The Great Speeches of Modern India

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

  The second important event took place a year later. I was on my first trip to London to work for a spell in the head office of our advertising agency. The first film I saw in London was De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. I came out of the theatre my mind fully made up. I would become a filmmaker. As soon as I got back home, I would go all out to find a sponsor for Pather Panchali. The prospect of giving up a safe job didn’t daunt me any more. I would make my film exactly as De Sica had made his: working with non-professional actors, using modest resources, and shooting on actual locations. The village which Bibhutibhusan had so lovingly described would be a living backdrop to the film, just as the outskirts of Rome were for De Sica’s film.

  Bicycle Thieves was in many ways a revelation. I assume many of you have seen the film. For those who haven’t, I shall give the briefest outline of the story.

  Ricci, a poor worker in Rome, needs a bicycle in order to get a job. His own bike has been lying in a pawn-shop. To get it back, Ricci has to pawn some household possessions. Within a day of his acquiring it, the bike is stolen. Ricci desperately tries to retrieve it, but fails. At the end of an exhausting day, in a mood of abject despair, Ricci notices a bike left standing in an apparently deserted street. After a long fight with his conscience, he decides to steal it. But he makes a clumsy job of it, and is caught and beaten up by an angry mob in the presence of his ten-year-old son Bruno. As Ricci makes his way home weeping in humiliation, Bruno, who is also crying, joins him and offers his hand in sympathy. The two walk hand in hand and are lost in the crowd.

  As you can see, there isn’t much of a story, and not much of a theme either. But De Sica and his writer Zavattini pack into its 90 minutes such an incredible amount of social observation that one never notices the slenderness of the plot. The film simply bristles with details, some of which add depth to the story in unexpected ways. For instance, there’s a scene towards the end where Ricci suddenly runs into the thief in front of the latter’s house, pounces upon him, and demands that he hands back his bike. Hotly denying his guilt, the thief suddenly goes into an epileptic fit. As he sinks to the ground shaking and foaming at the mouth, his mother, who’s been watching from an upstairs window, tosses pillows to put under his head. Meanwhile, Bruno has dragged along a policeman, whom Ricci now takes into the house to make a search. We see the miserable pigeonhole of a room where the mother cooks a meagre meal for the family of four. ‘Instead of accusing him,’ she says, ‘why don’t you find him a job?’ The bike, however, is not found. As Ricci comes out of the house, he finds that the whole neighbourhood has turned against him. His hopes dashed to the ground, he has no choice but to walk despondently away.

  Apart from adding dimension to the story, the film challenges our stock response of instant antipathy towards a character who brings misery on the hero by an unsocial act. But so finely is the balance maintained that the incident doesn’t lessen the calamity of the hero’s loss. It merely makes the film a far richer experience than a conventional treatment would have done.

  One quality which is sure to be found in a great work of cinema is the revelation of large truths in small details. The world reflected in a dew drop will serve as a metaphor for this quality. There is a scene in Bicycle Thieves where father and son go feverishly looking for a man they believe to have connections with the thief. In the process the two lose each other. Finding himself alone in a back street of a quiet neighbourhood, Bruno is seen to approach a wall while unbuttoning his pants. But before he can do what he wishes to do, Ricci suddenly appears and calls out urgently. Bruno whirls round and runs to join his father, his urge unsatisfied. This one detail brings home the implications of this desperate, daylong search more vividly than anything could have done. It is such details, combined with acute social observation, and the suffusing warmth of the father-and-son relationship that make Bicycle Thieves a great work of cinema.

  When I finally decided to become a filmmaker, I was well aware that I would be up against a relatively backward audience. And yet I had set my mind on breaking all manner of conventions. I had discussed the project with a number of professionals, and, to a man, they had discouraged me by saying that it couldn’t be done the way we wanted to do it. ‘You can’t shoot entirely on location,’ they had said. ‘You need the controlled conditions of a studio.’ ‘You can’t shoot in cloudy weather; you can’t shoot in the rain; you can’t shoot with amateur actors’, and so on and so forth.

  So one of the first things we did was to borrow a 16 mm camera and go to a village and take test shots. Subrata, who was to be my cameraman, and I went to Bibhutibhusan’s village Gopalnagar, the Nishchindipur of Pather Panchali. It was in the middle of the rainy season, and we had to squelch through knee-deep mud to reach our destination. But once we got there, we lost no time. We took shots in the dim light of a mango grove, we shot in pouring rain, and we shot in the failing light of dusk. Everything came out.

  I shall not go into the various ordeals we had to face in the two and a half years it took to make Pather Panchali. The story has been told often enough. But what I have probably not mentioned elsewhere is that it was in a way a blessing that the film took so long to make. We learnt filmmaking as we went along, and since we went on for so long, it gave us that much more time to learn. With all my knowledge of Western cinema, the first thing I realized was that none of the films I had ever seen was remotely like the story I was about to film. Pather Panchali had its roots deep in the soil of Bengal. The life it described had its own pace and its own rhythm, which in turn had to mould the pace and the rhythm of the film. The inspiration had to come from the book, and from the real surroundings in which we had decided to place the story.

  If the books on filmmaking helped, it was only in a general sort of way. For instance, none of them tells you how to handle an actor who has never faced a camera before. You had to devise your own method. You had to find out yourself how to catch the hushed stillness of dusk in a Bengali village, when the wind drops and turns the ponds into sheets of glass, dappled by the leaves of shaluk and shapla, and the smoke from ovens settles in wispy trails over the landscape, and the plaintive blows on conchshells from homes far and near are joined by the chorus of crickets, which rises as the light falls, until all one sees are the stars in the sky, and the stars that blink and swirl in the thickets.

  We wanted to show fireflies in Aparajito. The books didn’t tell us that the light they gave off was too weak to be photographed. Our own tests with the camera proved that. So we had to invent a way of showing them. What we did was photograph a group of bare-bodied assistants in black loincloths, who hopped about in total darkness, holding in their hands tiny electric bulbs which flashed on and off in a simulation of the dance of the fireflies.

  If film books didn’t help much, I was helped enormously by Bibhutibhusan. He is one writer whose stories are a gold-mine of cinematic observation, and it is fortunate that I developed a taste for him right at the start of my career. Even in his lesser works—and there aren’t many that rise to the heights of Pather Panchali.

  Annapurna’s daughter Khenti has just got married, and it is now time for the bride to depart. The palki is resting on the ground with the bride and the groom in it. Annapurna, whose heart is torn by anguish, glances at the palki and notices—I translate—‘that the end of Khenti’s modest red balucbar has trailed out of the palki, and is nestling against a drooping cluster of medi flowers by the bamboo fencing.’ In its context, this is a heartrending detail, and a perfect film close-up of the kind described by Eisenstein as pars pro toto, part standing for the whole.

  Yet another quality which Bibhutibhusan had was a wonderful ear for lifelike speech. A vital and unending pursuit for a filmmaker is the study of speech patterns: speech as a reflection of class, and speech as revealing states of mind. This is one area where Bengali cinema had been particularly weak. The forties and fifties were the era of something called smart dialogue. One often heard it said that ‘so-and-so is unsurpassed as a writer o
f smart dialogue.’ The implication seemed to be that dialogue was something to be admired for its own sake and not, as it should be, as a concomitant of the characters who speak it. The epitome of this was, of course, Udayer Patbe, where the hero’s speech gave the impression that he was born spouting epigrams. The best film dialogue is where one doesn’t feel the presence of the writer at all. I am talking here of the kind of film that tries to capture the feel of reality. There are also films which attempt a larger-than-life style, or an oblique, fractured or expressionist style: I myself wrote dialogue with end rhymes in Hirok Rajar Deshay, which was a fantasy. But the overwhelming majority of narrative films belong in the tradition of realism, where the dialogue sustains the feeling of lifelikeness that is conveyed through the camera. This realism in films is not the naturalism of the painter, who sets up his easel before his subject, and proceeds to record faithfully what he sees. For a filmmaker, there is no ready-made reality which he can straightaway capture on film. What surrounds him is only raw material. He must at all times use this material selectively. Objects, locales, people, speech, viewpoints—everything must be carefully chosen, to serve the ends of his story. In other words, creating reality is part of the creative process, where the imagination is aided by the eye and the ear.

  The novelist has a similar task. In his supposed omniscience, he can describe the innermost workings of his characters’ minds, while evoking the surroundings in the minutest detail. The reader sees only what the author chooses to describe. It may be just a factual description, or it may go beyond that, where the author adds his subjective comments to it. It is such description and such comments—this combination of the concrete and the abstract—that builds up the picture of reality in the reader’s mind.

  A film, on the other hand, presents information in lumps, as it were. At any given moment, the image on the screen may be filled with a plethora of details, each carrying information. In other words, the language here is far more diffused than the language of words, and it is the filmmaker’s job to direct the attention of the audience to the dominant idea contained in the image. If the idea is conveyed through dialogue, there is usually no ambiguity. But when it is conveyed in non-verbal terms—through gestures, objects, pure sounds, and so on—precise communication becomes difficult. When a writer is at a loss for words, he can turn to his Thesaurus; but there is no Thesaurus for the filmmaker. He can fall back on clichés, of course—goodness knows how many films have used the snuffed-out candle to suggest death—but the really effective language is both fresh and vivid at the same time, and the search for it an inexhaustible one.

  Since nine out of ten Bengali films are based on novels, and since both films and novels use words and images, one would think that such novels would substantially help in the creation of a film language. But here a problem arises. I don’t know if it is a reflection of the Bengali temperament, but many of our writers seem more inclined to use their minds, rather than their eyes and ears. In other words, there is a marked tendency to avoid concrete observation. Here is a small segment of Balzac’s description of Madame Vauquer’s lodging-house in Old Goriot:

  ‘The indestructible furniture which every other house throws out, finds its way to the lodging-house, for the same reason that the human wreckage of civilization drifts to the hospitals for the incurable. In the room, you would find a barometer with a monk, which appears when it is wet; execrable engravings, bad enough to spoil your appetite, and all framed with unvarnished black wood; a clock with a tortoise-shell case inlaid with copper; a green stove; lamps coated with dust and oil; a long table covered with oil cloth so greasy that a facetious boarder can write his name on it with fingernails; broken-backed chairs; wretched little grass mats unravelling endlessly, without ever coming completely to pieces; and finally, miserable foot warmers, their orifices enlarged by decay, their hinges broken and their wood charred. The furniture is all old, cracked, decaying, shaky, worm-eaten, decrepit, rickety, ramshackle and on its last legs.’

  Here you have the art director’s job already done for him. This sort of vivid observation—the kind that is a godsend to a filmmaker—is by no means common in Bengali fiction. Bankim reveals this quality occasionally—there is a minutely observed description of Nagendranath’s house in Bisha-Briksha, and Debi Choudhurani’s houseboat is described in sumptuous detail. Such descriptions occur in almost every page of Hutom, and in more recent times, one finds it again and again in the writings of Kamal Kumar Majumdar. But to come to a major novel I’m involved in at the moment, for the second time—Rabindranath’s Ghare-Baire—such concreteness is noticeably lacking.

  For instance, there is no description of Nikhilesh’s house anywhere in the book. Of the two rooms where most of the action takes place—Nikhilesh’s bedroom in the inner part of the house and the drawing room in the outer part—barely three or four details are mentioned by name. Sandip has regular meetings with his boys, but we’re never told where they meet. Occasionally, there is a description of what Bimala is wearing, but none of the male characters’ dresses is ever described. In the present case, this lack of visualization may be because the chronicler is not the author himself but the three main characters, who by turns reveal their mind and motives, and advance the story. Also, the clash of ideas and ideals which forms the substance of the novel may account for the predominance of the abstract over the concrete. However, the fact remains that the trait is a common one in Bengali fiction, and leads one to conclude that the writers are either incapable of or disinclined to visualize beyond a certain point. This itself need not be held against a novel, but in a film writer, the tendency can only lead to a film that shows a lot but tells very little. A film by its very nature makes the characters and their surroundings concrete. The camera makes them so. You see the characters, you see the setting in which the story unfolds. But this concreteness is a sum of the elements that go to make a character, a room, a background; and these can come alive only through a deliberate and apt choice of such elements. In other words, what a film says is intimately bound up with these elements, these visual details.

  Our films have consistently neglected these details in their preoccupation with content. Our critics too have shown a tendency to judge a film predominantly on what it says rather than how it says it. I have no wish to belittle content, but we must remember that the lousiest of films have been made on the loftiest of themes. That a director says all the right things is in itself no guarantee of artistry. At best it is a reflection of his attitude, or his ideology. If it is a true reflection—and often there is no way of telling—it will mark him out as an honest man, but not necessarily as an artist. Unless a film aims at deliberate obfuscation, or is unintelligible through sheer clumsiness of execution, what it says is usually clear to all. But what it says is only a partial index of a filmmaker’s personality, because it is the manner of saying which indicates the artist. There are filmmakers who are not overly concerned with what they say as long as they can say it with style or finesse. One would sooner describe them as craftsmen, because it is difficult to think of an artist who is totally devoid of an attitude to life and society which he reveals in his work. Usually the attitude is implicit in his choice of material. But his success in portraying it in terms of the cinema is in direct ratio to the purity, power, and freshness of his language.

  I shall end this talk by describing a scene from one of my own films, which attempts to use a language entirely free from literary and theatrical influences. Except for one line of dialogue in its seven minutes, the scene says what it has to say in terms that speak to the eye and the ear. The scene will also introduce an important element I haven’t spoken of so far. This is the recurring motif. Appearing at several points in a film, often in different contexts, these motifs serve as unifying elements.

  The seven minutes refer to the opening scene of Charulata. Once again I assume many of you will have seen the film—if not in the cinema, at least on television. This scene establishes visually the appro
ximate period of the story, the upper-class ambience in which the story unfolds, the central character of Charu, and a crucial aspect of her relationship with her husband. In other words, it sets the stage for the drama that follows. I should point out that no such scene as this occurs in Nashta-nirh, the Rabindranath story on which the film is based, and that there are elements in it which have been invented for the purpose of the film. But this is inevitable in any adaptation of a literary work for the screen. It is also justifiable if what has been introduced serves to articulate the author’s theme, and illuminates the characters conceived by him.

  The film opens with the letter ‘B’ being embroidered in a handkerchief by Charu. This will prove to be a major motif in the film. We will learn later that the handkerchief is meant for Charu’s husband Bhupati. It will trigger off the conversation which will make Bhupati aware of Charu’s loneliness. Towards the end of the film, after Bhupati’s traumatic discovery of Charu’s feelings towards Amal, Bhupati will use the handkerchief to wipe his tears, and will notice the embroidery before he decides to return to his wife.

  As Charu finishes her needlework, we hear the grandfather clock on the verandah strike four. The clock is heard chiming the hour at several points in the film, and may be said to be the second motif.

  But what is special about four o’clock? We learn in a few moments when Charu puts down the embroidery, goes out of the bedroom and down the verandah to the top of the backstairs, calls out to the servant and asks him to take tea to the master in the office. We thus know that Bhupati’s place of work is in the house itself.