The crackdown on the grey legal area of intellectual property rights has forced us to rethink the kind access that globalization promised us. Books published by foreign publications that were not easily available even at libraries and films that the increasingly strict and not to mention ridiculously prudish Censor Board refuses to release, were accessible to those of us who wanted to watch something beyond the lazy Las-Vegasness of Kareena Kapoor’s latest outing.

Let’s face it, production houses don’t need an audience any more to break even or even to be successful. The economics of production have changed thanks to intermediary players like television rights, music rights, overseas distribution etc. A full-house is just an incidental feel-good factor, an ego massage really. And as far as books are concerned, especially academic books, students or individuals have never really bought personal copies. No profit comes from individuals, and libraries will buy books irrespective. What then is the crackdown going to achieve?

As we pledge our support to the unidentified owners of lib.nu and to the hopeful aggression of piratebay, may be it is time to rethink what freedom means any more and who it is meant for.

And as I end yet another “The end of…” piece, here’s one by Lawrence Liang who seems to hold more hope than I dare to. Click here to read.

(image: The Guardian)

As Kodak files for bankruptcy following a decision not to invest in digital cameras any more, it seems like the end of an era. It is a decisive moment in the history of cinema, as this move all but seals the fate of celluloid, making way for a cinematic culture that will be dominated by the digital image. As the virtual social network is bursting with stories of people’s first cameras, the cameras they inherited from their parents and grandparents and their many Kodak moments, here are some photos uploaded by BBC and The Guardian that trace a pictorial history of Kodak.

Kodak’s Development in Pictures (by BBC): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-16627900

Women in Focus: the Kodak girl:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jan/19/women-in-focus-kodak-girl-in-pictures

Read more about SOPA at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/719/Homai-Vyarawalla

Freeze the time and slow down its passage, I am mourning my own death;  I am afraid to meet with the moment…cripplingly alone. This is what I took home from Melancholia,

I AM DEAD BY MOURNING IT.

From Terminator to Day after Tomorrow, Hollywood had already churned out a gamut of “end of the world” films playing out the threat of natural disasters and invasion of the aliens on our planet. Lars von Trier takes off from that legacy, but does he really propose a trajectory to the great threat to human existence, advancing the  American obsessive fear  of being wiped out, the fear of the limitations in putting things under control.  Perhaps for the film, the approach of the planet melancholia, only partly emanates from this discourse and the rest of the deeply entrenched nihilism emanates from a shadow of the self, looming large and threatening. It is  a disintegration of the Nietzschean figure of the all controlling superman.  Melancholia is in us, a part of us, which is sent to retreat in the unconscious depths of the mind, by the exuberance of an assurance of rationally generated happiness, wholesomeness and a well being predicated on visibility and control. The impossibility of sharing the suffering of death is the primary predicament which sows the seeds of futility and decay in the film. The impossibility of meaningful communication aggravates the suffering to a state of paranoia and neurosis.

Raising another toast to the soul of the feminine in, Breaking the Waves, Idiots, Dogville, Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist, and now Melancholia, von Trier continues to capture women in their various facets in relation to men who have been posited in his films as weak, insensitive and shortsighted. Women have been the center of all of Von Trier’s films, where either they are the epitomes of selflessness, or custodians of natural human values or embodiments of anti nature, or a born seer who is also doomed. Melancholia explores the various dimensions of death, of the fear of death which almost every human being experiences, and the anticipation of death. Let’s think of the film by beginning to ask what does melancholia mean? Is it sadness, emanating from heavy heart; is it mourning over the death of someone close, or is it  persistent sense of sadness, of possession of a certain knowledge of being doomed, and a simultaneous inability to be in any harmonious relationship with  the presentness of an existence in the congregation of the life world and the affected self. Taking its cue from Antichrist the film opens up the classical dichotomist relation between man and the beautiful, bountiful nature. The big question is, “will it be a friendly planet? Will Melancholia pass us by?”.

Melancholia tries to knit a matrix of complex issues of time, eros, death, eternity, science, consciousness, absence of faith, and nonexistence. It is within this that von Trier tries to cast a hypothetical story, set in an almost theatrical ambience, shot with spot lights and soft key lighting.  A certain shade of light which fills the sky before and after an eclipse.  The narrative unfolds with  a set of extreme slow motion shots, carved in hyperreal temporality. A sense of the surreal pervades each of the shots, like the stag in labor and the acorns in Antichrist , as the three main characters, Justin,  Claire, and her little son Leo, are caught in action and frozen by virtue of the apparatus of cinema. A cut suddenly unsettles this intoxicating imagery half like real, half reel, and highly picturesque with a hint of gothic illusionism, reverting back to an enlarged version of Peter Breugel’s hunting scene in the snow. Thus flows the narrative as a huge tech savvy car tries to make way through a narrow alley, carrying the bride and the groom. The story is in a flash back, but strangely without a point of view, and if there has to be a perspective, it is of the dead, of all of them who will be subsequently living to die until the slow motion shots in the opening matches to complete the circle. Who survived then to narrate the story, none…. But cinema alone! Or may be one of them,  but, the high angle introductory shot into the narrative flow, belongs to no one, not a tree nor  a building on either sides of the woods. The film is chaptered like a novella, as Justine and Claire; named after the two sisters by the Danish auteur. So begins the anachronistic journey into dead time, a time frozen in eternity. There are no ghostly horrors in the narrative world, although the opening shot of Justine’s face in close up with her jelled locks fashioned as thorny outgrowths, framed by birds and leaves caught in their descent, coupled with the bellow of a haunting soundtrack sets the mood of an anticipated horror. The grotesqueness of the horror is underplayed by the characters who live in their own ghostly shadows, the breath and intensity of the impending horror does not befit the tools of representation, and thus is treated as an overwhelming, all encompassing affect. The sheer enormity of the sensibility of death paralyzes Justine in the latter part of the first chapter. The inability to share it pushes her into neurosis. Her disease pertains to the order of the mental and not her physical status, until she has come to terms with the truth. We are alone is what Justine will tell Claire when Claire tries to comfort her in the second chapter. Loneliness accentuates the heaviness of the irremediable sadness.  Quite interestingly both the sisters look whitish and lost in their stone cold faces, even Claire who tries to apparently remain on top of things is always pallor faced, who pulls herself with an innate courage into a long way until her suspicion becomes a reality. Claire had hoped against the odds, and so her plight was more intensified than Justine who believed in  certitude of her knowledge, and therefore towards the end appears more composed.

Melancholia evolves as a site of debate between accuracy and capability of calculative scientific prediction on its paradigmatic axis, and intuition and unscientific predictions and knowledge on its syntagmatic axis. The ground of this debate is tactfully set in the game of beans in the bottle, and the accuracy of predicting the correct number by the guests. Of course Justin is correct, that the bottle has 678 beans, because she can sense things beyond what is manifested in its material forms, before the sight of the rationally trained eyes. The event of the approach of the planet is like an eclipse, only, maybe this time the sun shall never shine on earth again… casting an eternal shadow of death and oblivion.  Finally, the debate meets its resolution, when John’s claim that melancholia has been predicted by scientific calculations to be a “friendly planet” proves to be a miscalculated conclusion on an alien object. John defeat had forced him to commit suicide when plethora of scientific analysis went awry.  But, John too perhaps had a haunch of this and therefore had hung on to scientific analysis and predictions with vehemence as a belief system. His constant iteration became his sign of doubt. The entire scientific apparatus symbolically the telescope, and scientific belief( the fact that Leo had invented a tool to measure the speed and map the approach of the mammoth Melancholia) falls flat, and much before the earth is shattered we see both the most active men in the film are lost, John and the servant and their father.  The scientists tried to witness and archive the moment but ironically became archived by the lashing Melancholia, stowed away in oblivion, maybe in the recesses of the cosmos.

My question after having watched the film is, was Melancholia only affecting the secluded mansion and its inhabitants, is it not uncanny that the affect is never addressed among the villagers? Yes, the servant goes missing and the horse shows signs of an imminent natural calamity, but what I wish to ask is, are they too, not a part of the very same household which goes through this crises in negotiating death and life. Is the affect then not an extension of the thinking mind of  certain social group of people, and therefore by default  becomes a contagious malady caught by the servant and the horse. What is “thought” then – a rational means to render clarity on things beyond tangible control/supervision or things which autonomously exist. Von Trier sets the film almost like  a chamber drama where the space of the chamber flows and meanders itself within the precincts of the mansion.  One thing that cannot escape being noticed is the huge sun dial or some ancient devise to measure time, stands tall in the prim green courtyard before the house. Several times in the course of the film Justine had walked through this stretch, but this mammoth piece of artifact is never seen.  What lies in front of the house, is it a lake – island with silvery water or does its meadow stretch into an infinity merging with an ocean of nothingness. Remember, Melancholia rises from this vast stretch to hit onto the trio of the two sisters and the nephew who had tented up outside at the final call of death, hoping to battle against strategically. In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, thanatos or death personified loomed on the shoulders of the brave knight, but the affect was not hyperbolic, he simply reminded the Knight of his time left on earth to wind up things. In Melancholia the melodramatic affect of death is accentuated by an acute sense of loneliness, of deafness, of insensitivity, perhaps it is not the same Kierkegaardian existential crises of a Christian world view, but a crises in a milieu of the absence of any God, the absence of any religion has already been iterated.( we do not see a church wedding, but all other paraphernalia of the event unfolds in this film, unlike in Breaking the Waves). Does religion help in compromising with this degree of acute affectation? The film of course does not answer these, but unsettles a set of contemporary worldview by positing these alternative thoughts. “This is why I hate you so much Justine”, has been a refrain from her sister, the hate is for seeing and sensing truth and its ugliness. Strong willed and vivacious Claire contacts the malady of affectation and passes on into an existence of fear, horror, and inability to prepare for death. Melancholia prepares for death, it reminds of a close end, her affect has been too late and therefore she dreams of a dramatized ending with a song and wine on the terrace as the earth passes into non –existence, swept off by the invasion of the approaching planet.

Morality has never triumphed in Von Trier’s. It’s a sort of cliché which has mutated over centuries to take the shape of a generative, affirmative value,  growing into an ethics of the self. The self is the protagonist which deconstructs itself contesting its very own self fashioned image of a “self” it performs in its everyday practice,  and in doing so, sometimes loses  out on the essences of  each of its individual fragmented beings, throwing up a contradiction for any singularity in its existence. Von Trier opens up a play of this kind of ethics and the desire of the “self” versus the two most human drives: of death drive and sex drive.

Every life that manifests itself on our friendly planet comes into being by its unique guarantee of non –existence in its materiality. What then has the planet Melancholia got to do with death. Historically western philosophy had always pointed out to an umbilical relation between eros and thanatos. Eros affirms life and thus confronts or mitigates with the death drive in human beings. Melancholia in its first part plays out this binary and its implicit disharmony through its façade of a lugubrious marriage of Justine, an ornate, extravagant event set in the heart of a no where( where the film is actually situated). Like Dogville, it is also a closed world, and at least in Dogville the film’s narrative navigated its way through a network of relationships that the female protagonist had woven, each a double edged sword. In Melancholia, the diegetic world is completely cut off from its larger whole, throughout the sumptuous banquet we hardly ever see any conversation between people who don’t form a part of Justine’s everyday. Claire runs to the village with her son Leo as a last bid to save their lives from the life engulfing planet, but there is no shot to establish the village space other that the lush green vicinity.

Justine the bride is an epitomic celebration of this sense of melancholia which diffuses and captures her other closest kin, her sister Claire and her nephew Leo. So what is Justin’s character like? Is she straight out of the Gold Heart Trilogy of Von Trier; or does she figure as a new type. Even before death literally approaches the deep affectation by a strong sense of its impending, inevitable, appearance, Justin looses faith in any of the relationships she has or even on the very day of her marriage. Justin commits   the sacrilegious act of having sex with a stranger  Tim (the man who had been planted by Justine’s employer to get the “tagline “ out of her) on her wedding night, leaving her husband in the midst of their lovemaking; but doesn’t she implore him to just sit with her for a while?. The moment marked the failure of the husband to sense the grief in his wife and therefore signified the emptiness, the void in the relationship. Is this defiance a test to see if she can defy the impending horror of death.  Nobody gives her a hearing or asks of her discomfiture, her husband is also deaf to her utmost need, and once again the stranger becomes the chosen partner.  In the beginning of the film  Justine is shown in a bridal dress sinking without a ripple into a pool of still water… sinking into an irretrievable ocean of melancholia, which will squeeze out the life from the being before it has actually gone.  She is like an archetype of the order of Tiresius of the Theban tragedy , and the irony lies in the fact that she is a part of what she sees and senses. She is doomed to see the real, and feel it with its harsh intensity.

Melancholia is itself the melodramatic excess in the film, it is also the lament and resurfacing of a lost schema of the world, as Peter Brooks had suggested. The lull and the foreverness of this feeling coming from an ancient ritual of mourning ( ancient both in the sense of being historical in the parlance of tradition and society and also as historically determined by the body itself, from its very moment of being into existence as an entity through the trauma of umbilical severance.), becomes an alien element in a scientific, post-postmodern world view, offsetting the rational and the controllable. The soft lighting is symptomatic of this unconscious, the film is like a bad dream, with its elemental roots in the real. The harrowing sound track of violas and violin provide an anti climax to the visual track of the film, persistently and deliberately from the very opening.  As the couple set afloat the balloons lighting them under the nocturnal sky, the happy celebratory moment recedes into a mournful score. A pervasive sense of unreal, fictitiousness, and a sense of losing out, conjures the film as an important take on the melodramatic.

“We make 1100 films in a industry that is worth just US $1.8 billion to sustain the discourses of modernity in 16 languages. We must remember here the US $ 4 billion revenue generated by one Hollywood film, Avatar. This is not to be seen as a business, I see it as a social ritual. Nearly 850 of our films are to be seen as disasters financially as they do not collect their money back. There is probably an underlying logic of madness in this industry where such a large number of films do not get their returns and yet we continue to make films in large numbers. I am sure Mr Mukesh Ambani is personally worth US $ 15 billion and his group is worth a crazy figure. He can buy the tiny Indian film industry just like that with his money.

But the difference between the tiny Indian film industry and Mukesh Ambani is: He wont get four pages or two pages every day like the Indian film industry in our newspapers. Nobody wants to know about the richest Indian like Mukesh, but everyone wants to know about what is happening in the film industry. Another interesting fact is everything we use by way of raw materials and equipment in film making in India is imported and we stretch their use exponentially. We use Arriflex cameras for thirty years whereas in Hollywood they do not use beyond a year. We make large number of films with little money and poor resources because we work beyond normal expectations of filmmaking. Filmmaking here is enacted by individuals as a social ritual where few or many individuals come together and pool their money to make films. The lost money belongs to all and that does not come in the way of the social ritual that is enacted as a matter of pride and prestige, as in the case of expensive marriages of rich men. Rich men do not worry about the money spent on their children. They do not count them as money lost, but as money spent on a social ritual. That’s why there are few corporate players in Indian film industry. They can not handle the idea of filmmaking as a social ritual.

What we must pay attention is the language of Indian cinema. I mean by language, what Indian films use to enact the social ritual – songs, dances, fights etc., The language of Western cinema or their idea of cinema is deeply rooted in the idea of authenticity. We do not care for being authentic. All our films are post-dubbed. No sync sound is possible here. Here the picture is authentic, the sound is not. There they have 20 takes for getting authentic sound.We can not bother about or I can not afford to bother about that. Our is an image dominant cinema, whereas the smallest Iranian cinema takes pride in live sound. Even Ousmane Sembene bothers about live sound. Like our films, the only other exception in this regard is the early Italian neo realist films such as Bicycle Thief. As we have a huge talent of dubbing artists in this country, I do not worry about whether my actors speak in the language of my films. Actors move from one language to another and this helps Indian films to stitch a new fabric that is Indian cinema. This also helps to bring other parts of India to viewers in my area.

One of the words I dislike is “escapism.” Indian films are not escapist. They are what sustains modern mythologies. Here the stories have to be unreal so that the viewers can access them. Like Ramayana, our films are mythological in a sense. Therefore the cinema of realism is ridiculous here. As in epics, in Indian films we have our own heroes and icons. Reality does not provide clues about the solutions to our problems. It is the unreal nature of our films that allows our viewers to access their reality. It is not providing escapist fare, but helps us to deal with my reality through the unreal depiction of heroes and villains. If our villains and heroes look like us, they can not appeal to us. They have to be unreal to make a point about our reality. Hanuman’s unreal act of shifting a mountain just to get a medicinal leaf for Rama was meant to convey the extent to which a friend can go in times of need. Here we should not ponder over questions about the unreal nature of the act, but the message. This is true of Indian films’ heroes and villains.”

The dominant impression I got about the Indonesian film industry from the visitors is the manner in which the animist and folkloristic beliefs of people are leveraged by the horror genre. Horror films are what the Indonesian audience like most, according to members of the team. On closer scrutiny, I found something revealing about what sustains horror filmmaking in Indonesia. The folklore in South East Asian countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where the feminine grotesque in the form of Kuntilanak and Sundelbolong, the avenging female ghosts, comes anew in what Indonesians call as the end of the new order regime in 1998 to deal with the violence of the regime. Its implications at the “visceral level,” as Thomas Barker (2011) says in his abstract of the paper on Indonesian horror films, are what gives a new meaning to the very conventional genre of film making, horror. “By drawing on psychoanalytical film theory that analyses how horror films represent widely held social anxieties, I suggest that the popularity of horror films in post 1998 Indonesia belies a broadly felt trauma about the unresolved violence of the New Order regime. At the visceral level, these stories of horror provide catharsis for audiences in post 1998 Indonesia through the re-enactment of the violence in the genre of horror. It also reveals a relationship between popular film, contemporary audiences, and historical trauma.” The Indonesian horror is not horror without its subversion by the role of filmmaking as a modern mythology and a social ritual to deal with the violence of the past regime and its implications for the present reality. Here what is enacted is an appropriation of a film genre that originated in the West by a Eastern film industry to reveal the social ritual of communication films ought to play. Here film making comes alive as a modern mythology, as Hariharan argues in the case of Indian films, by leveraging the mythological/folkloristic traditions to deal with the reality of violence of the previous regime and present circumstances. Obviously, in India and Indonesia, there seems to be a strong case to see film making in a decentred manner. In the Durkheimian logic, rituals are what sustains social cohesion and individuals’ sense of belonging. Without the public performance of rituals which films seek to perform on behalf of the society and its members, there is likely to be a threat to social bonding and individual wellbeing. In this sense, sociologically speaking, filmmaking is film making, not because of what we conventionally attribute to it, but because of what it seeks to embody in terms of the long running social necessity for rituals and mythologies to connect with the reality of the past and present.

from bollywoodhungama.com

The following could arguably be the most crucial scene of Milan Luthria’s The Dirty Picture: a beautiful actress, the object of every man’s desire is sitting in a bathing tub, covered with nothing but some strategically placed foam. The tub itself is placed like a centerpiece of the tiny room. A flustered journalist is barely able to hold his camera still as he frantically takes pictures of Silk (Vidya Balan). Within seconds, what would have been a sensational expose of Silk’s humble home, turns into a feat in seduction as the journalist was all but forced to ignore the humble surroundings and focus on the star in the most thrilling, inviting pose. Silk’s plan to overshadow the shortcomings of her house by putting herself on display worked wonderfully. Something similar happens with the film, The Dirty Picture, which is somewhat patchy, plastic and awkward, but no one cares because Vidya Balan’s stunning performance overshadows the failings of this film.

In the first instance, it is a conventional story about the tragic life of a film actress who decided to make her way up in the industry by using her sexuality. However, despite a less than spectacular story, the film deftly positions itself in complex ways. Consider this: in the run up to the release of the film, producer Ekta Kapoor said in an interview to The Indian Express, “The Dirty Picture is about female sexuality and about a woman who created her own niche.” This sanitized, even progressive view of what the film wants to achieve was in contradiction, to say the least, on ground zero as a packed house of audiences clapped, whistled, hooted and even passed comments each time Balan licked her lips, bent provocatively to show her cleavage and moaned loudly as the couple next door tried to have sex. Even as it plays itself out as a biopic of the mysterious, exploited and tragic figure of Silk Smitha, it simultaneously uses the very tropes a number of Silk films used back in the late seventies and eighties, making it impossible to draw clear, moral distinctions between ‘celebrating’ female sexuality and ‘exploiting’ it.

The key player in complicating the politics of this film is the promotion. While talk of National Awards has gone viral (particularly with Ekta Kapoor saying she would be surprised if Balan didn’t get a National Award), the Web is still flooded with reports that emphasize what is constantly being referred to as the ‘boldness’ of the film. A sampler: “Simpleton to sexy siren: Vidya Balan goes ooh la la!” (Mid-Day), “The Dirty Picture: Breast Wishes” (blogpost), “Lots of Oomph, Sex in this Vidya Balan starrer (koimoi.com) and most importantly, Luthria’s quote that made headlines, “I have used sex to market The Dirty Picture” (Rediff). And this is not counting the sea of videos on YouTube that are on similar lines.

The most interesting bit of news in this regard was reported by The Economic Times, that said, “Readers of popular Hindi magazine Manohar Kahaniyan will get more than their dose of pulp fiction when they pick up its latest issue, the cover of which promises the raunchy story of a “sexy heroine”. The magazine with actress Vidya Balan on its cover is an enticement for an upcoming movie, The Dirty Picture, offering more than its staple fare.” It goes on to explicate that the production house has enlisted the services of a marketing agency called Spice Bhasha that was helping them promote the film in “non-metropolitan India…B-Towns”. Sidestepping the narratives of freedom and progression, the film is being promoted here in a way that is eerily reminiscent of how a Silk Smitha film would probably have been promoted a few decades ago.

It isn’t surprising therefore that the cover of the magazine has an image that is used as a magazine cover about Silk in the film as well. In other words, what serves as an image of Silk in the film, is being used as an image of Vidya Balan. To put it crudely, the unstated but ubiquitously understood distinctions between an award-winning actress of Balan’s caliber and Silk Smitha, who occupied the space between B-grade and soft-porn, are blurred. The very idea of representation, as something that is distanced from “what is” becomes shaky as these distinctions become unclear, underscoring the film’s confrontation with the moral hypocrisy of the film-making and viewing community, particularly in India.

Occupying multiple categories The Dirty Picture ensures that it manages to play to the gallery in diverse economic and cultural spaces. As action films return with a vengeance with films like Bodyguard, Ready and Singham breaking Box Office records in 2011, the only other film that successfully played a tongue-in-cheek game of now-an-action-film-now-a-parody, was Abhinav Kashyap’s Dabangg (2010).

Does being astounded by the mediocrity and didacticism of a morally suffocating film on dowry deaths; mean that one is insensitive to the idea of women struggling against systems of power? Is there only one prescriptive way to respond to all films that speak of ‘social evils’?  Is there no space in political imagination where one can collide with narratives of violence against women?

Further, is there no conception of progressive politics where satire and laughter can function as modes of critique? Perhaps the only person in the Bombay film industry who was able to suggest irony and laughter as potent modes of critique was Kundan Shah whose dark comedy Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983) remains something of a benchmark in social and political satire in Hindi films. It is therefore disappointing that he made a journey from the nuanced execution of a film like JBDY to an over-simplified film like Teen Behenein (2005).

While we were surprised by the scope of this film—which we will take up in a moment—what was more troubling was the response it generated. Teen Behenein seems to have become one in a long line of films that receive praise despite fatal flaws at nearly every level (script, dialogues, acting, direction) merely because it takes up a topical social issue. Not unlike the reviews of a prescriptive and ultimately badly made film like Taare Zameen Par (Khan 2007), some of the responses to Teen Behenein conflate the intention, the issue at hand and the final film product[1].  And any response that dares to criticize the film is quite easily branded unaware and insensitive.

A case in point is this review of the film/the film’s reviewers or rather the film’s criticizers (click here). While we don’t intend to take on what seems like a moral high ground from where our immediate response to the film—of laughter— has been somewhat severely judged, what we do want to spend some time doing is trying to think through some of the things that this ‘review of reviewers’, throws up about the film.

Teen Behenien seeks to make an important point about the kinds of sexual, social, psychological and physical violence that continues to be encountered by women. The fact that it is premised on an act of suicide that has many factual resonances, the most remembered being the 1988 Kanpur suicides, is something that imbues the film with immense possibilities. What the film makes of those possibilities, is however, extremely disappointing.

The fascinating and troubling premise on which the film is based i.e. a day in the life of three sisters on the verge of killing themselves because of the social climate that prevails around them, is systematically and brutally dismantled by the film as it gets on. The characters emerge not as people but as caricatures. These are listed as follow

(1)  Pious older sister-full of compassion and wisdom- completely devoid of anger-quazi mother figure-ready to sacrifice even her life so that the parents will have lesser to worry about.

(2)   Opinion-less middle sister- lives up to her title of ‘Manjhali’- looking up to moving up the ladder of piety soon, despite of her beauty.

(3)  Rebellious –angry –youngest sibling- immature but sensitive. Pampered-bratty- outspoken. Speaks mostly babble and feels misunderstood.

(4)  Lechy-well wisher neighbor uncle-looking to take advantage of helpless girls.

(5)  Arrogant, rich matchmaker- more than ready to keep reminding the girls that he feels nothing but pity for them and their father- drops his mask of compassion and transforms into a malicious, prejudiced, evil proponent of dowry within the space of a single scene.

(6)  Etc.

What makes these types even more insufferable is that they go on to give lengthy, verbose and stilted explanations of everything they think, want, believe and hate. There is absolutely no space for silence and the unspoken. This cacophony of ‘let-me-tell-you-why’ also finds its way into the performances and the acting becomes a painful exercise in illustrating the dialogue. The memory of such cardboard characters and performance styles seen in countless films, comes back with a vengeance, as one sees entire dialogues being spoken in measured tones, against blaring tear jerking background music while people are being shown to be breaking down with grief.

The ‘nuance’ of both emotion and cinema, therefore, completely escaped us.

Further, on the film’s idea of  ‘empowerment’—that peaked with the song ‘hum banayenge apna future’— and ‘oppression’; the fact that it can imagine only a linear journey from being oppressed within the confines of a house to being empowered outside in the realm of employment, is a limit.  The inability of re-formulating resistance within domesticity  and a redrawing of power maps by these young sexualized bodies within the immediate space they occupy, keeps the film well within safe confines. Ultimately, the only real desire the girls seem to have is to get married as the empowering song goes to naught and the oldest girl goes goo-goo-eyed at the thought of being a bride. Limited by the premium it places on marriage, the film posits it as an ideal to be achieved, and is unable to make room for any doubt about the mental, physical suffering and humiliation that many women face after marriage. This ‘vision’ and ‘authenticity’ is at best questionable.

Having said this, we would also like to say that every kind of articulation- a story, a film, a song and even a review, is inhabited by it’s own disruptions. Teen Behenien is too. There are moments that stand alone in memory, almost as if from a dream. A queer sequence in which one of the sisters dressed as a groom and the other as a bride are deeply immersed in erotic intimacy and a television show which by the end of the film becomes a surreal device where the ghosts of our world can find a voice, are instances, which when thought of closely can push some ideas in interesting directions.

Responses that aim to defend the moral weight of the story not only stifle dissenting voices but also gloss over the magic of such moments of potential rupture. In response we would say that to push any understanding of politics and power in newer, sharper and more productive directions it is important to understand that disagreement must be allowed to exist at multiple levels.  Only a very reductive idea of feminism and politics will say ‘if you disagree then you’re not a feminist’/ ‘if you don’t like this film then you’re disconnected from reality’/ ‘I know what reality is, and therefore hold the right to trash any other interpretation of it’. It is therefore no surprise that most feminists are not quite as taken with this film.

To end we will just say that like there are many ways of being feminist, there are also many many ways of watching films and reviewing them. To assume the privilege and insularity of people who you know nothing about, only creates a very narrow, bitter, alienating and self-righteous idea of radical politics.

Finally, even the ‘real ‘, ‘oppressed’ of the world deserve good cinema, don’t they?  In our opinion, Teen Behenien fails.

The current economic recession in the United States of America and world over has led to a literary resurgence of an odd kind as the writings of economic theorist Karl Marx started selling in record numbers. Marx has now been accorded the status of the “comeback kid” of the present financial crisis.[1] Such spacio-temporal travels of past forms testify to the retrospective view of historical narration, one that is recounted through the gap between the moment of first encounter and the moment of recounting. Revivals, adaptations, and remakes have often been seen as cultural symptoms of this echo of history. Released among a web of inter-textual as well as inter-historical articulations, Todd Haynes’s multiple Emmy award winning mini-series Mildred Pierce (2011) strategically places itself along the nodes of a faithful adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1941 depression era novel and a reflective remake of Michael Curtiz’s inventive noir adaptation (1945) of the same.  Riding on the success and cultural memory of Curtiz’s film and socio-economic resonance of Cain’s novel, Haynes builds his version of Mildred Pierce as a mega television event which uses historical memory as a means to explore and expand generic possibilities of a remake, while simultaneously foregrounding its travels through the mediums of literature, cinema and television.

“A mother’s love leads to murder”, reads the tagline of Michael Curtiz’s 1945 noir classic, Mildred Pierce. Produced by studio giants- Warner Brothers, the film adapted James M. Cain’s melodramatic tale of a single mother in Depression era Glendale, into a whodunit murder mystery. The success of Cain’s earlier novels- The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943), both of which were soon adapted to films, established him as a lucrative crime writer. Mildred Pierce however vastly differed from his earlier works. For the first time, Cain created a female protagonist and narrated her struggle through divorce, financial crisis and troublesome relationships, particularly the one with her daughter Veda. The novel spans over nine years, from 1931 to 1940 middle-class Los Angeles and is primarily related as a third-person narrative. Mildred, newly separated from her adulterous husband Bert and faced with the challenges of a new role as a single mother to her two daughters- Ray and Veda, takes up a job as a waitress  in the troubled economy of the Depression. Working through her job and intimate encounters with Wally and Monty Beragon, Mildred turns an entrepreneur while obsessively providing for her snobbish daughter Veda. The central premise of Cain’s narrative revolves around this mother-daughter relationship of Mildred’s obstinate, almost irrational love and the eventual betrayal by Veda. Cain laboriously crafted  the complexity of this relationship in order to reflect on issues of class and socio-political realities of 1930s America.

Warner Brothers decided to adapt Cain’s Mildred Pierce but adventurously mutated the ostensible social-realism of the novel into a noir film eliminating the crucial references to the Depression in the process . Infused with the noir leitmotif of crime, deceit and blackmail, Michael Curtiz audaciously supplanted the narrative with subplots, voice-overs and flashbacks directed towards the generic premise of a crime thriller. The 109 minute long film opens with a serene but imposing mansion by the seaside which is undercut in the next shot by the aural and visual violence of gunshots directed at a man who whispers the name ‘Mildred’. What follows is a police investigation of the crime wherein Mildred Pierce, wife of the murdered Monty Beragon is interrogated as she narrates the story of her survival and relationships.

Film scholars like Pam Cook, Elizabeth Cowie and Zoe Bolton have debated the generic hybridity of Curtiz’s version which lies at the interstices of melodrama and crime thriller, between ‘woman’s picture’ and ‘man’s film’, most starkly present in Mildred’s flashbacks(Cook  1978: 26). Bolton for instance elaborately describes how from the violent opening shot of the murder to Mildred’s introductory shot at the night time pier in the next scene, Curtiz skilfully interrupts the tone of violence by the melodramatic aural track with which Mildred is revealed.  It is in her subsequent narrative (flashbacks) during the police interrogation that the fur-draped iconography of the femme fatale (a typical film noir figure) is replaced by the domestic set up. It is in this shift that melodrama constantly intercepts the overwhelming visual connotations of noir. Curtiz’s film however uses this detail ultimately in service of revealing the truth of the murder. In his adaptation of Cain’s novel, the central premise of Mildred’s irrational love towards Veda is directed towards the play of concealment and revelation of a murder mystery.

As against this widely known framing noir discourse that ingeniously coupled melodrama with noir aesthetics but engulfed the details of the Depression and turned it into a noir classic, Haynes’s Mildred Pierce returns to the original source of the novel and reinvents it into a 5½  hour long historical mini-series. For Haynes, the premise of Cain’s novel becomes a trope through which he explores the haunting realities of history on the present. In the novel, the political is represented through the personal- Mildred is quick to point to Mrs. Geesler that the breakdown of her marriage was “depression’s fault” (1941: 15). In Curtiz’s adaptation, the political is obliterated in favour of generic conventions of noir and melodrama. In his revisit to Mildred Pierce, Todd Haynes employs similar treatment of the subject as Cain by narrating the political, this time of both the historical past and the socio-economic realities of the present narrated through the personal. The official HBO trailer for Haynes’s mini-series for instance, introduces Mildred as a woman of indomitable spirits – a woman who found love when divorce was unthinkable, who worked when women stayed home and a woman who made her fortune when America was suffering[2].  Mildred’s relationships most apparently visible in her pathological relationship with Veda embody this spirit of incessant and continuing aspirations of social mobility and economic ascension (intrinsic to the American dream), which according to Haynes get played out in the series through money, finance and class. (Haynes 2011) It is in this moment of cross-historical resonances that Haynes foregrounds the generic conventions of 1970s filmmaking in order to place the meta-text of Cain’s novel through the retrospective glance at film history.

Much like Haynes’ previous remake venture, Far from Heaven (2002) where he returned to Technicolor and ’50s tropes of filmmaking (with special regard to Douglas Sirk and Fassbinder), in Mildred Pierce he turned to genre filmmaking of the 1970s . He describes the naturalism of the series as an artifice, a return to the ‘dressed-down” style of American cinema of the 1970s, visibly apparent in films like The Godfather, Chinatown and The Exorcist which revisited genres and earlier historical eras. In The Making of Mildred Pierce he goes on to justify his choice of the ’70s as a mid-way era between the 30s and today, a moment that ‘brackets the progressive era that the ‘30s began – idealizing of wealth and unbridled consumption and ideals that are associated with our dear Veda.’  Shot on Super-16 mm film resonant of the ’70s in natural light of outdoor locations, Haynes effectively employs tropes and techniques reminiscent of  ‘old movies, old genres and old subject matter (with the aim) to trick people into thinking about their world today.’ (Haynes 2011) Employing his signature technique of using reflective frames of windows, reflections, and dusting surfaces (a technique reminiscent of Fassbinder’s films), Haynes foregrounds Mildred Pierce in the history of re-presentational form of reconstituting the past. The Remake then becomes the prism through which the cultural biography of generic film practices is built around the dramatic narrative of Cain’s novel on the one hand and a memory text of Cutiz’s on the other. Haynes’s remake is thus not merely a reflective form; rather it rides on the artefact of memory that travels through various generic conventions, historical moments and mediums.

In its journey from a socio-realist melodrama in Cain’s novel to its metamorphosis as a noir-melodrama in Curtiz’s 1945 film adaptation to Todd Haynes’s expansive canvas of a period drama, Mildred Pierce fluidly travels through genres and mediums as a testimonial to the complexities of adaptation and remaking. Endowed with high production costs and a powerful star cast, the series was advertised as a mini-series “event” on television.  Haynes employs the historical biography of the depression era recounted faithfully from Cain’s novel while redirecting the aura and memory of the 1945 film, particularly in relation to stardom. In returning to this source material while capturing the overhaul of films’ success and its persistent presence in public memory through the presence of Joan Crawford’s aura (in her Oscar winning role as Mildred Pierce),  Haynes employs the extravagance of star profiles, set design and costumes and binds them into generic constraints of a period drama.

Samples from HBO’s publicity campaign ostentatiously parade the Oscar credentials of its star cast particularly with respect to Kate Winslet, who essays Mildred’s role in the series. The publicity poster of the series for instance, triumphantly declares Kate Winslet is Mildred Pierce’ (my emphasis). Writing a review on the series, Brian Lowry of Variety aptly points out

The way Kate Winslet’s name is displayed in enormous block letters — right before “Mildred Pierce” — provides key insight into how HBO operates, using this sort of extravagant exercise to market the channel. Who else, after all, would have the audacity to commission a five-part, nearly-six-hour version of James M. Cain’s period melodrama — enlisting not just Winslet to star, but surrounding her with a splendid cast that includes fellow Oscar winner Melissa Leo, Guy Pearce and Evan Rachel Wood? That the production proceeds deliberately becomes somewhat irrelevant. Because before it’s over, “Mildred” is big, beautiful and clearly not just any TV.[3]

Straddling this in-between space of commercial veracity and generic experimentation, Haynes’s Mildred Pierce pushes the limits of the medium of television in order to reinvent the narrative of ‘the great American institution that never gets mentioned on Fourth of July–a grass widow with two small children’ into a mega event. (Cain 1941: 10)

References

Cain, James Mildred Pierce (e-book), The e-Mystery weekly, Vol. II N. 32

HBO: The official Website: Mildred Pierce; See http://www.hbo.com/mildred-pierce/index.html

Hilton Als, ‘This Woman’s Work: James M. Cain on the Grass widow’, A Critic At Large, March 28, 2011, The New Yorker, Volume LXXXVII,  No. 6, 108-111

Lowry, Brian ‘Mildred Pierce (Review), Variety, March 20, 2011; http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944847/

Bolton, Zoe ‘Entertainment and Dystopia: Film Noir, Melodrama and Mildred Pierce’ in Crime Culture, 2005

Cook, Pam, ‘Duplicity in Mildred Pierce’, in Women in Film Noir, ed. by E. Ann Kaplan, (London: BFI, 1978), pp. 68-82.

Cowie, Elizabeth, ‘Film noir and Women’, in Shades of Noir, ed. by Joan Copjec, (New York: Verso, 1993), pp. 121-161

Radish, Christina ‘Kate Winslet and Director Todd Haynes: Mildred Pierce (Interview)’ Feb 2’2011; http://collider.com/kate-winslet-todd-haynes-interview-mildred-pierce/69347/

ARTS & MUSIC in DOCUMENTARY

EDITOR: VEENA HARIHARAN

The art of the documentary has been explored at some length in documentary studies. John Grierson famously defined the documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality.” Less, however, has been written about the relationship between documentary and the arts, the impact of documentary on art and artists and vice-versa. The diversity of issues related to representation and interpretation, and the challenges involved in the representation of one medium by another, complicates the discursive spaces of production of art, music and documentary. From the early debates around fidelity and dynamism to the more contemporary ones around interactivity and performativity, the relationship between art, music and documentary is a rich terrain for exploration.

This special issue of Wide Screen attempts to address this dynamic relationship between the two and hopes to include in its scope documentaries related to music, performance, photography, painting, dance, architecture, folk and cultural forms, kitsch, experimental video, installation art and exhibition practices. We hope to include in this issue, documentaries on art and music in the international context and within frameworks of ideological, narrative and cultural production analyses.

We invite essays, articles, interviews, film and book reviews on this theme. They could include but are not limited to the following:

• Documentaries on particular artists

• Documentaries on particular artworks Folk art and artists
• Art online
• Installations
• Experimental Video
• Feminist Video Art
• Representational Challenges involved in depicting art and dance on film
• Spatiality, Architecture, Documentary
• Documentary and Photography
• Musical history
• Musical narratives
• Reconstructions and live recordings of musical events
• Documentary essays on musical genres
• Portraits of musicians
• The Use of Music in Documentary

  Deadline for paper submission: Jan 5 2011.
  Papers can be submitted at: http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions
  or emailed to: hariharan.veena@gmail.com
  Author guidelines, copyright notice and other information can be accessed at: http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/submissions