“documentary Brahminism”

Here is a part of the article by documentarist Amudhan R.P. from Madurai. The complete text can be found here.

‘The new wave:
But there is a small problem which is both internal and external. There is a new trend emerging in Indian documentaries now. It may not be obvious, but it is subtle. Or it is both. It is the new wave of personal films. These films are also apolitical. They are negating the whole concept of wider audiences. It is almost equal to multiplex wave of filmmaking in Indian feature film industry. It is almost equal to exclusive film shows organized by European film producers in 1890s to 1920’s.

Let me explain that. A feature film recently in Tamil language did very well in box office of multiplex cinemas in big cities while almost bombed in smaller towns. The film was based on cosmetic love story portraying urban life with consumerism as a core value. The cost of tickets in multiplexes is too high, that the film need not do well in smaller towns at all. In other words the common people of Tamilnadu need not participate in that film. Despite that the film can do well. The film catered to urban audience with particular sensibilities and values. It is a sign to show the power of multiplex cinema and of course money. This can lead to exclusive cinema and a reverse to what happened in 1930’s where cinema had to include people from all strata of society to succeed economically.

It is also happening to Indian documentary. The films commissioned and broad cast by PSBT or NDTV are of the same nature where only soft issues are dealt with. Serious political issues are not encouraged and more and more film makers are falling into that trap. Although there is nothing wrong in making personal and artistic films, they should not be the only documentaries that are made in this country. If documentary as a form is left to urban film makers alone that can become a reality. Although there are 100 functioning documentary filmmakers in Mumbai alone, not one documentary on farmer’s suicides has been made so far. Such is the social responsibility of an urban filmmaker.

When Films Division lost interest in producing documentaries in 1980’s due to political and economical compulsions, only independent and activist film makers took it up. They begged, borrowed and robbed money from somewhere and somehow made documentaries dealing with serious political issues facing lot of difficulties. They also took the films to the people. They screened not only their own films. They screened films made by others too. Suddenly it is being propagated as an outdated concept. Articles are written about. Interviews are published. That people’s documentary or activist documentary is gone.

Now the new genre of personal and artistic films has some specific characters. They need not face audiences. They do not have the responsibility of catering to general public. They have international film festivals and international funding. Nothing comes in between them and victory. More and more filmmakers from film schools and institutes are also taking up this style of film making and producing. It is almost like multiplex cinema. In fact some of the new documentaries are also being screened in multiplexes these days. Although one can see it as another space for screening, it can also lead to exclusiveness.

There is also a danger when the apolitical style of filmmaking is getting standardized and popularized through film festivals and awards. Documentary as a form is getting slowly appropriated by such personal and artistic expressions. In a country like India where caste and creed play an important role in access to any resource, such appropriation is a dangerous sign. It can also lead to a documentary Brahminism. In fact it is moving in that direction.

There is space for all kinds of documentaries in India. Artistic, avant-garde, impressionist, cinema verite, personal, political, issue based etc., what ever you call it. But if we succumb to the obsession of shooting ourselves we might end up creating multiplex documentaries alone.
However, there are solutions too.

Village festivals:
India is going through a difficult period politically and economically. More and more billionaires emerge amidst the dead bodies of fellow Indians who happen to be poor farmers, dalits and adivasis. Land, water, sea, forest and air are being taken over by the state and corporate sector in the name of development using “law and order” as a cover. With the failure of media and major political parties to represent ordinary people of India, independent media has all the more social responsibility for the new political forces to emerge.

To make use of documentary as a political form to raise serious political questions about the direction in which the state is led to, the medium has to reach people. The audiences are waiting there in rural areas to watch and discuss films. The film festivals have to go to villages. The film makers should be made accountable for their films. If they face people, the ordinary people instead of just festival and television audiences, more films reflecting people’s aspirations will be created. More new filmmakers with new experiences, new perspectives and new stories from rural areas will emerge. That is the true media democracy.’

Very interesting debate has been raised here. there seems to be caste warfare within the documantary circuit too! Wonder what he’ll think about my films, which completely fit with his description of the kind of degradation that Indian documentaries have been going through– made by ‘brahmin’, for PSBT and international channels, ‘personal’, ’shooting themselves’, urban oriented. Are these traits to be seen as faults, and against social responsibility? My own view regarding social resonsibility of the artist is that, being an artist, one has already given up any social responsibility, because merely the act of picking up a camera and shooting something puts you in a particular position with regard to the ‘people’ you film. The most an artist can do is to ’see’, and by his or her own ’seeing’, hope that others will also ’see’. Thats the outer limit of what an artist can do. As a hyper-urban, English speaking filmmaker, I can understand Amudhan’s particular frustration. It’s the self-indulgence and self-absorption and apoliticism of many of the urban documantaries. (Sarai, watch out!) His solution for this is to take the films to the ‘people’ of the villages and let them judge their worth. But this is implying too much value on the power of documentaries. It is an arrogant view. My answer to that is a documentarist is like the cops in old Hindi movies, always reaching the spot too late, and mostly after the villain has been caught. A documentary or non-fiction film (i like this later term) is always already after-the-fact. Even if you were in the middle of an event, capturing it rather like a war photographer, the film itself does nothing to stop the event from occurring, and moreover, it is in the interest of the filmmaker that the event actually occur so that he or she can film it! Thats the diabolical positon of a filmmaker, whether fiction or documentary. Simply by creating a ‘looker’ and the ‘looked at’, the filmmaker is in a priviliged position. So my clever, cunning ‘brahminical brain’ makes the argument that every filmmaker is by default a ‘brahmin’ so to speak, (in the abusive use of the word!) If filmmakers want to do something useful and actually stop being self-indulgent, the should keep their cameras at home, and go out and do whatever little he can to help someone in distress. But if you want to be a filmmaker, be aware that you are merely watching that distress from behind a camera. If you are then able to make meaning out of that image you have filmed, then thats the best you have done, and contributed to the ‘ocean of knowledge’ (a very ‘brahminical’ thing to say, i guess, hehe!) . Ok, time to dig my nose!

low-tech

Its very interesting, the Japanese, when it comes to communication, or expression of ideas, always prefer low-tech, as opposed to the West, where they really pay attention to design and the ‘look’ of the whole thing. For example, in comics, they prefer black&white instead of colour, TV graphics are cheap and functional, websites are extremely low-tech– just see Comiket’s site– its the world’s largest comics convention, and it doesn’t have a single image on its homepage!! and the site-meter counts more than 16 million hits since 1998. Other examples: animation is mostly 2-D, and hand-drawn frame-by-frame, and even as they shift to computer animation, they prefer to keep the style to look as if it were hand-drawn. The Americans go to great lengths trying to perfect 3-D, but the Japs don’t care about Disney/Pixar style animation. It seems that for Japanese, the motto is to say the most with the least. Economy of style.

low-tech

Its very interesting, the Japanse, when it comes to communication, or expression of ideas, always prefer low-tech, as opposed to the West, where they really pay attention to design and the ‘look’ of the whole thing. For example, in comics, they prefer black&white instead of colour, TV graphics are cheap and functional, websites are extremely low-tech– just see Comiket’s site– its the world’s largest comics convention, and it doesn’t have a single image on its homepage!! and the site-meter counts more than 16 million hits since 1998. Other examples: animation is mostly 2-D, and hand-drawn frame-by-frame, and even as they shift to computre animation, they prefer to keep the style to look as if it were hand-drawn. The Americans go to great lengths trying to perfect 3-D, but the Japs don’t care about Disney/Pixar style animation. It seems that for Japanese, the motto is to say the mosst with the least. Economy of style.

a dream

Since I’ve been reading a lot of Naipaul these days, (a late discovery), I had a dream last night of a meeting with him. I ask him whether he has written anything about his sexual life, and then he shows me his autobiography, in which there is a chapter titled ‘A Manly World’, where he talks about his childhood and his sexual life. He even shows a childhood photo!
Naipaul has never written an autobiography. But his non-fiction work is full of autobiographical events. I think that is better than writing ‘the story of your life’. A writer must become the sum of his work.
I often get dreams where I meet this or that person I happen to be engaging with in waking life. It is as if I can’t meet them in reality, so I meet and talk to them in dreams.
I was reading ‘Beyond Belief’ the other day, his account of travels in non-arab Islamic states, and he talks to a former Pakistani revolutionary. Pakistan had its own naxalite-type movement at the same time as in India (late 60s-early 70s), and was crushed as strongly as here. Naipaul is against armed struggle of the marxist type. I noticed that whenever he meets revolutionaries he asks them one common question. ‘Have you read Turgenev’s ‘Virgin Soil’ (1877)?’ All the revolutionaries he talks to haven’t read it. Naipaul is of the opinion that if only they had read that book, they would have understood the problems of revolutionary politics in a better light, and perhaps not made the mistakes that they did. it is interesting that most people who become leftist revolutionaries are inspired by scientifically written fact-finding books and less by fiction, as though fiction has nothing to do with reality. When Naipaul asked the Pakistani revolutionary about ‘Virgin Soil’, he says that he didn’t relate fiction to his political development. Revolutionary texts on the other hand, are short, simplistic and very abstract. I tried reading ‘Communist Manifesto’ by Marx and Engels, and I found it full of axiomatic sentences that I found hard to engage with. It only left me with a lot more questions.

an ambitious plan

ok– here it is– i hope to do a series of short story comics- 40 pages each–10 stories= 400 pages– over the next two years–collect them in one book– let’s see if i can pull that off!!

The Renaissance of Indian Pop Music

I think Indian pop music, or Bollywood film music, if you like, is going through a renaissance. It’s better than it has ever been, and I think Indian pop music can even make it to the top of the international pop charts. BUT, the only missing link is a face! Pop music needs a face, a star, and India does not have it, yet. That’s because of a curious aesthetic magic in Indian cinema in which the voice of the singer is ’stolen’ and transmuted into the actor, so that all the power of the music is hijacked by the hero/actor/star, leaving the musician faceless. It is strange that the convention of lip-synching continues to this day!
I think Indian pop music has opened up so much because of the use of electronic, processed sounds, which i feel to a large extent liberated film music from its dependence on ‘playback’ singers– the reason film singers were called ‘playback’ singers is because the song is first recorded in a studio and then while it is being pictured with actors, the song is literally ‘played back’ on location while the actor moves his/her lips. These days, with the increasing complexity of the processed voice and the pace of songs, lip-syncing is getting more and more difficult, but nevertheless, the convention remains.
Even though western pop music has had a wide influence on Indian film music, the older music directors never actually used western style singing. When remixingof film music started in the late nineties, all this changed. Suddenly, Hindi film music became history, became antique, and therefore valueable as artifact. In these early remixes, they would include a bit of English rap, or reggae vocals over a heavily processed electronic beats, over which some really old Hindi film song would be sung, and revived for a new generation. Rahman really upped the standard for film music when he started using electronic sounds and foreign rhythms like reggae and hip-hop. I always wonder why this didn’t happen earlier. Maybe with the earlier system, where singing dominated and the ‘orchestras’ played, and the music ‘director’ directed the arrangements, it was simply not feasible to create a real mix of western and Indian.
The remix boom gradually opened up the film music scene, because, with all the sampling, a lot of musicians with a little imagination could hope to bring out a remix album, if not actually make film songs. It reduced the entry barriers, which are still very high in the filmmaking scene, like acting or directing. So, while the film industry needed a drastic makeover after the dead-end of the eighties, it was the new film music that gave it the needed boost of energy. But this energy turned out to be too strong for the film industry. The music evolved so rapidly that the faces, the stars who lip synch and the directors who picture the songs are still trying to match up. Film music still stays far ahead of the curve, and is the most vibrant and creative aspect of a popular Indian film. The acting, story, direction are too far behind and archaic, rooted to the old Indian theatrical conventions.
So far, the film industry has been riding on the backs of music industry. And the Indian film industry is all about music and dance. But its high time that the music industry starts finding its own ‘voice’, and not continue to the fakery of filmstars hijacking the voice through lip-syncing. Filmstars, dance all you want, but leave the singing to the singers, who deserve their own stardom.

Room No. 47

I first noticed Room No. 47 and other occurrances of the number 47 in David Lynch’s films ‘Lost Highway’ and ‘Inland Empire’. in these films, strange events occur in Room no. 47. When I went to Tokyo for the first time, one evening we went to dinner at a dungeon themed restaurant, where customers are taken in handcuffs to prison cell like cubicles and are served food there. We happened to go to cell no. 47. And then, recently, I was reading V.S.Naipaul’s ‘India:A million mutinies now’, and in one of the chapters, he talks about Jarnail Singh Bindranwale, the Sikh leader and militant who was killed by Indian Army in the Golden Temple at Amritsar. When he had lived in the temple, he held court at Room No. 47 in the rest houses inside the temple complex. Room No. 47…

Tamil pulp fiction

One of the problems with being an English speaking Indian is that you lose out on so much of exciting pop culture coming out of the various Indian languages. One such is the explosive pulp fiction scene in Tamil. I live in Coimbatore, and until recently, I never knew that one of the most prolific authors of fiction in Tamil lives in the same town. He has written about 1200 novels, tons of short stories and is a literary star! His name is Rajesh Kumar. I got to know all this thanks to the new ‘Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction’. Of course, for English readers, there’s a veneer of ironic distance, and cool quotient involved in the very idea of taking out this book. But its best to approach this with as little cynicism as possible. For one, there is nothing like this for English readers. There is absolutely no Indian-English cheap popular fiction. Whoever loves this kind of stuff has to make do with foreign bestsellers. That’s something strange about the English speaking culture in India. We refuse to look at ourselves as a ‘local’ culture. We don’t seem to want to read about people-like-ourselves. Even when I see contemporary Indian English comics, there’s little that talks about us and our lives around us. This doesn’t mean that I’m vouching for some naive ‘realism’. It’s simply that most of the stories don’t seem to resonate with our lived experience as urban middle-class Englsih speakers. It’s also important to reconginze that most of us speak more than one language, and are not unfamiliar with local language cultures. And yet, there is nothing for English readers of the type of fiction that these cheap 10 rupee Tamil magazines offer. They are not great for the originality of their stories. But they are great for creating characters that feel and smell like people we’ve seen and met in our lives. That’s affecting.
It was interesting for me to compare the Tamil pulp fiction culture with the Japanese manga culture, since I’m making a documentary on it. I see many parallels. Both are narrative oriented forms, magazine-style,cheap, serialized stories. Both types of authors are prolific (Rajesh Kumar writes at least 10 pages a day, manga artists typically draw 2-3 pages a day, which is a lot!), magazine titles are generally generic, like ‘Big Comic’ or ‘Weekly Boys Comic’ for manga, and ‘Super Novel’, or ‘Great Novel’ for Tamil pulp fiction.Both forms have a certain degree of self-reflexivity, where they address the reader directly. Both have an equal representation of male and female writers, and have both male and female fans. I also found some similarities in some of the cover art. Both forms have genres, like mystery, romance, science fiction, detective fiction. I am not sure though, how exciting Tamil science fiction is…I’m curious to find out.
In the translator’s introduction, she confesses to reading these stories in the school bus, where the driver would lend the magazines kept under his seat. That’s the kind of detail that interests me, because I see these things in everyday life. But in a lot of Indian English fiction, such details get obscured under the weight of grand historical-philosophical statements– check out even some random titles, “the Alchemy of Desire”, “The God of Small Things”, “The Inheritance of Loss”– weighty titles! So, ignoring much of the well-marketed Indian-English fiction, I read ‘Hurricane Vaij’ and ‘Sweetheart! Please Die!’ and ‘Idhaya 2020′, hungering for more translations of full-length Tamil pulp fiction.

Savita Bhabhi

Finally! At last! The thing I’ve been waiting for! AN INDIAN PORN COMIC! Savita Bhabhi is an online comic by a bunch of enthusiasts which has been around for some time now, but I only just got to know about it. Even as some comic enthusiasts in Delhi like Sarnath Banerjee, Orijit Sen, Amitabh Kumar, etc. have been plodding on amidst a lot of ideological confusion trying to make some kind of cool, hip, urban comic, here is something that is direct, urgent, and unabashedly expresses itself as Savita Bhabhi–a horny, married (married! with sindoor and all that!) middle-class auntie hungry for sex– what’s great about the comics is it does its job very well– I for one, got a decent hard-on reading it– this is way better than any snooty ‘graphic novel’ bullshit that’s been in the Indian comics market, and way better than Virgin Comics, who are trying to sell some version of Indian mythology wrapped in the latest superhero fashion. As an Indian male reader, Savita bhabhi is someone I can fantasize about, and yet we are still such a long way off from getting Indian girls have their kicks through Indian comics.

This is not to say that ‘Savita Bhabhi’ has great artwork or great story. My enthusiasm is because I can see that this is an expression that is coming ‘unadulterated’ (um…is there a pun here?) from the minds of these artists. There is no Deepak Chopra here telling them how the characters can be licenced and be used to make anything from coffemugs to grand Hollywood franchises. To me, its a tiny step forward from the Chacha Chaudhury days. It’s high time Indian comics got rid of done-to-death mythological stories and super heroes, and get into our homes and bedrooms, and ultimately our minds, and show all those kinky and crazy and volatile thoughts that are breeding there like cockroaches in the kitchen sink!!!

I’m encouraged to do a couple of porn comics myself!

Tokyo Diary