Creatures in Shards: Elem Klimov’s ‘Come and See’
HUG “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.’ And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” ~ The Book of Revelation, New Testament. To Dig We dig. In times of our stolen and mauled childhood, we begin to dig deeper into the earth—seeking meaning and refuge in buried rifles and grenades, toys to our existence. Seeking meaning where there are none. So does Florya, the young/old boy who takes us through a creaturely journey during an extraordinary time in Belarusian history—its encounter with the advancing German military in 1943, during what the Soviets call ‘The Great Patriotic War’(WWII). “Playing a game? Digging? Well, go on digging you little bastards,” an old man shouts at two boys right at the outset of the film. And we keep on doing just that—digging underneath our layers of sanity, even as we travel with a humanity that is stripped off all its veneer. No battle scenes, no feats of heroism or sacrifice; nor any unfolding love story in times of war distract us. It is an unalloyed realism of life, one that only war can spawn, scene after scene. In fact, the sting of realism veers off to hyper-real forms. It is this borderline that tantalizes the spectators . The verisimilitude of being engulfed in an apocalyptic mayhem is brutally interrupted constantly with baroque, expressionistic interventions throughout the narrative. Very early in the film, Florya tramples on a nest full of eggs, some of which are half-born chicks. This happens unintentionally but the tone is set. The important point is that Klimov never makes history and politics irrelevant by atomizing them into horror (what Susan Sontag had said of Arbus and Herzog). Instead, the camera takes on a huge moral responsibility in depicting what order human beings can both endure and inflict simultaneously—Klimov is not a bored anthropologist seeking fascination in the novelty of horror. The screen pulsates in Come and See. All the time. Like Terrence Malick, but in a much too sharp a fashion, Klimov twists and unfurls the landscape in light, colour and other non-human variables such that the multiple sites of slaughter, genocide and betrayal that mark the countryside turn the visceral into normal. The here-and-now cannot satisfy the journey. So we elongate space and duration that we might receive some kind of metaphysical clarity. But the prolonged gaze in the direction of our metaphysical quest is not one of mystical unity but an obtuse one, whose real focus is to show how history turns expressionistic within our viscera.For example, in a remarkable series of shots, a cow is guided across to what seems to be open, unguarded terrain. And a firefight breaks out. The cow stands untouched by the furious engagement, until suddenly struck by a barrage of tracer bullets. Finally its eyes rapidly shift and dilate before death—an indelible set of images that carve remarkable audio-visual statements. In fact, animals are a key motif in the film—constantly placed alongside humans in uncomprehending naivete. The camera lingers on these animals during violent incursions. Unseen birds chirp and a low-frequency whir follows us often. Florya and Glasha hide up following the attack in the fir forest and a stork wanders about and peers in at them in their cavern. The same stork appears twice, almost unnoticed, at the edge of the well and in its dark, perfectly still surface we see Florya’s face reflected, until it is ominously extirpated by the impact of a drop of water. Much later, the German commander fondles his pet marmoset while his men prepare to torch the church in a scene where the graphic impact is again lengthened and made hyper-real. Once the massacre gets under way the marmoset is spared the spectacle when a German helmet is placed over it. The pat by a loving owner’s hand on the helmet completes this fleeting but all too persuasive image. Much of the notorious massacre scene goes un-scored, the sounds of villagers in disarray, barking dogs, sudden gunfire, and Nazi laughter take over.Often images speak for themselves, and sometimes silence stings us with its eloquence. In an early scene of a German bombing raid, Florya temporarily goes deaf. The audio takes his subjective point of view, and wehear the same deafening ring. This shattering ring is thereafter brought back at strategic moments. At other times, a cacophonous fusion of beastly noises, droning hums, occasional excerpts of classical music, and of course, the expected terrifying sounds of war follow us. In the film’s final scene fittingly we hear: the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem. Nothing is a tableaux though—sonic or visual. Klimov is not documenting war. Rather digging is a relentless motif, which keeps taking us beneath the surface: into another real. At one point as he breaks blindly through the crowd of keening and wailing peasant women, Florya comes upon the old man whom he and the other boys had tormented on the beach only days before. Near death, the man is a mass of charred flesh: “I was set on fire,” he gasps. “I warned you not to dig. I begged them to kill me. They laughed. I said not to dig.” No, violence is not gratuitous at all. It happens. Because historical events make it happen. Simone Weil had said of life’s nameless horrors, that “we have to accept the fact that they exist simply because they do exist.” Klimov bridges distance with an identification that is deeply uncomfortable, for it opens one to the pain of the other.And in rare moments the reckless vitality of youth seems to be impervious to horror: like the scene where Glasha dances happily on a log for
RATI CHAKRAVYUH: DISSOLVING NOTHINGNESS INTO NOTHINGNESS, शून्य में शून्य का विसर्जन चक्र
Amrit Gangar Finding a form, a cinematographic Mandala! सिनेमॅटोग्राफिक मंडलः स्वरूप का निजी आत्मसात और निरंतर खोज़। All of Ashish Avikunthak’s cinematographic work seems to be held by a common thread,by an invisible sutradhāra, the thread-holder, and that sutradhāra is kāla or time, which in turn,is held by Kāli – his consistent faith in the Tāntric Sakta cult.[1] From his very first work Etcetera (1997) to Rati Chakravyuh (2013), Avikunthak, as i have been watching him since he started making films, is constantly in search of a formal energy (not just ‘form’ per se), a swaroopasakti, and in that sense Rati Chakravyuh is not an accident, it is a consequence of his praxis, his belief system.[2] About an hour-long meandering single-take in Katho Upanishad elongates itself to a circular 102-minute in Rati Chakravyuh through Avikunthak’s temporal engagement.[3] However, what i find interesting is his increasing employment of the spoken word, the sabda and its sensorium.[4] As if the silent eloquence of Etcetera had to become vāchik (verbal) eloquence of Rati Chakravyuh and some of its predecessors. But it is still within a certain body, the sarira that its enconsity is retained. This enconsity he might call religiosity but it is, i think, more of an ongoing dharma. Once translated into a ‘religion’, the term dharma tends to lose its true edge. Worse, it becomes a static and dogmatic corpus rather than a dynamic concept-in-action.[5] My usage of the word ‘religion’ henceforth will be in the sense of dharma, which could itself take a form of sound (sabda).[6] In his films, Avikunthak’ssabda of silence (Etcetera) to sabda of dhwani, sound (Kalighat Fetish, 2000) to sabda of mrityu, death and its rahasya or mystery (Katho Upanishad) has been increasingly acquiring an abundance (Rati Chakravyuh); this is also an interesting part of his journey towards finding a form, as if a cinematographic Mandala, where sabda rings like a rhythmic chant!Rati Chakravyuh is a chakra (circle) within a Mandala of chakra that embeds a triangle, the trikona and a central dot, a bindu, seed or a beej as it were! Broadly speaking, and as M Esther Harding in his essay, The Reconciliation of the Opposites: The Mandala, mentions, the Oriental thought concedes to the unconscious much greater place in the psyche than in the West; consequently ‘evil’, the destructive aspect of the life force, is not excluded or repressed but is recognized as the negative or dark aspect of the deities. So Kāli is but the devouring aspect of the Mother Goddess, while Siva is both Creator and Destroyer.[7] “The goal of perfection for the Oriental is not identification with the All-Good, as it so often is with us; rather, he seeks that enlightenment through which good and evil are recognized to be relative, a pair of opposites, from whose domination the individual can be released by acquiring a new standpoint and a new centre of consciousness.”[8] Mandala, the Practice, the Significance मंडलः अनुष्ठान,सारगर्भिता Simply stated, the mandala would mean a ‘circle’ or a ‘holy circle’ or even a ‘charmed circle’! In the sense of Yantra, it is a two- or three-dimensional geometric composition considered to represent the abode of the deity, within the broad sense of Sacred Geometry. The word appears in the Rig Veda and the Tibetan Buddhism has adopted it in its spiritual practice.[9]In his autobiography, Memories. Dreams. Reflections., C.G. Jung, describes Mandala at length. It is a graphical representation of the centre, which Jung calls ‘seat of the Self’ or the archetype of wholeness. However, in association with the film Rati Chakravyuh, besides Tantra, what i find fascinating is the way the Mithila tradition imagines ‘Kohbar’ or the nuptial room. In Mithila’s folk tradition, the priest or bhagat draws a circle about his place, chanting appropriate mantras. That prevents the evil from causing any harm or hindrance to his performance. The bhagat’s place is called gahbar (cave). Kohbar, the nuptial room, where the newly-wed couple perform the garbhadhānam rite, is also made a ‘protection space’. Like the nontribal priest, the Oraon Mati makes a ‘protection space’.[10] Talking about geometry would be a long debate for the specialists but what i find interesting is Plato’s imagination of the cosmogony, he said, ‘God geometrizes continually’ (as attributed to him by Plutarch). My hypothesis is that it could be interesting to contextualize or even problematize the continual circularization of Rati Chakravyuh within the Renaissance Perspective-cinematography debate. In his paper Seen From Nowhere, Mani Kaul, deals with this aspect.[11] By continual circularization, Rati Chakravyuh, defies a convergence presumed by the perspectival perception, and even the presence or the notion of conventional ‘frame’, which is significant.[12] Again, what interests me is the sub-texts and their randomness: a sub-text of the sabda and the sub-text of the circularity or the cycle of movement-image and time-image, in their randomness. In this essay, i propose to discuss these aspects of Avikunthak’s cinematographic work, particularly with reference to his film Rati Chakravyuh. Graveyard / Space.Death / Time.Goddess of Love / Rati: The Life-Cycle. स्मशान (आकाश). मृत्यु (काल). रतिःसर्जनविसर्जनचक्र। It begins with the graveyard (space) in Etcetera and passes through death (time), which could be sacrificial or suicidal (Kalighat Fetish, Vakratunda Swāhā, 2010), through sensuality of the sarira (body) or Rati (Nirākār Chhāyā, 2007). The philosophy of Tantra would suppose that the body is the link between the terrestrial world and the cosmos, the body is the theatre in which the psycho-cosmic drama is enacted. Rati, the Goddess of Love is the female erotic energy, when Sakti sees Siva, rati becomes active. Rati represents kinetic energy too; the couple’s union, completeness, and this has been depicted in different schools of the Indian miniature and other painting. However, Sakti of the Saktas is not the consort of Siva. In her cosmic self, Sakti-Siva are eternally conjoined. “The significance of viparita-rati in the copulative cosmogony is of the feminine principle constantly aspiring to unite, the feminine urge to create unity from duality, whereas the masculine principle, with each thrust, invariably separates, representing
The Constellation of Singularity
Adrita Mukherjee, Mantra Mukim and Rohan Kamble [Review of The Deed of Words by Pothik Ghosh, New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2017. The authors are reading for the M.Phil in the Department of English, University of Delhi.] *** For any new form of art, which in its epoch might be censured as being too ‘political’, in its trajectory from the streets, where it was born, to the hallowed grounds of academia is characterized by hostility and diffidence. The tenuous bond that had been forged between art and politics in these incipient stages does strengthen over time and yet remains a conundrum that continues to attract further rigorous analyses and study. Do art and politics constitute non-overlapping magisteria or are they inextricably entangled with each other? What are the dynamics that drive the sustenance of the politico-aesthetic interface, assuming that there is one? Pothik Ghosh’s The Deed of Words is a welcome addition to this area of study. Ghosh swerves away from the conventional path of tracing the political affiliations of authors in their literary oeuvres. Instead he looks at a literary work as a reified entity which by its sheer existence and peculiar aesthetic arrangements necessitates ramifications which are political. Its ‘being’ invariably inflects the domain of what we construe as the ‘political.’ Ghosh’s contention that Akhtaruzzaman Elias in his novel Chilekotar Sepai foregrounds the universality of the struggles in the meditational specificity that they posit is a significant argument in the book. The description of the struggle manages to transcend the boundaries of identitarianism and representation that the politics of capitalism follows. This leads us directly into a caveat: the insurrectionary potential of the identitarian struggles, one has to admit, is derived precisely from the adhesive forces which forge the identity. If the moment of insurrection, the culmination point of localized insurgent forces, results in a new subjectivity emerging which is resistant to ‘externalized determination’ doesn’t it invariably lead to the subsumption of infinitely different space-time configurations under the rubric of the counter-totalization; the force of singularity? If the ‘savage mind’ is a de-identitarianising force it simultaneously dissipates the revolutionary potential that one can find in the underbelly of struggles driven by a mixtures of identity and principles. The non-identity that emerges as a result of the insurrectionary moment will inevitably have to confront the question of newer modes of identification and representation. This yet unresolved question Ghosh may wish to confront more squarely. This question has forever vexed the serious independent left positions but given the current geo-political climate, takes much more ardency. The crisis of capital (capital itself being a moving contradiction) is that it wants to eliminate singularity, the book argues. This is a significant thrust in the book. At this moment, even as there is a will to eliminate the same, singularity is constitutive of capital. It does not lie outside of capital but is significant as a formalization: it can be a moment of launching the critique of capital. But how? One can relate this insight with the insurrectionary politics that the first essay of the book locates in Elias’ work. The moment of insurgency is the moment of break or rupture: an event that harbours the potential to transform the reader-writer relationship, which is that of capital. The expression of this break is one that collates both spontaneity and form—something that can also be seen in Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of the allegorical. Elias’ description of Tamijer Baap chasing the ashen clouds away in Khowabnama is precisely this moment of a break. That is to say, there is a desire to experience “that past when it was present as its own emerging.” Herein lies the politics of the break, of insurrection. Regarding the moment of rupture and the consequent dream of the implosion of capital: this transformation will occur only by stretching the finite, historically defined moment to the monstrous beyond. Tamijer Baap then becomes an allegorical figure harking to that break. Allegory and politics, therefore, cannot be separated. Politics of insurrection, that is and within this framework, the insurrectionary mind as revealing itself to be a constellation of forces. In other words, the constellation of singularity wherein lies the break and its potential, then, to transform passive practicality. The constellation of singularity, in the text, is the proletariat. One notices the relentless counter-capital strain of the work. One underlines how in Ghosh’s mind the proletariat not at all a sociological group but a living, material concept that questions ideas of historically bound identities. This is an extremely crucial point of departure for the political way of reading literary texts in the way that Ghosh has conducted. Another entry point to this critical work is to notice how the act of reading literature for Ghosh has a use-value, which is non-relational. Unlike the circuit of capital where the value of a commodity is determined by its exchange, literary experience is valued singularly on how it, the work itself, is consumed. Literature, for Ghosh, thereby never becomes a tool for political didacticism as it can never be exchanged for politics. As his reading of Muktibodh makes evident, literature rather becomes politically productive only at the moment of its non-relationality, that is, its withdrawal from exchange. The issue with Ghosh’s argument here is the ease with which he brings together Marxian theory of value with the concept of singularity, particularly Badiou’s. In Capital, Vol I, use-value actually exhausts the object of consumption, that is, if object A is consumed rather than exchanged for object B, then the utilization of A would limit any possibilities of exchange. Thus, it is surprising that Ghosh deploys the concept of use-value to theorize literature as an excess that cannot be supplanted or redistributed for any empirical uses including that of consumption. If use-value is a relation of consumption that exhausts its object, how can literary experience have one such value since the literary work never completely exhausts its field of content/style nor is it ever exhausted by a
MOMENT, META-MOMENT AND THE MINIATURE: NAINSUKH, THE ARTIST AND AMIT DUTTA’S FILM
Amrit Gangar _______________ [This is the pre-screening lecture-text given at the Rachana Sansad, College of Architecture, Mumbai, on 24 January 2017.] This is a beautiful moment indeed, beautiful because it connects me with yet another moment not in a distant past, but nonetheless in भूतकाल – in the sense of a past continuous, where भूत , वर्तमान and भविष्य keep coagulating! That was in far away Zurich, in Switzerland, where I had the opportunity to curate an Indian film program under a big umbrella event called Bollywood in Switzerland, which also had an exhibition around it at the city’s Museum of Design. My week-long stay there took me to the Museum Rietberg that has one of the biggest collections of Indian Pahari paintings. In that elegant museum, a graceful moment made me meet its director Dr. Eberhard Fischer, who welcomed me very warmly and took me around. During our conversation he asked me about the young film maker Amit Dutta and whether I knew him. Well, I did knew Amit Dutta. I said. But not very well, from his film institute days; in fact he was still studying at the Film & Television Institute of India in Pune. He also referred to Prof Suresh Chabria, whom I knew very well. He had been Amit’s professor at the FTII, and it was he who had first recommended Amit’s name to Eberhard Fischer to make a film on नैणसुख And how appropriately so – as we see it now! Amit was a brilliant student and undoubtedly promising to be a distinguished film maker. That pre-birth moment of the film नैणसुख (Nainsukh) to now, when she has grown into a 7-year old lady, (in fact over 15 years from the time she was conceived) – this is a momentous occasion for me, to be here, and talking about her. Cinema or cinematography to me is feminine, but she might turn androgynous off and on during my talk. I must thank the management of Rachana Sansad, Prof Rohit Shinkre, the Principal, Prof Gangadharan, my old friend and a comrade-in-cans for giving me this moment. Cinema has lost her Can-Yug, she is now on DCPs, pen drives, blu-rays, links and tubes. I also thank all of you who have gathered here to see an extraordinary film by Amit Dutta. Actually, it is to him that I owe my presence here today. From far away Palampur in the Himalayas, it was Amit who said this to me on the phone that in his absence, he wanted me to talk about the film in whatever manner I wanted to. I must thank him for reposing faith in me. I will also talk about him and his filmosophy in my own way. There is also my constant wrestling with the God of our times, Googleshwara, as he keeps challenging us all the time, while making things already known universally and all across the board, this God has blurred the difference between guru and shishya. But yes, it is a constant battle, particularly for teachers across the world on how to surprise this god and the shishya at the same time. If I am able to surprise you even a little during the course of my talk, I shall feel I haven’t wasted your time. One way, as I humbly believe, is to create or evoke a भाव or भाव जगत, the state of being and its universe, rather than search for meaning, because meanings keep changing and Googleshwara already has a huge museum of meanings for all of us to see. For me, Amit Dutta’s cinematography is an evocative bhava, his is the cinema of feelings, like music or painting, it touches our heart and enduringly so. Any ‘moment’ that endures, is a good moment. Also, any film that endures, is a good film. And any such film, I believe, defies synopsis. Often, I ask students to try and write a synopsis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror. Wanting always to comprehend films through conventional simplistic synopses, they find it impossible to synopsize Mirror. Amit Dutta’s oeuvre is largely synopsis-defying and yet extremely engaging because he is an extraordinary bhāva-sarjak or evocator, both in words and in images and sounds. I will later briefly talk about his recent Hindi novel called Kaljayi Kambakht, which, as Prof. B.N. Goswami has said, is like a दिव्य विमान , a divine aircraft – but more on that later. Invoking a prefix, an = उपसर्ग प्र and its illumination Amit Dutta likes the word प्रक्रिया (prakriya), the process. And that induces me to dwell for a bit on two prefixes – प्र and सं (pra and sam); these miniaturized letters called उपसर्ग and प्रत्यय, if wedded or welded to another word – a verb, a noun or an adjective – have the ability to achieve greater metamorphosis, they have the ability to imbue an expanded meaning – in motion. प्र is an engine. Look, what it does to the word योग (yoga), for instance. प्रयोग (prayoga) to me is a much richer word than the English ‘experiment’. Or what it does to गति (gati), just prefixing गति with प्र and turning it into प्रगति (pragati) pushes the motion forward, making it progressive. In a similar way, it turns simple क्रिया (kriya, performance, activity) into प्रक्रिया (prakriya), which could be both a complex and a forward process. Even in भूमीति (Bhoomiti), in Geometry प्र turns simple मेय (meya, measurable) into a प्रमेय (prameya, a theorem).मेय is also ज्ञेय, meaning discernible. Or what this does to the adjective शांत , it turns it into प्रशांत , which could be, ocean, the world’s largest and deepest ocean, the प्रशांत महासागर, the Pacific Ocean. I believe, Amit Dutta’s cinematography is an invocation to such महासागरú. And you will feel this in his film Nainsukh, as it inaugurates herself. So is the prefix सं (sam). Your own institution, for instance, has it – संसद (samsad or sansad) which is an assembly, a meeting. With Rachana