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Akaler Sandhane (1981)
What does Storytelling Do?
In Akaler Sandhane, Mrinal Sen employs a meta-fictional structure to probe the political complexities of representative practices. The narrative begins with a production team camping in a village in Bengal to shoot a film based on the 1943 famine. In the ensuing process, the social conflicts that haunted the village during the actual famine get reinvoked in the course of several encounters between the villagers and film crew. It leads to unrest among the villagers and the eventual disbandment of the shoot. Sen's critical acuity in articulating the dynamics of such encounters needs no further acclamation. The differences in their worldview, disruption of the local economy, and the incitement of past trauma are distinctly stated in the film. The village headmaster's didactic speech in the end further rounds up the troubled situation between the film crew and the village authorities from a dual perspective. But what lurks beneath Sen's critique of filmmaking structure is an acute recognition of the force of narrative devices and formal tropes in fiction.
The crew's director, played by Dhritiman Chatterjee, goes through a process of unlearning as he faces unforeseen circumstances during the shoot and negotiates with the village's reality. As the scenes of his film unfold in the village, the locals associate themselves with the enacted sequences. Durga, a resident of the village, finds her predicament reflected in the character of Smita Patil, the female protagonist of the concerned film. The orthodox Brahmin elites of the village, on the other hand, find themselves on the evil-side of the story as it highlights the exploitative practices of upper-castes. Haren Aon, who used to perform in jatras, rekindles his lost passion for playacting by witnessing the shoot. Despite the contextual differences between the villagers' past and Chatterjee's story, these associations develop over narrative tropes that touch upon the universal conditions during a humanitarian crisis. The moral dilemma of a married woman who trades sexual service for survival necessities is one among such tropes. Instead of the plot/story as a whole, narrative fragments and their particular affects become a site of identification and reflection. Even on a formal plane, the word "cut", accompanying the clapperboard, is joyously reiterated in onomatopoeic association by the village children.
What does storytelling achieve after all? In the film's end, the Brahmins remain stubborn, Durga's predicament is unchanged, Haren's involvement with the crew terminates, and the production company fails in its endeavour. But, the act of storytelling in that space generated an opening for the villagers, as well as the crew, to reflect on their cultural practices and current state of existence. The potency of fiction precisely lies in this bare affective capacity to situate ourselves better and rethink our relationship with others. In the light of this reading, one cannot help recalling Sen's remark in an interview for the Cineaste: "you cannot topple a government or a system by making one Potemkin... All you can do is create an environment in which you can discuss a society that is growing undemocratic, fascistic."
Le sang d'un poète (1932)
The Impurity of Images: On Cocteau and The Blood of a Poet
I attempted to 'read' Cocteau's film by looking through the succession of images and trying to discern the adventures of the protagonist, but it gets increasingly difficult to come to any deductions given the contestations Cocteau had with the surrealists when this film was made. Blood of a Poet and Luis Bunuel's L'Age D'Or, both commissioned by Vicomte de Noailles, are often heralded as the pinnacle form of surrealist imagination in cinema. But interestingly, Cocteau has consistently denied any relation of his film to the surrealist movement. As he claims, the film draws nothing from dreams and symbols, rather it "initiates" the mechanism of dreams and "rejects" symbols by substituting them with allegories. It is true that many artists who associated themselves with the surrealist movement later left it due to political reasons, and Cocteau's disassociation might probably be on the same lines. But I am more interested in reading Cocteau's statement as a proposal for a new-fangled process of reading surrealist texts. Several readings have pinned the images to Cocteau's biographical details. The suicide of the protagonist, for example, is supposed to be a reference to Cocteau's father's suicide, the snowball game to Cocteau's childhood memory, or the pervading homoeroticism to his sexual inclinations. But in response Cocteau has always maintained, "People read it in many ways, but the only solid truth is the "valid opinions of the technicians" who agree that the images are lasting and fresh."
His interest, therefore, precisely rests on the images he conjured in a "half-sleep" state, allowing himself to wander in a labyrinth where conscious reflection exist in an interactive relationship with drives, memories, and trauma. As some critics have pointed out, the images are not derived from restful sleep but from exhausted slumber. The referentiality of the forms and objects are not fixated, it is in the process of making. Reminiscent of the half-finished statue, head half-constructed with wires, or the fragmented body of the hermaphrodite, the film's aesthetic principle harps on the incomplete stages of creativity that has failed to achieve its aesthetic culmination. This unformed, unfinished structure is manifested in the texture of the film. To perform a reading following surrealist tenets, it is necessary to consider the film as a spontaneous celluloid manifestation of images derived by "psychic automatism", as Breton would prefer. Uninhibited from the rules of reason, it is supposedly a "pure" vision of our functioning of thought. Cocteau's film does the opposite. He does not claim to have stripped his images from moral reasoning or conscious thought. He retains the tensions, the impurity of the images in a semi-wakeful state, to inculcate a new mode of reading surrealist texts. The ensuing tensions in Cocteau's images particularly emerge from the inconsistencies in the "pure" flow of uninhibited thought. The resulting gaps make our reading more difficult because it is not based on following referential channels of 'pure' signifiers but to harbour the impassive movement in comprehension. Thereby, the direct textual references to his biographical or symbolic existence cannot be completely disregarded, at the same time they also unexpectedly blend into elements that radically depart to purely meaningless forms.
La chute de la maison Usher (1928)
Epstein and his Cinematic Translation!
Jean Epstein's 'adaptation' of Poe's story is also a comment on the fallacy of on-screen literary adaptations that adhere to diegetic fidelity. The relationships, motivations, and dilemmas of the film's characters strikingly differ from its literary counterpart, yet there are uncanny appendages that bring these two texts closer. To understand this intermedial textual relationship, it is important to map the literary structure of the short story against Epstein's cinematic imagination. This is not to eke out similarities between literary-visual presentations and their corresponding camera techniques, but to reflect on the role of the literary in the foundational principle of cinema or vice versa. For Epstein, cinema is a machinic transfiguration of poetry that churns out cinematographic spectacle for the mass sublimation of emotions. In its 'pure' form, cinema echoes the patterns of our visual thought by conjuring meaning from accumulated sequences of isolated objects and elements. In this poetics of cinema, the dramatic effect is obtained more through the orchestration of fragmented space and time than the unity of plot and action.
Epstein's cinematic reading of 'The Fall of the House of Usher' precisely follows this aesthetic rationale. The tensions and conflicts between the characters are contained in the visual semantics constructed with close-ups and intercuts. Introduction scenes of Usher and Madeline, for example, proceed with a detailed focus on Usher's playful hands and Madeline's reactive face. This visual-dialogic encounter initiates the intersubjective tension between the characters. Manifested on the textual surface of the screen, this tension exists beyond the provenance of their exact relationship, be it of married couples (in the film) or siblings (in the story). The visual perception of Edgar Alan Poe's protagonist exhibits a similar logic when he thinks about the 'sickening' and sorrowful view of the House of Usher: "...there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among the considerations beyond our depth... a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression."
Epstein's brilliance rests in the synaesthetic adaptation of the story by harping on Poe's narrative visualisation instead of the plot. Usher is obsessed with painting his wife in the film. With every stroke of brush over the years, his wife seems to become paler, as if gradually transferring her spirit to the painting. In one particular scene, Madeline touches her face exactly at the places where Usher puts his brush on her portrait, almost as if responding to the touch on her painted self. This gesture exemplifies the textual synaesthesia at work in the process of translating the story on screen. A similar instance appears near the end of Poe's text. The unnamed narrator tries to read out the adventures of Ethelred to Usher in his madness despite knowing the incongruity between the book's uncouth content and his friend's lofty 'spiritual ideality'. As he goes over the descriptions of doors and planks being torn apart in the book, similar sounds are heard from a distance in their "exact similarity of character", "the echo of the very cracking and ripping sound" mentioned in the book. The desperate groan of the anguished dragon in the book undergoes literary transmogrification to Madeline's painful escape from her coffin. Such textual-literary transference of forms and elements is implicit in both the texts; Epstein's logic of adaptation particularly espouses these sort of textural linkages that traverse across medial boundaries and necessities of plot. Departing from Poe's exact story and the characters' relationships, the film adapts the textual-formalist construction of the narrative, thereby reinstating his philosophical formulations on cinema and its alliance with literature.
Trans-Europ-Express (1966)
Characters working beyond the dictates of the author.
The narrative brilliantly brings out the conflict that is often present in a relationship between an author and her character. Does an author possess complete authority over her created character, or can a character exist independently after a certain point of time? Well, both of them are possible, and this film is precisely about the dynamics of power that plays out between the creator and the creation.
As Jean, a film director, boards a train along with his producer and assistant, they decide to build a plot for a thriller starting from the very train they are seated in. Consequently, a stranger enters their compartment for a brief while before leaving for another compartment, and this person, whom they decide to name as Elias, becomes the protagonist of the tale they start spinning. After a series of heart-racing events, escapades, and encounters, we observe Elias' fate unfolding in the fingertips of Jean, where sometimes certain incidents are replayed for corrections, rewinded for plot improvements, or deleted for plot efficiency. One feels the detached and objective manner in which Jean handles the adventures of his protagonist, often making him suffer through betrayals, harassment, and eventually a cruel death.
However, as they wrap up their story with a well-constructed conclusion, we see a return of the protagonist, along with another character, after their death. Elias comes back to life to unite with Eva, a double agent with whom he developed a short sadomasochistic relationship. In the plot narrated out by Jean, Elias kills Eva out of mistrust; this particular episode turns out to be quite depressing, especially after the strange development of a strong sexual relationship between them. But in the end, the film closes with a shot of Elias and Eva meeting each other in the same platform where Jean and his team arrived. The immediate killing of Eva is suggested to be so improbable that the characters resurrect themselves to live beyond the narrative threads of the director and his mates.
By looking back at the camera in the last freeze-shot frame of the film, the characters reclaim their authority; almost suggesting the denial of Elias and Eva in accepting the fate meted out by their author(s).