The Lord of Light: Robert Richardson

A short Q&A with renowned cinematographer Robert Richardson, for India Today. 

Photo credit: Yasir Iqbal, India Today

Robert Richardson, 63, has won the Academy Award for cinematography three times, for JFK (1991), The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011). He received a Lifetime Achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in March. We caught up with him on a brief visit to Delhi. 

Q: You’ve been a cinematographer for nearly four decades. The technology has changed a fair bit. Has what makes a good cinematographer changed? 
The techniques have changed. The speed of film altered first. In the studio system, with highlighting, to trying to do no lighting, yet having slow speed so you had to do lighting. And then you moved into digital, which had a higher speed, so lighting started to disappear altogether. It’s more about shading than lighting. Composition altered. You got the handheld shot. All changes created by technology.

Q. Almost all ‘films’ are now shot in the digital format. Do you see this more as a loss or a gain?
I could take both those perspectives. Film has been developed for years as a way to capture human skin tone more naturally. It has a softer resonance. But digital’s moving into a larger space of comfort, a wider range of capture. Also, you have to use less light to achieve the look.

Q. So would one argument for the digital format be about being closer to life, more natural? 
That’s where they’ve gone. But, in a film, you’re telling a story. Even a writer can’t do that in a ‘natural’ manner. Why should a cinematographer?

Q. You’ve had close working partnerships with great directors like Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. Have you ever been tempted to direct? 
I’ve been tempted. But it didn’t fall into the well.

Q. Do you have a favourite film among your own? 
I can never do the favourite film thing! There’s films I don’t like. But the ones I do love, all happened for different reasons: Salvador was my first film, Platoon my most emotional, JFK was what I wanted to move forward to. Between The Aviator and A Private War, how can one be judged better?

Q. You’ve often shot on a grand scale, but you became a cinematographer after watching more intimate work: Sven Nyqvist on Ingmar Bergman’s films, and Nestor Almendros on Eric Rohmer’s films. Does scale matter to you, personally?
Scale is a complicated thing. When you do something on a very large scale, say, a tentpole film like World War Z, that has a more commercial aspect: you have to move within studio requirements. But with, say, A Private War, or Wall Street, the studio makes no demands. A powerful director who can keep control, that’s more important than a film’s scale.

Q. What’s it like to shoot in India? 
I have shot here before. Eat, Pray, Love, and commercials: Microsoft, and now Absolut. Today was 114 degrees F! But I love the concern, the movement. It’s chaotic. The chaos is what’s beautiful.

Published in India Today, 24 June 2019 issue.

Disenchanted Nights

1957’s second-highest Hindi grosser is much watched but little understood. Pyaasa may have been filled with poets and poetry, but it’s true, bitter subject was money.

Pyaasa started life as a story idea called ‘Kashmakash’ (‘Dilemma’), which Guru Dutt first put to paper in 1947 or ’48, when he was just 22. It was nine years later, once he had established a name with films like Baazi and Mr & Mrs 55, that Dutt returned to his tale of a struggling poet. By then he had his team in place: writer Abrar Alvi (clearly responsible for a great deal of Pyaasa’s script, although he is credited only for dialogue), lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, and cinematographer VK Murthy — all of whom reached deep into themselves to transform Dutt’s germ of an idea into one of Indian cinema’s abiding gems.

Casting our eyes back sixty years, it seems remarkable that this melancholy piece of filmmaking, with a hero afflicted not just by romantic or familial tragedy but by a near-total disenchantment with the world, could become the second-highest Hindi grosser at the box office. We clearly had a greater appetite for tragedy then – and greater empathy for a hero who dreamt of escaping the material condition.

The film opens with the young poet Vijay (Guru Dutt) lying serenely in a garden, composing beautiful verse as he looks at the flowers and bees around him. Suddenly he rises anxiously, and we see him dwarfed by the dark shadows of trees. In the next scene, he must rescue his folder of nazms from a smalltime magazine office: his responses to the poverty and exploitation around him have found their way into the dustbin. “Aapki bakwaas koi shaayari hai? Pad gaye bhookh aur berozgaari ke peechhe latth leke! (Is this rubbish of yours poetry? You’ve taken a stick and gone after hunger and unemployment!),” mocks the smarmy old sherwani-clad editor, before waxing lyrical on what ‘proper’ poetry should be: “Gul-o-bulbul pe sh’er kahiye, jaam-o-suraahi pe sh’er kahiye... (Write a couplet on the flower and the nightingale, write one on the goblet and the wine flask...)”

Vijay scorns this unctuous injunction and walks out with his poems. But preserving this independence of mind, the film suggests, is not easy – especially if the body needs to be preserved first. A penniless Vijay tries his hand at manual labour, placing a dhoti-clad gentleman’s purchases in his car and earning a coin for his services. But when he presents the coin as payment for a meal, it turns out to be fake. Later, hopeful of having his poems published, he accepts ajob as an assistant in a publishing house, which sometimes requires him to serve in the home of the boss, Mr Ghosh (Rehman). It is worth noting here that Dutt and Alvi display an unreconstructed middle class horror at the idea of the educated young man performing menial labour – a horror amplified in women’s eyes, whether the ex-lover watching Vijay serve drinks, or Vijay’s mother imagining him having to take care of himself.

Poetry may lie at the centre of the plot, but Pyaasa’s driving theme is money. Whether it’s a poet or a sex worker, the world seems intent upon making them sell themselves. While suggesting this analogy, the film thankfully also recognises how deeply one’s freedom is inflected by class. At one end of the scale are those whose survival depends on finding clients, for which they might have to resort to deception: the streetwalker Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman) sings a seemingly romantic song only to lure Vijay, whom she assumes is a potential customer; the maalishwala Abdus Sattar (Johnny Walker) is often seen tricking people into a head massage. These are people on the margins, and the film does not judge them – in fact it offers what might be among the most acute depictions of a streetwalker’s life in the scene where Gulabo is thrown out of a moving car, and when she demands her money, thrown into the jaws of ‘the law’: a beat havaldar.

It is much harsher on the middle class woman – Meena (Mala Sinha), who has left Vijay for the security of marriage to a richer man (Rehman). Vijay pronounces her shallow and greedy; only VK Murthy’s remarkable camerawork that allows us to see her position with any degree of empathy. In the scene where she talks to Vijay in the lift, she ends by saying agitatedly, “Arrey, main toh bhool hi gayi, mujhe toh upar jaana hai” — and we watch the elevator doors close over her made-up, bejewelled visage: the rise to the top for a woman like her involves giving up her freedom. In another scene, Murthy takes an almost operatic pleasure in showing us Meena as the memsahib in the white limousine, emerging hurriedly from this lap of luxury when she sees Vijay in the distance. But in Murthy’s framing, the liveried Sikh chauffeur who opens the car door also bars the memsahib’s path to her old love.

The film adopts a properly romantic stance, with the hero picking obscurity and freedom over worldly fame and wealth. In a society where the only good poet is a dead poet, Vijay literally chooses social death.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Sep 2017.

Film Review: Harud shows us a Kashmir we rarely see on the big screen

In the last three decades, Kashmir in popular Hindi cinema has meant films about terror and militancy, almost always filtered through an Indian nationalist lens: Roja, Mission Kashmir, Fanaa. Before that, from the 1960s technicolour moment of Junglee and Kashmir ki Kali, up until as late as 1982 when Amitabh Bachchan and Rakhee sang “Kitni khoobsurat yeh tasveer hai, mausam bemisal benazir hai, yeh Kashmir hai” in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bemisaal, Kashmir was the ultimate Hindi movie cliché for beauty.

Aamir Bashir’s 2010 Harud (literally, autumn) which releases in several Indian cities today under the PVR Director’s Rare Initiative, is quite aware of this strange cinematic history. As someone who grew up being an Amitabh Bachchan fan (until a screening of Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief in Delhi “thankfully severed [his] relationship with ‘Bollywood’” ), Bashir knows the subconscious expectations with which a Hindi-movie-goer enters a film about Kashmir – and sets out very consciously to dismantle them.

First of all, Harud refuses us the luxurious otherness of a beauteous landscape in which we might comfortably immerse ourselves. Shot entirely in Srinagar, the film captures an everyday Kashmiri urbanity rarely seen on the Indian screen. The one exception I can think of is Onir’s I Am, where the Srinagar segment, with Juhi Chawla and Manisha Koirala as childhood friends divided by history, was strikingly shot by Arvind Kannabiran, creating a vivid sense of a city beleaguered in time. Here, Bashir’s direction and Shankar Raman’s surefooted camerawork (he also shot Peepli Live) create a world that is more languorous, dreamier—and yet somehow waiting to erupt.

The sense of a dreamscape is created primarily through Rafiq (Shahnawaz Bhat), the adolescent boy at the film’s centre. We often see him actually sleeping: eyeballs rolling beneath closed lids, dreaming unsavoury dreams. Even the rest of the time, despite his wide-open eyes, one wonders if he is quite awake. He seems to inhabit a world of his own—and it is not a pleasant one. The seething anger he clearly feels—about his ‘disappeared’ elder brother, his father’s ineffectual slide into mental illness, his mother’s refusal to grieve—remains almost entirely suppressed.

That sense of feelings tightly wound up – of things simmering beneath the surface and not being allowed to come up – is integral to the film. Be it the low-key performances with their refusal of drama, the minimal dialogue, or its very colours, Harud feels deliberately muted. The film’s palette sticks close to the chilly half-light of an autumn evening—the buses, the interiors of houses, even the jackets and phirans never stray far from dull blues and grays, only interrupting them occasionally with the rich gold of fallen leaves.

At one level, Harud documents the unremarkable ordinariness of life in Srinagar: there are autos, there are red Marutis with PRESS signs, there are hawks in the sky at twilight, and young men who loll about in parks talking about imaginary football teams and dreaming of making it big. But it also shows you the walls with ‘Azadi’ scrawled in ink on every pillar, the slow-motion violence of identification parades, the guns pointing at you in frame after frame that thread the slowness of the everyday with menace. And yet, when this violence erupts—when the stone is thrown, when the grenade bursts, when the restaurant is bombed—it is absorbed back into the everyday, almost as unremarkable as the stifled fear that preceded it.

The film gestures constantly to the crisscrossing registers in which ‘Kashmir’ is pictured, saying a great deal about the politics of images, without spelling it out. A photo studio plays ‘Tareef karoon kya uski’ in the background, but the pretty girl whose pictures have been developed is mourning a lost lover. Rafiq’s friend posing like a hero elicits an angry remark about ‘tourist photos’ from a news photographer whom we have earlier seen haggling for a better price for his pictures. The famous 1948 Cartier-Bresson photograph of veiled Kashmiri women has someone ask if it is Afghanistan. A Delhi journalist’s smiling P2C about the arrival of mobile phones in Kashmir is just patronising enough to echo the Central government ‘gift’ she is documenting.

Bashir has made a film of great restraint, in which many things crying out to be said are left deliberately unspoken. In its slowed narration, its often silent contemplation of landscape and faces, its reduced dialogues and its use of symbols (the short-circuiting wire, the falling leaf, the lamb readied for slaughter), Harud seems inspired not so much by Iranian cinema as by the melancholy minimalism of the new Turkish cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (I was especially reminded of Distant) and Semih Kaplanoğlu.

It is not an easy film to watch, especially for the unaccustomed viewer—regardless of dialogues dubbed into Urdu/Hindi—but it is often a rewarding one.

First published on Firstpost.