by Mark Cousins
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Xie Jin – the most important Chinese director working before the Cultural Revolution – directed the expansive melodrama Two Stage Sisters in 1964.
Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966, the year after the release of Two Stage Sisters. Really a counter-revolution, it clamped down on aesthetic freedom and the cinematic boldness of directors, such as Xie. Both Xie’s parents killed themselves in the aftermath of 1966 and he was accused of “cinematic Confucianism”, implying an interest in ancient Chinese philosophy which annoyed the authorities as much as Paradjanov’s interest in Ukrainian folk traditions riled the Soviets. Xie was given a job cleaning the toilets of the film studio where he was once a leading director. After the leaders of the revolution were deposed he returned to filmmaking with Furong Zhen/ Hibiscus Town (China, 1986), a fierce attack on the inhumanity of the late 1960s. In 1997, he made a triumphant exposé of how the British flooded his country with opium, The Opium War.
In Hong Kong in the 1960s, producer Run Run Shaw and his filmmakers went from commercial strength to strength. Mixing the choreographed kinetics of Beijing opera with spaghetti Westerns, Kurosawa and Ian Fleming’s James Bond, directors like King Hu formed a new infectious philosophical-action cinema. Hu’s Hsia Nu/A Touch of Zen (Taiwan, 1969) will be considered in the next chapter.
NEW FILMMAKING IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA
The roster of names of new 1960s filmmakers with fresh visions is already exhausting, but they keep coming. Un-hampered by the realities of Communism, Central and Southern American directors were invigorated by the spread of new leftist ideas. As we have seen, Cuba’s revolution had taken place in 1959. Further south in Argentina, the father of Latin American new cinema, Leopold Torre Nilsson, made La Casa del Angel/End of Innocence in 1957. This was a self-consciously personal film in the manner of Luis Buñuel, whose anti-establishment stance Torre Nilsson much admired. But the gloss of his films was not typical of the work that followed from other directors. Add Italian neo-realism to his work and you get something like Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Vidas Secas/Barren Lives (Brazil, 1963). Torre Nilsson and he, together with the new ideas about culture and post-colonialism which flowed from the Bandung Conference, formed the building blocks of Cinema Nôvo, the socially engaged cinema of Brazil which would flourish in the 1960s.
Alongside Barren Lives stimulating this burst of creativity was a sister film, Dues e o diablo terra do sol/Black God, White Devil (Brazil, 1964), directed by a twenty-five-year-old journalist and theoretician called Glauber Rocha. Born in the poor Bahia region of north-east Brazil, Rocha was deeply unhappy with the endless musical carnival films made by his country’s industry. Brazil’s indigenous Amerindian culture, unlike the much more developed ones of Egypt, India or Japan, had been almost completely wiped out by colonialism. The descendants of black imported slaves from Africa comprised two-thirds of the population by 1959. At the age of nineteen he wrote an essay, “The aesthetics of violence and hunger”, very much in the spirit of Bandung, arguing that the complex realities of contemporary Brazil needed a cinema incorporating neo-realism’s bracing shock tactics.
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One of the landmarks of new Brazilian cinema – Glauber Rocha’s political Western Black God, White Devil. 1964
Black God, White Devil was Rocha prac-tising what he preached. A political Western set in his Bahia peasant homelands, it was photographed like one of John Ford’s films and edited in an Eisenstein-ian manner. The story is about a cowboy who kills his greedy boss, becomes an outlaw and, together with his woman, follows a strange black Christian revolutionary preacher (232). En route he meets a wandering bounty hunter, Antonio Das Mortes, who will feature in later Rocha films. Forty minutes into the film a bravura scene reveals Rocha’s approach. The cowboy, Manuel, heaves a rock onto his shoulders and agonisingly edges up a mystical mountain with it, accompanied by the preacher. Cut to an ecstatic scene. Someone shouts “the sun is made of gold”. Manuel’s wife writhes. Manuel is told to bring her to the preacher. “Tomorrow a golden rain will fall and the earth will turn into the sea.” The preacher kills their child silently, making a sign of the cross on its head with its own blood. Then Antonio das Mortes shoots all the preacher’s followers. He says he wants a world without gods or devils. At the end of the film a troubadour sings “A world badly divided cannot produce good … the earth belongs to man, not god or devil.” Rocha’s complex message is “violence is normal when people are starving”20 and that religion will not address his country’s problems.
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Santiago Alzarez took “Now”, a song sung by Lena Horne, and illustrated it with a montage of still and moving images of civil rights demonstrations in the US. The result was a radical fore-runner of the music videos which would emerge in the 1980s. Cuba, 1968.
In 1964, a military coup in Brazil reduced freedom of expression. Five years later Rocha and another important director, Ruy Guerra, left the country and, in effect, ended the Brazilian New Cinema movement. Rocha died in Rio in 1981, aged just forty-three, but, together with Guerra and others, had found a way of marrying innovative cinematic schemas to anti-colonialist ideas in a way that inspired cinema throughout the Third World.
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An intellectual ruminates of love, life and revolution in one of the great sixties essay-films, Memories of Underdevelopment. Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Cuba, 1968.
Early Eisenstein, in particular, was an influence well beyond Glauber Rocha. Santiago Alvarez was a Cuban who studied in the US, joined the Cuban Communist party and worked at the island’s influential film school, ICAIC, which was started after the revolution. A documentarist, his eighth film, the short Now (Cuban, 1968), is a striking example of ICAIC’s radicalism. Taking Lena Horne’s title song as its only sound element, Alvarez edits it to images of black protest and police brutality in the USA. As Horne insists on equality “Now, Now, Now”, events at Civil Rights demonstrations accelerate and American law men use more and more force (233). Now has real power and can be seen as a forerunner of music video techniques in the 1980s and since.
One of the first and most important feature films to come out of ICAIC was Memorias del subdesarrollo/Memories of Underdevelopment (Cuba, 1968). Perhaps surprisingly, this is a film as uncertain and dithery about revolution as Now was assured in its targeting of the civil rights atrocities of Cuba’s enemy, America. Set in Havana in 1961 it tells of an intellectual whose woman leaves him and who is left alone listening to their taped conversations, thinking aloud, asking what is the meaning of life. Like Alvarez and Godard in France by this time, its director, Tomás Gutíerrez Alea, used authentic photographs of political events in his film.21 Alea had studied in Italy in the 1950s, knew the lessons of neo-realism inside out but incorporated them into a more ambitious, personal essayistic style. The structure is the free-flow of the intellectual’s thoughts, which roam between his personal life and that of the island. He considers the role priests and philosophers played in the subjugation of people before the revolution. The “underdevelopment” of the title seems to refer to his own “inability to relate to things, to progress”. As we hear the character think, we see Antonioni-like slow pans through empty spaces at one moment, hand-held camera shots in crowd scenes the next. Eventually he is accused of raping a girl but is set free. Memories of Underdevelopment is one of the best examples of the 1960s film collage, the driving force of which was not narrative but the search for meaning. Nowhere in the world were these types of films as popular as the more traditional closed romantic realist ones, where story problems were encountered and solved in parallel universes with people like us but more glamorous, but for the first time in film history, they represented a significant alternative.
TRIUMPHANT BEGINNINGS IN IRAN AND SENEGAL.
The dominant art form in Iran in the twentieth century so far had been writing. In the first three decades of the century, during the silent period in Western cinema, an extraordinary range of Persian poet
s emerged. Then around the mid-1930s, modern Iranian fiction came to the fore. By contrast, no important indigenous films were made until the 1960s in the country which screened the first Lumiere films, a year after they were made, in the Shah’s Palace in Tehran. The first, a short documentary directed by the female poet Farough Farrokhzad, was perhaps the single most auspicious initial step taken by any film culture. Khaneh Siyah Ast/The House is Black (Iran, 1962) was a film about a colony of people with leprosy (235), simply shot in black and white and given a poetic commentary by Farrokhzad herself. What really set the tone for much of Iranian cinema thereafter was this film’s sincerity of tone, its deep humanity and its attempt to move beyond simple description. There was a timelessness about these people’s lives, and an economy which turned scene after scene into something like a hieroglyph.22 The House is Black was a key influence on the spare Iranian poetic cinema of the 1990s and, in particular, on the director Samira Makhmalbaf whose Sib/The Apple (Iran, 1998) tells the story of two girls imprisoned at home for their own safety by their father. Two things were unique about this great film, which was written and edited by the director’s father, Mohsen. The first was that most of the parts were played by the real people in question. The second was that its director was eighteen years old.
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Farough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black, a documentary portrait of a leper colony, was the first indigenous Iranian film and is the only instance where a nation’s first filmmaker was a woman. 1962
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Ousmane Sembene’s The Black Girl, the first black African fiction feature made by a black person. It told of a young Senegalese woman (left) who is forced into service for a white French family, and eventually kills herself. Senegal, 1965.
Three years after The House is Black, another country entered the history of cinema. La Noire de…/The Black Girl (Senegal, 1965) was not only the first indigenous feature film made in Senegal in West Africa, it was the first Black African feature film ever made by a black person. There had been Egyptian films for many years, of course, a film studio in Cairo and important directors like Youssif Chahine. Decolonalization in sub-Saharan Africa left Africans with the question, What sort of art – and film – do we want to make ourselves? In recent years there had been what was called “negritude” – blackness asserted with white, European intellectual ideas – but this itself was a kind of colonialism. The Black Girl was the first Black African feature film to break with the tradition of negritude and begin to improvise an indigenous voice.
To say this implies that its director, Ousmane Sembene, started with a blank sheet, with no schema whatsoever, but this is not true. After nearly seventy years of filmmaking, this was conceptually impossible. Sembene, a former bricklayer, lived in the south of France for a while, and joined the French Communist party. He had seen and absorbed many films. In the mid-1950s he published an autobiographical novel and became a major cultural figure. Dissatisfied with the small readership for his novels he went to Moscow in 1962, studied film with the same teachers as Muratova and others and returned to make The Black Girl. Using the simplest of camera techniques, touches of John Ford in his compositions, and very basic sound equipment, he told the story of a young Senegalese woman who becomes a servant in a white household (236), moves to France with the family, becomes desperately lonely and eventually commits suicide. To internalize the film, he used an interior monologue by the girl. To separate this from the outside world so dominated by her bosses, the thoughts are spoken by a different actress. This was new and allowed the layers of her life to become central to the story. Sembene’s pioneering work inspired other directors. The Tunisian critic and filmmaker Ferid Boughedir, for example, called The Black Girl, “Incredibly, powerfully moving, beautiful, dignified, humane and intelligent.” Sembene would go on to make some of the most important African films of the 1970s.
INDIAN TRADITIONS AND NEWCOMERS.
Black Africa was taking its first cinematic steps, but in India the situation was more complex. Established directors did some of their best work and new filmmakers emerged. The country’s main film school, the Film and Theatre Institute of India (FTII) was established in 1960 and became a focal point and think tank for those who wanted to experiment with Indian film style. Radical Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak taught there from 1966, introducing the films of the neo-realists, Bresson, Renoir and Welles to the undergraduates. Ghatak himself had melded Indian melodramatic and mythic traditions with a rigorous interest in film language in 1960 in Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-capped Star (India).
The pupil of his who most extended the language of Indian cinema was Mani Kaul. His first feature Uski Roti/A Day’s Bread (1969) took Ghatak’s interest in how lenses create screen space to new heights. Using the story of the strained relationship between a bus driver and his wife as a starting point, Kaul filmed with great forethought. Where Bresson always stuck to a 50mm lense, Kaul used a 28mm one to balloon the space around the driver and a 135mm one to flatten it to nothing, rendering almost everything fuzzy and ungraspable. A Day’s Bread was India’s A bout de souffle, its Black God, White Devil. Like each of these it challenged a well-established film industry with new ideas about form.
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The most stylistically innovative Indian film of its period: Mani Kaul’s A Day’s Bread. 1969.
Of course that industry was not homogeneous. Just as France in the 1940s and 1950s had modernist forerunners Bresson, Cocteau and Tati, as well as the tradition of quality films, so India had Ghatak and Satyajit Ray as well as Guru Dutt, Mehboob and its mainstream All India directors. Ray continued to be the only director from the country known and admired by the West. He remained firm in his dismissal of the escapism of All India films, but his 1960s work, far from following the fashion for experiment like Ghatak or the younger Kaul, became further absorbed by microcosms, unities of time and place, and psychological nuance. This is important because it explains his alienation from, and disappointment with, Indian film. Take this comment he made in 1982, “The concept of an art form existing in time is a Western concept, not an Indian one. So in order to understand cinema as a medium, it helps if one is familiar with the West and Western art forms. A Bengali folk artist, or a primitive artist, will not be able to understand cinema as an art form.”23 This is astonishing because Ray is saying that not only is the film camera a Western invention but its sense of what time is, is too. That he believed this in the early 1960s is clear from his films Devi/The Goddess (1960), Teen kanya/Two Daughters (1961) and, what many consider his best, Charulata/The Lonely Wife (1964). Just when Godard was fragmenting time, Warhol was numbing it, Alain Resnais was rendering it ambiguous, Jancsó was intensifying it and Tarkovsky was transcending it, Ray in each of these was again emphasizing its real and classical properties against the grain of the films of his country. Like the novelist and songwriter Tagore he took enclosed worlds, describing them with minimalist detail. Tagore said that the whole world was reflected in the convexity of a dew drop and each of these films is just such a drop.
The Goddess (see page 491) is a beautiful film in which Sharmila Tagore – one of the greatest actresses in the world at this time – plays a woman whose father-in-law dreams that she is a Hindu goddess. People believe him and she is anointed in a fabulous ceremony. The imagery of the film, photographed by Subrata Mitra, is among the finest in world cinema. The theme is that of the clash between ancient Sanskrit culture and modern enlightenment values. In a manner similar to Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (Italy, 1957), it is an attack on religious fervour, but where the Italian film undergoes a series of stylistic transformations, The Goddess is consistent in its miniaturism. Two Daughters is even more so, a mass of gripping details about a new postman from the city who comes to work in a tiny village. He gets to know his orphaned child assistant, reads Walter Scott novels, gets malaria and leaves. Charulata is about the bored wife of an upper-class anglicized publisher. Ray’s favourite among his films, and his most literary, it is also
about how writing might free this woman’s soul. It is perhaps appropriate that a film about repression is itself so contained physically and temporally.
THE NEW WAVE IN THE US AND THE DECLINE OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM
As we saw earlier in this chapter, at the start of the 1960s some American filmmakers began to beat new paths. The documentary Primary used up-to-the-minute equipment; John Cassavetes adapted the rough visual style which resulted; Alfred Hitchcock employed TV techniques in a story about ordinary people, and Andy Warhol turned gay desire into a static trance.
It wasn’t until later in the country’s momentous decade, however, that changes in world cinema in general, together with continuing social upheaval, began to influence more conventional filmmaking norms. By 1968, the Kennedy brothers were dead, Martin Luther King had made his famous Civil Rights speeches and the Vietnam protests had begun. In the world of cinema, no less than 1,500 film courses were now being taught throughout the country. European films were shown on campuses and in specialist cinemas.