by Mark Cousins
Like many of Minnelli’s films, Paper Flowers, is an elegy for a lost artistic past, richly detailed and brilliantly composed. The director in the movie comes from a wealthy Anglicized family, which looks down on “the dirty world of films”, and the same prejudice wrecks his marriage. He then meets a girl under a banyan tree on a rainy night, falls in love with her and wants to cast her in his current film, which happens to be Devdas (P.C. Barua’s classic work about a drunken young man in love with his neighbour, see page 124). The girl is unwilling to dress up and wear film make-up, calling such things a sham and saying that she looks like a monkey. Thus, Paper Flowers becomes a comment on India’s cinematic past and its tendency to glamourize and decorate.
Dutt’s camera style is the most distinctive of this period. He tracks backwards rapidly and repeat-edly to reveal the size of a space, a rare technique even for the masters of tracking shots – Mizoguchi, Ophüls and Minnelli. He does this particularly in the film’s most beautiful sequence, a musical number set in a sound studio. The girl comes into the vast space, a diagonal shard of light splits the screen (301) and the song “Time has inflicted such sweet cruelty on us” begins. The director and the girl stand almost motionless, while the camera pulls back and circles them and the space. This exquisite number is reminiscent of Minnelli’s ballet climax in An American in Paris.
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The director meets his muse in an empty film studio in Guru Dutt’s Paper Flowers. No widescreen print of the film seems to have survived, but this rarely illustrated musical sequence captures some of the boldness of the lighting. India, 1959
Other countries in South and East Asia reflected India’s artistic development of melodrama. In 1924, the pioneering Shanghai producer, Tan Sri Runme Shaw, had gone to Singapore and together with his sixth brother, Run Run Shaw, established Southeast Asia’s most commercially successful film company. Another brother, Runje, ran a similar unit back in Shanghai. Their modest successes encouraged them to set up elsewhere in the region and soon they were the major players in Malaysia, producing dramas, love stories and horror movies. In villages without cinemas, the Shaw brothers would erect temporary open-air or tented screens in fields with mobile projectors to test the local audiences’ taste for movies; wherever crowds came, the Shaws would establish a permanent theatre. They diversified rapidly into cabaret and amusement parks in the early 1930s and by 1939, they owned 139 cinemas across Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and what is now Singapore. The Second World War slowed down their expansion, but they picked up again thereafter. Their subsidiary, Malay Film Production, made 300 films in the years after the war, with Chinese and then Indian directors, and it was the latter’s glossy style that was preferred by local audiences. During this time the legendary Malaysian actor-singer-director P. Ramlee (1929–73) emerged. Known as the “Eastern Gene Kelly”, he made seventy films and recorded hundreds of songs.
The Shaws would soon move to Hong Kong, but even before their arrival, its filmmaking was vibrant. The considerable influx of talent from China at the end of the 1940s boosted its production to nearly 200 films per year in 1952. The most innovative early ones of this period were melodramas, as had been the case in India, and included Zhu Shilin’s Zhi Ben zhi ZhiGe/The Dividing Wall (Hong Kong, 1952). Zhu was Hong Kong’s best director of the period and The Dividing Wall takes social themes and dresses them up in melodramatic guise.
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The Shaw Brothers production Princess Iron Fan, based on the classic Chinese folk tale, Journey to the West. Director: Meng-Hwa Ho. 1966.
In 1957, Run Run Shaw went to Hong Kong, bought forty-six acres of land at 45c per square foot and established the largest private film studio in the world. Soon Shaw Brothers productions were employing 1,400 staff in twenty-five departments and their first Hong Kong successes came in 1962 (175). After this, they borrowed heavily from Kurosawa’s sword movies, establishing the martial arts genre of Eastern cinema. Shaw stars like Bruce Lee would become massively successful in the 1970s and the speedy, choreographed Shaw style would influence action cinema thereafter.
Korea remained largely outside the Shaws’ influence. In 1954, when the Korean war finished, only nine films were made in the country’s capital, Seoul, but by 1959 that number had increased to over 100.
BANDUNG AND THE NEW POLITICAL FILMMAKERS
Returning to India in the mid 1950s, a third major filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, emerged, providing the country with what could be called its “Rashomon moment”. What Kurosawa’s film had done in 1950 for Japanese cinema, Pather Panchali/Song of the Road did for India in 1955. It played in the West, was a huge success, screening in New York for six months, drawing the international spotlight onto Indian aesthetics. Mother India also played abroad, but had little impact on America and Europe. Pather Panchali stripped Indian cinema of its fatefulness, religion and “masala” musical numbers and, influenced by Italian neo-realism, was more to Western taste. If Mehboob and Dutt were India’s answer to Sirk and Minnelli, then Satyajit Ray was closer to being India’s Kazan.
Ray was born in India in 1931 into a literary and Westernized Calcutta family. As a boy he loved the American films of Ernst Lubitsch and Griffith actress Lillian Gish and in the 1930s he even wrote a fan letter to US actress and singer Deanna Durbin. He had a liberal education at a school run by the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose writings he would repeatedly adapt for the screen throughout his career. In 1947, he helped set up the Calcutta Film Society, which introduced not only himself, but Ghatak and others to trends in world film. The society was a place in which film was worshipped, like similar organizations in Paris, New York and London. Ray watched Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Soviet Union, 1925) twenty times there, and Pudovkin and Jean Renoir both gave talks under its auspices. In 1951, he actually assisted Renoir on the production of The River (India–US) in Calcutta. Ray would become a major figure in international art cinema with his 1960s films Devi/The Goddess (1960) and Charulata/The Lonely Wife (1964) and his style and themes will be detailed in the next chapter. What is relevant here is that his secular, liberal Pather Panchali, which was made to dispel ignorance about Indian village life, was a spectacular début and India’s first major Western success.
It tells the story of Apu, the son of a priest. Apu’s father leaves their village. His brother and old aunt both die and the remaining family members also leave at the end of the film. Ray used naturalistic lighting (176), realistic costuming and asymmetric staging, none of which was common at the time in India. He coaxed realistic performances from his child and adult actors, having been heavily influenced by Renoir. He had studied painting and one of his first jobs was as a book illustrator; the image top right (177 top) is one of his woodcuts from the novel, Pather Panchali, on which the film was based. The scene shows Apu and his friends seeing a steam train for the first time, one of the most memorable sequences in the film. Ray believed in Nehru’s plans to industrialize India, so the train’s arrival is treated with wonder and hope.
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Subir Bannerjee as Apu in Satyajit Ray’s ground-breaking portrayal of boyhood in an Indian village, Pather Panchali. India, 1955.
Pather Panchali was the first of a trilogy of films Ray made about the same characters, the others being Aparajito/The Unvanquished (1956), in which the young Apu grows up and his parents die, and Apu Sansar/The World of Apu (1959), in which Apu dreams of becoming a novelist, takes a bride, rejects his son and then accepts him. These films’ success took Ray to Hollywood, where he met Kazan and Billy Wilder, who had already directed Double Indemnity (1944) and who was working on the classic comedy, Some Like it Hot (1959). Like those other key innovators in international cinema, Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel, Ray was soon disappointed by what he found in Southern California. Wilder said to him, “Well, I guess you’re an artist, but I am not. I’m just a commercial man and I like it that way.”3 Ray was later to comment that, “there were no poets in American cinema.” As we will see at the end
of this chapter there were at least four mature ones and, around the time that Ray visited their country, they each made a masterpiece: The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) and Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959).
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A rare opportunity to see the visu-al idea for a film develop. Satyajit Ray illustrated the arrival of the train in the novel Pather Panchali (top) with block printed simplicity. His story board of the same moment (middle) is more linear. By the time he filmed the scene (bottom) the train had become a distant element. Only the steam of the locomotive is common to all three.
Indian cinema was fascinating in the mid 1950s, but in order to understand it fully, the broader world political situation must be considered. The de-colonization that began in the previous decade continued apace and Egypt’s 1952 revolution was a key event in the Arab world. The Algerian National Liberation Front began attacks on French institutions and Tunisia became a sovereign state independent of France in 1956.
Across the globe, citizens were agitating against oppression – from other countries or from their own leaders. Central to this was a meeting of twenty-nine Asian and African countries in Bandung in Indonesia in 1955. The purpose of the Bandung Conference, as it came to be called, was to forge economic and cultural links between countries like India, China, Japan, and Egypt. Soon what was called the “Nonaligned Movement” emerged. This comprised, as well as these countries, Yugoslavia, Indonesia and many African and Latin American states. Crucial to their co-operation was that they were allied neither to the “first” capitalist world of North America, Europe and Australasia nor to the “second” communist world of the Soviet Union and the communist block. They were a self-styled “third” world and that is what they came to be called.
Such events have implications for film history. If the First World made closed romantic realist films and the Second World followed the Soviet realist line, the Third World would attempt a fusion of each. The Bandung Conference had iden-tified a third point on the political triangle which, in turn, resulted in a third point on the map of film style. Movies such as Mother India, which had already been enthusiastically greeted in many of these Third World countries, were the bedrock of this new style, combining US elements from Sirk and Soviet influences from Dovzhenko. Many of the 1920s naturalists, such as Lois Weber and King Vidor in the US and Painter in India, had already attempted a similar combination of ambitions in their films. But the aftermath of the Bandung Conference heralded a type a movie making not as technologically sophisticated as Western cinema, but more relevant to the Third World’s changing political climates. At the very beginning of this book, we imagined Steven Spielberg driving in the Mojave desert, planning the opening of Saving Private Ryan (USA, 1998) and how he would make it innovative. His reasons for doing so were also suggested (see Introduction). After the Bandung Conference Third-World filmmakers would try to change the schema of their medium – aiming to do nothing less than improve their countries. In the 1970s, the most radical of them together with their theorists rethought the Third World’s cultural implications and “Third Cinema” was the outcome (see pages 368–70).
If Mother India was one of the bedrocks of the new non-aligned filmmaking, Bab al-hadid/Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, Egypt, 1958) was another. Little has been heard from Egypt since the formation of the Misr studio in Cairo in 1935 and the filming of its first distinctive movie, The Will (1939). In the interim, production remained at about twenty films a year, mostly formulaic musicals and comedies. One of the best of these was Flirtation of Girls (Anwar Wagdi, 1949), a screwball comedy in the manner of Hawks, but with musical numbers which included some of Egypt’s most famous comic performers. Derived from the films of Mamoulian and Lubitsch, it is set in an aristocratic world in which the young daughter of a pasha is taught by, and flirts with, a new tutor. The Will’s director, Kamal Selim, died in 1945, aged thirty-two and his tentative realism influenced the next generation’s two key directors, Salah Abu Seif and Tewfik Saleh. A state cinema body was set up in the country in 1957.
Cairo Station, shared a similar rage to that in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar and became a landmark of North African filmmaking. It was composed of a mosaic of characters and incidents in the country’s main travel hub. Its main story told of an infatuation between a station newspaper seller and a beautiful soft drinks vendor. Its subplots concerned women demonstrating for marriage rights, luggage carriers agitating for a union and even a 1950s pop song.
These were woven together and shot using crisp, clean, wide-angle lenses (178), which in the bright African sunlight afforded deep focus and deep staging. At the centre of this microcosm of Eygptian society was a brilliant performance by Youssef Chahine as the crippled newspaper seller, maddened by his repressed desire. Chahine combined the roles of director and actor, as his Indian counterpart, Dutt, had done in Paper Flowers. Born in Alexandria in 1926, he studied theatre in America for two years and fell in love with its musicals. Returning to Egypt, he started directing in 1950, aged just twenty-four. In 1954 he made the first film starring the young Egyptian actor, Omar Sharif, who would later become an international movie star. Chahine’s Cairo Station was his first stylistically original film. When the crippled newspaper seller realizes the object of his love is having sex with her brutal fiancé, Chahine expresses his character’s anguish semi-abstractly. The camera tracks into a Coca-Cola bottle from which he has been drinking and then obliquely away from him, passing a door behind which the sex occurs. This is intercut with a close-up of a train wheel bending a worn piece of track repeatedly. Chahine merged Eisenstein-ian, Egyptian and Hollywood melodrama in yet another 1950s scene about the human breaking point. His work would become more political in the 1960s as it became influenced by Egyptian President Nasser’s Arab nationalist policies. By that decade’s end, he had made the astonishing La Terre/The Land (Egypt–France, 1968). His 1970s films (discussed in Chapter Eight) would mix bracing accounts of his country’s recent history, combined with musical numbers inspired by his hero Gene Kelly, subtle and daring depictions of homosexual desire and brilliant melodrama. Few world cinema careers mix the schemas of international filmmaking with such dynamic results.
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Director Youssef Chahine played the lead in his landmark melodrama Cairo Station. He would go on to become one of the greatest directors in African cinema. Egypt, 1958.
Chahine was broadly free to explore his own complex ideas about society and filmmaking, but the same cannot be said of the Communist bloc directors. The Lodz film school in Poland surpassed many similar Western institutions and produced at least four important international directors: Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski and Krzysztof Zanussi. The first of these was the most significant Eastern European director of the mid-1950s. Wajda (179) was born in 1926 in Poland. Aged sixteen, he fought the Germans in the Polish Resistance movement. After the war he became a painter before studying at Lodz, then debuted with a film trilogy about Poland during the Second World War: Pokolenie/A Generation (1954), details the underground struggle; Kanal/Canal (1957) is about the Polish resistance in 1944, and the best of the three, Popiol i Diament/Ashes and Diamonds (1958), starts with the first day of peace after the Second World War. This dialogue snippet captures the film’s attitude:
POLICEMAN: How old are you?
BOY: 100 years old.
POLICEMAN (slapping him): How old are you?
BOY: 101.
“Every director in the world wants to do something original”,4 wrote Wajda, which could be the thesis of this book. His originality came partly from the way he disguised his films’ meaning from the Polish authorities, by encoding them in symbols. He later said, “After my first few films, the reviewers began to say that I was a ‘symbol-oriented director’. Ever since then I have always been pursued by the white horse that appears in Ashes and Diamonds, the ineluctable sign of the Polishness of my films.”5
Symbolism had b
een part of the way filmmakers expressed themselves, at least since Mario Caserini’s The Evil Plant (Italy, 1912), whose opening shot featured a snake. Sergei Eisenstein’s films were full of symbols of the destructive power of capitalism, whereas Dovzhenko had represented the Ukraine’s pastoral qualities through them. Lubitsch in 1920s Germany and 1930s America used sexual symbols, as did the French surrealists (in a different way) and Buñuel and Hitchcock. In Von Stroheim’s Greed (USA, 1924) gold represented avarice. Certain frontier towns stood symbolically for the whole of modern America for Ford and objects represented the tranquillity beyond human experience for Ozu. Welles’ Citizen Kane (USA, 1941) was full of metaphors for childhood and power. Leftist Chinese films used people and tenement buildings to symbolize the evils of nationalism. The train’s arrival in Pather Panchali was the symbol of India’s hopeful, industrialized future for Satyajit Ray and Kikuchiyo’s shooting in Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai represented the passing from the age of the sword to that of the musket. The use of an image, an object or event to represent something greater than itself already had a rich cinematic history.