2013

FORECAST

NEWWAVE CINEMA

FROM A MUMBAI TO BIHAR

A new wave of gritty realistic cinema is eliminating the rural-urban divide on screen

FARHAN AKHTAR IN BHAAG MILKHA BHAAG

t the Film & Television GUEST Institute, the other day, I COLUMN found myself doing what I increasingly do at places like that: To check the most recent films that students may have either downloaded or ripped. Obviously, in return I would give whatever I had. This time my haul included almost 40 GB of Japanese Ashish film, including controversial Japanese filmmaker Sion Sonos Suicide Rajadhyaksha Circle series. In turn, I passed on major films by Chinas Sixth Generation filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai, including his now famous Frozen, and So Close to Paradise (better known as The Girl from Vietnam). Wangs official arrival in India was only last November, when the Kolkata International Film Festival awarded 11 Flowers the NETPAC Award. Long before that, he was well known among young filmmakers and cinephiles for his 2001 classic Beijing Bicycle. Both filmmakers reputations, along with existing harddisk circuit classics Kim Ki-Duk and Jia Zhangke, were made well before they were seen on any official screens in India, by the kind of excited sharing and equally excited discovery of new masters by film students across the country. On numerous occasions, as with Wang Xiaoshuai, it is only this kind of informal curationas cinephiles play curators, post their recommendations online and share, share, sharethat has led to festivals acquiring and screening films. Earlier this year, on a bravura programming exercise at the newly refurbished Osians festival at Delhis Siri Fort and other venues, film scholar Kaushik Bhaumik juxtaposed Anurag Kashyap (the complete two-part Gangs Of Wasseypur) and Rituparno Ghoshs Chitrangada alongside a major retrospective of Japanese pink film, and then also showed some edgy Pasolini (Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom) to make an argument about film history that I think is completely new to film programming. To make the point still further, Osians brought over the filmmaker Q (whose controversial Gandu has been making the informal circuit even though its official release in India is still nowhere in sight) along with his band Gandu Circus to Delhis Blue Frog. Rounding it off, with a most unlikely origin of all this, was a major and full retrospective of avant garde master Mani Kaul. It is fairly well known that there is a new energy in almost all languages of Indian cinema. What is startlingly, even mind-numbingly new is the global context within which our films now consciously set their work. And with it, what has enabled this new ecosystem to develop. It is arguable the new spaces of showing, which include numerous and ever-expanding informal areas, from art galleries to cafes, are preceded by what I can only call new circuits of curation, performance and ex-

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2013

FORECAST

NEWWAVE CINEMA

KHAN CLASHES

TRIPLE TREATS

MOVIE TRENDS OF THE YEAR

In a year of Aamir Khans Dhoom 3, SRKs Chennai Express directed by Rohit Shetty, Salman Khans action film directed by brother Sohail, there are lots of other pleasures

Dhoom 3 Aamir is the villain. Director Vijay Krishna Acharya will be if he doesnt deliver a hit. Murder 3 Emraan didnt want to do a third. But uncle Mahesh Bhatts brandwagon wasnt going to wait. Krrish 3 Hrithik returns as superhero in 3D. Vivek Oberoi is baddie Kaal. The Roshans are on a roll.

Salman Khan No film on the floor but Sher Khan could make it in time for an Eid release in August. Aamir Khan Dhoom 3 is expected to be released around the year-end.

Shah Rukh Khan His road movie Chennai Express is expected in mid-2013.

Madhuri Dixit in Soumik Sens Gulab Gang with Juhi Chawla as her politician antagonist. Kangna Ranaut as a solo honeymooner in Vikas Bahls quirky Queen. Vidya Balan in a sequel to Kahaani. Priyanka Chopra with Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh in Gunday.

INSPIRED BY SONGS , DIALOGUES

Nautanki Saala: (Who said it: Amitabh Bachchan, Sholay, 1975) Director Rohan Sippy Stars Ayushmann Khurrana. Connection Rohans father directed Sholay. Phata Poster Nikla Hero: (Who said it: Naseeruddin Shah, Hero Hiralal, 1988) Director Rajkumar Santoshi Stars Shahid Kapur, Ileana DCruz. Connection Shahid Kapurs father and Naseeruddin are married to sisters. Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani: (Who sang it: Randhir Kapoor/Kishore Kumar, Jawani Diwani, 1972) Director Ayan Mukherji Stars Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone. Connection Randhir is Ranbirs uncle.

hibition bring together numerous live practices and installation art to help restructure and redefine our encounter with the moving image. This could not have been envisaged even a decade ago, when someone like Mani Kaul was still struggling to make films in the face of rank state indifference, cripplingly low budgets and the impossibility of distribution. Today, Kauls student Gurvinder Singh, who dedicates to Kaul his extraordinary debut Anhe Ghore da Daan, a Punjabi film showing 24 hours in the life of a village near Bhatinda, has found his film released by the National Film Development Corporation, and will be seen in its use of non-professional actors and its extraordinary sync soundtrack to be a worthy equivalent of Jia Zhangkes justly celebrated Still Life, set in the Three Gorges Dam.

Anyone can be a film buff now

To many, the major public face of this new cinema is Anurag Kashyap, as much in his capacity of filmmaker as that of producer. As things are, Kashyap is producing Qs next Tasher Desh in Bengali, Marathi filmmaker Sachin Kundalkars Aiyya, and already has Bedabrata Pains Chittagong out. He would have produced Kauls own next film but that wasnt to be, with Kauls sudden and tragic demise, so he is now producing a documentary on Kaul. For many, Kashyaps appropriation of this new space is something of an act of opportunism, an appropriation of a diverse set of practices by no means limited to his own priorities. To others, however, his selection of both people to supportVikramaditya Motwane, to take just an instanceas well as films from diverse languages and contexts, remains a marker of how old-style film production can be now combined with a new curatorial instinct. Films like Kashyaps Mumbai Cutting, comprising eleven shorts by such names as Sudhir Mishra, Kundan Shah, Jahnu Barua and Rituparno Ghosh, bears some similarity to a film student curating his hard disk, sharing stuff both with friends

and with unknown fellow cinephiles online and, sometimes, extending it into a filmmaking practice. Both styles are sufficiently well established for us to look back and see what kind of filmmaking and film history can emerge. There are discernible trends: for one, films are being watched and assembled. A hundred years of Indian cinema does not, it appears, any longer need a film archive; any film students 1 TB disk can do. It is less easy to define the kind of filmmaking practice emerging from all this, but there are enough straws in the wind to make some kind of informed sense of whats going on. Here are a few speculative suggestions. The emphasis on gritty realism is certainly in: Wasseypur is only the most recent in a long series of films that may well have started, in hindsight, with the Mumbai gangster movie of the 1980s and 90s. This is Realism Mark II, we may say, and it certainly replaces an entire legacy of post-Independence cinematic realisms. For one, it eliminates what used to be the key distinction central to earlier realismsbetween country and city. Wasseypur is somewhere between the two, a mobile dystopic space at once the heart of Mumbai and Bihar. Such realism relies on a completely new soundscape: At one level sync sound is in, but at another, the extent of sound manipulation is such that sync may be better comprehended through Sneha Khanwalkars Sound Trippin than through fidelity to location. Location sound, then, mediated through sampling to produce literally the exact sonic equivalent of nowhereland.

thickened, even curdled, into such a dense communicative idiom that you cannot unpack it in any simple way: you need to first get a lexicon of a near-century old film practice. And so the remake genre: The Saheb Biwi aur Gangster genre, and the mode retro of Bollywood where you cant understand, say, Om Shanti Om, unless you know the 70s movie. Most interestingly, perhaps, for me, the way an entire substructure of cinematic memory undergirds new narratives. My most interesting example here has been Srijit Mukherjees 2010 Bengali film Autograph, in which Prasenjit plays a movie su-

perstar now acting in a fictional remake of Satyajit Rays Nayak and reprising the covert knowledge of star-predecessor Uttam Kumar.

Much more than just a movie

A third trend within the gritty-realism movie is the characterisation structure: Drawn as much, I think, from gaming experience as from cinema itself. We dont yet have an Indian equivalent of, say, the Arkham games of Batman, but it is clear to me that this kind of cinema is straining at the leash, wanting to break out into a potentially interactive idiom. And so what we have is a relay of characters, and literal movement from character to character, as we weave through a story almost as though we had an X-Box console in our hands. The last is almost the most interesting of the three, partly because what we now see is a narrative imperative to do something in India that is simply not supported by the economy: The disaster of the Ra-One game on Sony Playstation 3 being only one example. The need, in a Rajinikant movie like Robot, or Shah Rukh Khans superhero ambitions, is to go beyond the cinemato see the cinema indeed like a glass cage in which they are trappeddefine a drive that is larger than even these stars: A drive to push Indian cinema into a space for which neither is the market ready nor the technology. But then this in itself is not new to Indian cinema, which has often functioned without established market support, forcing a spectatorial alliance to do their bit to see films through. Now the only difference is spectatorship is appended to a brand new set of hard disks.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture & Society, and the author of Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema.

Havent we seen it before?

You cant now conceive of todays filmmaking style without first understanding yesterdays: All film language has
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