The Dispossessed (G Aravindan-1991)

Written and Directed by G Aravindan
Cinematography Sunny Joseph
Editing KR Bose
Music Salil Choudhary
Starring Mohanlal, Neena Gupta, Neelanjan Mitra, Shobhana, Padmini

Vasthuhara or The Dispossessed, Aravindan's final film, takes up a theme that is of historical significance. But instead of treating it in its broader context, Aravindan pares it down to the personal, which in turn reflects the larger society around it. Aravindan's cinematic swansong is a portrait of a people who have been deprived not only of their land and wealth, but their very identities, making them refugees in their very own land.

The film opens with newsreel footage of scores of people migrating from East to West Bengal during the post-independence partition, as a voiceover describes the suffering the migrants are put through. From there, we cut to 1971 in Calcutta and are introduced to Venu (Mohanlal), a Malayalee officer at the Rehabilitation Ministry who is involved in relocating refugees based in Calcutta to the Andaman islands. 

One day he is approached by Arathi (Neelanjan Mitra), a middle-aged Bengali woman who requests him to deport her to the islands so that she and her two grown-up children can escape from their impoverished lives in Calcutta. The woman comes across Venu as being familiar, be he is unable to figure out how. Further probing reveals disturbing truths about Arathi's connection with Venu's family, and her daughter Damayanti's (Neena Gupta) dislike for Malayalees. We do not see much of her son, except in the scene when Damayanthi takes her to him, who is under hiding due to his involvement in the Naxalite movement.

Aravindan being a high-brow intellectual himself, is apparently disdainful of the pretensions of the Malayalee, as is evident in the scene where a group of Malayalees in Calcutta discuss the greats of Bengal literature surrounded by food and drinks but are apparently oblivious to the harsh reality that surrounds them. Often, the greed of the upper classes in Kerala when it comes to property is highlighted in this film rather explicitly, which is unusual for an Aravindan film.

Based on a novel of the same name by CV Sreeraman, The Dispossessed is deeply humane in its regard for the woes of the expatriates, though Aravindan is never vocal about his empathy. He prefers to give us small visual cues from which we have to relate to the whole.

Like in his other work, The Dispossessed takes on a loose narrative structure, taking occasional detours by focusing on the faces of refugees as they are being transported to the islands, intercut with images of a Durga Puja, one of the most important festivals in Bengal, and the immersion of the Durga idol in the Ganges. The film ends with the refugees being transported in a ship, followed by newsreel footage of the exodus of 1971 and the India-Pakistan war that eventually culminated in the creation of Bangladesh after another round of horrible bloodshed. The downtrodden of the earth are indeed a condemned lot.

Celluloid (Kamal- 2013)

Written & Directed by Kamal
Starring Prithviraj, Mamta Mohandas, Chandni, Sreenivasan
Cinematography Venu

I have a hunch that more than telling the story about a long-forgotten pioneer in Malayalam cinema, director Kamal (not to be confused with actor-director Kamal Haasan) wanted to take his viewers through a journey to the times when films where made on film and projected through film. Though 35mm screenings have remained the norm until a few years back(I'm talking about India),  the movie going public were largely ignorant of how a series of 24 still pictures flickered on the silver screen to create movement ever since they were bombarded with several video formats like the VHS, VCD, DVD and now the Blu-Ray. Nostalgic crap, you would say, but it is also evident of the attachment an artist can have with his tools.

This feeling for a fast-dying tradition is evoked throughout the movie, right from the first scene when a child burns an entire reel of film down to the last scene, where JC Daniel's last son, Harris (Prithviraj again) confesses that he had burned the only copy of Vigathakumaran (The Lost Child), the first film made in Kerala, by a Keralite. Several such glimpses abound in the movie, like in the scene where he holds out a strip of film to his wife Janette (Mamta Mohandas) and explains how the illusion of movement is created. Another moment is while  he lovingly rewinds a reel of Chaplin's The Kid and briefly dwells on Chaplin's image embedded on each frame.

One of the disappointments I encountered with Paresh Mokashi's Harishchandrachi Factory, which documented the making of the first Indian film Raja Harishchandra, was that despite the better quality in the acting, the filmmaker hardly touched upon this aspect, and worse, treated silent films as an anachronism. Celluloid, on the other hand, dwells on its protagonist JC Daniel's (Prithviraj) initial fascination with the film medium and is more respectful of the early films, as seen when the local townspeople witness a screening of The Kid which is held in high regard by our protagonist. If the film is to be believed, JC Daniel had set his ambitions higher, and unlike the staple mythological films made in the country at the time, wanted to make a "social drama" that could stand on a par with Chaplin's masterpiece.

The first half of the films are laden with a lot of humour, when Mr Daniel begins shooting his film and has to handle actors who have never seen a motion picture camera before. The social context of the times is also an important sub-plot in the film, especially the despicable tradition of caste oppression, which Daniel boldly defies by roping in a lower-caste woman Rosamma (Chandni) for the role of a Nair woman in his film. This will turn out to be the nemesis for Vigathakumaran, the film whose fate turns out to be exactly that of its title.

The film's second half chronicles how Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan (Sreenivasan), the writer, catches up with an aged, impoverished and forgotten Daniel and writes his biography, the only source of reference for anything related to the pioneer, and we follow his struggles as he tries to get the government to give the forgotten pioneer credit as the father of Malayalam Cinema. Though not as interesting as the first half, it still is an interesting watch, thanks to a decent script by its director Kamal.

I would, however, not call the film a masterpiece, especially not when you have Prithviraj, the lead actor, delivering an uninspired performance, which is the same of all his films. But you take it for granted that there are no other actors in the industry young enough and can get the Travancore accent right, besides the fact that you need a familiar face to bring the audience to the theatres. Equally unimpressive is Mamta Mohandas' performance, though she does better in the second half as the aged wife. This handicap of the film is given redemption by a strong supporting cast and by some impressive production design.

Despite its flaws, Celluloid is still a recommended watch since it is, to me, more original than what normally passes for as "new generation" cinema in Kerala and the downplaying of musical numbers as seen in a handful of recent releases is indicative of a sort of recovery in Malayalam cinema, which, for more than a decade, was hell bent on churning out stuff that looked like its counterparts in Tamil and Hindi.

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles-1941)

Directed by Orson Welles
Written by Orson Welles and Herman J Manciewicz
Cinematography by Gregg Toland
Edited by Robert Wise
Music by Bernard Herrmann
Starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick

A shot of a wired fence with a No Tresspassing sign on it and a castle in the distance dissolves into another shot that takes us on the other side of the fence- we have defied the warning.

The very opening shot of Orson Welles' debut feature Citizen Kane strangely evokes his own non-conformist  nature. He was, in a way, signifying through the very first couple of shots that he was going to break all the rules that hitherto existed in the Hollywood tradition of filmmaking.

The film, as we all now know it, is a character sketch of Charles Foster Kane, the newspaper baron and pioneer of yellow journalism, from the perspective of a newsreel, Kane's guardian Mr Thatcher's manuscript, and testimonies provided by his associates and partners, interviewed by a journalist who wants to know what Rosebud, Kane's dying word, is all about. While neither of them has a clue, the audience finally gets to see at the end of the film what it is all about.

The story of how George Orson Welles, an amateur theatre and radio artist, grabbed a Hollywood project at age 24- a deal which most people could only dream of -is the stuff of legend. Welles had already gained fame and notoriety for staging Shakespeare's Macbeth using a team of Afro-American actors, and for his radio adaptation of HG Wells' War of the Worlds, which drove an entire city wild with panic. His approach to his first movie project was also in the same spirit of rebellion, and that is exactly what makes Citizen Kane such an enduring film.

Another fact about the film that is enshrined in legend is that the film takes several digs at William Randolf Hearst, the real-life press baron still living at the time, who made a marketable commodity out of journalism. Another side of the mogul that was extensively caricatured in the film was his relationship with his mistress, actress Marion Davies, who was portrayed as Susan Alexander, a singer in the film.

While the premise in itself had enough to give it notoriety, Welles looked for more. Another factor that gave Kane its notoriety upon its release and which is one of the reasons the film is celebrated today is its technique. The film made extensive use of fragmentary flashbacks, cunning editing (the abrupt cut from Kane's deathbed to the obituary newsreel; a 10-year-old Kane wishing Thatcher Merry Christmas to Thatcher wishing Happy New Year to a 25-year-old Kane), expressionist lighting, an unconventional soundtrack, deep focus photography and single take coverage of scenes. All this, packed into a two hour movie, seemed too much for the audience of 1941 to take in, and Citizen Kane failed at the box office.

But this notoriety turned into renown in a few years' time, thanks to the critics' championing of the film (Andre Bazin, especially, was bowled over by the film's use of deep space, so was Bosley Crowther of the New York Times), and especially by the interviews delivered by Welles and his DP Gregg Toland. That, and  the relative oblivion of non-Hollywood films in the international film scene helped Kane in being reputed as the first film that made use of the effects mentioned above. It also won acclaim as being the first film that showed the ceilings of sets.

But as time has now proved, several of these innovations were already in place in other filmmaking cultures. Post-50s, the proliferation of film festivals and international film culture revealed that Mizoguchi and Ophuls were already pioneers of the long take, Renoir had perfected deep focus photography in The Rules of the Game, and Yasujiro Ozu was showing the ceilings of sets years before Kane was released. Despite these revelations, Welles' film continued to be voted as the greatest film ever made for over 50 years, until Hitchcock's Vertigo toppled it in the Sight and Sound list of 2012.

This surely does not mean that Citizen Kane is not a great film, for it truly is one of the twentieth century's great works of art that demands analysis yet defies it. While the several innovations the film is credited with was already in place in several filmmaking traditions around the world, Welles, as he himself admitted in an interview, had the advantage of total ignorance of their use by other directors and hence, made use of them in his own, original way. Besides, he had the expertise of cinematographer Gregg Toland by his side, to whom he would ever remain indebted.

Annayum Rasoolum- Juvenile, but Heartfelt

Directed by Rajeev Ravi
Written by Santosh Echikkanam
Starring Fahadh Fazil, Andrea Jeremiah, Aashiq Abu

The basic premise of Annayum Rasoolum is one of the most cliched, predictable and what was once the staple fare of pan-Indian cinema through the late 80s and 90s: love at first sight, boy pursuing girl until girl agrees to fall back in love, unwilling families on both sides, girl eloping with boy, and the eventual climax. But what makes this film worth the watch is the freshness in treatment.

For one thing, the traditional song-and-dance routine is entirely done away with, the songs merely to highlight the emotional state of either of the characters. The story is set around Fort Kochi , serves as a major backdrop to the events around which the story will turn. A lot of emphasis is placed on characterisation, and each character in the film become quite believable. Dialogues are pared down to a minimum, and melodrama is also downplayed to a great extent. It is the eyes that do most of the talking, especially the eyes of our protagonists. Everything, from infatuation to search, discomfort, anticipation, acceptance, disillusionment and devastation are all communicated with the eyes.

Rajeev's skills as director are also evident in this work, in the way he stages his scenes and especially in his handling of actors. Annayum Rassolum is one of the most well-acted films in Malayalam I have seen in a long while, and every character, right down to the menacing brother of the heroine (another cliche!), are done quite convincingly. Even directors Aashiq Abu, as Rasool's brother and Renjith as their father, have played their parts convincingly.

When a film has so many virtues, one has to ignore the weak storyline. And yet, the film manages to rattle you with its ending in ways few films dealing with the same plot actually can. And have.

Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati- 1958)

Produced and Directed by Jacques Tati
Written by Jacques Tati, Jacques Lagrange and Jean L'Hote
Cinematography Jean Bourgonin
Editing Suzanne Baron
Starring Jacques Tati, Jean Pierre Zola, Adrienne Servantine, Alain Becourt

How do you study a film that is devoid of plot or detailed character analysis and yet is a classic?

Jacques Tati is perhaps the cinematic equivalent of Samuel Beckett, whose plays dispensed with the Aristotelian tradition of storytelling, which laid emphasis on plot and characterisation. Both Beckett and Tati dealt with the increasing isolation of the individual in the modern world.

As one of the major filmmakers during the post-war era, Tati, along with others like Antonioni, Bresson, Bergman and Godard, would be instrumental in changing the way films were read. His third feature film and his first in colour, Mon Oncle is essentially a tour-de-force of set pieces involving Mr. Hulot, Tati's trademark character, and his sister's son Gerard, who lives in an ultra-modern house and spends every evening after school with uncle Hulot. While Gerard and his mother are fond of Hulot, his father, an executive  at a factory, is disdainful of him, largely due to his simplistic ways.

Hulot's sister tries every trick possible to get her brother into respectable society, like getting him a job at her husband's plant and finding a girlfriend for him, but they all simply fall flat. Hulot simply does not fit in "society proper"

Several of the film's set pieces revolve around the ultra-modern house Gerard and his parents stay in. It goes without saying that one of the prime concerns of the film is its lampooning of modernity. But that is not all there is to it. Tati also takes several digs at a society that prides itself on status and wealth.

Mon Oncle earns its praise mainly due to the way Tati gets his points across to the viewer. His use of colour to pit the old-fashioned world of Hulot to the modern, sterile world of his sister and her family, is simply extraordinary for its time. The dull greys of the modern settings, with the occasional intrusion of strong colours, is strongly contrasted with the warmer colours of Hulot's old-fashioned world.

Tati's disregard for convention can also be seen in his mise-en-scene. Close-ups and editing within a given scene are generally eschewed, opting to let the scene play out in distant, uninterrupted takes. He compensates for this relative rigidity in camera style by making extensive use of choreography, which makes the images a delight to watch.

Even more demonstrative of Tati's flouting of convention is his use of sound, and the soundtrack of Mon Oncle, as that of all of Tati's work, is one of the most meticulously designed in all of cinema. While there is little dialogue in the film, what dialogue there is is largely reduced to being just another sound effect. And yet the soundtrack adds so much to the spirit of the film that a great deal of the film's humour is lost if you switch off the sound, despite the fact that there is little dialogue in it.

There are several analogies that rise when mention is made about the Hulot character, mostly to the Tramp character of Chaplin. They are similar in that we see the same character in successive films (Unlike Keaton, who had different names in each of his films, but shared the same traits). Both characters are non-conformists who do not give a damn about the world. But while the Tramp is a yearning romantic, Hulot is not and does not care to be. His cool detachment is more like the Keaton type.

Tati's brand of film comedy clearly draws from the work of the great silent comics, and he is perhaps the last film artist to have taken their legacy forward. Sure is a pity that this legacy has not been taken forward.

Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi - 1953)

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Produced by Masaichi Nagata
Written by Yoshikata Yoda
Cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa
Music by Fumio Hayasaka
Edited by Mitsuzo Miyata
Country/Language- Japan/Japanese
Cast- Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyo, Kinuyo Tanaka, Sakae Ozawa, Mitsuko Mito and Kikue Mori


Ugetsu or Ugetsu Monogotari, the original Japanese title, is perhaps the most widely seen of all of director Kenji Mizoguchi's films (Sansho the Bailiff is another one). It was an important film for Mizoguchi because it was the first film that brought him international renown.

Ugetsu made its appearance in international film circles closely on the heels of Rashomon, which was an international sensation and gave its director Akira Kurosawa the sort of reputation no Japanese director had enjoyed before. Mizoguchi, who started his career in the 1920s as a director of silent films, was a relative unknown outside his native country. The fact that a Japanese film could appeal to international audiences was proved by Kurosawa's film, which may have prompted Mizoguchi to try the same. 

Incidentally, both the films do share a few similarities. Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyo, who played the murdered samurai and his wife in Rashomon, also essayed important roles in Ugetsu, the cinematographer and the music composer for both the films were the same, and the plots for both the films were created by combining two short stories. And yes, both films won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

But the similarities end there. When it comes to plot, style, tone and performance, the paths of both the films tread entirely different paths. Ugetsu stays clear of any moralising we may hear in Rashomon, despite the theme being about human vanity. Where the tempo in Rashomon is raised to a feverish pitch, and the acting broad (What else could you expect from someone like Toshiro Mifune?), the tempo and acting in the latter film are restrained. 

Mizoguchi tells his story in a more serene way, in the manner of a Buddhist fable. Set in 16th century Japan, ravaged by civil war, the film is centred on two families, that of Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), a potter, who hopes to make the most of the war for his business, and his brother Tobei (Sakae Ozawa), who is driven by his desire to become a samurai. Their wives, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), and Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), are sceptical of their ambitions, since they are motivated by greed. Unmindful of their wives' advice and the eventual tragedy that befalls them, the two carry on. While Tobei becomes a samurai through fraud, Genjuro is enchanted by Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo), who vamps him.

What gives the film its uniqueness is its almost uncanny blend of the real and the ethereal, factors that are often indistinguishable in the film. One could argue that it holds true even in real life, where the illusory is often taken for being real. It is not the characters alone who are unable to differentiate the real from the unreal; we, the viewers, are also deceived in our perception of this seemingly two sides of the coin, and credit has to go to the impeccable artistry of Mizoguchi.

By now, it would have become obvious to you that the heart of the film has its roots in Buddhist thought, which abounds with themes of how man is led to suffering as a result of his own desires and vanity. But there is hardly any moralising in the film- Mizoguchi is content with simply presenting us with the story and does not want any character to stand in as a mouthpiece for his views.

The mood that the film evokes is one of mysticism, and this mood is evoked through Mizoguchi's mise-en-scene, his use of graceful long takes and complex camera movements. Kazuo Miyagawa delivers some of the most beautiful images through his magnificent use of the crane shot. The actors are, for the most part, framed in medium to long shot- even in scenes of dramatic intensity, Mizoguchi prefers to keep the camera distant. The only close-up I can recall is that of Miyagi towards the end of the film. The distanced view that pervades through the film embodies a spirit of detachment, which again has its roots in Buddhist thought.

The score by Fumio Hayasaka also deserves to be mentioned, since it is a vital contributor to the film's mood. While his score for Rashomon used a lot of Western themes (like Ravel's Bolero), the music here is largely Oriental (at least to my knowledge).

Though Ugetsu bought Mizoguchi the worldwide attention he so deserved, he was already nearing the end of his career. He would die of leukemia three years later, at the age of 58.

Siegfried Kracauer- Cinema, it's Basic Properties, Tendencies, and the Issue of Art

The German-born journalist, writer, sociologist and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer is most renowned today for Theory of Film, his dissertation on the aesthetics of the cinema. Among his many elaborate chapters on the subject is his classification of its properties, tendencies and the ever longing debate about whether cinema could be considered "art" or not. 

Kracauer classified the properties of the motion picture into two- basic and technical.

Basic Properties

The basic property of film is very much the same as that of photography in that both the media attempt to record and reproduce physical reality, the only difference being that the former records the world as it evolves in time whereas the latter is frozen in time. It is this ability of the motion picture to capture movement that makes it suitable for recording events and preserving them. But it cannot be counted as making use of the creative potential of the medium.

Technical properties

Of all technical properties that can be attributed to the medium, Kracauer considers editing to be the most significant (It was, undoubtedly, one of the earliest properties that was discovered by filmmakers). Editing helps the filmmaker, through the arrangement of various shots, to communicate an idea. This is where cinema and photography diverge- although photo montage can come close, it does not offer such potential.

Moving from the properties of cinema, Kracauer lists some of the main tendencies of the medium and moves on to list two tendencies, realistic and formative.

Realistic tendency

When the motion picture camera was first invented, the earliest pioneers were content to use a stationary camera and record the movement that was presented before it (Kracauer called such movement external movement). It paid off initially, since audiences were enthralled by the very act of seeing photographed movement. Over time, the novelty wore off and filmmakers were constantly in search of newer ways of expressing themselves.

In this search for newer possibilities of the medium ,filmmakers were quick to realise the potential hidden in subjective movement like a panning, tilting or travelling camera to reveal objects that would otherwise have been left unnoticed. Equally significant was the ability to communicate ideas through by arranging different strips of film in the appropriate manner.

When it comes to presenting an incident on film, staging becomes an important factor. In cinematic staging, it is very often not only the action that demands staging; the surroundings in which the action is staged also deserves attention. Owing to the nature of the medium, it is obligatory that the surroundings in which a scene is staged needs to be as faithful a reproduction as possible as the real world so that the viewer is deceived into believing that the world presented on celluloid is a real one.

Staging an event for the camera can sometimes make an event look more convincing than it would have been were it shot on real locations. An example for this would be Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. Barring the first scene, the rest of the film was shot entirely in a studio, and it looks quite convincing. Chaplin could never have made the film the way he wanted to if he had shot it entirely on location in the stormy mountains of Alaska. But there are situations where the opposite is also true. A famous example for this would be Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, which could never have been shot in a studio.

Formative Tendency

Right from the inception of motion pictures, filmmakers have constantly strived to go beyond merely recording and reproducing physical reality. George Melies can be considered to be the first person in the history of the medium to have explored this tendency of the medium, wherein a non-realistic world is created entirely using photographic means. Since then, many filmmakers have constantly tried to create films that are anything but realistic. The experimental or avant-garde film is one such genre which explores such possibilities of the medium.

As many films have demonstrated over the past century, it is possible to bring both the tendencies together in one film. As a result, you have realistic films that include dream sequences and those where the hero suddenly bursts into a song. Not that they always make an effective combination- there are several examples of films where the two tendencies have been used in woefully mismatched ways –but they can be brought together in several ways that are aesthetically valid.

When is cinema “cinematic”?

Kracauer believes that a film can claim aesthetic legibility if they build from their basic properties, that of recording and revealing physical reality. But there have been reactions against this property, chiefly from the German Expressionist cinema, which revelled in highly stylized, almost dreamlike imagery. But over a period of time, such films have come to be considered less “cinematic” than the ones that draw on physical reality, the reason being that films of the latter type provide a certain degree of insight and enjoyment that the former cannot. Yet there have been films produced time and again that do away with realism and still become popular among the audience.

It is exactly for these reasons that it is good not to be single-minded about the potential of the film medium. In short, there is no standard definition for what can be considered “cinematic”. The essence of cinema lies in how efficiently a filmmaker uses his creative faculties to make the best use of the medium’s potential.

The issue of art

The very concept of cinema as an art form misleads many people into placing it on a par with the traditional art forms. This is untrue since most art forms are free from reality whereas the very nature of film is its function of recording and revealing physical reality. This very function of the medium provides the raw material out of which the filmmaker can make his composition. While it is true that cinema can draw a lot from the other arts like painting, music, literature and theatre, merely transferring them to the camera is a neglect of the medium’s intrinsic potential. If that were so, the world would never have seen films like Battleship Potemkin and Nanook of the North, which would not have existed if there never was a movie camera.