A Critical Film Zone on Zoom

As with the once magical and soon banal zoom lens, Zoom webinars on film have bridged distance and connected scholars in startling simultaneity since COVID-19 struck education. As a retired lecturer in film, I have very rarely participated in them, so they still hold a bit of magic. Recently, I attended a couple webinars on film that left me reflecting on the nature of the film history, theory and criticism I have practiced and taught for well over 30 years in Australia. I would like to share a thought or two here about what happened in this new transnational cinematic ‘public sphere’ where the protocols of cinema studies were not at all required in discussing at length the politics of two films. Neither of the seminars was linked to film studies specialist groups.

One of the webinars was on Funny Boy by Deepa Mehta (Canada/Sri Lanka, 2020). It is in Tamil and English with a little Sinhala. It was Canada’s official entry to the Academy Awards. The webinar on it was organised by a university literary organisation called Vibhava in Sri Lanka and was conducted in Sinhala. Funny Boy is based on the Lankan-Canadian Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 book on the coming of age of a young boy, Arjie, who is gay, and is set in a Tamil upper-middle-class family in Colombo during the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom by Sinhala mobs that set off the civil war.

The other webinar was on The Single Tumbler by Sumathy Sivamohan (Sri Lanka, 2020), based on her original script in Tamil. It was an official entry at the International Film Festival of South Asian Cinema, Toronto; won the best foreign film award at Cinemaking IFF, Dhaka; and was also screened at the Jaipur IFF, among others. The webinar on it was organised by the London-based South Asian Solidarity Group. The film is set in a Tamil middle-class home in Mannar, in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka, well after the near-25-year civil war ended. The film recollects, in memory images, a central traumatic historical event in the early 1990s (not often discussed), of the expulsion of thousands of Muslims from their homes in Mannar, by the Tigers (LTTE), and the simultaneous disappearance of a Tamil man who questioned the expulsion. The film is largely set within this disappeared man’s home during a family reunion. The elder sister, who after the pogrom had left as part of the Tamil diaspora to Canada, returns home for a holiday to see her ailing, mentally disturbed mother who still mourns her ‘disappeared’ son. The elder sister’s visit is the occasion for reminiscing, when a traumatic event from the past irrupts, quite by chance.

I very much appreciated the ethos of the two webinars, the participants’ emotional engagement with the stories, the sense of camaraderie among strangers and their remarkable attentiveness over a long period of time. Then I had a flash of a bad memory of some film tutorials at Sydney University where one would, at times, have to work so hard to get a discussion going despite all the preparation that went into doing just that, the furtive looks at the clock and the sense of relief when the time’s up! It’s not a fair comparison, I know. The tutes were compulsory. But then the students chose their courses.

Ravi’s invitation to write this piece gives me a chance to acknowledge what I learnt by listening outside my discipline and also to imagine what I might have said at the webinars I participated in, one of which ended well after midnight, Sydney time! Belatedly, I asked myself what a cinema studies approach could have contributed to the two insightful webinars by way of describing and amplifying the formal, structural dimensions of the films and their basic conditions of possibility. For my critical practice, description matters and theoretical engagement and concept ‘creation’ are central to my scholarship.

Selvadurai’s book Funny Boy was translated into Sinhala in 2001, but films and plays on the issues of queer sexuality are very rare in Lankan culture. As such, I was very moved by the brave initiative of the students in organising the webinar and the question of whether I liked or disliked the film was quite irrelevant:

(Dear Bioscope, Permit an old teacher of 75 a moment to reminisce here on her critical practice; For decades I taught D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) in my course on Euro-American silent cinema, watching the full three and more hours, preceded by a short one-hour lecture. It was a hard experience for my students and me but I sternly lectured them that without understanding the foundational role that racism played/s in the Hollywood cinema and in developing its very syntax (parallel-montage) in this canonical film, we cannot understand its hegemonic, so-called universal language, which became invisible as oxygen, ingrained into our sensory-motor system, as Raul Ruiz said, when he developed his critique of what he called ‘Central Conflict Cinema’. Though as a film scholar I have wide interests, I am devoted to what I think of as ‘esoteric cinema’, that is, films that, despite me spending decades teaching them, still remain mysterious and dark to me, such as Chaplin’s The Circus, Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Mathew, Parajanov’s fairy-tale Ashik Kerib, Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box, Ryan Coogler’s The Black Panther and, yes, even Birth of a Nation too – all films that plunge my brain into ‘speeds and slowness, movements and rests’ that is hard to sustain in writing. These and many others can’t be tamed by calling them slow-films, or modernist films, or superhero high-speed digital films or whatever. They signal through the flames – as Maria Falconetti did in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc – an image on fire).

Brandon Ingram, the actor who played the role of the young, gay schoolboy, participated in the webinar along with a well-known human rights lawyer, Visakes Chandrasekeran, who also directed the film Frangipani on a queer theme and has also come out as gay. He informed us that homosexuality is still illegal in Sri Lanka and that there were no laws protecting privacy either, unlike in India. The discussion centred on gay gender politics and the politics of race, which formed the film’s background. I learned that LGBT rights are now discussed in Sri Lanka and not only among the Westernised English-speaking middle and upper classes, and that there are also government clinics that provide hormone therapy for trans people, outside the capital cities. There are Sinhala words coined for some of these gender-fluid and even gender-neutral queer categories, though not all. I also learnt of the strong criticism of the film by the Canadian-Tamil diaspora for the failure to give the main roles to Tamil actors and also for the bad Tamil accents spoken by the North Indian and Sinhala actors. There appears not to have been a discussion on the most unusual case of a Sinhala actor playing the role of a Tamil man suspected of having been a terrorist – perhaps a politically fraught role for either a Tamil or a Sinhala actor to have played.

Brandon Ingram’s performance in the role of ‘funny-boy’ was nuanced, with many shades. I was particularly struck by the light and playful aspect of his performance as a 17-year-old gay teenager, while himself being 34 at the time. He is an experienced actor on the English stage and has also come out as gay. But there was no discussion of his acting, which would have been the most obvious starting point for me. I have had the impression for a long time that acting is not discussed and theorised nearly as much as it should be within cinema studies. What difference would it make to name his acting a form of ‘camp’ performance? As there is no equivalent word in Sinhala, one could use it and gloss it through Susan Sontag’s wonderfully accessible essay, ‘Notes on Camp’, as an ability to dramatise every-day-life through theatricalised gestures, movements and speech patterns Sontag, 1979). One could deepen that further by quoting cultural critic Andrew Ross who theorised that, ‘camp is the re-creation of surplus value out of forgotten forms of labour’ (Ross, 1989, p. 170). Within such a cultural dynamic, discarded or outmoded or tired gestures say, or materials that define and confine the gendered body, can be replayed, re-crafted, in such a way as to be able to provide modes of survival in oppressive and nasty situations. The camp impulse to theatricalise a body’s modes of address is also a mode of enjoyment and self-enjoyment, which at the same time highlights the limits of normative, gendered modes of comportment and speech, which heterosexuals habitually tend to consider ‘natural’. There is also a rather wide range of camp acting styles in the history of Western cinema, both in Classical Hollywood and in avant-garde films and more recently in Baz Luhrman’s oeuvre, not reducible to effeminate gesticulation. This little history lesson on camp acting is motivated by a key dramatic line in the film itself: ‘Say! “I am a Grand Diva!”’. When as a little ‘funny’ boy Arjie is bullied and reprimanded for play-acting by dressing up like a bride and wearing bright red lipstick, his young Canadian aunt, who understands what is happening to him, instructs him to repeat that line and twirl and strike a pose. She shows him how to do it with style and gets him to rehearse the moves. So, the young adult Arjie has by then internalised this mode of camp self-presentation in every-day-life. Critics duly noting Arjie’s high-spirited performance have called it melodramatic, which is a lazy catch-all term used when we don’t know what to say about a marked deviation from the familiar, so called ‘normal’, naturalist mode of acting prevalent in the rest of the film.

Sumathy Sivamohan who directed The Single Tumbler is a professor of English literature and is also a performer, playwright and poet with a keen interest in film studies. She participated in the webinar by responding to some of the questions but allowed the discussion to flow. Tasneem Hamead, also from and English literature and drama background, approached the film from the singularity signalled by the title The Single Tumbler. Playing on this quantification, she asked, ‘Were there others? If so, what happened to them?’, and then moved on to the disappearance of the son of the family after he questioned the LTTE as to why the Muslim population of Jaffna were expelled. That number is quantified as about 75,000, in a statement at the end of the film, which evoked the countless numbers found in mass graves or never even found, blasted into oblivion by bombs. In this way, Hamead provided a dazzlingly penetrating conceptualisation of the film’s narrative structure and its ‘work of mourning’. Through her powers of analytic description, Hamead showed us how Sivamohan (without actually showing any of the violence), has been able to deftly and powerfully evoke the war in a complex manner and to open up a very nearly forgotten aspect of its horror – the expulsion of the Muslim people from their homelands. In contrast, there are several recent Indian films that have represented the civil war in an action-thriller genre, playing up the violence to the hilt.

When asked, Sivamohan said that the Tamil literati were not happy with the film because it didn’t focus on the grave trauma of the Tamil people. But we were all excited by the shot of the single tumbler on fire beside the open door of a microwave oven. It felt like the burning heart of this quiet film. Lots of stuff has happened to that tumbler, it has a mini history. The old mother, known as Daisy Teacher, was entrusted with a set of tumblers and other precious items for safekeeping by her friend and colleague, Fatima Teacher, before she was expelled from her home in Mannar with a host of other Muslims. Clearly, she expected to return. Daisy Teacher’s son who questioned the Tigers about this expulsion disappears on the same night, and in her grief, Daisy Teacher’s mind merges the two events and so she gets rid of the set of tumblers. The single tumbler that survived opens a wound and a potential. She flings the tumbler on the floor yelling at the maid for having served her tea in it. Then the suppressed past erupts irresistibly into the present. The brief hallucinatory shots of the appearance of both the young and the old Fatima Teacher to Daisy Teacher conveyed so much, so quietly. All of this ‘information’ appears not as exposition but in suggestive, condensed and minimalist images. One can sense that Sivamohan is moving quietly towards an oblique poetic mode of address, as her skills and powers of abstraction mature over several fearless post-war feature films (beside short films made during the war years), exploring the marginalised histories of the multi-ethnic polity and culture of Lanka under duress.

Her next film, soon to be released, is a feature-length documentary about the return of some of the expelled Muslim people back to Mannar. Not having had the chance to study Sivamohan’s oeuvre, I can only say that I think that she is perhaps Sri Lanka’s sole woman filmmaker who has made its fraught, bloodied, multiracial history her area of film research. The single tumbler, a humble metal cup, invested with the values of friendship between two old professional women, the Tamil Daisy Teacher and the Muslim Fatima Teacher, offers this old Sinhala Laleen Teacher an image on fire, a gift of sorts one might say. This suggests to me a rather urgent need to conceptualise a new history of contemporary Lankan (not Sinhala) cinema of the civil war period, maybe as ‘Works of Mourning’, to use Freud’s vital, non-linear concept here. The linear history of the Lankan cinema, as successive generational change among a few gifted young male filmmakers, will definitely have to be rethought if the work of a woman filmmaker such as Sivamohan is to be properly acknowledged, disturbing its naturalised male narrative. There is nothing inevitable about the fragile history of Lankan cinema, and to think so is both ahistorical and intellectually lazy if not irresponsible.

It is by thinking through the two webinars here with Valentina Vitali’s insightful analysis of how South Asian women’s films have been represented in the West, that this quite obvious but hitherto un-thought thought hit me like a Neo-Realist stray bullet (Vitali, 2020). She says that at the top of this account are the star directors such as Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair and a few others living in the West and then a number of Indian women directors with family ties within the Hindi film industry, whose work may be found on various streaming services and then there is the rest working on modest to no budgets and making a wide range of films whose distribution is uncertain and public profile uneven. I find this analysis helpful in thinking about Lankan cinema history in general and the films made there by women and Sivamohan’s work in particular, which, however, doesn’t quite fit within this schema. I am astounded at the role chance played in generating this train of thought.

Now, this Laleen Teacher is wondering if she is not too old to return to write on the Lankan cinema, after having cut her scholarly teeth on the subject of its female representation, once upon a time, as a young film scholar. But then, the penultimate image in The Single Tumbler comes to mind. Old Daisy Teacher, dressed in a green sari with a dark green blouse, gets up and leaves the house, shuffling along the main road, alone, with a strangely dazed and distressed expression (captured in a close-slightly-low-angled mobile shot, framed against trees and sky), carrying that dented tumbler, perhaps hoping to return it to her friend.