The Film and I

Ritwik Ghatak, The Cloud-Capped Star (still), 1960.

This week we share an essay by Ritwik Ghatak written in 1963 when he was preparing to enter Hindi filmmaking in Bombay. Taking that moment of transition as an occasion for reflection, Ghatak defines cinema as both personal expression and a collective practice grounded in contemporary reality. Against the strictures of film theory on one side and the conventions of commercial production on the other, he insists on the plurality of cinematic form—a position that speaks to the present in its resistance to a fixed concept of what committed cinema should look like.1

I am coming to Bombay.

Fortunately, my entry into Hindi films is through the kind efforts of a progressive group of film enthusiasts who mean business and with whom I see eye to eye in things of art. They have the requisite background to make our joint venture a significant one. I am really thrilled, the prospects are exciting. With the ample facilities, technical and otherwise, that filmmaking in Bombay offers, one can really have a go at it.

Pitfalls are there. But let us hope we shall find ways to get around them and arrive with healthy, clean, wholesome, and dramatically gripping film fare. At least, I am fervently hoping so. It is a turning point with me, you know.

Such a situation naturally leaves one vaguely searching. One likes to formulate what one means by his filmmaking activities. One tries to take stock.

I am doing the same.

I would like to formulate my ideas about film.

Here goes the effort.

Film is, basically, a matter of personal statement.

All arts are, in the final analysis. And film seems to be an art.

Only, film is a collective art. It needs varied and numerous talent.

It does not follow that film is not personal. It may be, at one end, the case of a collective personality, and on the other, may bear the stamp of one individual’s temperament upon all the others’ creative activities.

To be art, either one or the other must be the case. Any work that lacks style and viewpoint necessarily lacks personality, and thereby ceases to be art.

To my mind, this is the very root of the matter. Some hodge-podge thrown together, stylistically divergent images strung together by the device of intrigue and “story matter,” may be a good evening’s entertainment, but no sir, it is not art. Such products abound all around us. One should resign oneself to these sad facts of life. Sometimes one may get great pleasure out of them, but not artistic pleasure.

That is why, even such a considerable artist as John Ford becomes considerable only at intervals. The rest of present-day Hollywood, of course, does not count.

I accept that these very “story matters” and intrigues and howling good situations are raw materials of art. But raw meat is not exactly Moghlai kebab. A cook comes somewhere in between.

A cook, that is, the artist’s personality.

The moment the artist enters, things come throbbing to life. From moment to moment, you realize with sudden shocks that it is your innermost feelings and unnamed emotions that are being given voice to. You, in a word, have a revelation.

That is why the seers of Upanishads are called poets. The poet is the archetype of all artists. Poetry is the art of arts.

The word “art” in films is much abused, both by its friends and its foes. But probably art is not such a bad thing after all. For instance, whatever is pretentiously dull or breathtakingly spectacular is not necessarily art. Art does not consist merely of ambitious subjects or outlandish propositions or extensive use of a newly available extreme wide-angle lens. It does not consist also of montage and manipulation of filmic time and dedramatization solely. It rather consists of bursts of fancy. Whatever may be the genre, art brings with it the feeling of being in the presence of living truth, always coupled with enjoyment.

Further than this the formulation must not go. Because it will be dangerous to do so. All aesthetic theory tries to comprehend and encompass reality. But all theory is, a priori, less than the sum total of that reality. It is bound to fall far short of its aim. One can have some guides to creative action, no more. Danger comes from this inherent inadequacy. Because the next step in the career of a theory is its attempt at monolithic unity and formalism. Life being varied, art being numerous in its possible expression, artists being gloriously dissimilar in their temperaments, catholicism is the only possible approach from now onwards.

Because film is just like any other art in its functions, pundits notwithstanding. From the point of view of final consummation, the Tenth Muse is no mysterious maiden. She cannot stand straight-jacketing, just as other arts cannot.

This is the reason why even the brilliant Dr. Siegfried Kracauer goes astray when he tries to impose his theory of “redemption of physical reality” on all films. Hitchcock, to him, becomes a major and significant artist and Olivier’s Hamlet no film at all. The same happens to Parker Tyler, when he tries to read exclusively and intrinsically literary connotations out of all the films, in spite of his eminently valid “cult of displaced laughter.”

Film is not a form, it has forms. Nobody denies the special privileges of the cine-camera, but one should not approach the issue from that side at all. One should approach it from the point of view of the emotions aroused and intellects sharpened by one’s end-product: the result that accrues, after all, you create “for” the people.

That is why all the forms, from utter naturalism to extreme expressionism, seem to me to be totally valid, if your thesis and temperament demand it. Here I am reminded of Tagore. With his vividly plastic imagination, Tagore hits the mark. One feels so grateful to him. He faced parallel problems in his own sphere and solved them in his inimitable way. Though Mr. Eric Rhode, the Sight & Sound reviewer of Ray’s Teen Kanya, calls him just a formidable guru, his was a truly transcendental vision, far outreaching all the filmmakers of the world.

And what about Chaplin, who cuts across all theories?

I believe in committed cinema.

I mean committed in the broadest sense of the term.

To me, the great Indian example is Pather Panchali. Because of its truth, its sense of beauty, its bursts of visual ecstasy and of mental passion. I know I am being a bit old-fashioned, but there it is.

Satyajit Ray, and only Satyajit Ray in India, in his more inspired moments, can make us breathtakingly aware of truth, the individual, private truth. The Indir Thakurun sequences of that film remain to me the highest and noblest expression of art in Indian films.

Somehow, Satyajit has achieved a link with contemporary reality in those moments.

Committed is to that contemporary reality, to the daily acts of heroism in that reality. No important work can be created without this commitment, I think. I am quite aware that this reality and this heroism can be aimed at from the vantage points of past and future. That is also exciting, to approach this India through a story of, say, the India of Primitive Buddhism.

Because this commitment presupposes a desire for change in that reality.

I am also aware that there are so-called “eternal” elements in art, eternal only from the point of view of a human existence. That is the cosmic element. As playwright Ernst Toller expressed it in one of his prefaces, it is “the silence of the universe” element. But it always appears in contemporary relationships, in the things of the moment. No serious artist will ever deny the position of this “eternal” in the creations of man.

I have been experimenting in my films. These were the thoughts behind them. To me, all my films are just completed exercises, I cannot have any opinion about them. But when I hear, for instance, that the non-realistic cry of a consumptive girl — “I want to live” — just when she is at the point of death, is horribly forced in the context, I truly wonder. I feel I have not been able to convey the entire allegorical connection of Uma, the wife of the Lord of Destruction, who is the archetype of all daughters and brides of all Bengalee households for centuries, with the protagonist. Or, for instance, when I hear that I am guilty of expressionism in my latest film, and that expressionism and symbolism do not go hand in hand with reality, I try to think out, then what are the things on which expressionism thrives? To me, it is precisely contemporary reality, with its innumerable and unwieldy patterns and crosscurrents of forces, that needs abstraction, if I set myself the task of propounding certain fundamental traits of that reality. I think much in modern art and literature and painting have to be thrown out if we do not accept this position.

Picasso and Jamini Roy, for instance, will cease to exist.

This sort of theorization has exasperated people like Marcel Proust who declared film cannot be an art. He is the antithesis of Dr. Kracauer.

This line of thinking one can understand, of course, under the shadow of the bomb. Western civilization is in the pangs of death. These are but expressions, in films, of that crisis. When learned men start abusing any abstraction, and blaming science, which is born of such abstractions, for contaminating the minds of men, one is reminded of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century yearning for the Noble Savage. This pathetic clinging to the superficial can make one feel merciful, but not partisan.

Trying to crawl back to the origins of cinema and exalting the still camera plus motion formula are ludicrous attempts. As ludicrous, say, as trying to go back to Dionysiac orgies and satyric mimes and masks of Thespis would be today in matters of the stage. The same can be resolved with a sense of the contemporary, of course, but in a synthesis on a higher level, such as Strange Interlude of O’Neill or Strindberg’s Dream Play, or more aptly in Brecht’s experimentation. Organon remains the most brilliant attempt at such a synthesis.

And that is precisely what is happening in the hands of all the masters of cinema, from Flaherty down to Fellini and Antonioni.

My first film was called a picaresque episodic film along the lines of the eighteenth-century Spanish novel Gil Blas de Santillane, the second was called a film of documentary approach, the next was a melodrama, and the fourth, nothing at all, just no film.

To my mind, I am only groping. Groping to find the most proper expression for the theme at hand. Sometimes I may have connected, sometimes gone wide off the mark. I have tried to experiment with forms of story, treatment, styles of taking, images, etc. Each one of my films is quite different from the others, though I fear my personality and inclinations are in all of them. From the compositional point of view, all the films have divergent balancing principles thought to be inherent in the theme. In the sound tracks, including the music, I have tried to weave different patterns.

It is the nuances I am after, the elusive, fleeting nuances. They contain the life-spark.

Any story is good material if it contains the scope for those nuances, even the songs and dances are not loads around your neck. They are creative elements with tremendous potentials, if the theme and approach calls for them.

There are so many genres. One accepts melodrama as one. I do not believe in the film’s privileges being turned into dogma (à la Dr. Kracauer). I do not abhor abstraction, scientific or otherwise. I believe in organizing my filmic elements, even if one wants to catch and portray the very flow of life itself.

I do feel a quickening of heart when the camera shows the instantaneous, the casual, the proverbial ripples in the water, the everyday glory of a sunset, or an involuntary twitching of a pain-stricken face. But I do not rule out of hand the passions of an Othello or a drunken clown’s tirade about life to a ballerina who is sick at heart.

I think a truly national cinema will emerge from the much abused form of melodrama when truly serious and considerate artists will bring the pressure of their entire intellect upon it.

After all, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa and Kinugasa took the Noh and Kabuki in their hands and squeezed supremely personal statements out of them.

The prospect is exciting, is it not?

1963