Cinema of India and Irish Pages

Irish Pages LTD Glorious Particularity Author(s) Mira Nair Reviewed work(s) Source Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 103-108 reap by Irish Pages LTD Stable uni figure of speech resource locator http//www. jstor. org/stable/30057428 . Accessed 09/11/2012 0627 Your delectation of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, op date of referencetional at . http//www. jstor. org/page/info/ some/policies/ endpoints. jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students disc all(prenominal)place, succumb, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive.We use learning technology and tools to increase productiveness and facilitate pertly stochastic variables of scholarship. For to a greater extent training near JSTOR, please contact emailprotected org. . Irish Pages LTD is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, touch and extend access to Irish Pages. http//www. jstor. org GLORIOUS PARTICULARITY MiraNalr Illumining the actual. I invite images in my work. I dont pen words, in particular not words to be delivered from church service pulpits.So I experienced great excruciation writing this essay, particularlysince it was also meant for publication, until I began to jut out it as an opportunity to think out loud with you on what has been possessing my mind of late, in this roily past year since the watershed of 9/11/01. I bring on been reflecting on the torrent of ceaseless images flooding our lives in the print media, TV and of course, in our favourite movie theatre, ultimately request myself the age-old perplexitysTer Braakraises in his still-radicalessaywhat is the role of an artist in whatsoever society? What is the place and future of movie house in the instauration today?In the new worldwidevillageof incessant images, increasinglyI play the mishap of mass media to impart actual fellow feeling. This overactive pluralism gives unriv aled the illusion of sleep withing a gang about a lot when actu some(prenominal)y you know a occupy about nothing at all, loss in its wake an listening so thoroughly bludgeoned by little bits of information that one is left confused and because apathetic policy-makingly. Perhapsthat is its intention. The fact is that while images rent catch to a greater extent and to a greater extent international, tribes lives get remained astonishingly parochial.This ironic truth of modern life is e exceptionally troubling in todays war-mongering fourth dimensions, when so much depends on understanding worlds so contrastive, and consequently totally basind, from ones own. In this post-9/11 world, where the schisms of the globe be being cemented into huge walls between one tone and way of life and early(a), now more(prenominal) than ever we need flick to say our flyspeck topical anesthetic worlds in all their glorious particularity. In my limited experience, its when Ive do a celluloid thats done full-blown honourableice to the truths and idiosyncraciesof the specifically local, that it crosses over to become surprisinglyuniversal. Take Monsoon edding,or instance. I wanted to settle an intimate family W out of nothing, a love song to the city of Delhi where I come flick, something from, to return to my old habits of rebel fill-making. Except this time, fired m by the recent empowering of the Dogme ethod, I wanted to moderate a picture in just 30 days. That was the original premise to kindle to myself that I didnt need the juggernaut of zillions of dollars, studios, special effects and plenty of men in suits to make a good trading floor in the to the highest degree interesting optic way possible. I wanted 103 Irish PAGES o capture, maiden and foremost, the spirit of masti(meaning an intoxication with life) inherent in the full-bodied Punjabi comp both from where I come, and thence, to capture the Indiathat I know and love, an India wh ich lives in several centuries at the identical time. As Arundhati Roy put it, as Indian citizens we subsist on a uniform diet of caste massacresand nuclear tests, mosque breakings and expression shows, church burningings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded jade and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbandswho continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable pile of MissWorlds. It couldnt be said better. Such were the fluid backbones of the India I wanted to put on convey 68 actors, 148 scenes, and one hot monsoon term later, apply paintings,jewellery, saris and furniture taken from relatives on the screen, with each member of my family acting in it, after(prenominal) shooting exactly 30 days, a submit was innate(p) that then had a journey so different from any expectation (more correctly, non-expectation) that we might put one across had for it during its making.People from New Delhi to Iceland to Hungary to Brazil to Amer ica believed it was their wedding, their family,themselves on that screen and if they didnt have a family,they yearned to get going to one same(p) the mint they cut on screen. I didnt make the film to educate anybody about my culture and my people- I believe that to be only when a cultural ambassadorof ones country is thudding rather, if it was make for anybody beyond myself, it was do for the people of Delhi to feel and laugh and cry at our own flawed Punjabi(a. k. a the PartyAnimals of India) selves. uniquely for me, Monsoon edding as the first of seven films Id do that W was all in all embraced by the mainstreamBollywood film industryin India producers, dreadedctors, movie stars, choreographers, musicians a standardized embraced the film, and for the first time in my 20-odd historic period as an self-governing film maker independent truly from both the Indianand the Americanmainstream I felt the gap of my work be granding somewhere. Although the musical mode a nd form of Monsoon edding as radical for the Indianpublic (the entire film was w W hot with a hand-held camera,was ingenuousness-based, with a host of completely unknown faces mixed in with legendary actors, live singing, no studio shooting, using a mixture of old Indianpop songs with new original music, and dialogue simultaneouslyin Hindi, English and Punjabi),it continues to impart in Indiaalmost a year after its release. Perhapsthis was because we took a familiar premise that of an Indian wedding, and of the family turn that surrounds such an event anyplace and made a realitycheckversion of it so different from the normal Bollywood film.Bollywood, a term for the frightful commercial-grade film industryin Bombay, refers to those grand, heroical and over-the-top extravaganzas eplete with musical r 104 Irish PAGES tropes and lavish production values, intentional as escapist entertainment for the masses. It is what Ter Braak hilariously describes in his discussion of low film born among cig atomic number 18tte-chewing youths and giggling maid-servants, received with wild excitement and the honest romanticism of a trade union movement yearning for deliverance. Despite its inimitable, distinctive style and its current arty-exotic cache, Bollywood is nothing like cinema of the art-house, New Wave variety, nothing like expressionism it does not have pretensions of purity. It is defiantly popular, made for the masses and for profit. Therefore, Bollywood as a cinematic form is necessarily adaptive and confused a genre welcoming after-school(prenominal) fascinates, not fearing them. In the first place, the filmmakers ceaselessly aiming for the broadest possible audience have had to throw the multiple interests of an extremely regional and several(a) country.Certain unifying elements Mahabharata and Ramayana, the foundational epic texts from which many stories derive, and the emphasis in all films on family tradition and local setting give Bollywood films a broad resonance within Furthermore, Bollywood was born under colonialism and brilliantly dwells in a post-colonial world. The Bollywood style is famously adaptive and absorbent, a sponge that had to respond to imperialist puzzle outs to survive pre-Independence, and willingly imitated them for profit in more recent years. A common phenomenon in Bombay ar the so-called DVD India. irectors who rig their stories to moviestars using cued scenes from wellknown Hollywood movies (e. g. , it is basically a combination of Godfather meets Love Story meets When irritate Met Sally). westerly stories from Jane E re to Dead PoetsSocietyare retold with Indian characters and production plan that very lots ingeniously job into both westwarders and Indians idealization of India. This suggests a spring around India that is both porous and protective, flagrantly absorbing and copying all sorts of influences further twisting them to make it finally have the appearance _o r_ semblance inimitably Indian or, to put it more accurately, inimitably Bollywood.There is much debate on the survival of local cinemas in a global age, and much consternation about the unstoppable wave of American culture, often accused of alternately dulling and diluting art and aesthetic sensibilities around the world. The French have been railing about cultural protectionism from Hollywood for years now. In this context of trying to preserve and cultivate local voices, it is fabulous to check into the unflagging energy of Bollywood cinema. Bollywoods vigor, its staying power and its improbable, tensile hybridity, are all results of its huge native market.Commercially and artistically much like Indian culture itself. Bollywood is supple and muscular cv IRISH PAGES The mass Indian audience for whom Bollywood films are made is evergrowing and makes the industry tremendously profitable, even without taking into account the global reach it has attained. The first Indian fi lm, Rala w Harishchandra, as produced in 1913. Thirty gramme films have been made since. Today,800 films per year are made throughout India, and 12 million people within the countrys borders go to see a Hindi film daily.The flourishing Bollywood market is self-sustainingand runs parallel to and undisturbedby American film exhibition in India. This is before taking into account Bollywoods huge market abroad, both as an export to other lands (such as Russia, the Middle East, Africa) and to the far-reachingIndian Diaspora. Growing up in India in the siseties and seventies in the fairly remote state of Orissa, I was not an aficionadoof Bollywood pictures. I did swoon over many of the popular love songs from the movies, that the films themselves did little for me. I was much more interested in stories of real people, the extraordinarinessof habitual life.Initiallyinspired by jatra which is the form of traditionaltravellingmythological theatre in the countryside, I later became invo lved with political protest theatre in Calcutta. Then, with look focused beyond my own country, I became preoccupied with the Beatles and the antiVietnam War movement, the Western avant-garde, guerrilla theater, etc. It wasnt until I went to America for college and began examine film that the otherIndian movies first reached me SatyajitRay, Ritwik Ghatakand Guru Dutt, whose hornyism and visual stylization were actually pure independent film-making, just now made from within Bollywood.The immediacy and grandeurof these films is a pillar for me now I rely on seeing one of Guru Dutts movies every six months before I make another one of my own. However, I was the last mortal to ever imagine that the commercial cinema of the Indian mainstream would have anything whatsoever to do with my own work. Yet the opportunity to give this lecture has given me a chance to reflect on my own trajectory, and I am surprised to begin that my home plate cinema has had a strong influence on my b ody of work indeed, regardlessof my geographic expedition of increasingly motley and disparatecultures.And in reflecting, Ive seen that the influence of Indian films specifically that unabashed horny directness, the freewheeling use of music, that emphasis on elemental motivations and values is a medal running consistently through every one of my films even when exploring foreign worlds, I have taken the bones and name of those societies and tried to infuse them with the spirit of where Im from. very much of post-imperial scholarship focuses on the Western glance and Bollywood itself, as Ive said, had to adapt to and be invariably aware of the colonialist point of view. I find myself applying an Eastern gaze 06 IRISH PAGES to Western contexts now, and enjoying the reversal. Historically,Hollywood has everbeen open to foreign directors, so long as we have the competency, craft and genius needed to make money. From Erich von Stroheim to BillyWilder to Ang Lee to PaulVerhoe vento ShekharKapur, the doors have opened for us, so long as we understand the bottom line. In my most recent film, Hysterical lindness, working-class drama set in a B New Jersey in the eighties, I found that even in the muddied and loveless confines of these bar-hopping girls world, the Bollywood approachwas just as useful.Half-jokingly,I refer to the style of the film as AmericanBleak, Bollywoodstyle. Within the frame of American Bleak,understatement and terrestrial circumstances notwithstanding, the full-blown emotion was in that respect, hold to be made overt. People are people, after all, and no matter if were trying to portray a loveless reality where desperate women comb neighbourhood interdict facial expression for love, only to find heartbreak,audiences must feel their neuroses as if they are their own.And now, looking at pre-Victorian London to adapt Thackerays gloriously entertaining saga, vacancyFair, I find an enormous panorama of themes familiar to those of us s teeped in Bollywood a woman who defies her poverty-stricken scope to clamber up the social ladder, nonreciprocal love, seduction through song, a mothers give for her child, a true gentleman in a corrupt world . .. the compose of human stories remains the same. Moreover, it is a tarradiddle that comes down to basic human ambition, asking a spiritual, even yogic questionWhich of us is happy in this orld? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied? The bold strokes of Indian cinema are ideal for this canvas,too. Culture-combining does not have to yield the soulless Euro-gateau lamented by Istvan Szabo in Zanussis 1993 lecture here. Because, as Zanussi explained, those are films without a center, stories that take place in nameless, unrecognizable cities with a host of European actors desperately attempting a neutralAmerican/English accent, afraidof any eccentricities or distinctiveness that would distract from the mongrelization of the piece.The Bollywood form, itself an ever-growing collage of culturalinfluences, is making its way around the world, but retaining its soul. In fact, my only fear as Bollywood seems to cross over into Western commercial screens is that it waters itself down to suit the Western palate. Lately,Western culture has taken Bollywood styles and incorporated them into the mainstream Hollywood vocabularysmash-hit movies and plays imitate Bollywoods musical form and ultra-theatricalstyle, adaptingthem to Western contexts (MoulinRouge, ombay B Dreams). Think of Thora lash in GhostWorld, atching a 1950s Hindi dance w umber and move around her room gleefully. She sees a luminescence and 107 IRISH PAGES lustiness totally take away from her Anytown, USA existence. The crazy dance number is delightfullyforeign to her, yet throughit we also see her humiliated world with new, sharp clarity. Bollywoods pure emotional thrust and distinctive vocabulary has legitimacy in itself, however manufactured and work the form has been over the years. In this era of internationalmisunderstanding,as the threat of a global divide culturally and politically is more dire than ever, this distinctiveness is to be celebrated.I have always repeated to myself and to my students that if we dont tell our stories, no one else will. The weand our in the best films is both local and universal. Cinema can mirror an individuals tiny world, yet reveal infinite other worlds in all their particularity. Film should not behave. It cannot. Cinema is too democratic to be lobotomized into a single way or style. I always say,There are no rules in making cinema there is only good cinema or soulless cinema.And as long as there are films made like In the Mood or Love,Angel at My Table,Pyaasa,Battle of Algiers,Dekalog, Timeof the f Gypsies,were doing all right. What is happening to the world lies, at the moment, just outside the dry land of common understanding. The only revenge is to work, to make cinema that illuminates this common understa nding,that destabilizes the dull competence of most of what is produced, that infuses life with idiosyncracy, whimsy, brutality, and like life, that captures the grand but fabulous energy that sometimes emerges from the juxtaposition of the tragic and comic. a F M L U Thisessaywasdelivered s the Cinema 2i1tans ecture t the Netherlands ilmFestival, trecht, in September002 It is create ereor the irst time. 2 hf f maven of the worldsleadingfilmakers,Mira Nair has directedeightfeaturefilms since her celebrated ebutwith SalaamBombay in 1988. Bornin 1957, shegrew up in Orissa, ndia d I and attendedHavardUniversity. Her mostrecentilms are Vanity Fair (2004), Hysterical f blindness (2002) and Monsoon Wedding (2001) Hernextfilm, he Namesake, basedon a T i novelbyjhumpa Lahiri,will be releasedn the springof 2007 108