Abstract
Living Archives
Absence appears to be a governing trope in the study of film history in the subcontinent: absent films, non-existent studio papers, intermittent, and mostly doubtful statistical series, a lack, inability or willful indifference on the part of government institutions to make records accessible; many a time is the eager researcher confronted with the death-knell scribble “file not transferred” on her archive requisition slip. As many scholars have noted, perhaps the most difficult absence of all is the researcher’s confrontation with the fact of mortality, the failure to speak to people and record their experience in time. The project of capturing live testimony, whether through interviews or ethnographic engagement at various sites of film activity emerges as a pressing agenda in contemporary bids to develop an archive of experience. While the film industry itself has been largely negligent in archiving its history, many researchers have noted the important phenomenon of private collections, where obsessive individual effort has led to the collation of valuable material on film experience—song-books, lobby cards, posters, production stills, newspaper and magazine reviews, dedicated film and music journals, and leisure magazines, gramophone records, and radio recordings. In addition, the Internet has proven to be an important site for the sharing of material by film enthusiasts and music buffs, and YouTube has proved a veritable treasure-trove for unexpected film material.
In his use of the idea of a “living archive”, Stephen Putnam Hughes asks for engagement with a host of possible sites, including the governmental, but points in particular to the less codified and instrumental realm of the private collector. The interviews and writings of Randor Guy, print and photographic holdings of Film News Anandan, and the detailed knowledge and writings of Aranthai Naryanan are cases in point, and, as industrial demands and public needs—of fans, film enthusiasts, and scholars—grow, such figures have graduated to the position of expert on the basis of access to their own important collections, interviews, and writings. As Hughes points out, important transformations, drawing together the professional archival drive and the private collection may signal another line of mutation, as in the case of the archive built around the collections of Roja Muthiah in Chennai. In this constellation of more dispersed and less rule-governed drives to collect material and make it accessible, the Internet has had a major impact. Ravikant, a historian of popular language and media forms, has for some time been arguing for the significance of the Internet as a distinctive zone of archival activity based on its very dispersion. Here enthusiasts upload material to share and discuss, with film music in particular being a popular subject. Both film music and film song sequences emerge into visual and auditory grasp even when the films themselves may be absent from official archives and commercial video libraries. However the latter, too, constantly surprise us, as with the Induna company releasing a spate of important titles, for example, the Lahore classics produced by D.M. Pancholi, Khazanchi (Gidwani, 1941) and Khandaan (Rizvi, 1942). These had not been available for many years after the shift from VHS cassettes to digital disks. As Hughes notes, many more Tamil film classics are now available through the activity of commercial DVD companies than could be accessed through the official film archive. There are elements of the uncanny here, as official archives, government institutions and the film industry have been sidestepped to display a wider realm of collection, or unravel involuntarily to display their wares. This apparently has been the case with that most recalcitrant of government media institutions, Akashwani (All India Radio), which researchers have found difficult to penetrate: parts of the archive of programs on film music from AIR’s Vividh Bharati station have now been made available on different blog and podcast locations on personal initiatives taken by radio presenters such as Yunus Khan, Sujoy Chatterjee, Irfan, and Sajeev Sarathi. 1
Apart from the Internet bringing all sorts of material to light, it has also been an important site for techniques of ordering and searching through material. At the conference on hindicinema@100 organized by Ravikant and Viyaya Singh at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, B.M. Shukla, a member of the information technology staff at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, showcased his impressive efforts to digitize print material relating to film, including filmographies and song-books (cheap publicity pamphlets comprising film credits, lyrics often in more than one language, and images from the film). Shukla has also developed a search engine that can navigate information about films, music directors, composers, playback singers, and lyrics. He comes from a city known for the enthusiasm of local amateur historians and passionate collectors such as R.P. Singh and R.C Mishra. Leading amongst these is the legendary Harminder Singh Hamraaz, who has edited a Listener’s Bulletin since 1971, and compiled the indispensable Hindi Film Geet Kosh, a multi-volume directory of Hindi film music. Some of these collectors started as fans of particular singing stars and then diversified into larger collection practices. At Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Indian Cinema Century conference organized by Ranjani Mazumdar, Ira Bhaskar, and Veena Hariharan in January 2013, Lawrence Liang and Ashish Rajadhyaksha displayed and discussed the Internet based “cinema of India” encyclopaedia 2 . The venture is based on Rajadhayaksha and the late Paul Willemen’s landmark 1994 Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (Rajadhayksha and Willemen, 1994) and is possible because of Rajadhyaksha’s farsighted move to retain rights to digital publication of the book. The Internet edition provides a remarkable interactive design, where material of different sorts can be uploaded and linked, including essays, film stills, posters, and audio-files. As Liang and Rajadhyaksha pointed out, the emergence of this form facilitated a different type of collation. Rather than attempt to get the best or most reliable account about, say, a film and its credits, the online version had the capacity to feature more than one account. In contrast to the idea of positive or near positive information, we have the lineaments of a different architecture, a possibilist rather than a positive structure of research inquiry. The project has developed in tandem with the work of pad.ma (public access digital media archive), the exciting project to develop a powerful, annotated database of Indian film footage. 3
Ethnographic engagement, and the ethnographic diary, provides a vivid account of media practices in the fullness of how they happen, the people, objects, rhythms, and spaces they address, engage and frame, the technologies and techniques they deploy, and the imaginations which animate their practitioners. We are happy to introduce a field work focus in this issue of BioScope that sits suggestively alongside ruminations on the idea of the living archive. Anand Pandian has for some time been undertaking an innovative ethnographic project focused on the film shoot. He crosses a careful citation of conversations with practitioners—directors, cameramen, editors—along with a detailed observation of practices within the overall location or film set. He also mobilizes a film-theoretical awareness particularly calibrated to ideas of temporality. In an earlier article, he considered the different temporalities involved in the film-making imaginary at the point of the film shoot. These included exploration of how the director would look at the space through the camera lens; the point when he reviewed the day’s rushes; and his anticipation of how the scene would play out in the final cut and at the cinema hall (Pandian, 2011). In his article on lighting and camera work in this issue, he composes a detailed account of the shooting of a scene in a set evoking Madras’s Central Station at the time of Indian Independence for the Tamil film Madrasapattinam (Vijay, 2010). The account explores the biographical details and viewpoint of cameraman Nirav Shah, with incidental insights drawn from the personal musings of P.C. Sreeram, Shah’s mentor and leading cameraman, on the idea of the “camera diary”; a careful description of the selection and placing of lights, including the human labor involved in managing these; the introduction of new lighting techniques, such as a lightning machine which, ironically, the US company introduces to India some 20 years after its launch in Hollywood; the importance of different types of set manufacture, and the sense of material negotiation involved in developing action and camera work amidst the process of construction; the bringing together of built structures and digital effects to engage the audience in an expanded imagination of space. The result is an extraordinarily intricate exploration of cinema, where the fictional subject seems almost incidental to the dense weave of technology and technical skill, and the multiple types of work, material form and life history which compose the moment of the shoot (However, let us not overstate the marginality of fiction in all of this; after all, as Nirav Shah says, in the mainstream format, when organizing lighting and a frame, the idea is to make the audience fall in love with the heroine). This includes a strong emphasis on contingency, the fact that light and other factors are not controllable, requiring adaptability on the part of Indian filmmakers which they often counterpoint to the powers available to Hollywood.
All of this suggests an entirely different level of theoretical and empirical research enquiry, one not remote from the quest to develop a living archive. For while we may, and will, continue to ponder what happens on the screen and what sense we can make of it, there is now an expanded sense of the things which go into the making of the cinematic object, its contexts of production, exhibition, and consumption. This includes an evolving sense of what the archive means: from the public and yet incomplete and often inaccessible governmental enterprise to a more expanded domain which includes collections driven by private, often obsessional motivation, as well as a will to share, exchange, augment, and annotate. If this situates the cinematic object in a complex architecture of information, then the work of ethnography appears to urge us to explore the ramifications of the cinematic practice in the material world, in the organization of light and space, texture, and movement, in technical orientations and work, in life histories.
Histories
The essays in our main article section communicate something of this complex weave of information, and present different ways of doing film history. These involve an engagement with scandal as archival trace or clue to a significant substrata of prohibitions, possibilities and opaqueness in the realm of women’s work in the film industry; the exploration of the complex relationship between the circulation of film material and the compulsion to address audiences on the basis of identity claims in southern regional film history; and finally, something like an archaeology of a particular matrix in Tamil forms, centered on the figure of the dasi or temple dancer, and traversing a shifting temporal frame, from ancient Tamil classics such as the fourth century Cilappatikaram, through to nineteenth century plays and novels, and onto a persistent motif within the cinema, especially the “hagiological-devotional” of the 1930s through to the 1950s.
Debashree Mukherjee has been exploring film as a field of experience which includes a broader spectrum of film-related material, from tickets and song-books to biographical writings, periodicals, newspaper reviews, gossip columns, and oral narratives. This method explores film as social and cultural form through its dispersal into other materials, a sensate and discursive universe conjured from trace elements which gesture to all sorts of possibilities, ranging from fantasy worlds through to new vistas of the working life, for example in the film studio. Mukherjee points out that while the studio was seen as a risk-laden space for its mixing of men and women in intimate proximity, it also offered new potential for women evaluating career lines. This was especially so because female stardom was presented not only for its glamour and its risqué vocation, but as a viable profession earning substantial remuneration. She makes the point, in fact, that in the upper salary bracket women might top men, indicating their centrality to the attractions offered by the cinema.
In exploring women’s work, and the absence of information about the lines of tension and horizons of expectation that emerged around women’s presence in the industry, Mukherjee takes scandal as a point of entry to excavate significant changes. She works with two instances, a poster campaign smearing Naseem Bano, daughter of the courtesan and singer Shamshad Begum, in the princely state of Hyderabad, and a mobilization amongst Parsis against the featuring of two Parsi women, sisters Khorshed and Manek, in a Bombay Talkies film, Jawani Ki Hawa (1935). These incidents provide Mukherjee an opportunity to explore how film introduces new dynamics into the conventional habitus offered to women by gendered patterns of power, patronage, and community. The courtesan sizes up the prospects of marital life for her daughter with a Hyderabad prince, and chooses instead a career for her in the film industry. The gramophone industry was another, often allied option. Did the new technologically driven cultural forms release performers from the constraints of live performance under feudal patronage? In this case the cinema option undoubtedly challenged patronage conventions and authority, leading to the jilted prince’s unleashing a slanderous public attack. Mukherjee discerns another line of unsettlement in the reaction of Parsi organizations to women from the community appearing in Bombay Talkie’s Jawani Ki Hawa. Significantly, the sisters’ earlier career in radio did not invite the same aggression, it was the visual rather than auditory public, body rather than voice which elicited community anxiety. And it was in voice and melody, as singer and music director, and an assumed and soon to be famous name, Saraswati Devi, in which Khorshed would take refuge. This narrative connects, anecdotally, with the beginnings of playback, as Khorshed/Saraswati will stand in for Manek, still on-screen, when the sister loses voice. That the film was completed indicates for Mukherjee the power of commerce, and of Bombay Talkies, whose board included several Parsi members, to withstand the public outcry. In her argument the organized pressure by community associations reflected a failing male authority now confronted with new avenues of professional, and perhaps romantic and marital choice that would take Parsi women away from the community and the possibilities of its reproduction. In all this, teasing out women’s work, status and financial position within the industry proves a challenge, and one which at the lower levels of the film industry does not even provide scandalous and speculative narratives for deconstruction.
In exploring Malayalam studio films of the early 1950s, Jenson Joseph grapples with another order of absence, for local language films were not part of what film audiences could view in the early period of the region’s cinema history. He tracks with care how Malayali distributors had to rely heavily on Tamil film product to develop the cinema trade, and how expectations of what it meant to go to the cinema were shaped by this initial formation. Mythologicals and musicals—a term actually used in local discussions, contra its absence, by and large, elsewhere in Indian film culture—provided a horizon of possible forms. Thus, when Malayalam cinema emerged based on studios such as Merryland and Udaya, they did so within the logic of distribution and exhibition still dependent on Tamil features. In Joseph’s argument the trade was caught between the need to put film content into the cinema halls, and at the same time to reassure a middle-class audience that cinema would evolve within the imperatives of shaping a Malayali culture and identity against what was perceived to be a vulgar Tamil film aesthetic. In practice, rather than a clear-cut strategy to create cultural difference and cultural authenticity, producers had to reconcile these countervailing pressures by generating hybrid forms which captured different components, including musicality and mythological elements that were part of the popular assemblage.
Miriam Hansen (2000) referred to how the cinema emerged on the grounds of an industrial– commercial public sphere which was indiscriminate in the compendium of forms and attractions, traditional, folk, theatrical, musical, popular skit, high culture, which it gathered to engage audiences. The cinematic apparatus facilitated the circulation of all sorts of material, and Joseph’s approach points to the importance of exploring the variety of this material, especially important in complicating the certitudes of an identitarian/national cinema/regional identity approach. A focus on film circulation is key here. It displaces or reassigns significance to the moment of production as a key node of scholarly attention, and allows for a wider engagement with films as they roam within and across borders. Stephen Hughes’ (1996, 2010) work on pre-cinema and early cinema exhibition in the Madras Presidency is a case in point, as is Ranita Chatterjee’s work on early cinema in Bengal (Chatterjee, 2012). Both remind us of the dominant position of foreign film content in the first 40 odd years of cinema’s history in the subcontinent, a detail put aside by even the most complex of cultural histories of early cinema because of the priority given to exploring the Indianness of film culture as part of a post-colonial engagement. Acknowledgment of the sheer weight of foreign cinema in this period is a first step; we then need research on the genres that exercised presence in different audience segments, and to evaluate the cultural functions, modes of cognitive and sensory engagement foreign film circulation offered, and how it influenced local film production. This was a film culture before the emergence of local film production. Such recognition also requires an agenda to explore how such “foreign” material became local, whether through intertitles, live mediation or the circulation of print culture around the cinema. And one of the great unexplored subjects of sub-continental screen studies lies in the phenomenon of images of the local circulating both in theatrical programs, for example “topicals” and newsreels which might connect directly to contemporary politics and political mobilization by governments, national, and social movements; theatrically exhibited advertising films, key to the development of a modern consumer economy; and in the wider circulation of non-fiction material in non-theatrical circuits, for example, for purposes of instruction and education, propaganda and improvement, especially in areas of health and agricultural improvement.
As we engage the cinema at different levels of film experience, and from different locations in the subcontinent, we are likely to produce a new constellation of possible beginnings and discursive fields. Amongst these, the issue of a remarkable persistence of deep heritages and ancient traditions continue to assert their significance. In contrast to the register of contextual historical analyses, Sundar Kaali sets up an encounter between a literary tradition of ancient provenance and key motifs, even obsessions, in cinematic discourse in Tamil Nadu. Focusing on the figure of the devdasi or temple dancer, his concern is at one level to demonstrate how the cinema of the studio period, especially from the 1930s through to the 1950s, was part of a modern reformist impulse to institute the Hindu family through stories that excised the dasi’s influence over the householder, and other figures of authority and standing. Kaali goes back to key classical texts such as Cilappathikaram to identify basic features of the story, relating to the unsettling of landed and mercantile property by a protagonist’s obsessive involvement with a dasi and his ruination of himself and his family. This is entangled with other genre formations, for example the “hagiological-devotional”, where sexual allure and temptation become ways of testing the devotee by godly antagonists (the devotee could as well be the dasi as the merchant). Kaali constructs an impressive list of films which partake of the key themes and generic worlds he describes. He notes the pre-cinematic significance of older narrative traditions and texts becoming the focus of a reinscription of literary cultures in the nineteenth century, with intelligentsia cultivated within the new legal, administrative, and educational professions undertaking work of literary transposition. Such impulses arose as much from a passion for language, literature, and theater, and new forms of their deployment and creation, as for a reforming of the self. In a related drive, Kaali focuses on sexuality and vision as key parameters for the construction of filmic texts, and argues the tendency within a number of films, to deliver a denouement which punishes the protagonist with blinding or self-blinding for his sexual transgressions.
Whatever the drives for reformist narrative closure, our attention is drawn as much to what the protagonist sees as to the imperative that he must not see, or at least not see in the way he does. Few films survive from the earlier period, as Hughes points out, but seeing, and by extension spectatorship, appear to relate in these films to an investment in the dancer and the dance, and, of course, in the auditory allure of the song, with key singing stars such as Bagavathar involved in emblematic works such as Cintamini or Bilwamangal (1937). From Kaali’s descriptions of plot lines and narrative spaces, we are also provided with an intriguing geography of sites, from temples to merchant houses and royal courts, suggesting a strong investment in the architectural sensibility. There are also fantastical features, including trick effects and miraculous manifestations that define the genre of the devotional, with the central role it gives to the realm of gods, devotees and their powers.
Kaali relates a number of intricate turning points in the narratives he so carefully details. He especially focuses on key moments of what he refers to as the uncanny, drawing out psychoanalytical registers to suggest that the dasi emerges as that which was familiar and intimate but has become repressed and comes to appear strange. While the analysis refers to specific motifs and narrative shifts, it also implicitly invokes a world that is no longer available. For this world has been altered by the imperatives of modernization and familial reform, a project in which Kaali understands cinema itself, and specific films and genres, to be complicit. The irony of this scenario is that such worlds only continue to be available, imaginatively, and in terms of sensory engagement, because of the cinema, just as in an earlier epoch, they came to be rendered through prose and theater. It is perhaps exactly in such a complicated architecture, even archaeology of affects—the visual, spatial, textural, and aural dimensions of a world that must be evoked only to be changed—that cinema captures the layered imaginary that underline its importance as evidentiary trace and complex apparatus for historical transitions.