Picture This -- Rinse and repeat

Yesterday's BLInk column: 

The experience of viewing a film a second time ought to be a tidier, more predictable, repeat of the first. After all, the film is the same, and ostensibly, so are you.

What happens when you watch a film for the second time? I don’t mean the sort of second watching that comes decades after the first — like when your mum finally decides she’s had enough of Arnab Goswami and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar is playing on the next channel. I mean something much more deliberate: returning to the theatre or sitting down with your laptop to watch a particular film, a few days or a few weeks or, at most, a few months after the first time you saw it.

Now when you’ve watched something once already, you think you know how you feel about it. You know what you liked about it and what you didn’t, where the actors seemed to be trying too hard and which scene played itself out too quickly. So one might imagine that the experience of viewing a film the second time will be a tidier, more predictable repeat of the first. After all, the film is the same and, ostensibly, so are you.

But think about it, and you know that the second time is likely to be different. And not just different, but unpredictably so. That scene which you thought you wanted to watch unfold forever the first time might now seem excruciating rather than deliciously condensed. The jokes you laughed at the first time may lose their punch: repetition often does that to humour. Additionally, the experience will depend at least partly on what you hope to achieve by the repetition. Sometimes we’re just blown away by the film, and it seems like a pleasurable idea to try and recreate the magic. Sometimes it’s cinematic complexity that creates the desire to return — meaning there was such a host of things going on in the film, visually or aurally or narratively, that a second watch seemed necessary to absorb them. Sometimes it’s just chance that brings the film back into your life — a friend who insists you watch it with them, or a public screening that lets you decide to watch it again.

A recent trip to McLeodganj to attend the utterly charming Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) was bookended for me by two such instances. The festival’s opening night involved a screening of Thithi, a Kannada film that I first saw in Delhi at a Siri Fort Auditorium screening of National Award winners early this summer, and that opened to a long and fairly successful run in cinemas across India soon after.

My memories of watching Thithi (and the notes I made at Siri Fort) were dominated by the characters. Like everyone else, I was most struck by the bearded, unkempt Gadappa (literally ‘beard-man’). But there were others who stayed with me: the bush-shirt-clad wheeler-dealer through whom Gadappa’s son wants to sell the family land, the gleeful excitement of Gadappa’s grandson Abhi as he successfully woos a striking shepherd girl who’s caught his eye.

The other thing that had stayed with me was a powerful sense of Raam Reddy’s chosen landscape: stretches of almost barren red earth, bumbling herds of sheep, groves of sugarcane whose overgrown greenness is beholden to an erratic irrigation pump.

This time around, I remained enchanted by Gadappa’s face and bearing — his memorable melding of a childish stubbornness and a wisdom that can only come from experience. And perhaps because I already knew what they were going to say, I could gaze uninterrupted at the faces of many others.

But otherwise it was like watching a different film. The visual seemed to recede into the background, and sound came to the fore. The funerary band that I had marked for their incongruously orange sashes, I now noted for the deliberate gaiety of their music: defying the lovely gravity of the faces around the pyre, perhaps defying death itself. There was the tinny congratulatory tone of the TV talk show, and the sulky silence of the blocked-out porn clip. I heard, as if for the first time, the mobile ringtones piercing the otherwise bucolic quiet of the village: songs of youth, anthems of the present. But suddenly, now, I heard more and more industrial sounds: the loud tractor on which Abhi and his friends go on their illegal logging expeditions, or the borrowed bike that makes him monarch of all he surveys, the dull whirring of the wood-cutting machines. But I also heard, with much greater clarity, a repeated exclamation: “Hou!” — its intonation differing from person to person and situation to situation. It is not a word I know, I have no wish to look it up — and yet, somehow, it felt absolutely central to Thithi’s conjuring of a landscape.

On the way back to Delhi after the festival, part of a crew of returning journalists, I found myself granted the unreturnable gift of the video coach. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil was to play, and greeted with a mix of delight and mock-despair. “Our last DIFF screening,” said someone. Ae Dil wasn’t a film I had intended to watch again. But there in the back of the Volvo, surrounded by new friends whose reactions I couldn’t predict and was utterly curious about, it became a different film. Or rather, as many films as there were faces to watch.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 19th Nov 2016.

Sound Tripping

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

A conference in Delhi brings fresh insights to bear on technology and music in Mumbai's cinema.

The most exciting thing I've done last week is to spend two successive working days in the School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where an academic conference on the subject of technology and music in India has been unfolding. 

Titled 'The Music Box and its Reverberations', the four-day event represented a marvellously eclectic mix of music. There was a morning devoted to Hindustani classical and (in nicely egalitarian fashion) an afternoon to Carnatic, there were lively papers on everything from Garhwali folk VCD culture to how the singer LR Eswari created (and was created by) the husky female voice in Tamil music. 

There were also many great discussions of film music and the Hindi film song, ranging from early Bombay cinema, through the cliched 'golden age' of the fifties and sixties, and into the present. Poet, editor, music and cinema aficionado Yatindra Mishra, who is working on a book on the life and music of Lata Mangeshkar, offered up a talk on innovation and fixity in the Hindi film song. 

It contained several great anecdotes: my favourite was about Raj Kapoor, whose musical sense I would have thought was fairly good, given the stunning songs his films always had. But Kapoor was apparently so obsessed with Raag Bhairavi that when Shankar-Jaikishan, his music directors, offered him a song based on any other raag, he was certain to dismiss it as "popatiya". 

Neepa Majumdar, who teaches Film Studies at Pittsburgh and is the author of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s (2009), presented a fascinating paper arguing that early Bombay cinema displayed a "near-pathological" reluctance to depict itself. Until as late as the 1970s, she suggested, the technology of cinema -- the screen, or even the film camera -- almost never appeared within our films, even if a film star featured as a character. 

Instead, what early Hindi films often contained, especially as part of song sequences, were 'stage shows'. Majumdar suggests that this incorporation of the stage might represent the cinema's desire to ally itself with older, more legitimate art forms like music and drama, to gain some of the respectability it was seen as lacking. 

Majumdar had many more interesting thoughts on the way cinema dealt with theatre. She pointed out, using the classic 'Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon' song from Patanga (1949) as an example, that the stage sequence in films often took recourse to the split screen: a visual device that was most definitely cinematic. 

Also, the sense of 'liveness' in these stage scenes within films was often produced by cinematic techniques. For instance, showing the interaction between on-stage performers and members of the on-screen audience through continuity editing and eyeline matches. 

But, while the cinema rarely made an appearance, the radio was a popular feature. Majumdar argued that the way the radio programme was depicted on screen often turned on the idea that the radio was actually broadcasting live. Temporal coincidence -- the fact that the singer and the listener occupied the same time -- was what created a relationship between the performer (often shown in the recording studio at the radio station, or elsewhere) and the listener (in their home or in some public place where the radio was playing). Even if the protagonists were clearly distant in space, sound was the bridge between them. 

Later the same day, in a round-table session called 'Film Music and Sound Practices', the Carnatic classical singer Bombay Jayashri Ramnath spoke of a new kind of sound bridge: Skype. Jayashri described the laborious process by which she and director Ang Lee came up with the final version of her Oscar-nominated lullaby for the film The Life of Pi: connecting across computer screens each evening for ten days, at two ends of the world. 

Skype came up again in the same session, when the musician Arijit Dutta described the goose bump-inducing process by which he managed to work with the legendary Pakistani singer Shafaqat Amanat Ali to produce the marvellous 'Bol'. 

Dutta was making his debut as a music director with one of 2014's most successful small-budget films, Nitin Kakkar's large-hearted, funny Indo-Pak bromance Filmistaan, and though Ali was happy to work on the song, he couldn't come to India for visa reasons. That was when the two decided they could just do this on Skype. The technology allowed them to bypass the barriers set up by their nation states -- in a strange and lovely echo of the plot of Filmistaan -- where it is the cinema itself that performs that unifying job. 

The sparky Sneha Khanwalkar, famed for the music of Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Gangs of Wasseypur and her superb music-scouting TV show, Sound Tripping, was also present at that session, and made it clear that the move away from the studio and to location shooting is what she sees as revolutionising film music. 

And that move is enabled by new sound-recording technology, which allows anyone, anywhere to record something that can then be incorporated into a film. More than ever before, she argues, the process is opening up the field of music -- and music direction -- to newcomers. And if the old man in the UP village can't come to the studio to record, it no longer means we can't record him, she said. "Technology: Baap," said Khanwalkar, raising her hands above her head in a gesture of obeisance.

An Auto Sonata

TRISHA GUPTA meets the man who made the sound of Delhi’s auto-rickshaws part of the India Art Summit

IT’S A regular Saturday in New Delhi’s Connaught Place. A post-lunch crowd ambles along, window-shopping. The soft murmur of afternoon traffic on the Inner Circle is slowly turning into a louder buzz. Suddenly, above the cars, buses, auto-rickshaws and taxis comes a series of honks – sharp and staccato ones followed by a long, low-pitched tone. A cavalcade of flag-embellished auto-rickshaws is turning past E Block, honking in choreographed unison. Passers-by stop to look, someone tries to hail one, while one autowallah waves as he drives past. Things are already odd enough, but then a white man in yellow pyjamas darts nimbly into the street, holding up a hand as if to stop the traffic. It takes a minute to realize that he’s only taking a photo.

The pyjama-clad man is Geert-Jan Hobijn, and the honking autos are his idea. Hobijn is known in international music circles as the founder of Staalplaat Soundsystem, an Amsterdam-based initiative that he began with friends in 1982. Staalplaat (Dutch for steelplate; ‘plaat’ also means disc, thus record) has a reputation for supporting weird and wonderful sounds, “expanding the boundaries of what we call ‘music’”. One piece Hobijn remembers fondly was inspired by Dadaist poetry: a voice repeating ad infinitum the phrase, “The minister regrets these statements”, removing one syllable each time round so the sound becomes less intelligible and more abstract. Another was an Austrian yodeling song, cut up and reassembled. “This was before digital editing,” he points out.

Staalplaat is now a forum for sound artists, an organisation network with a music label, an e-zine, a radio program, a shop and a distribution company and Hobijn has moved from being a dogged releaser of other people’s quirky sounds to creating his own. “In 2000, I began making music with objects not usually seen as ‘musical’ – vacuum cleaners, kitchen mixers, tumble dryers.” In 2005, a museum in the north German city of Kiel invited him to “use the building as an instrument”. The idea of an increase in scale was exciting, but not easy. “You can’t bang on a building, or drill holes in it.” What he finally created involved moving soundboxes, some placed on children’s tricycles. “People could hear thuds and sirens, but couldn’t see where they were coming from. Of course, the Germans thought it was about the war,” Hobijn smiles wryly.

HOBIJN ISN’T keen on art being message-y: “Like this 48C festival you had in Delhi, it was too political, too environmental for me. I’d say, leave that to Greenpeace.” Yet his work is clearly connected to what’s around him. “Man’s first compositions were based on the birds. But now we are alienated from the sounds around us, ‘noise’, we call it. As a contemporary urban person, I want to make music from these sounds.” When he arrived in Delhi last October to do a residency with Khoj, the first thing that struck him was the traffic. “That’s the sound of Delhi. Of most modern cities, actually. Only here, it’s louder.” He decided to take the city’s chaotic sounds and overlay them with something seemingly similar, but actually structured and discrete. The performance involved remotely triggering the horns of 30 auto-rickshaws as they moved around the concentric circles of Connaught Place, creating a “moving sound choreography”. “When you hear a single horn, you think: that’s loud! When you hear 30 horns in synch, you think: hmm, why isn’t that louder? I just want to make people listen differently.”


From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 35, Dated September 05, 2009