Frames of Production

My Mirror column:

Rahul Jain's spare and affecting documentary Machines, which is on an award-winning streak, turns our gaze onto the oft-ignored world of the factory floor.

"Most narrative films begin after work is over," runs the voice-over in Harun Farocki's 1995 film Workers Leaving the Factory. "Whenever possible, film has moved hastily away from factories." Rahul Jain's powerfully immersive documentary Machines, which premiered at Sundance and has picked up awards at a range of film festivals from Brazil to Greece before winning a Silver Gateway at MAMI's India Gold section last week, seems almost a response to that vaccuum. Unlike Farocki, who paid critical homage to that originary moment of cinema, the Lumiere Brothers' two minute film of workers leaving the Lumiere factory in 1895, but left us still positioned outside the factory gates, Jain takes us inside a cloth factory in Gujarat -- and keep us there for almost the whole 70 minutes.

The effect is often bleak and suffocating. The aim of Jain's film seems to be to make viewers experience, in whatever inadequate way we can, the ceaselessness of time inside that ur-space of capitalism: the factory. We watch as the workers labour through their days, in almost constant activity except the rare moments when they collapse in tired heaps. The camera is not intrusive, but it does not shy away either from these often bare bodies, sometimes clad in thin sleeveless vests that are no longer really white - their meagre coverings juxtaposed with the reams of fabric that surround them. For what seems like minutes at a stretch, we watch the nonstop motion of their limbs - stirring a vat of dye, slapping colour onto a pan, dragging a barrel along the floor. Everything is endless. Men unfurl fabric from gigantic rolls, it pools into unwieldy piles. There is little conversation. Who has the time to talk?

Very occasionally, Jain offers us a moment of pause: such as a sequence with the men bathing. This too is a silent act, though a collective one: four or five men hose each other down with a pipe, squatting, with their underpants on. For once, I felt sorrow rather than relief at the sign on the wall that informs us -- in Hindi, without a subtitle -- that the use of mobile phones is strictly prohibited. Farida Pacha's 2014 film My Name is Salt depicted backbreaking labour, too -- the making of salt in Kutch -- but the stunning desert locales and the presence of a family unit made the quiet seem organic. Here, the silence hangs heavy in the air, as if held in place by the only regular sounds that are permitted - the machines. The trundling of carts, the rumble of the conveyor belt, the twist and thud of cloth as it is printed and bundled.

Of course, the machines do not work themselves. Men are needed to work them. "God gave us hands, so we have to work," says one worker Jain interviews. He follows these words with visuals that echo them - a man daubing dye with his fingers, another using his palm to make a note, or perhaps a calculation. And yet there is something about the mechanised process that makes the labour of hands seem as far from human creativity as it is possible to be. As the German thinker Walter Benjamin pointed out almost a century ago, the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt means that the thing being worked on comes into the worker's range without his volition, and moves away from him just as arbitrarily. In working with machines (wrote Benjamin), workers must learn to coordinate "their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton."

In one of Machines' most affecting scenes, we watch a young worker - likely a teenager - almost falling asleep on his feet as he turns some interminable crank. The camera forces us to look as he fights his body's uncontrollable need for sleep: his eyelids drooping to a close, shuddering, waking up, yawning, looking sleepily towards us, then almost falling back to sleep before he wakes up again with a jolt. In a previous scene, the same young boy has spoken of how when he arrives at the factory gates each morning, he feels like turning back right then and there. Jain seems to gesture to the physicality of these reactions, the ways in which the body resists being broken in. "My gut tells me to leave," the boy says quietly. Then he stiffens and adds: "But it's not good to turn back."

Between his slow, deliberate and yes, aestheticized images of men turned machines, Jain presents us with a spare, distilled narrative of the systemic indebtedness and inequality that pushes these people into their positions. "Why am I working 12-hour-shifts here, far away from my parents and wife and children? There is no other solution, sir, this is the condition of poverty," says one man.

From a labourer who says he has never even seen the seth, we cut to the seth himself, in his well-lit office. "If I paid them more, they would just spend it on tobacco or something. They don't send money home. Almost 50% of them don't care about their families," he says, so convinced of his imagination that the fictional percentage comes easily. Jain does not dwell on the matter, but it is clear that this casual class disdain is crucial to the ideological smokescreens that perpetuate inequality. The seth watches these men labour all day on a CCTV screen, and yet he does not really see them. Machines will have achieved a great deal if we do.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Oct 2017.

Filming the Factory

My BL Ink column this month:

Two engrossing documentaries — a German film from 1995 and an Indian one from 2015 — make for a bleak but thoughtful engagement with the figure of the factory worker

Harun Farocki’s 1995 film Workers Leaving the Factory is named for that originary moment of cinema from 1895, of men and women leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons. The original footage was shot by the Lumière brothers to demonstrate that cinema could capture movement. But Farocki, in his characteristic style, entered into a sustained engagement with the subject. After a year-long effort to track as many variants as he could of this theme — workers leaving their workplace — he produced an essayistic assemblage of archival footage that is both haunting and playful.

One of the first things Farocki’s film does is to show us several clips of workers coming out of factories. In almost all, the speed with which they emerge is extraordinary. Often they are actually running, as if they would rather be anywhere other than the factory.

The strike features occasionally. In an American film by DW Griffith, the confrontation between workers and capitalists assumes the face of civil war. An excerpt from a Soviet film contains an exchange in song, a rhythmic face-off between striking workers and the factory supervisor that’s almost gentle by contrast: “You’ve got us the piece of bread, but where is the whole loaf?”

Farocki points out that the moment when workers are leaving the factory produces, as at no other time, the feeling of a multitude: because of the simultaneity of their dismissal, and the compression produced by the exits. The film moves between images that suggest the oppressive squeezing of workers, and the potential power of their collectivity.

“Where the first camera once first stood, there are now hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras,” says the voice-over in Workers Leaving the Factory. The technology of film has taken its place on the side of capital.

“Most narrative films begin after work is over,” the voice-over continues in this vein. “Whenever possible, film has moved hastily away from factories.”

Farocki’s film (free to watch on Vimeo) was recently shown at Delhi’s Max Mueller Bhavan alongside a recent Indian documentary called The Factory, directed by the filmmaker Rahul Roy. The juxtaposition threw up interesting conjunctions, not least the fact that Roy never got to shoot inside the factory of his title.

The reason for this is not complicated. Roy’s film is a meticulously researched, disturbing account of the Maruti Suzuki case, in which 147 workers from the automobile company’s factory in Manesar, Haryana, were arrested and imprisoned without bail for several years, on charges that include arson and the murder of a human resources manager called Avanish Kumar Dev. Thirty-six are still in jail.

The Factory is told entirely through the eyes of workers. The many dismissed workers Roy speaks to suggest a grave miscarriage of justice by the Maruti establishment, aided by the full might of the state: public prosecutor KPS Tulsi was paid ₹5.5 crore for this one case. The workers say that Dev’s death was caused by hired bouncers. It was, they believe, a conspiracy to do away with the one member of management who had helped them organise, while simultaneously framing them and demonising the union.

Harun Farocki’s film contains footage of a strike by English car workers in 1956. “The workers’ disputes are far less violent than those carried out in the name of the workers,” says the voice-over.

Roy started shooting a year after the incident, on July 18, 2013. He presents, without comment, the disproportionate increases in salaries that framed the growing divide between labour and management. In 2007 a senior permanent worker at the Maruti factory earned ₹2.8 lakh annually. By 2013, he earns ₹3 lakh. Meanwhile, in 2007, the CEO earned ₹47.3 lakh. By 2010, he earned ₹2.45 crore.

The film goes on to paint a depressing picture, of a management increasingly distant from workers, while intent on applying the greatest possible pressure on them.

Not allowed to film inside the factory, Roy melds archival footage and conversations with fired workers to recreate life on a production floor where a new car was readied every 45 seconds.

Every group of workers in an automated assembly line is usually provided with one reliever, a worker who can take over if another worker needs to go to the toilet or drink water or simply take a few minutes’ break.

If earlier there was one ‘reliever’ for every 10 men, at Maruti it became one for every 25. Often if a worker was absent, the reliever might be made to take his place, leaving the group without a reliever.

A worker’s absence was penalised with harsh pay cuts — the minimum cut for one day was ₹2,000, which was a fourth of a worker’s monthly variable pay. If a man missed four days, he would lose his entire variable pay, which was half his salary.

Lunch breaks and even toilet breaks were strictly policed. Mistakes on this punishing assembly line resulted in not just verbal ticking-off and written complaints, but also humiliating physical punishments.

“It is a common characteristic of all capitalist production...” wrote Marx, “that the worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker, but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technically concrete form.” The rhythm of production on a conveyor belt, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, means that the article being worked on comes into the worker’s range of action without his volition, and moves away from him just as arbitrarily. In working with machines (wrote Benjamin), workers learn to coordinate “their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton.”

“Workers changing shift in the film Metropolis. Uniform dress and equal step,” announces the voice-over in Harun Farocki’s film, as we watch that classic 1927 visual of bodies marching in unison through the hellish corridors of Fritz Lang’s imagined dystopia. Heads drooping, movements robotically coordinated but painfully slow: these are human beings with their humanity leached out of them.

If this vision of the future has not come to pass, it seems to me, it has not been for lack of trying.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 9 April 2016

Book Review: Channelling the Mahabharata

Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean
Via Amruta Patil
Harper Collins, Rs 799
Pages: 276

Adi Parva is the richly imagined and stunningly executed first volume in Amruta Patil's forthcoming Parva trilogy, a pictorial retelling of the Mahabharata. As different as Adi Parva's jewel tones and lush forest glades are from the spiky, angsty, black and white world of Patil's first book, Kari (2008), they would both be described as graphic novels. Yet the two narrative endeavours could not be more unlike each other. Kari's authorial voice is so intimate and personal that at least one reviewer felt it read "like a reconstituted memoir". In contrast, Adi Parva positions itself self-consciously as a retelling of what is perhaps our most enduring story — if one can refer to the innumerable nested narratives that make up the Mahabharata as a single story.

In an essay called 'The Storyteller', Walter Benjamin made a characteristically fertile, provocative suggestion: that the rise of the novel marks the end of storytelling. "What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature — the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella — is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it," wrote Benjamin. In a 1977 lecture, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss made a similar throwaway reference to the moment "when myth disappeared as a literary genre and was replaced by the novel." Both Benjamin and Levi-Strauss gesture to a binary in which myth — and its community of oral re-tellers — form one end of the spectrum, while the novel — and its solitary, textual originator — forms the other.

Adi Parva is fascinating, first of all, because it attempts to marry these two apparent binaries: to enshrine the oldest stories in book form, to put her stamp on them not just verbally but visually. There's no denying that this involves freezing that which was meant to be perpetually retold, to be imagined differently each time it was heard. But in a world where less and less of us will hear these stories from a grandmother or a village bard, this book is a precious gift.

And Patil understands this clearly: the place of her book, and the place she must clear before she begins. Adi Parva is not "by" her, but "via" her. And when her preamble invokes the sutradhar —"Trust the humble storyteller who knows how to unravel thread. Beware the braggart who embellishes and confuses" — one can hear the echo of Benjamin's words — "it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it".

Her telling does steer clear of unnecessary explication. But the storyteller's voice is a very particular one: cool, wry, but always just this side of dramatic. The narrator is Ganga, "queen of celestial and earthly rivers", a central character in the origin-myth of the Kuru-Pandavas. She first appears here as a mortal in a white sari, telling her tale to a rapt street side gathering, even as passing men gather to challenge this woman "sitting brazenly talking to strangers in the middle of the night". Ganga and her listeners form a kind of Greek chorus, their comments and questions helping clarify the main narrative. Choosing a female narrator (rather than Ugrashravas) is a simple but radical move, allowing Patil to focus on the women with natural ease and empathy. We think, perhaps for the first time, of whether the mountain princess we have always only known as Gandhari had a name except that of the kingdom she represented, and of how Kunti must have felt when her husband King Pandu died making love to her rival queen Madri. (And we wonder how this will change in the next volume, when the narrator, we are told, will be Ashwatthama.)

There are occasions when Patil's narrative feels too clever, too knowing, too full of backchat. But textual pleasures are the least of the joys afforded by this book. With artwork that ranges from black and white sketches (for Ganga and her audience) to magnificent textured collages, with Patil drawing on and reworking everything from Botticelli's Birth of Venus to Matisse's La Danse to ancient Egyptian motifs with delicious abandon, Adi Parva is perhaps the most beautiful book you can own this year.

Published in the Indian Express.

Book Review: dates.sites, a publication of PROJECT CINEMA CITY

This review was published in the Nov-Dec 2012 issue of Biblio.

dates.sites
Project Cinema City 
Bombay/Mumbai         

Tulika Books, 2012.
Rs. 995 
              

Bombay was where the cinema made its first appearance on the Indian subcontinent, when the Lumiere Brothers’ ‘Living Photographic Pictures in Life-Size Reproductions’ were shown at the Watson’s hotel in Kala Ghoda in 1896. Since that originary moment, the city of Bombay/Mumbai has been irrevocably linked to the cinema -- as an industry that supports thousands of people, as ‘its most adored public institution’ and perhaps most significantly, as the lens through which the city acquires its visual primacy in the imagination of the rest of India (and the world).

One of the outcomes of a artistic-cum-archival project called Project Cinema City conducted by the arts initiative Majlis, dates.sites takes this fundamental connection between the city and cinema as the basis for a decade-by-decade account of events that might constitute a ‘cinematic history’ of 20^th century Bombay/Mumbai. It calls this a “timeline” – a word chosen precisely, Madhusree Dutta tells us, for its 21^st century Facebook-and-Twitter-inflected connotation of stitching things from various sources into a personalised narrative of the self.

At first glance, it is a book that seems straightforward in its aims – a historical ready-reckoner, a vast compendium of facts about the city and its film industry, arranged chronologically. And it is that, at one level. But as you spend more time with it, it begins to reveal itself as a quirkier creature: an artifact in its own right, a space where facts about the transformation of land and labour, law and life in the city can share the page with cinema history, inflected by chatty, opinionated commentary – a list of ‘Archetypal Urban Characters of the 70s’ ends with “Mother of all Indian men: Nirupa Roy in Deewar”; Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth (1982) receives the somewhat catty three word description “Bollywood on Bollywood”.

A page from the book

With a narrative as unconventional as this, there are as many ways to ‘read’ it as there are people. Some might want to dip into it at random, or pick a decade they’re interested in. Someone else might choose to be guided by the cornucopia of images. The visuals in the book are of two kinds. There are found images, often in fragmented form – old photographs, postcards, advertisements, logos, letters and telegrams, magazine images, paintings – and also a series of 100-odd ‘calendars’ created by several artists as a contemporary homage to the long popular history of calendar art in India. Both kinds act as triggers to the imagination, sending the brain off in all sorts of associative directions. Most are anything but illustrative, working instead as a tangential narrative that can open up the text in new ways. On p.19, for instance, there is a series of images of sea and ships – what looks like a picture postcard, a stamped envelope dated 5-9-1972, a technical drawing of a ship. These bear no actual relationship to the early 1900s timeline on that page, but they do somehow alter one’s appreciation of the fact that the foundation of Alexandra Dock was laid in 1905 “to meet rising traffic of goods and traders”. Other images are more strictly historical. For instance, Abeer Gupta’s calendar for 1949, ‘Liberty’, is a faux-advertisement for Liberty Cinema: ‘Showplace of the Nation’, with the Indian flag flying above it and the theatre-front displaying a poster of Mehboob’s Andaz, which was indeed the first film shown at Liberty when it opened in 1949 as the first airconditioned theatre in Bombay that was devoted to Hindi films.

It is a volume that lends itself to randomness. Playing conscientious reviewer, though, I decided to go from beginning to end. I paused often, arrested by a particular constellation of facts or images, but resisted the temptation to skip ahead. As I went through the sequence of events in chronological order, however, I kept finding myself wanting to draw diagrams that would somehow link up events in 2000 with events in 1914, or 1973, on a thematic basis: real estate, or land reclamation, the history of the labour movement or the history of popular performance – or create a map that would somehow contain, in the name of a neighbourhood – say ‘Pila House’, or ‘Girangaon’ – everything that it had ever been.

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

So wrote Italo Calvino in his now-classic Invisible Cities, a book even more strange and wondrous than the one under review. Like the mythical Zaira, “city of memories”, Bombay/Mumbai cannot tell its past; it can only contain it “like the lines of a hand”. dates.sites might be seen as a Calvinoesque effort to make that past visible, by mapping -- in the words of Invisible Cities -- the “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past”.

Certainly the text is sensitive to space in a way that few historical timelines are. Whether describing communal and caste riots, the newsreels shot after Tilak’s death, or the arrival of migrants to the city, the timeline takes every opportunity it can to double up as a ‘spaceline’. So we learn that from 1904 to 1910, Sunni Tolawalas and Bohra shopkeepers clashed over the route of the Muharram procession in Bhendi Bazaar. We learn that newsreels of Tilak’s funeral procession on 13. 02. 1920 shot it from Crawford Market to Chowpatty. We learn that Tamil migrants to the city in the 1920s mostly worked at construction sites or at tanneries in Dharavi, and later that Sikh refugees after Partition were accommodated in camps in Sion Koliwada and many of them started automobile workshops in the Opera House area, resulting in both areas later developing “a distinct Punjabi flavour”.

The book’s history of cinema in the city – its production as well as its consumption – is equally attentive to local geography. Iconic places might get a whole explanatory paragraph, like in a dictionary: eg. “Pila House—hybridization of Play House—a cluster of theatres staging Parsi theatre plays and Tamasha performances – bordered on the east by red light area of Kamatipura (names after the Telugu-speaking community of masons) , and on the west by migrant courtesans and other entertainment artists at Congress House (named after the office of the Congress Party nearby—is at its peak at the turn of the century.” But it is the visible revelling in anecdote that lifts the book from a staid recounting of facts into a storied, personal, almost gossipy register. So a typescript entry for 1975 reads: “The queue for buying [Sholay] tickets at Minerva Theatre, showing the 70mm print of the film, extends to a bus stop 3 kilometres away”, followed by the ‘handwritten’ note: “prompting the bus stop to be renamed as Sholay stop”.

dates.sites is a real goldmine of stories, allowing itself the luxury of the suggestive anecdote: the sparkling, free-floating detail unbound by the ponderous footnote. The text continually throws up real-life characters whose mythification in urban lore was immortalised by the cinema. The most well-known are mafia dons whose lives have been the source of endless film plots: Karim Lala, Haji Mastan, Varadarajan Mudaliar onwards, down to the post-textile-mills era which saw the rise of Arun Gawli, Arvind Dholakia, Rama Naik and so on. The book also digs up more minor figures, like an Inspector Bhesadia whose crusade against hath bhatties (crude breweries) in Dharavi Creek in the 60s was apparently the inspiration for Amitabh Bachchan’s originary demolition of the illegal liquor den in Zanjeer (1973). (Bachchan, of course, went on to demolish many liquor addas, in other cities as well – I remember the one on the outskirts of Delhi in Trishul.) 

My pick for the most fascinating real life character, though, comes from a much earlier era: “Flamboyant Tamasha artiste” Patthe Bapurao, whose first appearance in the timeline is in 1927, when he visits Ambedkar “flanked by two women dancers dressed in finery” and offers to contribute the proceedings of eight Tamasha shows to the Mahar Satyagraha Fund, a campaign for the entry of Dalits into temples. “Ambedkar rejects the offer on moral grounds.” The second reference to Patthe Bapurao is in 1941, when he “dies in poverty”. It is in this entry that we are told that he was born a Brahmin (Shridhar Krishnaji Kulkarni) and underwent “caste conversion in order to work in Tamasha and … married a Mahar woman”. A biographical film was made on his life by Raja Nene in 1950, and Falkland Road in Pila House was renamed Patthe Bapurao Road after independence. Most tantalizing of all is this tidbit: “His persona influences several significant tragic poet-hero characters in later films such as Devdas, Pyaasa.” Since Devdas was based on a 1917 Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, one must treat the Bapurao connection as a suggestive supplement at most.

But however provisional it might declare itself to be, a timeline is not the sort of text in which arguments can really be incorporated. So an entry for 1933 tells us that “Music director Madhav Lal used Chinese and Japanese singers from Safed Gulli (White Lane) (demarcated area for prostitutes with fairer skin than Indians) to create a ‘Far East ambience’ in Hatimtai”. It has been suggested by other writers that Safed Gali acquired the name not from its prostitutes but from its customers: it emerged to cater to white soldiers. But a timeline, no matter how playful, does not allow the space for both possible interpretations to be included.

On the other hand, a timeline enables unexpected juxtapositions, creating fertile ground for suppressed histories and new thoughts to emerge, just by being on the same page. On p. 118-119 for instance, we learn that comedian Johnny Walker’s “urban actor-character-actor prototype in the tramp mould” and Raj Kapoor’s Awara date to the same year: 1951. Both were responses to Chaplin, sure – but how often do we credit Johnny Walker with creating the Indian tramp persona? Another example connected with the influence of foreign cinema: Italian neo-realist films shown at the first International Film festival of India (1952) are credited with influencing Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953), while on the same spread we learn that Sohrab Modi’s Technicolour extravaganza Jhansi ki Rani (1953) was shot on an ‘imported on rent’ camera by Ernest Heller, cameraman of Gone With the Wind. The juxtaposition of these two facts, which might otherwise have been neatly boxed into two very different histories, produces a vivid sense of the multiplicity of world cinematic style, and how Bombay filmmakers negotiated their places within that world.

Sometimes a juxtaposition serves as comment. For example, AIR’s highhanded attitude to Hindi film music (leading to the rise of Binaca Geetmala on Radio Ceylon from 1953 onwards) is presented without judgement. But then you read of KA Abbas’s daring effort to make a song-less film (Munna) crashing at the box office in 1954, and it is quite clear that the nation-state’s battle against the market can only be a losing one.

Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, both theorists of the urban mass culture that emerged in Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, pioneered the study of cultural fragments and surface phenomena as unconscious revelations of the epoch. “[T]he quotidian landscapes of life – posters on the wall, shop signs, dancing girls, bestsellers, panoramas, the shape, style and circulation of city buses – are all surface representations of the fantasy energy by which the collective perceives the social order,” writes anthropologist Brian Larkin in a wonderful essay on the materiality of cinema theatres in the Nigerian city of Kano. dates.sites is a Benjaminian archive of the materiality of cinema in Bombay/Mumbai. Accessible, joyful and packed with possibility, this is a book every film-lover should have on her shelf.

Published in Biblio.