Archives: Safdar Hashmi On Three “Pseudo-Radical” Films
Safdar Hashmi
Three recent films shown in the ‘Indian Panorama’ section of the tenth International film Festival held in Delhi from January 3 to 17 have drawn a lot of praise from the big press. Adoor Gopalakrishan’s Mukhamukham (Malayalam), Govind Nihalani’s The Party (Hindi) and Ketan Mehta’s Holi (Hindi) have been variously described as “events of the year”, “radical classics”, “outstanding fare”, memorable masterpieces” and so on.
Apart from their by-now firmly established reputations, these films have apparently nothing in common to be thus clubbed together for a review. Their subjects, their styles and the approaches of their directors are all very different from each others.
Mukhamukham tells the story of Sreedharan, a leftist trade union leader in Kerala. The film begins a year before the formation of the first communist government in that state, and ends eight years later, after the split in the Indian communist movement in 1964. From the specific point of view of its director, it looks at the state of the post-split communist movement and tries to impressionistically study the reasons for the split.
The Party is about a group of upper middle class intellectuals and artists, their highly placed patrons, socialites and their hangers-on confronting their individual crises, nursing their ambitions and desires and intriguing against each other. This group of people is collectively haunted by the ever-present memory of a young poet who was once a part of their circle but later left them to work among tribals. The film tries to understand the vaccum in the lives of the various characters as opposed to a meaningful and direct involvement with the lives of the oppressed as exemplified by the absent poet.
The plot of Holi is based on a series of small events in a college which end in suicide by a young student. The subject of the film is the lack of purpose and direction in the lives of the students which has made them frivolous, perverted and sadistic. In a few asides, the film caustically surveys a small group of students who take an interest in issues like library facilities, fees, exams and so on, college karamcharis agitating for their demands and teachers engaged in their endless gossip.
Mukhamukham has a very leisured pace. Its emphasis is on visually exploring moods and states of minds. It explores the sensuousness of objects, places, and people experienced with studied concentration. Dialogue, though not of secondary importance, is definitely subdued by the visuals.
The Party has a more brisk pace and its structure unfolds with remarkable ease. Its fundamental mode of expression is the dialogue. All the characters are not only highly articulate, but are also very fond of expressing their innermost thoughts and anxieties with a good deal of eloquence. The camera adopts the restlessness of the characters as its sweeps in small circular movements or flits from face to face pausing but for a moment to catch a phrase, a smile, a twitch or vaccuous expression in the eyes of the characters.
Holi moves ahead at break neck speed. Deliberately loud, it jumps from sequence to sequence. The camera runs down the corridors, rushes upstairs, climbs the terrace and dives into nooks and corners with astonishing rapidity. In the protracted torture scene, it goes dizzy with the boy being brutalized by his friends. The numerous swishing shots lend a tempo to the film which strongly infects the audience as well. It bombards the spectators with so many experience in such a short time as to leave little time for introspection or review. While in Holi, a young director appears to identify completely with the rauccuous and anarchic iconoclasm of his characters expose their contradictions and double standards. In Mukhamukham the director lets events slowly build up a total picture.
These are only some of the obvious points of difference between these three highly acclaimed films. But it is because of the not-so-apparent similarities between them that they are here being reviewed together. The first thing common between these films is that their directors have very little understanding of their respective subjects. Adoor Gopalakrishnan betrays as much ignorance about the communist movement in Kerala as Nihlani does about the life of the upper middle class intellectuals. Similary, Ketan Mehta displays his total lack of understanding of the student question.
Predictably, this shared ignorance about their areas of interests leads all three directors into adopting the most distorted and misleading points of view, about their subjects, the very views that have been spread by official historians, sociologists and anthropologists of the establishment and political commentators hired by the monopoly press. Where Gopalakrishnan injects most of the myths popularised by the capitalist press and intellectuals about the communist movement, Nihlani resorts to caricaturisation to depict certain popular “types”, and Mehta presents a hard-selling brew of some of the crudest and most superficial middle-class attitudes about the alleged universality of students’ lawlessness.
Gopalakrishnan’s view of the world has nothing to do with history. It is purely impressionistic. This in itself has rendered him incapable of understanding the extremely complicated and intricate subject he has chosen for his film. It has also led him to display extreme lack of respect for the communist movement in Kerala and its enormous contribution in the evolution and strengthening of the democratic consciousness in that state and the rest of the country. But his distorted vision has also characteristically given him a lot of false confidence in the correctness of his own understanding. This is precisely what leads him to give cinematic life to a bogus petty bourgeois view of the split in the Indian communist movement. For him the whole question is ridiculously simple. To paraphrase it, “Before the formation of the first communist government in Kerala, the Communists were dedicatedly among the people are organized them along class lines. When their government came, they became bureaucratic amassed assets for themselves and fought with each other, became personally corrupt and intolerant of dissent and initiative. The old brand of militant workers became defunct. The future lies in the hands of the dedicated and honest young cadres who must break the stranglehold of the organisation to carve out a new path for themselves”. Almost sounds like an editorial from one of the leading national dailies, doesn’t it? But this, in essence, is the understanding Mukhamukham imparts to the spectators.
Needless to say, this stance of a sympathiser deeply tormented by the decay in the movement is the most convenient one for someone who wishes to attack the communist movement and counterpose it with the concept of a movement without an organisation of the working class. A typical stand of the middle-class intellectual, unable to fully accept the working class ideology. A stand that also suits the establishment eminently. Is it surprising, then, that the film is being showered with rare accolades, and its director being dubbed “possibly the finest film maker in the country today”? In The Party Nihlani resorts to a pseudo-realism reinforced by a tight script and stock characters using very familiar upper-class jargon to create a superficially convincing picture of an insular group of people irresistably drawn towards each other for a company yet full of contempt for each other and ultimately alone in their individual sufferings. He scrutinises them in terms of here-and-now letting each one of them do a bit of recapitulation of their past. He reveals a picture of selfish, hollow, ambitious and intriguing people. All of them are made the butt of biting satire by a young girl who is presented as a tongue-in-cheek caricature of the organized leftist movement and as much a part of this closed and self-feeding set-up as the other characters. The lives of these people are thrown in perspective by that of a young poet who has deserted this glittering circle to work among the oppressed tribals. His single act of courage and conviction is made the parameter of judging the careers of the others in the film. Towards the end of the film a debate takes place on the wisdom of his decision. The communist girl attacks him for his romantic fascination with spontanity and individual action and upholds the need for an organisation. But in Nihalani’s film the credibility of this girl is zero since she is shown to equally share the hollowness of the others and to be as much in love with words and unending debates. She and her defence of organisation are thrown up for ridicule, as merely a high sounding web of jargon which serves as a camouflage for inaction. The ideal promoted by the director is of the individual heroism of the poet-turned-agitator. The news of the poet’s tortured death at the end of the film, completes the trauma of the various members of the circle.
Interestingly, Nihalani’s stance is similar to Gopalakrishnan’s. He appears to be angry with these people who talk and talk and do nothing. His anger is really of Olympian proportions, encompassing in its sweep the pillars of respectable society and the communists who, we are told, are as much a part of the establishment as the others Against this spectacle of inaction he sees a ray of hope in the act of individual heroism by the poet-agitator.
Is it not just wonderful that these two directors, working in two different languages in different states, working in very unrelated areas, came to nearly the same conclusions? Great people think alike, indeed!
Coming to Holi, one is confronted by an astonishing cinematic talent. Ketan Mehta who has already earned a permanent place for himself with Bhavni Bhavai (Andher Nagri in Hindi), that wonderful first film of his, comes directly up our street with his second film. This is a film about students. So rapid is the pace of the film, and so absorbing its power, that it is likely to influence a lot of people, young and old. Or perhaps “influence” is not the right word, it will serve to “reinforce” many of the popular notions and myths about student rest and the “brutality inherent in our society”, so assiduously spread by the media and the spokesmen of the establishment. We are shown a large group of foul-mouthed, indisciplined, aggressive and sadistic students engaged all day in hurling obscenities at each other and everything else under the sun, ragging their teachers, fighting over girls, seducing and sodomising their classmates, breaking furniture, hurling eggs at their principal and driving one boy to suicide. The makes several ritual attempts to “understand” this behaviour in terms of their disillusionment with social values and institutions and their corrupt parents. He seeks to present this aggression as a result of their sense of uncertainty about the future. As a vision of the bleak and equally meaningless future he shows us two glimpses — one of a group of college karamcharis agitating for their just demands and the other of a group of teachers in the staff room. The first group is shown as a pack of thugs and the second as a congregation of lascivious, stupid and selfish people too absorbed with themselves to bother about the students. In another aside he shows a small bunch of students concerned about the needs of the students like fees, scholarships and library etc. They are depicted as lackeys and informers of the principal. However, there is one very serious-minded and ostensibly” positive” character in the film the warden of the boys’ hostel. He has a good equation with the boys and they, in return, give him a lot of respect. This “positive” character is the eternal lone ranger, silent and grim and deriving sustenance from the moral storehouse of his idealism. This ideal of director the students is not only the typical individual operator”, he is also the spirit of conciliation incarnate. He will appeal to the management on behalf of the students, but go no further.
It is significant that Mehta’s camera which is so mobile within the campus, never ventures outside the college campus except once briefly to record the lumpen behaviour of the karamchares at the college gate. This refusal to even peep outside the walls of this imaginary college is perhaps understandable. The picture of student life so carelessly built by Mehta iş so obviously distorted, so false and so fragile that it is in danger of collapsing totally if it is once confronted with the correct picture of the democratic student movement in India today. Unfortunately the truth lies outside the pale of interest of our young director. Mehta, our readers will be interested to know, was once a student activist himself. For a person who participated in the democratic student movement and identified himself with the broad struggles of Indian workers and peasants, it is an ignonimous fall to have blinded himself so completely. But perhaps that is just what is to be expected of a person who wilfully cuts himself off from the democratic movement and adopts the company of people like Mahesh Elkunchwar (on whose play Holi is based. Interestingly Nihalani’s The Party is also based on Elkunchwar’s script) who are themselves victims of their self-consuming cynicism and who hold the masses and their movements in contempt. It is interesting to note that through different routes all three film makers have come to an anti-organisation and pro-anarchic position.
The three films briefly discussed above represent the crystalised form of that trend in contemporary Indian cinema which began in our generation with Benegal’s Ankur, continued with his Nishant and Manthan, Nihalani’s Aakrosh and Ardh Satya, Utpalendu Chakraborty’s Chokh, Gautam Ghosh’s Maa Bhoomi, Buddhadev Das gupta’s Grihayuddha and so on. In the guise of radicalism such films present either a pseudo-critique of the Indian leftist movement or uphold the concept of spontaneous struggle independent of a working class party. Many friends are taken in by the surfacial radicalism of such film. It is very important to take a more critical attitude towards this new trend in Indian cinema
It has to be understood that this kind of pseudo-radical cinema that has adopted the road between the masala films of Bombay and Madras and the elitist ‘art cinema has itself emerged out of a need to provide more satisfying fare to a new urban audience. This new audience is not unaffected by the rising democratic movements all over the country and refuses to accept either brand of the prevalent cinema. A new formula, radical in appearance but anti-democratic in essence, was badly needed by the establishment. In the 15 or so years since this kind of cinema first emerged, it has congealed into one of the dominant streams of contemporary Indian cinema. However, one important point needs to be taken note of in this context. The increasing popularity of such films in our country is symptomatic of the need felt by our people of a cinema that subjects our de-people of a cinema that subjects our decayed socio-political system to a scathing scrutiny: In the absence of a truly democratic cinema, this audience is being captured by the purveyors of a hard-selling brand of bogus radicalism. We hope that the advancing mass movements of workers, peasants, youth, students and intellectuals will bring sufficient pressure upon young film-makers to join the mainstream and produce truly democratic cinema which responds to the mass movements of our people and reflects the democratic struggles that characterise this period in our history. Indeed, some such films have already started appearing. Films like Albert Pinto and Mohan Joshi. One hopes that more such films will come in future.
This article was written by Safdar Hashmi and published on Student Struggle around mid-1980s.
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