From paramita_gh at yahoo.com Mon Jul 9 01:20:21 2007 From: paramita_gh at yahoo.com (paramita ghosh) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2007 09:20:21 +0100 (BST) Subject: [cm_public] political Message-ID: <648065.13139.qm@web30514.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Paramita Ghosh The best of political films leave the spectator free. I am free to go with the character I like, and you, yours. I am free to take sides and approach it from the side that suits me best. There?s no bar ? I?m even free to go along with a character that?s ?bad?. Sometimes, as the film runs, the character can surprise and say something that makes you feel that what he said a moment before, may not be so wrong after all. And you think, perhaps, this is a man who is neither right nor wrong, but confused. Or a man who is asking too many questions. Or, as Jean Luc Godard says of his protagonist in Le Petit Soldat, a man who is asking certain questions badly. The way a good director asks questions is different. He places his principal character among other characters in a relationship of tension and watches him as if he were an object, among other objects. Each character thus becomes different points of view in the film and helps the director unravel story, line and plot. In theatre, Bertolt Brecht does this by distancing: by direct audience-address so that at no point do we feel one with the actors and the illusion on stage. Entertainment, in the broadest sense of the term, is not the politics of such art. This is not to say that art and entertainment are exclusive categories. Good propaganda films, like Gillo Pontecorvo?s Battle of Algiers , ?present both sides of the debate locked in a dialectical relation with each other, no false objectivity, doesn?t hide its fundamental sympathy with insurgents but neither does it obscure the contradiction of the liberation struggle,? as critic Michael Chanan says in his essay Outsiders in Sight and Sound. For the past two years, certain crises have rocked and raised issues of nation, nationhood, identity, justice and injustice in India. They have entered our ?first cinema,? the industrial cinema of Bollywood. Risk, Black Friday and Shootout at Lokhandwala, all three, are emblematic of this new rise of political thrillers that place the cop at the centre of the film?s morality and have borrowed from real-life people and real-life drama. Many of the tropes of the French New Wave ? newsreel clippings, cutting the film in chapters, jump cuts, interspersion of other media like paintings or tracks from other films -- that every man Tarantino and his uncle now use, have been used for Effect in these films. In Black Friday, for instance, Anurag Kashyap has appropriated these devices (the past, the film says in typical New Wave register, is prorogue) -- without being aware of its politics. Many of the problems of Indian ?new wave? from which ?radical? cinema of mainstream Bollywood now draws is that it is part of the same school of cultural production that has touched ed on politics without presenting all sides of a debate. Directors like Govind Nihalini?s artistic engagement with the people?s movements of his times -- Naxalbari (60s), JP movement (70s) ? mirrored the movements? inability to put forward a viable political alternative that would question and critique past structures. This absence is reflected in political thrillers like Nihalini?s Drohkal, that actually started the trend of the ?deadly terrorist? (Ashish Vidyarthi) who threatens the families of cops Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah for infiltrating his group. The state unquestioned, would thus always be above board. Not surprisingly, current Bollywood has shopped around for New Wave avantgarde devices. The films have high production values. Great style. New form. But should we cheer their politics? For starters, the problem starts at the level of form. In Shootout, Amitabh?s character who heads the Commission on the police?s excesses ? throwing criminals off the terrace, encounter of wounded and dying gangsters, putting a residential colony in Lokhandwala at risk to catch six people ? has this poseur for the Judge. And by implication, society at large. ?You are alone in your house and there is a man outside with a gun. Who would you want that to be? Maya, Bua or ACP Khan?? The journalist?s seeming open-endedness at the end of the deposition: ?Is this justice or what happened at Lokhandwala justice?? at the end of the film is contradicted by a ticker that says crime has dipped in Mumbai by 70% as the policemen leave court to be feted by a waiting crowd. Ambiguity has, in this way, been the spin-off of the quest for impartiality. Which chump will side with the anti-social in the face of such simplification? Should anti-socials have human rights? Apparently not. High-ranking police officials in both Black Friday and Shootout peddle the clich? of rights activists as trouble-makers for their men on the job. In Shootout, ACP AQ Khan froths: ?If they can talk, we have given them the freedom, what benefit is to people if people like Maya live?? This is a dangerous line to take and a cause of concern. When law-enforcing and corrective agencies say that criminals are without human rights just because they have flouted social contracts they speak as an instrument of a state that has totalitarianism as its central idea. Is it not always an act of power that decides what is criminal, who are terrorists or when any form of democratic, even militant, protest is anti-state? ?The criminal? is not a fixed identity as our mainstream films project. What?s perhaps more disturbing is the idea of ?Sarkar? ? ?Jo mujhe thik samjhe,? ( I do what I feel is right) in the film by that name. The above is a preposterous coinage when mouthed by a man who is part-authority, part-gangster and is shown to run a parallel government. A new problematic is the space that the central cop character have been shown to occupy: In Risk, cop Suryakant (based on the life of encounter specialist Daya Nayak) is in the system, and against it. His wanting to ?clean? the metropolis and ?eliminate? the Don recalls the ACP of Shootout, another man of action whose outburst to his senior: ?I just want to send then up (heaven)? is followed up by an operation to hunt down Maya and his brood. The iconography of Maya and gang has, of course, been established right from the beginning. Blood has been poured over him like chocolate sauce is over our ?heroes?. Maya who makes his appearance on the screen in rain-drenched gear to make his first killing as pretty as a gutter rat. Maya rules the grimy alleys, his crimes are bloody and, at times, is shown to kill without any deep reason. He laughs while killing, his men make love in sleazy hotels, their girls dance in bars. The policemen, on the other hand, lead troubled lives. Their marriages break due to duty, their families wait around birthday cakes. Even gangsters pay them compliments for being the kind who believe that ?mera bharat mahaan.? In Black Friday, the good cop-bad cop motif runs all through with Rakesh Maria chief investigating officer of the Bombay blasts flinching at lock-up room torture. The interrogation room in his police station, the film suggests, is a place without hierarchy. He asks the suspects for tea-coffee and lectures them about the fallouts of religious violence. Because he can. Badshah Khan, the suspect who turns state witness is shown to fall in line in the end:?Allah humare saath nahin tha (God was not with us).? While religious mobilization is a radical force against the colonial French in Pontecorvo?s film, in Black Friday, it is the old stereotype: a force of regression. Tiger Memon incites some of his community to take revenge in the name of jihad and Islami taqat. This he says will be apt revenge for the rape and arson by Hindus in Mumbai during Jan 93. By making Memon the spokesperson of minority anger and anguish, Kashyap has with one fell stroke delegitimised their protest. A constant attempt to equate all orders of violence ? majority action and minority reaction ? is seen even in the ?Epilogue? which has also been used in the film?s publicity material ? An eye for an eye makes the world go blind. But is it really all the same? Was then God on our side when the Babri Masjid was demolished? This is just one of the questions I would like to ask, and we must all ask them. ------ --------------------------------- Here?s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/cm_public/attachments/20070709/4661e5ba/attachment.html