Unravelling the science of cinema contd

Aaahh.. It's been a while since I blogged. It's not as if nothing much has been happening. Quite the contrary in fact! Lots of stuff happening and lots will be shared on this platform. Less time to kill these days and I'm quite liking the glimpses of the world that's awaiting for me. Cryptic? Maybe. Interesting? Oh yes! Details? All in good time :-)

I didn't share all the interesting things that were discussed at the film appreciation workshop in my last post. As I promised, I have come back to pen down more thoughts from that memorable weekend. Here goes.

In the last post I spoke about the issue of form and content. On the first day of the workshop we were shown a film which was shot somewhere in Africa. South Africa if I'm not mistaken. The film was a story involving a dog, a black boy and a white man. The scene which will stick in my head for a while happens in the first few minutes of the film. The dog is in a sack, the white man beats the sack and orders the boy (who is his slave) to open the sack. The boy protests, "The dog will think that I beat him!" His master refuses to budge and forces him to open the sack. I won't get into the details of the story but it was a touching story of the man ordering the boy and the dog being in a sense slave to the boy. However, because of that incident the dog nurses a hatred for the boy. The white man has tampered with the dog's reality. I was quite impressed with the film. Left me savouring the fact that I had just seen a very powerful film. It was through the discussion that I understood what the filmmaker had aimed to portray. It wasn't a tiff between two people over a pet. Far from it! It was a film about the colonisation of Africa. The metaphors and parallels that can be drawn by way of film is simply amazing!

Prof. Hari Haran also waltzed us through the opening scene of Ray's classic, Charulata. It's an eight minute long scene and even though I don't know much about cinema, I wouldn't be surprised if it's considered to be one of the best examples of Indian film making. It's a scene with very little dialogue. Charulata is the story of a rich housewife who is lonely but is extremely curious about the world. The opening scene ends with an amazingly powerful shot in which Charulata looks at her husband who's standing a foot away from her. She looks at him through binoculars! And when Hari Haran dissected the scene, it was just so clear what kind of a superlative film maker Satyajit Ray was. To give you an example to illustrate this, Charulata is based on Tagore's novel called Nastanirh. Charulata means "The lonely wife" and Nastanirh means "The broken nest". In brief, the book and film are quite different. In this scene, Charulta goes up to her bookshelf and stands there cooing "Bankim, Bankim" while picking out a book by Bankim Chatterjee. This is Ray signaling that he's not going with Tagore. Exquisite, isn't it?

There were a few short films that were screened at this workshop. A wonderful wonderful short film shown was 'Maestro'. I don't know how easily available it is but my word, it's an absolute must watch! It's an animated film and has this character having every move of his being programmed by an unknown gadget. He comes through as being a powerful person who has each and every need of his attended to. There is a subtle circular motion that is present during the film. And this character is going through a routine which seems as if he's been doing for a long long time. The film ends with this character emerging out of a grandfather clock as the cuckoo! A cuckoo is a 'Maestro'?! ("Each one of us is a king!",Akshay Kumar at the AAIFA awards promoting his film "Sinngh is Kinng")

How does one know that the villain in a movie is the bad guy? Is it the way he looks? The way he talks? His family or his upbringing? Is there a science behind it? Yes, by all means. He is the person whose actions cannot be explained by a motive. Think about it. If you were to know that the 'villain' is killing everything in sight of him because of things that he saw when he was a harmless two year old, would you brand him as villain/bad guy?

Why is it that Hollywood produces so much better scripts that Indian movies? More than 90% of Hollywood's films are based on novels. And in India, it simply doesn't pay to write. Simple. Another point of difference is the fact that Hollywood movies are either out and out musicals or have no song and dance routines. Why?! According to Hari Haran it's purely because of commercial reasons. Hollywood forged ahead with the music video industry while India didn't. Quite an objective analysis, isn't it?

I think that's about it from this wonderful weekend! Hope you enjoyed my ramblings and if you made it through both the posts from beginning to end then I'd like to bump into you someday. We just might become friends, if we aren't already ;-)