A Realist Metaphysical Turn in ‘Roma’

Siddhant Mohan It was one drunk night of November. I came back from Ayodhya and had finished a piece of reporting over the upcoming radical set up in Ayodhya which would demand for Ram Temple, yet again, to gather the political momentum in three states of north India. Soon I switched on to the YouTube app on my iPhone and began watching trailer of the movie “Roma (2018)”. The trailer, which lasted for about two minutes, made me sober up a little and I vowed to watch the film in its entirety. The film, as we know, of course has since then become somewhat of a cult across the globe. What might be the reasons? The culture of Mexican filmmaking and other art forms largely reflect the socio-political situation in and around that part of the world. Much of the creative development in the mainstream culture industry in Mexico used to deal with nudity, drugs, alcohol and so on for a long time in a merely representative sort of a way. This reflected in other creative media too. But soon came a new wave of Mexican cinema in 1970’s and 80’s when the movies started receiving global recognition. It led to the new wave of Mexican cinema, leading up to the contemporary ones, which still draws a great deal of enthusiasm from cinephiles outside of that nation. I am of course talking about moderate mainstream stuff: mostly owing to the works of the likes of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón who took the lead in Mexican filmmaking and blended their typical style with the Hollywood production techniques. Iñárritu made ‘Amores Perros’ as the new century started but soon made films like ’21 Grams’ starring Sean Penn and then arrived ‘Babel’. The films were critically acclaimed and received a lot of attention of film lovers too. This trend was on for a while with several low budget films made until 2014 when Iñárritu made “Birdman”. That film won the Academy Award. And surprisingly, Iñárritu also helped Leonardo Dicaprio win his first Academy Award of 2015 with ‘The Revenant’. Same goes for Guillermo Del Toro, who produced several films of Iñárritu, and went on to direct a few films on the sci-fi theme. That included a fair bit of work in animations as well. In 2018, Del Toro won Academy Award for his film ‘The Shape of Water’. The point I have been trying to make is that the new wave of global Mexican cinema pulled out several mythical and fictional plots and reached out to bigger audience. This approach draws from a fund of a far older Latin American archetypal imagination, then being globalized via films. The formula clicked. In the same trajectory arrives Alfonso Cuarón. He followed the same trend of low-budget Mexican filmmaking initially and grabbed the Academy Award for ‘Gravity’. But this is where Cuarón decides to deviate from the mythical and strange fictional imagination, and goes back to his roots, his early life, his ghetto in Mexico. This is an interesting reversal. He takes a steep turn backwards as it were, and goes on to produce and direct the film we are trying to discuss here: ‘Roma’. The film has has made an immediate impact. Is the world ready for a turn with such films? ‘Roma’, basically a locality in Mexico, is one autobiographical piece about Cuarón himself: on how his family survived through socio-political turmoils of 70s after Cuarón’s father left the family and went on to live with another woman. Cleo, an Indian housemaid in the same family steers the events around her, as it were. The character of Cleo, portrayed Yalitza Aparicio, a rookie actor, is one hell of a silent woman who does not utter a single word of complaint or remorse as she goes on through ordeals. When Cleo conceives a baby with her first and apparently only boyfriend, she and her employer comes to an a tacit agreement that women will always be alone. The story-line runs on a very linear manner, involving the very family in the backdrop of the Mexican society which got affected with the political turmoil, increased interference of US government and a slow and uneven paced settlements owing to developmental agendas and forms of neo-colonialism. Cuarón has portrayed history in a very deft manner, paying attention to every detail possible. Shots of Aeroplanes flying in the backgrounds every now and then remind us of the then political scenario; Mr. Antonio—the one who fell in love with another woman—parks his expensive car with such care so as to avoid any scratch-marks. This is deeply suggestive of an emerging class. And then the historical student-police clash is shown where police fires upon several protesting students killing many of them instantly. All these gets enmeshed within the plot-line. The plan to make this film in black &white is also a clever ploy. Cuarón takes a plausible risk, using simple shots. He has himself operated the camera, refusing to use zooms. Rather he fixes every shot. He does use longer trolley shots, pans too, but he fixes the camera by trying to make the story focus primarily over Cleo. This persolazizes history. This is clearly a moment of subjectivizing history in a new manner even as we deal with an apparently realist theme. ‘Roma’ is full of long takes and some are truly memorable. One can point out two such shots. In one, Cleo goes into the surgery-room after doctors fail to hear the child’s heartbeat inside her. In a single long take, Cuarón portrays the stillbirth of Cleo’s child: doctors giving CPR to the dead baby, passing the child on to Cleo for the final adieu, takes it back to prepare the baby from cremation and in fact, prepares the baby for its last journey by inserting cotton into its mouth, wraps it in a cloth while Cleo and the audience keeps on crying. And second one is when Cleo tries to save
RENU’s MUMBAI / रेणूजी की बम्बई

Amrit Gangar The title might sound as unpredictable as Renu Saluja’s ‘cuts’ in the films that she edited in her short but brilliant career in Mumbai. Renu Saluja (1952-2000) sailed across the shores – both parallel and mainstream. And on both sides of the river, we’d invariably discover precious pearls of her creativity. When Praba Mahajan informed me of the titles of the films to be screened as part of the GraFTII’s homage to her, I found that out of eight films, five – Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! (A Summons for Mohan Joshi, 1983), Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Who Pays the Piper, 1983), Parinda (1989), Dharavi (1991), Split Wide Open (1999) – had a direct relationship with Mumbai, the city where Renu lived all her working life.[1] It’s all about Renu’s Mumbai, thought I. A strange claim, but in the film production line-up, she was the final artist who had to weave a definite story from the available footage; cutting and splicing shots and sequences, honing the director’s vision, and imperceptibly her own, too. In the process, she had a legitimate claim on the ‘city’. These films so palpably demonstrate how strongly she must have felt about her city, else how could have they evoked its indomitable self and spirit in their peculiar pace and pep?[2] To me Bombay is the city of ‘cuts’ (not in the corrupt sense of ‘cut’ practice, but in its dramatic sense), the astonishing ‘experiential cuts’ that you find while walking on her streets, or driving on her roads, or travelling in her trains, you always encounter the unexpected, on every step, at every moment. And these ‘cuts’ Renu Saluja must have experienced and internalized to give back their spirit to the films that she gave the final shape to as editor. In the crevices of their ‘cuts’, the punctuations chosen by Renu Saluja breathed the city. It matters little whether she was born in Mumbai or not. But cumulatively she was writing a meta-cinematographic ‘editorial’ about Mumbai. I think she was giving us a Baudrillardian high, “Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvellous continuous performance of films and scenarios,” said the philosopher.[3] Editing was the final scripting stage of a film, Renu believed. A script is first written on paper – once, twice, ten times; it is then rewritten in the director’s mind and in the minds of the technicians and actors. Then a major rewrite takes place in shooting. Finally in the editing, it is constructed bit by bit with images and sounds. As she once said, one needed as much time to do sound as the actual picture cutting did. She always worked in close liaison with the sound recordist after the final cut.[4] I had the privilege of seeing her very briefly when she was working on Ketan Mehta’s film Sardar.[5] However, in that short time, I could see how terribly frank she was in voicing her opinion, how deeply and frenetically committed towards ensuring that the final work excelled. Within her svabhāva, temperament, she seemed to be in a perpetual quest, fathoming pace and rhythm of a moment, and that was the magic of her art and craft of film editing. Practically she travelled through the linear-non-linear, analog-digital span of the Moviola to the Steenbeck to the Avid. It has often been speculated that editing is a process that draws its momentum from the editor’s subconscious and Renu, through her subconscious, was able to make visual and emotional connections even between seemingly unrelated aspects. For every filmmaker, I suppose, the initial challenge is how to take off, how to set the story ball rolling on the screen. Watch any of the films edited by Renu and mark the ways they take. In those few foundational minutes, she skillfully quintessentializes the macro world of the story into its contextual microcapsule, while the rest, as it were, would be just an elaboration, an unfolding. The way she ‘cut’ the first seven minutes in Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! is remarkable. It is difficult to make out whether she cut it on music and song or was it the other way round. I saw it over a decade and a half ago but still can’t forget the juxtaposed image of the dying fish; perhaps because of the power of Renu’s montage that could enter the Brechtian conscience. The way we are introduced to Mohan Joshi and his wife Rohini and their ensuing struggle to get their chawl tenement repaired – it sustains even today. It is Saeed Mirza who has so consistently evoked Bombayness in his oeuvre – the city’s neighbourhoods, its lifestyle, its street language, its hybridity, its oddities, its aspirations, its agonies and ecstasies.[6] Last year, while participating in the IBM² seminar on the New Wave, Mirza said, he was the most regional filmmaker in India.[7] As editor, Renu very subtly understood the filmmaker’s urban ethos. In Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, she introduces us to the city through her initial cameo-cuts, as the photographers Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra (screen names for Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani, respectively) wait for clients at their newly opened studio. We get the snatches of its streets and high-rise buildings, passersby and a lonely puppy stopping and peeing on his way forward, as if from a Jaques Tati. Renu’s ‘cuts’ create a characteristic atmosphere within the film’s pupa that would gradually pave way for the film’s developed ecology. I think film editing is an art of ‘ecology’. Only an accomplished editor such as Renu Saluja could explore its intricate sub-texts for the director. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron was an epicenter of the youthful creative energy and camaraderie. You have to just look at the credits and the naming of its characters. Besides being editor of the film, Renu also assisted Kundan Shah on direction, along with Sudhir Mishra. Today, it would sound like a fairy tale but this great and meaningful comedy was made
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