Films that evoke spirits of past cinematic masters

I AM NOT usually sentimental about anniversaries, but this May, as the centenary celebrations of Indian cinema took place, I indulged myself a little by re-watching the 2009 Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory. This is the story of Dadasaheb Phalke’s struggles as he made what would become India’s first feature, Raja Harishchandra, but that synopsis doesn’t capture the spirit of this biopic. It is not a po-faced, realist telling of Phalke’s life—instead, it has the mood of a picaresque tale about an underdog sallying from one adventure to the next. The filmmakers clearly set out to capture the sanguine spirit of the movies that were being made in Phalke’s own time. And so, Harishchandrachi Factory glosses over some of the sadder aspects of the real Phalke’s life. He sails to London despite having no contacts there but gets help from many quarters, and the lilting score seems to goad him on. When he returns to India, it is as if he was barely away—we see his wife waking up, as if from a dream, to discover that her husband is back home, cooing at their new baby. The scene is a reminder of how cinema itself can ‘magically’ transport us to distant places and back within seconds (Phalke was one of our most important magicians). Watching Harishchandrachi Factory, it occurred to me that in recent years we have (perhaps inevitably) seen a number of films about the history of cinema. That great film student and teacher Martin Scorsese alone has made two—The Aviator about producer Howard Hughes, and Hugo, touching on the life of film pioneer Georges Melies. One question that arises is: can a film about a filmmaker resist the temptation of using a style that imitates its subject? In this context, take two other recent films: Hitchcock (2012) about the strain on Alfred Hitchcock’s marriage during the making of Psycho; and acclaimed Bengali film Meghe Dhaka Tara (2013) about the tortured Ritwik Ghatak’s time in an asylum in 1969. You would be hard-pressed to think of two directors more dissimi-lar. Hitchcock worked in the popular genre the suspense thriller and was for much of his career considered an entertainer rather than an artist—as if the two categories are exclusive. He began to be taken seriously when a new generation of critics in the 1950s and 1960s held his work up to deeper scrutiny. Ghatak on the other hand rarely achieved commercial success but is often considered the exemplar of the serious, politically committed artist who never compromised on his integrity. The titles of these two films tell a story, too. Hitchcock might appear a banal title, but it is an acknowledgement that the name alone is enough to create a wealth of associations. Meanwhile, the decision to call the Ghatak film Meghe Dhaka Tara—the same title as one of his own best-known films—may seem confusing but a moment’s reflection shows the aptness of it. The title means “cloud-capped star” or “a star covered by a cloud”, and one can’t think of a terser poetic description of Ghatak’s life. He was a genius who shone bright in his best moments, and his work continues to influence scores of movie buffs and filmmakers; and yet, his career was often under a cloud of alcoholism and self-pity with occasional patches of sunlight breaking through. Though these two films are different in outward appearance, strange resonances run through them. Hitchcock lived a more comfortable life than Ghatak did, but he struggled to sell his vision for Psycho; a trail-blazing departure for him—to bullying big-studio executives of the time. Each director is shown here as having a long-suffering wife who puts up with her husband’s moods and makes sacrifices at the altar of his art. You are no bhadralok, Ghatak’s wife tells him, while Hitchcock’s weary spouse notes that viewers only know about the “great and glorious genius” but not the flawed man. Most of all, both films are aware of how these directors went about designing their filmic universes. Meghe Dhaka Tara is beautifully shot in black-and-white, and unfolds in a deliberately (sometimes tediously) abstract style that is not far from the tone of some of Ghatak’s work. This may be the place for a confession: while I admire many things about Ghatak, I don’t feel a personal connect with his cinema, which is often meandering and pretentious. And perhaps for this reason, while Meghe Dhaka Tara is a brilliant visual experience and a very skilful film, I had trouble engaging with it. The more accessible Hitchcock has its own flaws—simplifications among them—but it is a droll, selfaware tribute that draws motifs from Hitchcock’s own work. In the very first scene, we see the mass murderer Ed Gein (whose macabre adventures inspired Psycho) clunking his brother on the head with a spade, upon which the tone changes from the gruesome to the comical: as the famous funeralmarch tune of Alfred Hitchcock Presents plays on the soundtrack, Hitchcock (played by Anthony Hopkins) enters the frame to introduce this story and to seal a pact with the murderer. Ed Gein committed horrible crimes, Hitchcock tells us, but if he had never existed, we wouldn’t have “our film”. This can be viewed as an artist’s admission to feeding off the ugly aspects of the real world; but the words “our film” are also a reminder that Hitchcock implicated his audience in everything he did. That opening scene catches so much of what the director was about: reflections on the relationship between life and art, between the watcher and the watched; the alternating of black, even tasteless humour with moments of human truth. At another point, Hitchcock stands outside the preview hall, so thrilled by the reception to Psycho that he waltzes about and moves his hands like an orchestra conductor wielding a baton; this is presumably a literalisation of the real Hitchcock’s remark that he liked to “play the audience like an organ”. As cinema continues to ruminate on its own history, one awaits more such films that playfully invoke the spirits of masters past.