Raam Reddy: ‘Film itself is a character’

My interview with the filmmaker Raam Reddy, as published in Mint Lounge on 3 Mar 2024.

Raam Reddy on his second feature, ‘The Fable’, and why the setting always comes early in his outline and feeds into everything.

Raam Reddy was 26 when his directorial debut Thithi (Funeral) premiered at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, winning several awards on the international film festival circuit and the national award for Best Kannada Film in 2016. A marvellously deadpan tragicomedy about three generations of men responding to the death of a patriarch, Thithi was set in co-writer Ere Gowda’s village of Nodekopplu in Karnataka’s Mandya district.

Now 34, Reddy has made a second feature strikingly different in terms of cast, language, setting and tone. The Fable features Mumbai-based actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Deepak Dobriyal and Tilottama Shome, has dialogues in English and Hindi, is shot on 16mm, and unfolds in the shadowy glades of a fruit orchard in Uttarakhand. Set in 1989, it’s about an English-speaking business family not dissimilar to Reddy’s own—except that the man of the house (Bajpayee) spends a lot of time surveying his surroundings, wearing a pair of wings. The Fable substitutes Thithi’s gentle philosophical realism with the surreal and mysterious, exploring the family’s transformation after fires begin to break out on their estate. 

Lounge spoke with Reddy at the recently concluded 74th Berlin International Film Festival, where The Fable had its world premiere. Edited excerpts:

The settings of both your films are very different: a chaotically busy Karnataka village and a vast, quiet Himalayan estate. What role does place play in inspiring your work?
A huge role. Place always comes early in my outline and feeds into absolutely everything. My novel It’s Raining In Maya (2011) is set in a fictitious town inspired by my years in Delhi University’s North Campus. I lived in Malkaganj. For Thithi, it was the village. Here it’s the mountains, because they have an inherent magic in the air.

In ‘Thithi’, there was a real village. But in ‘The Fable’...
It’s fictional.

So, was the germ of this film the setting?
Actually, it was genre. The magical elements I have experienced in very moving ways in literature, I wanted to translate them into cinema. Then the setting: I spent three months in the mountains. The narrative structure comes from what story the place wants me to tell. Thithi was very... humorous? This time I was excited by the challenge of holding attention through mystery.

‘The Fable’ combines a real world with the surreal. How did you decide what those magical elements would be?
I would love to clap on a pair of wings and fly. Or be able to communicate without words. I always wanted to be part of that heightened reality. It gets a little indulgent, but I wanted to abide a little in these dreams, in a very pure way.

Do your scripts start as novels?
My novels look more like films scripts: I think in cuts. But yes, this screenplay was quite literary. I used language to create moods that had to be executed in the audiovisual domain. Quite hard to do if you have a lot of specifics.

Talking of specifics: why fires?
When I was in the mountains for the first time, I went to fight a forest fire. And I like allowing life to guide my storytelling hand.

You mean, it’s like magic: the fire happening while you were there.
Exactly. Fire was also exciting at the narrative level: it’s the perfect crime (there’s no way to know where a spark fell in a pine forest) as well as the perfect capsule to see how an unknown accident affects a social ecosystem. Fire also signifies many things, like regeneration. Destruction is not always negative. It also brings forth the new.

You have two songs, which seem crucial to the mood.
Not just mood, but meaning. The lyrics move me to tears each time, even in the edit room. Shivoham says you are not your body, or your mind: you are pure consciousness. This is the deepest part of our philosophy and I connect with it deeply. As does the family. It takes them into a spontaneous meditation. The purity of that space, from which the song comes, is why the family were worthy of this story. Naiharwa is about reaching the land of the enlightened. Both have been sung by my sister-in-law (Hindola Aguvaveedi). She would sing these to us after she married my brother.

How much does the film draw on your own life?
I have spent time in a coffee estate, I have seen those relationships as a child and I wanted to question them. So the soul of the film is personal, it’s my voice as an artist. But the body—the north Indian setting, the narrative elements, those are my craft as a filmmaker. I almost don’t want to be over-familiar with the place. Like in Thithi—it wasn’t my village.

In ‘Thithi’ you worked largely with non-actors. Here you have well-known actors.
Unlike in Thithi, where we wrote roles based on real-life characters, here I wanted to write and then find actors who could inhabit those key roles, who could transform. But there are many non-actors: the villagers, the army men, the gardener, the maid. They served different purposes within this tapestry.

Was the combining of actors and non-actors ever a challenge?
These are the challenges I love. That dynamic was exciting to me: having a veteran like Manoj-ji do scenes with Ravi Bisht, who is a Pahadi villager, is talented but never acted before. Or Tilottama (Shome) going into the non-actor world and playing a villager. But mostly we had an actor schedule and a non-actor schedule.
I tried with this film to bring opposites together. So it is realistic but also magical; it is 16mm, 1980s in look and feel, but it’s also VFX-heavy. (The fires, but also a lot of the nature is VFX.)

Why did you want to shoot on film?
Multiple reasons. One, it was the medium in use in 1989. Making it look like it was shot then, that authenticity was exciting. I also believe in a kind of transference of consciousness in art; I think film carries our emotions in a tactile way, more potently than the digital medium. Film itself is a character, the grain dances from frame to frame. I do still photography on film, so that was the entry point.

Creating this visual world was a beautiful collaboration with debut cinematographer Sunil Borkar, and debut production designer Juhi Agarwal. I love working with first timers in key roles—it’s not like I am so far away from being one—because their visions are so uncoloured, coming straight from the hearts.

Would you speak a little about the film’s politics, and class in it?

First of course there’s the colonial hangover. And class has always fascinated me. It is a cross-sectional analysis of a plantation society. There is the family at the core. Then the manager who is loyal to the family but is a local himself, so he mediates between worlds. Then there are the villagers whose livelihoods are based on the estate by choice, or at least within the choices available to them. There is a loving relationship between Dev (Bajpayee) and his workers, but there is an obvious disparity. There is a shot in the film where the workers are walking home, under suspicion—and you cut to the family at a dinner party.That’s just how much of India is. And then there are the nomads: they surrender to nature, they don’t speak.

The nomads seem to represent a different sensibility from your real-world concern with class. They seem almost fictitious.
Totally, almost like elves. They had to stand apart. They are part of the questioning of our rights. Can we inhabit nature, filled with trees and creatures, without being persecuted?

Your shooting schedule was disrupted for two successive summers by the pandemic. What do you do as a filmmaker when something stops a creative process like that?
You stop, internally as well. I make one film at a time. But I am a compulsive creator. I’m into photography, music, philosophy, poetry, songs—not for an audience, yet.

Do you think of ‘The Fable’ as political allegory? 
It is part of the layers, but you can decide what you think is the core. As an artist, that’s exciting to me—to leave room for my art to be inhabited.

Trisha Gupta is a Delhi-based writer and critic, and professor of practice at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication.

Plot before you click!

My piece about a special exhibit -- on photography and cinema -- at the Delhi Photo Festival:

Some people are just prescient. In a brilliant little story he wrote way back in 1958, when the world was young and photography even more so, the great writer Italo Calvino somehow arrived at the truth about photography in the 21^st century. Through Antonino, the photo-sceptic who turns obsessive photographer, Calvino captured the simultaneous attraction and frustration of taking pictures. “The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful, we must photograph it!', you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can, you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness.”

Now, in a world of mobile phone cameras, Facebook and Instagram, Calvino's words seem even more uncannily true. Given the ceaseless deluge of images in which we live, the big question is: can photography still arrest us? Can it still reveal the world anew? The organisers of the Delhi Photo Festival believe it can. And more than that, they believe they can make us think about the power that the photograph still exerts on our lives.

Organised by the Delhi-based non-profit Nazar Foundation, the Delhi Photo Festival is a biennial event that first took place in 2011. The second instalment is scheduled to run from September 27 to October 11, 2013. Prashant Panjiar, Dinesh Khanna and a Festival Secretariat of younger photographers have made their final selections from an impressive 2349 bodies of work submitted from 90 countries. There's a broad theme, 'grace', drawn from something the late Prabuddha Dasgupta said at DPF 2011. Panjiar says they deliberately kept the theme broad enough that it would encompass a wide variety of styles and subjects, yet also push people to interpret the work they submitted. “We consciously took a decision not to showcase genre photography. Work from all genres is welcome – photojournalism, fashion, wildlife, studio photography, documentary photography, intensely personal projects – but we think a great, or good photographer is one who transcends genre,” says Panjiar. DPF 2013 will have three kinds of exhibitions: works in print that will be mounted in the open areas, walkways and galleries of the India Habitat Centre, digital exhibitions that will run online, as well as – for the first time – partner exhibitions in many of Delhi's major art galleries. The scale is massive: just at the Habitat Centre, bodies of work by 41 individual photographers will be on display.

One highlight is a special exhibition called The Plot, which brings together five photographers inspired by Indian cinema. It is, in some ways, an obvious choice: the cinematic image is perhaps the most ubiquitous form of the photograph in India. Film posters and hoardings overpower so much of our public space, and are the defining feature of so many private ones. From auto-rickshaw interior to a middle class teenager's wall, our choice of filmstars is the fierce display of a private self. Nathan G, a photographer from Chennai, opens up that weird space between public and private which the star image occupies. 'Mad on Stars' is a series of pictures taken on Marina Beach, where outdoor photo studios provide life-sized cutouts of stars for people to pose with. In one image, a young man walks by with a cutout of Kareena Kapoor in white pants, holding it horizontally. The nonchalance with which he grips the smiling Kareena at the hip is wonderful, somehow familiar without being sexual. In another image, a young man pats his hair down in front of a red plastic-framed mirror, while Aishwarya Rai and Aamir Khan seem to look on in consternation. For that one ephemeral instant, the stars have come down to earth, and you can carry home the evidence in the permanently tangible form of a photograph. And yet the two-dimensionality of the photographic cutouts is almost Brechtian, drawing attention to the fakeness of the images.

Several of Jonathan Torgovnik's 'Bollywood Dreams' images are concerned with unmasking – our cinema's mild pretence of reality, even its attempts at glamour, heroism, villainy are revealed in these pictures as bits of tinsel. An intertwined Karishma Kapoor and Bobby Deol strike a pose in tight black clothes, but instead of just their flawless bodies in close-up, we see the wires, the grimy floor – the shoddy backdrop to glamour. A pair of tubby guards in ancient Indian costumes swig tea from cheap chai-shop tumblers. Prem Chopra looks more vulnerable than we have ever seen him: a hapless old man in suspenders trying to look masculine.

Some of Max Pincker's images seem to have a similar unmasking effect – like the picturesque waterfall backdrop that reveals itself as mere wallpaper. 'The Fourth Wall', as Pincker's body of work is titled, explores the imaginary line that separates the audience from the fictional world they are viewing, in this case the world of cinema. But often Pincker's work doesn't so much expose reality as hover in the terrain of surreality: a doorman seems to smile at a cloud of bright yellow smoke in a marbled building lobby; a Salman Khan lookalike stands atop a building terrace, looking for all the world like ready to take off like Superman. There are juxtapositions of gesture that unnerve and amuse: a photograph of one man holding another in his arms is followed by a shot from some 90s Hindi film song where Shahrukh Khan holds his heroine in almost exactly that pose.

The degree to which we live within the cinematic image – or the cinematic image lives inside us – is at the core of Kannagi Khanna's 'Ram aur Shyam'. Khanna's models, her grandfather and his younger brother, wanted to go to Bombay in their youth to try their luck as actors, but their family forbade it, and they spent lives running a printing press. A highlight of Khanna's childhood memories is of watching her Nana “break into popular Dev Anand songs and shake a leg with Nani, for whom this had become routine”, while she remembers her Nana's brother as a man who enjoyed being the “most glamorous member of the family”, who spends two hours daily even today on “self-grooming”. Khanna casts both men, now old, in classic poses associated with the iconic heroes of their times: doffing a hat cheerily as Raj Kapoor's tramp, or striking a threatening pose with a rifle perched on a shoulder as Sunil Dutt's daku.

The most well-known images here – and perhaps the oldest -- are also deliberate in their stageyness: Pushpamala N.'s 'Phantom Lady, or Kismet: a photoromance' (1996-98), where the photographer famously cast and shot herself as a Fearless Nadia figure in Zorro-style costume. Wearing a masquerade-style mask, a feathered hat, black shorts and a long black cape, Phantom Lady appears, in all sorts of classic noirish spaces in a nightime Bombay -- in an empty train station at night, sitting glumly opposite a moustachioed man in a cheap bar, or heroically suspended at the top of a staircase – creating a thriller of sorts.

Photography's originary claim was that of replicating the truth, and photography especially in India has traditionally seen itself as a documenter of fact. But as Calvino long ago understood, that claim can never be sustained entirely: partly because we cannot document everything, and partly because everything documented is not the truth. One of the ways in which photographers in recent years have responded to that impasse is by turning deliberately to the performative. And the world of the cinema, where the real is by definition performed, is in many ways an obvious choice of locale for such a pursuit.

What makes The Plot interesting to me is that it reveals two different directions in which this pursuit can lead. One is what I am calling unmasking. So rather than letting ourselves be lulled into the fake reality of the glamorous magazine cover, we see how hard Kareena and Bobby have to work to create that effect of luxurious oomph in that bare, tubelit studio -- and a different layer of reality is revealed.

The other direction is the opposite: it is to approach the world through staging it. “Staging is one of photography's main characteristics, theatricality, creating a clarified scene out of a chaotic situation,” Max Pinckers said in an email interview. “Every photograph is in essence staged to a certain extent, what I try to do is make that evident by letting the viewer doubt about what he or she sees.” Pushpamala, whose 'Phantom Lady or Kismet' is perhaps one of the earliest instances of photo-performance work in India, has also spoken in an earlier interview of belonging to the other photographic tradition, in which the thing that photography chooses to document is fiction. The person deliberately pretending to be someone else, whether it is Pushpamala's female avenger or Kannagi Khanna's grandfather, or Pincker's men embracing like Shah Rukh and Juhi, drawing on all the resources of cinematic melodrama, produces a powerful effect. “The mask, being first of all a social, historical product,” Calvino managed to say in the same short story, “can contain more truth than any image claiming to be “true”.

First published as part of Yahoo! Originals