on different issues regarding identity as opposed to the elements of fantasy which is purported to be the common thread of the book leaves the readings of vastly different films, ranging from classic Hindi-language films like Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) and Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975) to the British My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008), disconnected.

When these readings of the fantasy are elaborated and focused, they prove insightful studies of this element. Dayal’s reading of fantasy in Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) focuses specifically on how the fantasy of interracial coexistence is elaborated through the love story and, more specifically, its enactment through fantasy song and dance scenes. Spending the time to analyse these scenes as opposed to overburdening the analysis with a hurried reading of the whole film offers the relief of clarity and a well-elaborated argument that demonstrates the value of this reading that doesn’t necessarily come out in others.

Dayal’s conclusion that “Indianness” is malleable and unfixed serves not only to describe this broad concept of identity that has appeared in widely different contextual and theoretical forms throughout the book but also to describe the work itself. While this allows for the exploration of several factors, it leaves the overall book overwhelming and fragmented and the feeling of unrealized potential.

 

 

 

 

The Hindi Horror Cinema: Losing its Authenticity

I was born in India, and have grown up on a staple diet of Bollywood films that I adore, but a feeling of dread descends on me when it comes to watching horror films churned out of Bollywood. Most of them are either complete rip-offs of their Hollywood counterparts, and more recently East Asian horror flicks, or they lack any coherent aesthetics. They often come across as a parody of a director’s vision, or rather, a lack of it. What they are struggling with, apart from an absence of knowledge of basic story building, are the right proportions of aesthetics, themes and motifs, to concoct a horror film that complements an Indian context.

Surely horror films rely on the power of suggestion; what lurks in the dark corners, the suspense of unaccountable footsteps, the dread of imminent doom, the panic of being followed by unseen eyes, the terror when something suddenly emerges from the deep shadows—these are all crucial ingredients in achieving a sense of mystery and eeriness. However, the survivor of the horror is equally crucial. The person has to be someone who the audience can relate to and recognize themselves in. Conventionally the man plays the hero rescuing the damsel from distress. However, horror is one genre that has globally grown out of its Gothic inheritance by radically experimenting with the narrative, form and structure. A woman no longer has to rely on a gentleman to save her from the menacing monster. Now increasingly women turn out to not only be survivors but also heroes. Like Ripley in Alien (Ridley Scott,1979), Sethe and Denver in Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998), Samantha in The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009), Amelia in The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), Edith in Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015), and Thomasin in The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015).

Looking at the recent popular Bollywood horror films such as Raaz (Vikram Bhatt, 2002), 1920 (Vikram Bhatt, 2008), 1920- Evil Returns (Bhushan Patel, 2012), Shaapit (Vikram Bhatt, 2010), Haunted (Vikram Bhatt, 2011), etc., it becomes evident that these filmmakers employ age-old alien elements of the Gothic genre such as the self-sacrificing virgin maiden, the hero with a scientific bent, a villain, bandits, the clergy and a haunted castle or mansion. Further, by mistiming their frights, being too generous in the number of wails and shrieks, using mud-cake makeup on a possessed leading lady and placing the narrative in plastic Gothic settings, that have no relation to Indian landscape whatsoever, Bollywood filmmakers fail to create a sense of horror. Thus they deliver a film that fails to connect with their immediate audience. By being so one-dimensional the narrative, plot and characters render the work as being hollow and vacant with no critical insight or intent whatsoever. There is a thin line between horror and comedy and most Bollywood films seem to manage a spoof rather than a good spook.

Horror movies produced in the last three decades of the 20th century were no different. The 1970s and 80s were marked by a rise in the production of “masala” films. With the introduction of VCRS in the 1980s, most middle-class movie viewers chose to watch films at home rather than in the theatre which was increasingly regarded as an immoral space that was infested with crass and loud “masala” films. The narrative and plot of these films mostly revolved around urban crime, loaded with visceral graphic visuals. VCRS also opened up an avenue to global cinema, mostly represented by Hollywood. Many Indian filmmakers referred to these films for inspiration and started adapting these new plotlines and reworking narratives to make them fit with the Indian context. The proliferation of VCRS coupled with the rise of raunchy masala films allowed the B-grade horror film industry to progress in India. Tropes, characters and aesthetics of popular American horror films like The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) and works of Dario Argento proved to be resourceful and were employed judiciously as can be seen in the works such as, Jadu Tona (Black Magic, Raveekant Nagaich, 1977) Geharayee (Abyss, Vikas Desai and Aruna Raje, 1980) and Raat (Night, Ramgopal Varma, 1992). The Ramsay Brothers (a team of seven siblings) deserve a special mention here as they brought about a tremendous shift in both Hindi and Indian horror cinema. Even though aesthetically and narratively they lacked originality, mostly reworking Hollywood monster movies, they managed to experiment sub-textually with taboo issues and themes such as incest and exploitation that can be considered largely absent in earlier mainstream social films.

However, horror films were different in the post-independent India of the 1950s and 60s. They were authentic and original, and that is what I am going to discuss in the following article.

While spending an afternoon with my mom, I came across the film Woh Kaun Thi (Who Was She?), a mystery-thriller film directed by Raj Khosla in 1964. Its haunting and melancholic soundtrack drew my attention and my interest in the film along with the man who had made it was immediate. Not only did this director come across as someone who had a vision, but also for the first time, I recognised a director whose film noir sensibilities positioned him outside of the Bollywood system that I’d been exposed to before. The film seemed to be a truly a suspenseful and intelligent horror film. I sought out the next two films discovering that they comprised Khosla’s suspense trilogy, Mera Saaya (My Shadow) (1966) and Anita (1967), all of which starred the actor Sadhana Shivdasani as “the mystery girl”.

Bollywood as we know it today didn’t exist in the ’60s. The films produced in the newly independent India of the 1950s were preoccupied with either celebrating, or painting a dismal image of the nation that had failed to provide for its people. This perspective started to change a little in the 1960s with an increasing interest in the exploration of an individual’s life rather than the nation as a whole and popular films from this decade often focus on the modern young couple and the emergence of a commodity culture.

Female characters also became tremendously important during this time and the number of women joining the film industry rose. Before the 1960s women who chose to appear on screen in India were often courtesans as the film industry was considered a place of ill repute. Women’s role in the film industry began to change and beauties from “respectable” families now started to appear as leading ladies. Sadhana was one such actress and her appearance marked a breakthrough in the mainstream cinema. Sadhana became a significant figure influencing popular Indian culture by setting fashion trends, the most popular being the fringe haircut which is still popularly referred to as the “Sadhana cut” among Indians. She also introduced churidars, a form of well-fitting cotton pyjamas once only popular among women from the Muslim community, to the mainstream.

Sadhana’s face soon came to signify modernity and urbanism representing the woman of the now-somewhat stabilised independent India. Cities offered women like Sadhana the comfort of anonymity and a sense of freedom and allowed them to construct new identities for themselves professionally and socially. Once restricted to their homes, women were seen more and more in the public spaces of offices and markets where they worked and interacted with men; something that years earlier only courtesans did. This was a cause of alarm for conservatives because it now became impossible to judge a woman’s character. These anxieties were transported on to the screen in films like Khosla’s suspense trilogy: Woh Kaun Thi, Mera Saaya, and Anita.

The trilogy’s story revolves around the doppelgangers of a dead woman who is known for her purity and morality. It is interesting that Khosla repeatedly chose Sadhana for all three different female roles throughout the trilogy that addressed issues of property, the role of women in society, and marital life. The resolution in each film changes to offer different reasons for Sadhana’s dual characters. This tells us a lot about the changing nature of representation of a woman in Indian cinema and the industry’s social and cultural relevance. The doppelganger effect in the first two films allowed Sadhana to play out different characters without the danger of being typecast as a “vamp” for the rest of her film career as was the case with many female actors at that time. A search through her filmography makes it quite evident that she opted for roles that depicted women’s vulnerability, their reluctance to surrender and their persistence to survive.

In both Woh Kaun Thi and Mera Saaya Sadhana plays the role(s) of identical twins, one of whom is married, virtuous and reputable; the other, a criminal with loose morals. The films follow similar trajectories of suspense and mystery and both end with the death of the wayward twin while the virtuous woman is reintegrated in the civil world. Unlike the earlier two films, Anita’s titular character, again played by Sadhana, does not have a twin. Rather, she is forced into fabricating a fake identity for herself and constructing a false past, two things that are relayed to us through various men’s recollections of their encounters with her. There is a strong contrast between the Anita they remember and the one we see in the first half of the film before she commits suicide.

By carefully locating each of the three films in specific landscapes, Khosla creates the right mood for mystery and suspense as well as conveying a tone of horror. Woh Kaun Thi is set in the snow capped hills of a small town in India, Mera Saya is set in a dreamy oasis town, and Anita is set in a developing coastal city. A particular trope that Khosla employs in all the three films is to assign a characteristic song that is sung by Sadhana’s character. The song acts as a haunting mechanism designed to lure the male protagonist away from the society in search for their missing partner. In Woh Kaun Thi, Sandhya’s return to haunt Anand is accompanied by a melancholic “Naina Barse”. Rakesh broods away in Mera Saaya, listening to a song, “Mera Saaya,” sung by Geeta, lost in his memories of her. In Anita, Anita lures Neeraj away to a riverbank, singing “Saamne Mere Sanwariya”. All the songs convey the woman’s tremendous loneliness and sadness as she haunts by singing the song in a loop.

By using these elements of horror Khosla masks the actual public concerns that he is trying to address in these films. One of these is his depiction of the partial identity of the woman, her secretive “shameful” past, and hence the uncertainty of her role in the changing Indian society. The other is of the role of the former zamindari system and the difficulty in breaking away from it. This is addressed through the male leads Anand and Rakesh of Woh Kaun Thi and Mera Saaya, respectively. Though these men belong to a class of noblemen, they have to pursue a profession (Anand is a doctor, and Rakesh is a lawyer) in an independent democratic India. While Anand inherits a huge property, Rakesh is a “Thakur” or nobleman and lives in a huge elegant mansion by a lake. Both these men are unaware of their wife’s past and have never met her family, shockingly, not even when she “passes away”. The unruly hauntings that follow her death push these men to the verge of insanity that is only resolved with the killing of the malevolent twin restoring in some way the old order.

In these two films, Khosla seems suspicious of the ideologies of the emerging modern Indian couple of the 1960s. The practice of arranged marriage, marriages arranged by parents, a tradition that has persevered in contemporary Indian society and continues today. Within this tradition parents of each partner were well aware of each other’s families and their history as living in the village allowed little anonymity and privacy. However, the transition of this practice in modern and urban independent India was not a smooth one instead it was filled with suspicion and doubt especially concerning the woman’s moral character and past. The occurrence of strange events in the two films then comes to symbolize the eruption of the old order into the present and points to the idea that a transition from the old to the new is not going to be a smooth one and that a lot has yet to be learnt.

Anita follows a significantly different narrative to the previous two films. In the beginning of the film, Anita commits suicide because her father stops her from marrying her boyfriend, Neeraj. Compared to Anand and Rakesh in the preceding two films Neeraj is a not a nobleman but an honest and humble writer for a newspaper. Rather than passively mourning like Anand and Rakesh he smells foul play and actively investigates the reason behind the strange occurrences by digging into Anita’s past. Also, unlike Sandhya and Geeta, of whom we know nothing apart from their roles as wives in the house of their respective husbands, Khosla gives us ample experience of Anita’s life in her own home, in her own room and space. We see signs of an independent woman in her; she drives herself around, wears her hair short in the form of a bob as a “modern”, hip woman, and does not shy away from giving her opinions. She asks Neeraj, a man who socially belongs to a class lower than hers, to marry her choosing the unconventional court marriage over traditional Hindu ceremony, which is quite a radical move for that time. By suggesting court marriage Khosla seems to hint at a progressive practice of the marriage institution although he fails to develop it further.

When compared to its two predecessors in the trilogy, Anita offers a clear picture of Khosla’s maturity as a filmmaker and his realisation of the potential of filmmaking and storytelling as a lens through which to digest his changing world. His choice of a common man as one of the leads in the film shows that he has come to terms with the death of the old zamindar order and has made peace with the fact that a noble past is no longer required to validate a person’s character or virtue. More importantly, there has been an evolution in Sadhana’s character. She has evolved from playing Sandhya, a docile and subservient wife who quietly accepts the insults of her husband, and Geeta, who remains mute at the most crucial times in order to keep her past a secret, to finally embodying Anita, a girl who doesn’t easily give in to her fate, and fights all the way through to be reunited with her lover.

Anita is also Khosla’s attempt to overturn the very formula of horror he became comfortable with by reinventing the logic of suspense. He flipped audience expectations by depicting Anita as just a victim of cruel lies and weird male fantasies and deconstructed the absurd male fantasy concerning a “mystery woman” and the threat she poses. Khosla does this by insinuating that these are nothing but male anxieties threatened by the introduction of women into the public domain—something that I’m not sure he was even aware he was doing. Unlike Sandhya and Geeta, Anita has no partial identity, evil twin or a secretive past. By naming the final film after her Khosla is no longer playing with imagery of ghosts or shadows. Anita survives until the end giving us a glimpse of what a fully developed female character could be.

Khosla creates a sense of otherworldliness and unfamiliarity allowing himself more creative freedom while toying with the horror mood. To achieve this he developed motifs and aesthetics that managed to not only create a sense of horror but to also communicate creatively the anxieties that were prevalent socially and politically at that particular time. Surely, certain Gothic elements are present in Khosla’s trilogy, but rather than being simply replicated as plastic objects and props to decorate and fill the landscape they are employed as sub-textual characters with their own cultural significance and history. It is a disappointing reality that these aesthetics have been left, so far, unexplored and underdeveloped with Bollywood filmmakers still looking for “inspiration” any place elsewhere than films from their own industry.

Notes on Contributor

I have completed my Masters in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. I did my Bachelors (Hons) in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University.

Having studied film and media theory and aesthetics for my Masters, I have studied, researched and attended seminars on diverse and varied topics, such as, Indian Cinema, Historical Trauma and Memory in Cinema, South Indian Cinema, Asian Cinema, Science Fiction Cinema, Global Cinema, European Cinema, and Transnational Cinema.

I have spent most of my academic life on exploring the horror genre, the figure of the female vampire and the ghostly woman character in films and literature. One of my really well received paper has been on Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which I recently presented at NYU’s Graduate Student Conference at the TISCH School of Arts.