Category: Film essay

Review of Anita — a short fiction film written/directed by Sushma Khadepaun

Karl Jaspers defines boundary situations in which real situations become all-encompassing or transcendental situations. Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books, pronounces limit-images as Jasperian boundary situations in which a situation or action becomes transcendental. Situation and actions resolve into one another to form the continuity of movement i.e. the cinematograph: a writing with movement and sounds.

Shot in a vertical aspect ratio, Yudhajit Basu’s Kalsubai attempts a layering of consciousness that is, at base, hierarchical. The shot, which is between the ‘On’ and ‘Off’, gestures on the recording button on the camera and is a rhizomatic construct i.e., it connects one middle to the next middle. Basu’s attempt however is to challenge this rhizomatic construct and to instead open up a layering of consciousness that is, at base, phallic.

Kalsubai the goddess of the Mahadeo Koli people is the subject of the film. The mise en scène is so constructed that the primordial consciousness is the id, the unconscious that manifests itself as the ego of the subject Goddess. The structuring of the Self is as a tree and not as a rhizome. The vertical aspect ratio also helps one to see the frame’s matching with the expansion of consciousness, as the film progresses.

There are two aspects to cinema. One is the Open construct that allows space and time to be dis-closed. At the same time the voice over suggests the second aspect of the construct of cinema i.e., the Outside represented as thought i.e., through the voice over. Basu manifests the social anima by having only women as subjects praying to the Goddess figure materialised as an idol in the color red. The mountain formation is the face that simultaneously is symbolic of layers of consciousness in the phallus. Simultaneously, the film uses the Earth as geographical formations for the mechanic assemblage, represented by the windmills. The image literally meets its shadow as the passing of the shadow, as the subject represents this Earth as feminine. Cinema is not consciousness but its container.

The film, as pointed out above, is middle to middle through the relationship between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ that opens up to time i.e., the time of succession. This before and after is made possible through the middle i.e., the rhizome. However, Basu seems to be interested in the beginning and the end and not the middle. The beginning and end represent a theological approach to the Self, whereas the middle-to-middle structure of the rhizome represent the logical positivism that is manifest as science. The animals are represented before their sacrifice as Event, whilst the repetitive chants in praise of the Goddess represent the everyday.

Ritual and sacrifice form a dialectic with the everyday that produce the dialectic between pre-emption and delay i.e., chhanda. This metre or chhanda is matched pictorially to represent the opening up of the subconscious as a tree that signifies layers of consciousness. In other words, the aspect ratio is the index of consciousness. The perception is solid, causing a centering of both the Subject i.e., Goddess Kalsubai as well as the spectator (the Big Other), such that the spectator can emphasise freewill to will the shot. In this way, the film does not produce a quality of attention (dhyana) through metaphysics but resolves its subject-object dichotomy through the historicism of space as dialectic.

 

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Kalsubai made its world premiere at the Visions Du Réel Film Festival. It recently won the Grand Online Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

 

Set in the location-space that is the village of Arittapatti in Tamil Nadu, Pebbles (Koozhangal) immediately establishes the Oedipal relationship between the chain smoking, drunk Ganpathy and his son. The two take a bus ride together, the view of the window of which emphasises the cinematographic screen that is between the love-hate relationship between director, audience and actor; whilst at the same time making the actor the agent of the empty signifier (MacGuffin) that carries the film forward.

The film uses imagery inspired from video gaming with each character being followed by the steadicam. Very often the steadicam pans away from the character to allow the audience to project thought onto the imaginary. Between the vignettes are tableaux shots that reduce the plane of the image to a single dimension, i.e. intensity. The top angle shot towards the end transforms this intensity into a geographical location, so that the purpose of cinema, according to this writer, is simply for a body to occupy space.

The land of the location-space represents the masculine qualities of violence and patriarchy, making the mother-figure i.e. Ganapathy’s wife the ellipse in the film.The bus itself is a medium of slowness. During the bus ride Ganpathy participates in the transactional nature of the everyday (by purchasing a ticket) whereas his son is much more interested in the sensorial potentialities of the space, denoted by the shot of him blowing the balloon.

Film maker P.S. Vinothraaj uses the point-of-view shot to connect different characters as the camera follows them much like in a video game. The point-of-view shot denotes a perceptional consciousness i.e. that of wakefulness; whilst the characters appear at rest, in motion or static in a moving vehicle. The film’s cinematography is reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, but is different in one respect. Whereas Elephant centres on the high-school shooting as key event, Pebbles creates vignettes around the notion of the absence of the event.

This creates for a unique feminist approach to film making in which presence is suggested by absence i.e. the absence of the mother and of a central event. This feminist approach is underlined in the final sequence of the film, in which the anima is represented by the puddle of water in the parched landscape. The character uses the pot to collect this feminist consciousness, an agglomeration of consciousness just like the film is an agglomeration of time; whereas cinema itself is the pot itself i.e. the container for consciousness.

Cinema has the ability to transform subject into object and object into energy, so that desire can be withdrawn. Desire and resultant pleasure must wait through delay, or so states the cinema. Prantik Basu’s Bela uses this relationship to desire through the location-space i.e., the village of Bela, which literally means “time.”

Basu’s approach is to transform time into speed and slowness through changing the shutter speed of his camera; whilst simultaneously fragmenting space into light and dark. In this way parts of the frame are static and moving, or light and dark. The multiple exposures create a divination of time, which is simultaneously moving when still, and still when moving. This is possible largely through the pre-empted and delayed editing that create tension through the whole.

The use of diagetic sound and revealing the source of light in the frame suggest grace; that dissolves the relationship between sacral and profane. The use of camera movement against the face and towards the feet create a sensorial experience that challenges faciality; whilst at the same time representing the bare feet as a symbol of freedom from society. The constructed nature of time in the Chhau dance performance forms a binary with the infinite, atemporal form of nature. This atemporal nature suggests the equipment-like relationship between subject and object. In a remarkable sequence a worker balances cut wood in the form of sticks to suggest the relationship between balancing and unbalancing. This equipment has a sense of rhythm making the everyday mechanic much like the body becomes-machine through this rhythm.

Bela is not about gender as gender works at the level of the conscious, but instead of the subconscious female (anima) and male (animus) aspects of the characters. The telegraph pole is the apparatus to connect the unconscious, relating to the filmic unconscious: the film that plays beneath the surface. The equipment that surrounds the characters is surrounded by animals that do not possess the agency of the human characters i.e., their being is poor-in-the-world; whereas the characters are world forming.

As in the films of Luis Buñuel, the partial object represents desire that must be withdrawn so that matter can return to intensity. The dead chickens represent the arrival of sacrifice into the logic of the everyday nature of the space; with the interior spaces pointing to the outside i.e., nature. In other words, constructed time is an index to eternity. Much like Chhau dance which constructs and deconstructs in circles, the train is the repetition of the first note (sama) that creates a repetition in the linear flow of the narrative. In this way, the architectural interior is ruptured by the exteriority of nature so that the spectator feels time as a time.

The anima represented by the deity, is upside down representing the pathological nature of the unconscious. The objects at rest have a different degree of speed and slowness unlike the subjects in the back of the truck that transform a static cinema into one of a body in motion. The wind produced by this motion refers to the materiality of desire which must be collapsed to become one with denotational intensity. In this way, the clothes worn by the Chhau dancers are props i.e., free cinematographic objects. The closing sequences with the circular designs on the floor represent the curve as authentic Indian experience, instead of straight lines that converge and climax at a point.

The Chhau dance itself constructs through the curve, i.e., construction and deconstruction, so that the moving bodies, in their perfomativity are freed from the society they occupy.

 

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Bela on IMDb

 

Film: Tape 39 | presently streaming on Mubi
Director: Amit Dutta

 

The cinematograph can be defined as a writing with movements and sound. The essential problematic of the cinematograph lies precisely within this question—how can the cinematograph move beyond the manifest reality? This manifest reality is the apparent space and time represented before the camera. [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]The purpose of the cinematograph is to move to a higher dimension of reality beyond the manifest space and time of the shot.[/highlight] Marxist film praxis finds its logical realisation in dialectical montage in which “the minimum distortable fragment of nature” is juxtaposed to open out to a single dimension of reality. Cinema does not engage a single reality but shows you dimensions of reality with increased levels of consciousness.

Tape 39, the new film by Amit Dutta tries to emphasise this relationship between the manifest reality and the absolute reality. [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]If film is like producing a complete painting, video/digital is like using pen and paper to improvise a sketch stored on the DV tape.[/highlight] Dutta begins his film by emphasising the iconic nature of memory by showing us the DV tape in the manifest reality of the shot.

Since his early short film Kshya Tra Ghya, Dutta has been able to create labyrinthine forms of image and sounds to create a cosmic map. Can he manage to do this to the index of memory that is footage already recorded?

Dutta emphasises the chaotic through the shot of the glitched footage: the accident that captures the Absolute reality (isn’t this what Bresson also attempts with his models through the repeated retakes). The horizontality of the edit timeline that attempts to uncover the MacGuffin Jangarh Sinh Shyam simultaneously creates a vertical becoming where different magnifications of the same shot are used so that the shot is one on top of the other. Dutta is trying to create a cinema in which transforming states of mind produce a new relationship to the image/sound combination.

The pre-emption and delay are first emphasised through the pan shot and then the increasing speed of the car (a continuous frontal tracking shot?). The symbolic regime is opened out in which the shot of the Shiva-Linga emphasises manifest consciousness through the Linga and unmanifest consciousness through the snake on top of the linga. Countrapuntal to this engagement with manifest and unmanifest dimensions of reality is the landscape as face denoting matter at a degree of intensity.

This vertical movement of the metre (chhanda) produces an interest in the depth in the image so that the unmanifest can become manifest and vice versa; whilst the shots with different magnifications appear one on top of the other, i.e. delay with a verticality. In this way, Dutta is successful in suggesting dimensions of reality culminating in the deep focus shot of the Jangarh’s room where he died. A difficult proposition. Is Dutta trying to say that a dimension of the higher reality can only be achieved through death and its indexical documentation? This “transformation of nature into art” precisely finds its counter-shot in inserts of completed paintings between the shots. [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]Language in the form of inter titles is also an insert: cinema is not a language but language mediates cinema.[/highlight]

This is precisely Dutta’s mandala in Tape 39, i.e. to show you the verticality of chhanda using iconic memory images that document, as in Rossellini, their own unveiling. Every cut lies in between a new approach to the matter landscape that forms a colouring of the mind (for isn’t this what a raga is?); through vertical delays so that the physiological aspect, i.e. the cut, can be elaborated upon. In this way Dutta “colors the mind” (raga) but changes the approach to the cine-note with every new shot. The DV tape then is nothing but an index of memory as map maker that, through the denoted footage (the labyrinths of memory), destroys. In other words, [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]the cinematograph is anti-memory, producing a quality of attention that defies causality.[/highlight]

 

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Film: Ghormua
Director: Mukul Haloi
Duration: 25 mins
Language: Assamese
Award: Winner of the Cinema Experimenta Award at SiGNS

 

Gilles Deleuze defines a crystalline-image as that image in which the transparent actual image and the opaque virtual image simultaneously exist. For Deleuze, when Scottie in Alfred Hithcock’s Vertigo makes Judy into Madeleine he has juxtaposed the actual with the virtual. The juxtaposition of actual and virtual creates a crystal-image, which for Deleuze underlines the material specificity unique to the cinematographic idiom.

In Mukul Haloi’s diploma film Ghormua, this crystalline-image of time is presented as a kind of writing, which his characters free up by recitation.The film begins with a shot of an old lady operating a piece of equipment. This Heideggerean discourse around equipment as a tool to arrive at Being-there (Dasein) enters the denotational or symbolic regime. This symbolic regime is represented on the image track by the characters’ sleeping, waking and dreaming.

On the other hand, the sound provides us with the reality of the image (outside the domain of intentionality). As in Godard, (at the beginning of the film) the inside of the frame points to the outside. Simultaneously,  the deep focus points to what is before or beyond the denoted image. The characters are all written in time, whilst the shot of the road covered with crouching trees is Ozu’s “little time in its pure state”, at different degrees of intensity determined by the presence or absence of light.

The symbolic (denotational) regime enters the indexical regime through the shot of the character Rahul taking a photograph i.e. constructing memory. In other words, creating memory is part of the mise-en-scene of the film. Dreaming, sleep and waking are part of the denotational image as they are represented through the order words of language. The camera is placed at a distance so that the recording of the image deconstructs its own construction. The sound of the bird, that possibility for grace, becomes an index for its own line of flight, at which point the deep focus is disrupted. This is followed with the low angle tracking shots of trees interspersed with smoke: an index for fire. When the fire is eventually indicated on the image track, Ghormua returns to the symbolic regime from the indexical regime. Consequently, the sound of fire frees the construct through its own reality i.e. it is the assemblage’s line of flight. This produces a Self, that is mirror-reflected in the manifest world (as in the films of Tarkovsky), just as the characters and objects are reflected in the lake. And doesn’t cinema only provide us with this manifest reality with higher dimensions of realism without showing us the Absolute?

Haloi is inculcating the power of repetition in the image that is simultaneously dreaming, awake and in a state of perpetual deja vu. This power of repetition creates rhythm in the indexical regime, finding its culmination in the theatricality of the performance, by the character who evokes the beloved. The transformation of the object in the film is precisely this transformation from material equipment (as in the opening sequence) to immaterial equipment represented through MacLuhan’s “massage” i.e. the medium. The utterances are indexes of writing, much like cinematography, in Robert Bresson’s sense, is a writing with movement and sounds. This indexical regime finds its counterpoint in the intensity of light. This intensity of light is gradually diminished until the shot of the completely dark room that shows us the lamp as light source. This symbol of lamp as light source takes us back into Plato’s cave of shadows connected through that physiological aspect of film: the cut.

In Haloi’s film, the dream consciousness requires the mediation of language which moves from the indexical regime to that of suggestion. This suggestive discourse has an absence of light: that zero-intensity Body without Organs; that creates an imaginary image which the spectator realises by listening to the utterances on the soundtrack. The character, looking outside the frame, describes her dream; as the framing shows us the hands of a character outside the frame i.e the inside points to the outside and vice-versa (is this an indication of Godard meeting Bresson? A strange proposition!).  In the meanwhile the sound points to the reality of the image, which for Haloi is the horizontal movement of the final shot: the flattening out of the image to a single dimension.

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The director of Ghormua, Mukul Haloi, studied filmmaking at FTII. His documentary ‘Tales from our childhood’ is included in the film course at Gottingen University, Germany. He has been a special invitee at Griffith Film School, Australia, as well as Berlinale Talents, Germany.

Ghormua is presently streaming on Movie Saints. And below is the screener of one of his earlier short films.

 

Viewing a film can be thought of as a game played between the spectator and the director. The game comprises of the director intentionally constructing the shot, whilst the spectator tries to predict the next shot via the cut.

Of late, there has been a renaissance of a metaphysical form of cinema that appropriates space as time; following the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books: L’image-mouvement and L’image-temps. This approach popularized by the films, writings and discourses of Mani Kaul, has been the only consistent critique of the realism of Satyajit Ray in India. Contrary to the metaphysical approach to film is the dialectical approach, in which space and time conflict and contradict with one another, or form dialectic. G.W.F Hegel developed dialectical materialism, later taken up by Karl Marx in his critiques of capitalism.

Dialectical cinema, pioneered in the silent films of Sergei Eisenstein, could only find its first ‘talkie’ in Vselovod Pudovkin’s Dezertir. In this film, image and sound are in conflicting relationships with one another. In Indian cinema, a uniquely local approach to dialectical cinema was developed notably in Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, which finds its color counterpoint in Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan. In the latter, space and time provides a rational basis to history, rooted in Hegel’s dialectic, such that myth and reality form the space for the circular enfolding of History.

In Sthalpuran (Chronicle of Space), director Akshay Indikar weaves a dialectical cinema that is closer to the conceptual empiricism of David Hume, in which experience is the only basis of determining the ‘reality’ of space and time. This ‘chronicle’ is precisely the narrative, forwarded by the Marathi inter-titles; whereas ‘space’ is the location-space, which is nothing but matter occupying a degree of intensity. In other words, narrative and matter, combined with Indikar’s unique approach to the two, raise several important questions to the nature of cinematographic practice, namely: What is the relationship between depth-of-field (as in the films of Orson Welles) and a flattening of space (as in the films of Jean-Luc Godard) and can the two find a cinematographic relationship? Is a static shot in between a track and a handheld pan? Can time be frozen via the indexical (the stopped clocks that are a physical proof of time but do not work) instead of the symbolic?

Indikar provides several answers to these questions through his dialectical approach to film form that emphasize the dialectical relationship between space and time. For him, space is feminine, whereas time: masculine. The temporality of the film, its own duration, manifests itself in the story of the boy adjusting to the fragmented rhythms of a Konkan village. This manifestation finds its crisis in the handheld sequences in the city that find their Othering in the Maharashtrian ritual celebrating the initiation of the boy’s sister into Womanhood. In other words, the masculine becomes feminine, or time becomes space. As Martin Heidegger points out Dasein (Being-there or Existence) is a Being (temporal) that is there (spatialized).

Speaking like a cinephile, Sthalpuran is an Ozu film with the camera at a distance, and without reverse-shots. This is not to say that Indikar’s penchant for ordinariness in his content, reminiscent of the Japanese maestro, is derivative; for it has a unique authenticity in its approach. Most notable, in this context, is the fragmentation of rhythm to capture the texture of the sound-image combination that culminates in the tracking shots into the object. This is the primary position of cinema: between camera and object, which Indikar indicates, converges on the object; whilst the image and sound diverge from one another.

 

Sthalpuran has been nominated for the Crystal Bear,
Berlin International Film Festival | Feb 2020

 

How can point, line, shape, curve and texture be applied to the form of film? This question drives veteran Piyush Shah’s debut documentary The Third Infinity. Shot over 15 days in January 2017, Shah’s approach is to capture the grid in such a way that the flattened out space collides with depth and verticality, and horizontality form a mandala that free up time.

The essence of the film is cinematographic consciousness and its representation as an index in the film. The images, at the beginning of the film, show a flattened out space at the right half, and a deep space in the left half of the frame. Shah keeps reframing so that he is able to cut directly into space and produce a temporal collage of a new kind. The argument of this piece is that, with a certain approach to film form, it is possible to create a new image even in a post post-modern world. The horizontal plane represents the horizon which is the representation of bliss (ananda) and the vertical is an indexical for stages of consciousness that the film form can transform the viewer’s perception into.

The symbolic is represented by the triangular formation with which the film opens and into which the water thuds into, which represents a feminine energy. This grid like meeting of flattened shape and depth finds its own rotation along an axis. The manifest reality of this rotation, in other words, is in the swapna awastha, whilst the spectator is in the awake or jagrut awastha. The frame, the totality of matter in the image captures a straight line whilst it documents movement in a curve: is this a cinema of the tangent, in which the straight line meets the volume of a curve?

Shah’s use of color is reminiscent of Bauhausian color schemes, with yellow as the sruti or tonic color complemented by the red and the blue as is the Bauhaus dictum influenced by the writings of M.H.J Schoenmaekers. Having spoken about the matter in the image and the image itself, we now turn to sound. Sounds are used as indexes for fragments of rhythms:the sound of the helicopter, an index for the closing shot of Mani Kaul’s Before My Eyes, finds its counterpoint in the rotation-translation-line of flight assemblage that the sound of the cycle is a referent for. Similarly the kitschy sounds from advertising jingles and Bollywood songs refer to the outside of the purified space of Beneras that realizes itself through the suggestive form of the soundtrack. On the visual plane, the shot of the pigeon flying is precisely an index for the Deleuzean line of flight by which the spectator is free of meaning.

Which doesn’t mean the film is free of meaning or only celebrates experience. The indexicals implied in the above paragraph culminate in the shot of the red arrow pointing upwards that is an index in a visual form. The jor section where Raga The Third Dimension develops finds its symbolization in a vistaar of Raga Todi on rudra veena culminating in the shots of fragmented sounds and varied rhythms, in which a 4(16) beat cycle is broken into a 7 beat cycle which then becomes a 6 beat cycle. This is precisely where Shah returns to electronic sounds in the third quarter of the film to imply transcendence to a next level of consciousness. This transcendence is at the same time a new beginning i.e. in this new level of consciousness. Cinema however is an immanent form, which as Deleuze points out is virtual-real and not actual, and for Shah this immanent form is its representation as space. The lines of flight discussed above are precisely this proof of immanence whilst the indexes refer to transcendental possibilities of the image,

The solidified image finds its counterpoint in the liquefied images of Benaras ghat and the gaseous images of smoke. The solid and liquid combine in the paddle boat in which the equipment i.e. the paddle produces movement, only to be replaced by the diesel boat in which the sign is replaced by the signal, that moves the boat forward. This signal is a representation of post-modernity in all its form that dissolves the sign and all forms of objectivity. The Third Infinity tries to argue that the real of the dream is all the camera can capture as the spectator is in her/his waking state. For Shah, this ‘real’ of the dream is precisely equipment: the paddle which one links to Shah’s work as cinematographer i.e. equipment and moving into combination or appropriating equipment as the only way of capturing ‘the reality of the fiction’ that the ‘documentary’ cannot help but become.

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The Third Infinity was nominated for IDSFFK 2018.

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