When I read this week that Sidney Lumet died, I was saddened because it never occurred to me that he would have to stop making movies on one dull day.

The first Lumet’s movie that I watched was 12 Angry Men (1957). Instant fanhood. I watched it several times. The least I enjoyed it was when it was screened in the IC&SR auditorium after which people discussed it, then the moderator asked the audience to write down on a piece of paper the one thing they took away from the movie, then the audience wrote, then the pieces of paper were all collected, and then the audience left. Nothing ruins a movie like a crowd discussing it and a ring master asking the crowd to write the one thing they took away from it. It might be amusing to read how various people might have prioritized their thoughts and managed to throw away everything else while clinging on to the one thought that would make them look most unique and wise.

Then I watched the prophetic Network (1976). If you know of a better movie made about the television media, I want to know about it. Today Glenn Beck does a poor imitation of Howard Beale. I am yet to see a more cosmic and ferocious monologue than Ned Beatty’s, the chubby face of God. I am glad to see the movie enter the IMDB Top 250, and now rise up to the Top 200, glad that it has reached far more people than it did around the time I had first watched it. (1976-77 was a great and infamous year when All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, Network, and Taxi Driver lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Rocky.)

Then I watched Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Agatha Christie’s favorite film adaptation among her novels. It was possibly the most visually striking movie Lumet made (but how would I know! I watched 9 of over 70.), and it didn’t make a big impression on me visually, either because the print I had watched wasn’t good enough or because he just couldn’t make a movie where anything other than the story can be overt. But the movie was nostalgic and exotic about a time and a place that I know nothing about. It gave me a good idea of Poirot. Most of all it had a remarkable performance by Ingrid Bergman almost entirely during a single five-minutes-long no-cuts scene, the more interesting part of which is that Lumet kept the camera on her face throughout, as if directing our and the Academy’s attention.

Around this time I chanced upon the filmography of Sidney Lumet and found one of the most prolific and diverse repertoires. I took Roger Ebert’s advice when he wrote, “If you care to read only one book about the steps in the making of a film, make it Making Movies.” I hardly learnt anything from the book, but it gave me an appreciation of the infinite things that go into making movies, and taught me that I knew nada. The book introduced me to a warm non-auteur hard-working director who worked on making movies as if it was his daily job. He was serious about making movies, about making the best possible ones given various limitations, while being considerate with the producers and the cast and the crew. (Unlike the legends of cruelty about Kubrick and Hitchcock’s styles of filmmaking, Lumet sides with the softness in Eastwood’s approach.)

Sidney Lumet was often considered as lacking a visual style, and he likely took it as a compliment. He didn’t consider technical details unimportant, but seemed meticulous, even obsessed, about they being not just supportive but also invisible in letting the story to be conveyed in such a way that the audience isn’t drawn to any particular aspect of the filmmaking itself. It was clear when I watched the story of redemption, The Verdict (1982). The movie has the least dramatic courtroom closing I know of, even when compared to the famous scene in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962), which according to me is passionate though not dramatic. In the director’s commentary of The Verdict‘s DVD, Lumet spoke about David Mamet’s writing, Paul Newman’s acting, the numerous casting and lighting and coloring choices made, and many other things. I found his commentary, like his movies and book, thoughtful and informative about the themes of the works as well as the nitty-gritties of filmmaking.

Then I watched the rowdy Dog Day Afternoon (1975). I had watched it in several parts over several sittings before a recent full-length viewing. People quote, “Attica! Attica! Attica!”, which is unknown to me. Wyoming, anyone? Given the increasing debate about alternate sexuality in Indian society, I welcome its re-release or screening in a film festival. Apart from its rich themes and characters, its plot and narration are gripping enough for most people who watch movies. For some reason I didn’t love the much-acclaimed Serpico (1973). May be it was the hairdo, or the dog, or the heroine, or simply that Serpico wasn’t an easy character to connect with. Nevertheless, watching this and the previous movie were, to me, a new revelation of Al Pacino’s acting prowess.

Then I watched The Deadly Affair (1966), the movie I least liked among all Lumet’s movies, despite the famous novel and the stellar cast. May be the secret agent stuff has lost its charm on me. Had there been a DVD commentary, things might have been different.

Then I watched the nail-biting Fail-Safe (1964). It was remade recently and to me it seems very suitable for theatre production. It is a well-balanced debate on war and the tragic conscious choices of destruction that accompany it. It was understandably overshadowed by its counterpart. The satire of the movie was provided by the forced disclaimer about how the military makes truly fail-safe mechanisms that absolutely preclude the events of the story from ever happening. Hypocrisy, stupidity, or does it matter?

Then I watched The Anderson Tapes (1971). It gives an idea of what Lumet may have made of a script like Ocean’s Eleven‘s. While it is about a grand burglary by a hand-picked gang, it’s neither cool, nor smooth. Apart from what is considered as one of the earliest takes on the absurd intrusion of electronic surveillance, it also came across as the full-length first draft of Dog Day Afternoon.

All his movies that I watched are social commentaries on the ambiguity of guilt, the absurdity of consumerism and TV ratings, the validity of victims sentencing the perpetrator, the settlement of court cases on external reasons, the celebrity of crime, the sanctimony of watchdogs, the blurring of friends of enemies and enemies of friends, the logic of war, the notorious choice between security and privacy. His leitmotif was conscience, as the NY Times obituary suggests. His movies are filled with characters with personal moralities. Speaking of which, characters in Lumet’s movies often are themselves the vehicles carrying elements of surprise, either by peeling their layers one at a time throughout the narration (never a back story) or by having them act in a way that surprises themselves. When I think back at many of these movies, I notice that he was prone to downplaying even the most outrageous and dramatic elements in them, while accompanying them with a wryness.

7th July, 2011: I’m not sure why I felt compelled to not post this back then.

To the Editor:

There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think. That time is coming to an end. During the decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, it was the serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has been expelled as a serious influence on how life is perceived. The predominant uses to which literature is now put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as the rewards that literature affords an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use.

Your paper’s cultural journalism – the more of it there is, the worse it gets. As soon as one enters into the ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism of cultural journalism, the essence of the artifact is lost. Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in “the arts”, and everything it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet? Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: “Does the writer have the right to blah-blah-blah?” It is hypersensitive to the invasion of privacy perpetrated by literature over the millennia, while maniacally dedicated to exposing in print, unfictionalized, whose privacy has been invaded and how. One is struck by the regard cultural journalists have for the barriers of privacy when it comes to the novel.

Hemingway’s early stories are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so your journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they’re easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than fiction. The integrity of the journalist’s informant is never questioned – only the integrity of the writer. The writer works alone for years on end, stakes his or her everything on the writing, pores over every sentence sixty-two times, and yet is without any sort of overriding literary consciousness, understanding, or goal. Everything the writer builds, meticulously, phrase by phrase and detail by detail is a ruse and a lie. The writer is without any literary motive. Any interest in depicting reality is nil. The writer’s guiding motives are always personal and generally low.

And this knowledge comes as a comfort, for it turns out not only are these writers not superior to the rest of us, as they pretend to be – they are worse than the rest of us. Those terrible geniuses!

The way in which serious fiction escapes paraphrase and description – hence requiring thought – is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously, only that fiction, the lazy journalist’s fiction. The original nature of the imagination in those early Hemingway stories (an imagination that in a handful of pages transformed the short story and American prose) is comprehensible to your cultural journalist, whose own writing turns our honest English words into nonsense. If you told a journalist, “Look inward at the story only,” he wouldn’t have a thing to say. Imagination? There is no imagination. Literature? There is no literature. All the exquisite parts – even the not so exquisite parts – disappear, and there are only those people whose feelings are hurt because of what Hemingway did to them. Did Hemingway have the right …? Does any author have the right …? Sensationalist cultural journalism masquerading as a responsible newspaper’s devotion to “the arts”.

If I had something like Stalin’s power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I’d forbid all public discussions of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I’d forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I’d outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak one another. I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own. I’d do this for as many centuries as are required to detoxify the society of your poisonous nonsense.

– Amy Bellette/E. I. Lonoff

The above letter has been stripped out of context from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost without permission.

I watched Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy during three consecutive nights three weeks ago. I’ve wanted to write about it because I’ve felt that I understood something, yet my understanding is vague enough to elude words. Now I am grappling with words to express a vagueness that I know about.

The trilogy has been called different names — Faith, God, Man-God, Religious Chamber, Silence. Some even argue that they don’t form a trilogy but two of these along with some other one do. I haven’t read or watched enough of Bergman’s interviews, so I only hope he amused his audience by keeping mum. To me it’s the Silence trilogy. After carefully arranging all my notes and reading numerous critiques and interpretations of others (most of them on the IMDB boards), I have decided to discard them all, acutely aware of their thoroughness and incompleteness. Instead I take to addressing two different questions.

Some great works are timeless, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. They embody powerful capsules of truth that make us gasp once they get to our bottom. Some others reflect the state of the recipient’s mind at the time of reception, like Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Bergman’s movies — at least those that I’ve seen — fall in the latter category, thus offering a multitude of interpretations from different viewers and enriching the viewer through multiple viewings. I feel certain to draw different conclusions from the trilogy after experiencing some other things in life, or even the same things.

The urgent question, for which there is no single nor complete answer: How are such kaleidoscopes conjured?

The way this is usually achieved is through an unreliable narrator. Like a Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman uses Karin, a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics make wonderful narrators when they are not in the dock and when they are not like John Nash in Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind. Karin is played by Harriet Andersson whose teetering along the edges of sanity is as dizzying as Vivien Leigh’s Blance DuBois in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire. What does one make of a Virgin Mary’s apparently immaculate conception and a woman’s claims of being raped by a Spider-God? Who among the two women is mad and who isn’t? Which of the images is symbolic and which isn’t?

Another way is to use an introvert. In Winter Light we closely follow the life of a Doubting Tomas, but it is so filled with silence (his, God’s, and Bergman’s) that his doubts themselves aren’t clear (to him, to God, to the viewer), and when Tomas speaks one is not sure what to make of his words, like when he brutally tells Märta what he exactly thinks about her. This movie appears the most direct and simple of the whole trilogy, but it is this silence that is beguiling and thus seeds interpretations.

Another way of allowing multiple interpretations is through maintaining a strict distance from its characters, the way Bergman does in The Silence. In this movie he never tries to explain anything and allows the viewers to make what they can out of what is shown and heard, the way young Johan is forced to do all around the hotel. The actions are not always clear, and even when clear their intentions remain mystifying. This is not as easy as it sounds, neither for the director nor the viewer, and in addition to meticulous craft requires the director to trust the viewers with their intelligence.

Another question, one that is more commonly raised by Bergman’s fans is: Why incest?

As is perceived by many (not all) viewers of Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence, and in a few other Bergman’s movies, incest is never shown nor even implied. But it is frequently hinted. As simplistic and incomplete as this seems, I think one can find answers in the Bible. This Jonah hasn’t yet read the book and is hopefully waiting for an Esther to handover a leaf of translations.

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The only thing I knew about Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex aur Dhokha is that it originally had a five-minute sex scene which the CBFC cut to half. The last Hindi movie that I watched in a theater was Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. I was mostly disappointed by it, mainly because I fail to understand the greatness of Devdas. What struck me about Dev D then and LSD now is the increasing sexual liberation that mainstream Bollywood is witnessing. It is nowhere close to accepting sex as an integral part of life (as in Europe), but it is acknowledging its presence in the society, in youth, and on the Internet.

LSD is not doing as well as I wish it. On its eighth day, a Saturday second show screened on the biggest screen of a multiplex here was only half-filled. I wonder whether it is the unknown cast or the reality atmosphere that is putting off the crowds. If it is the word of mouth about the “adultness”, it is a pity for it has nothing more shocking than is shown round the clock on various Indian news and reality TV shows.

The movie opens without titles, with a promise that the viewers will be treated to three raunchy movies for just one movie ticket (though popcorn doesn’t really fit here), and it takes us on an unabashed tour of sensationalism. The three “movies” tightly share their themes and are loosely interconnected in the way many well-known non-Indian movies are (e.g. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, Paul Haggis’ Crash, Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic). I don’t intend to draw too much attention to this novelty, but it has been executed carefully here and I would like to see whether and how Indian Cinema milks it.

In the first movie, a young lad and a lass studying in a film institute fall in love while he directs a movie for his diploma certificate in which she plays the heroine. She is rich and he is street-smart, but together they are only fools for love. They reminded me of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (creepy Ricky Fitts with a camera in hand) and Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces (director and ingénue). Why the scholarship-sponsored young director would make such a clichéd and terribly-acted movie is beyond me (he prays director Adityji), but its production gave Dibakar the opportunity to throw many stones at today’s state of Bollywood and more on reality TV. The entire movie is shown through a camera spitting out the timestamp, aspect ratio, battery charge, and lighting, and I was initially curious why Dibakar chose to include them. He may have been drawing our attention to the fact that the characters outside the young lad’s movie act as dramatically (reality ishtyle) as those inside it. It is a distraction. It could be my inexperience with watching reality TV. During the first married night of the protagonists, I found myself wondering whether the shot would be cut because the camera only had two minutes of charge left.

Voyeuristic hidden camera scandals are apparently all the rage in India, and Indians find the grainy videos more orgasmic than autoerotic asphyxiation. I am amused by the amount of research that must have gone into making the second movie, which revolves around an unemployed loser’s attempts to make a titillating video using the CCTV cameras in a supermarket. He desperately needs the money, and his conscience can turn around and on and off like the cameras that he controls (and sometimes doesn’t). After one beautiful caricature of a salesgirl calls his bluff, he digs his way towards another salesgirl with low self-esteem. He respects and likes her, gets attracted to her, tries to possess her, and she falls for him. The characters and their story are more developed than in the previous movie, but they mostly continue to act, especially talk, the way people do on reality TV, as if they are aware of the camera and the roles that it entails for them. Random thought: would a man jerk off on the night that he witnesses a gun shooting?

In the third movie, a cameraman who was once involved in prestigious sting operations, finds a candidate for a sex “sting of the century” which is all that his new employer wants from him (thanks to TRP ratings and a beautiful award on her table). The candidate was abandoned by the topmost album singer for a Russian (could have been an Ukrainian) who was quicker on her knees. The scorned woman wants revenge after surviving a suicide attempt (like the cameraman). The cameraman and the woman try to execute the sting operation, sketched by his boss and her assistant, and enhanced by them. As the movie progresses, the camera recedes, and while I welcomed it, it also distracted me too much just the way head-hopping and POV transitions within a paragraph distract readers. I am mostly ignorant about camera positions, but here I started feeling that it interfered with the story.

While the three movies seem to be centered around love, sex and betrayal respectively, each of them have all three elements as their central themes. The most enchanting aspect of LSD is the set of progressions from one movie to the next: the receding camera awareness, the increasing camera importance, the thickening plots, the deepening characters, the increasing casualness of sex, the decreasing crime, … I tip my hat to Dibakar Banerjee.

Image Source: Wikipedia

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The day after the big night. The day after a decade of Oscars. This is a better time than most other to air my mixed feelings about awards in the acting categories (hereafter called acting awards) given my interest in fiction.

While the deservingness of awards are eternally debatable, awards play a role in reminding us of some notable events of any year. I tend to remember the acting awards more than any other awards. Because I love and root for the stars who bring those characters to life. Because I can appreciate and prefer character-driven stories to plot-driven and drivel-driven ones. Because I can more easily imagine myself having a conversation with them than imagine myself pondering great ideas or themes or crowds or angles.

I have watched 32 of the last 40 performances that won acting awards. The ones that I haven’t watched yet — including three that were announced last night — are from the movies Iris (2001), Monster’s Ball (2001), Dreamgirls (2006), La Vie en Rose (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007), Precious (2009), The Blind Side (2009) and Crazy Heart (2009). I have watched many others that won just the nominations, but it would overwhelm us all if we went into those statistics.

Anyway, as I thought about all those 40 characters it struck me that only 4 each from the leading actor and actress categories are fictitious. The remaining 12 characters are based on real people. Why is that? What does it mean? Every year Hollywood makes several biopics. Several, but a minority. Then how come some of these not only manage to get nominated but also win?

Apart from the given fact that the actors must have acted well, real characters have a great advantage. The writers and the actors start with a lot of material, from costumes to quirks to voices to unexplored depths. The actor can push limits to a great extent, lose or gain a few stone, grow hair or go bald, spend hours with the real fellow learning to play the piano, wear the underwear of the same brand that the real one did, do outrageous things that they wouldn’t normally do for a fictitious character. This gets the actor and the audience to believe that he or she has immersed into the character. The actor and the audience alike are willing to accept that there is something about this character that is unique, that is inexplicable, that is the way it is. And if you get it right, you get the award right?

I don’t mean to suggest that this is undeserving. Hollywood has got that part right about making biopics, about making in-depth character studies. Whether it is the writers’ inability to identify worthy protagonists, or the lack of freedom for them to do such things without getting into serious troubles, I haven’t yet seen that culture of making biopics take off in Indian cinema. I only wonder whether the award has been given to the actor because he or she has acted better than all others or because the actor has successfully delivered what we knew and expected from the character.

On the other hand, only 5 supporting characters of the last 20 that won are based on real people. If an original screenplay writer has a great character, they should probably write it as a supporting one.

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