By Subir Ghosh
In the early years of film production, cinema as a medium did not threaten the cultural status quo. Non-fiction films had dominated and films were always exhibited in “respectable” venues like vaideville and opera houses, churches, anc lecture halls. Films started making an impact on the cultural landscape with the story films becoming gradually popular, and exhibition of films gradually shifting to the nickelodeons.

Film historian Roberta Pearson writes of the early critics, “The industry’s critics asserted that the dark, dirty and unsafe nickelodeons showed unsuitable fare, were ofte located in tenement districts, and were patronised by the most unstable elements of American society who were all to vulnerable to the physical and moral hazards posed by the picture shows. There were demands that state authorities censor films and regulate exhibition sites. the industry responded with several strategies designed to placate its critics; the emulation of respectable literature and drama; the production of literary, historical, and biblical films; self-censorship and cooperation with government officials in making exhibition sites safe and sanitary.”

What Pearson writes here is about an American scenario, but one worth looking at a bit closely.

The nickelodeon was a multi-purpose theatre that grew in popularity in the early years of the 20th century. Usually situated in converted storefronts, the nickelodeons featured motion pictures, illustrated songs, slideshows and even lectures. These were one of the two main exhibition sites for films, besides the vaudeville theatres.

The term “Nickelodeon” was first used in 1888 by Austin’s Nickelodeon, a dime museum in Boston, US. It became popular when Harry Davis and John P. Harris opened their small, storefront theatre with that name in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on June 19, 1905. Although it was not the first to show films, it was the first theatre in the world “devoted exclusively to exhibition of moving picture spectacles.” The idea caught on. Louis B Mayer converted a theatre into a nickelodeon, and announced that it would be “the home of refined entertainment devoted to Miles Brothers moving pictures and illustrated songs”.

The nickelodeons usually exhibited films that were typically 10-15 minutes in duration, and in a variety of styles and subjects, such as short narratives, “scenics” (views of the world from moving trains), “actualities” (precursors of later documentary films), illustrated songs, local or touring song and dance acts, comedies, melodramas, problem plays, stop action sequences, sporting events, and other features which allowed them to compete with vaudeville houses. In 1910, there were an estimated 10,000 nickelodeons in the US.

Slowly cities grew, as did the audience sizes. Films also grew considerably longer in duration, resulting in the ticket prices being doubled from five cents to ten cents. Conventional film theatres grew in number, and the nickelodeons receded into history.

There were many in the American film industry who were finding it increasingly difficult to tell a story in the 15-minute constraint. The one who broke away from the norm was Vitagraph which produced the first major multi-reel film, a biblical blockbuster called The Life of Moses in 1909/10. The five-reel film encouraged others to follow suit.

The ones who threw a fit over this conversion were the existing distributors and exhibitors. The limited seating arrangements at the nickelodeons required shorter programmes. The studios initially played ball. They treated each reel of a multi-reel film as a separate identity, and released them to the exchanges according to the agreed schedule. Nickelodeons were free to show only one reel as and when they wanted. The transition to feature films, therefore, was severely restricted. Ironically, the impetus came from European films that were being imported into the United States. Italian films specifically were all multi-reelers and hugely popular.

In 1911, three Italian films treated American audiences to a pictorial splendour that they were sorely missing in domestic productions. These were the five-reel Dante’s Inferno (Milano Films, 1909), the two-reel Fall of Troy (1910, Giovanni Pastrone), and the four-reel The Crusaders or Jerusalem Delivered (1911). In the spring of 1913, the nine-reel Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, Cines, 1913) landed on American shores. The film ran over two hours and was a spectacle that featured over 5,000 extras, a chariot race, and real lions. It had the audiences in thral. The 12-reel Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, Italia) would change things forever. The depiction of the Second Punic War featured visually stimulating scenes of the burning of the Roman fleet and Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. Italian blockbusters were to change the US film industry for good. And in the bargain, had a far-reaching impact on world cinema as well.
Feature films were finally here.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/11/flashback-the-feature-films-coming-of-age/

By Joshy Joseph
It happened during the 1988 International Film Festival of India (IFFI) held in Trivandrum. I was trying to persuade Anand Patwardhan to agree to receive the first copy of a book on Malayalam cinema at an official ceremony from the reputed film critic of The Guardian, Derek Malcolm. The author of the book was a friend of mine. Anand agreed to receive the book but not without posing a question to me : “Why Derek Malcolm? Is it because he is a white man?”

Many years later when Films Division interviewed Anand for a curtain-raiser film on Films Division for MIFF (Mumbai International Film Festival for documentary, short and animation films), I heard him saying : “Luckily, we need not refer to Ben Kinsley as Gandhi, since FD has the original Gandhi footage !”

Anand speaks so lucidly through his films and in person. That is why, even while working for an official documenting agency, I always go back to Anand’s films for measuring the actual height and weight of Indian history. Anybody who has attended that edition of MIFF at NCPA in Mumbai, where Anand’s film Ram ke Naam was screened and stood out in sharp contrast to the official version of the Ayodhya issue, would understand me better.

Every time I wake up for a sunrise shoot or patiently wait to capture a clear-sky sunset shot, I cannot help envying Anand. I cannot recall a single ‘beautiful shot’ in his films — a shot devised for the sake of achieving beauty. It is the political conviction that illuminates his skies without bothering about the acceptibility factor, that strikes me over and over again. It is not for nothing that Anand’s films have withstood so confidently the test of time. And about the wrath of a nervous officialdom towards him and his films, it is only a cinematic addition to the good old stories of flourishing court poets aplenty juxtaposed with one or two poets of destiny.

In Kerala, experienced farmers always advise us not to buy spotless vegetables from the market. They tell us that naturally-grown vegetables normally have spots on them. In a supposedly advanced method of cultivation, systemic insecticides are fed to the plants as they grow, unlike the general practice of spraying pesticides from outside. That is why they are called ‘systemic insecticides’. So, any insect that touches the plant, dies on the spot! And the vegetables and fruits remain spotless like the glossy images in advertisement films!

Once, in the course of a MIFF selection process, Anand’s film on the fishermen’s issue was rejected on the ground of ‘bad image quality’. The chairman of the selection committee was a Hindutva element in disguise who had, wonder of wonders, no difficulty in choosing his own film for the festival! Anyway, the list of selected films reached me through a colleague who was visibly upset at the turn of events and chose to confide in me. He asked whether something could be done in the matter.

I immediately relayed this information to a daredevil friend of mine who was on the staff of the now-defunct weekly paper, The Sunday Observer. It was a Saturday evening. Overlooking space and deadline constraints, they flashed the story the next day — “Miffed Patwardhan withdraws his film”. The story, or rather the strategy, worked — Anand’s film was included on Monday.

Later, when we met at a cocktail party, I said ‘cheers’ to the selection committee chairman and murmured in a lighter vein, “You are Vinod and he is Anand, both meaning joy. Now enjoy.”

Changing to a serious note, I asked to know the reason why the film had been rejected. In some sequences, according to him, the visuals were very grainy. He knew that in the capital of sleek Hindi commercial cinema and corporate advertisement films, ‘the image quality’ bit could be used as a ready-made purdah to conceal the actual facial expression in the presence of truth.

Recently, in a court battle over the Bombay bomb-blast case, one party requested the court to view Anand’s Father, Son and Holy War to get an idea of the conditions then obtaining in the city before arriving at any judgement. Whether the court admitted the plea or not is not the point. Rather, the point is that in a case which involves a gun-toting Hindi film star, the reference point of facts was an Anand Patwardhan film. When countless crores go down the drain to project the pelvic thrusts and the dishum-dishum of constipated poster boys, Anand’s investment is his political conviction expressed by means of a precise aperture that records vital twists and turns of contemporary history.

Anand’s film War and Peace is an epic documentation of how violence is perpetrated and is being perpetuated in the name of patriotism. This film unforgettably unveils whipped-up mob frenzy through bombastic speeches of politicians and their heady narratives of nationalism. A cunning master-narrative is woven into this, which acts as an eyewitness and an argumentative self at the same time. The film encompasses the viewer, too, for almost three, most fruitful hours; thus, the unity of trinity becomes a complete experience. This is masterpiece cinema.

War and Peace gets into the interiors of two nations — India and Pakistan — as if in a laparoscopic operation. Even as the right-wing political party then in power kept puking vehemently, Anand’s camera surveyed the body politic with remarkable surgical precision. They wanted to restrain him by asking him to remove even the film’s reference to Gandhiji’s assassination. Hey Ram! Gandhiji never got assassinated in this country!

I have a feeling that Gandhiji knew why Bonsai plants don’t grow tall. When seedlings, root cuttings and small grafted plants are to be developed as Bonsai, they are first cultivated in ground beds. Here, the branches and root tips are pruned repeatedly. Each pruning session helps the plants to develop ‘dwarfing’ habits.

State-of-the-art pruning of political documentaries in India happens today more in the avenues of huge inflow of international capital through funding agencies and the pitching sessions they organise, than in the public-sector sphere. This will become clear if one watches and analyses the kind of projects that are backed by the European Documentary Network (EDN) and its offshoots like STEPS India.

In portrayals of marginalized individuals, or dushtu-dushtu, mishti-mishti analyses of Kashmir or the North-East, you won’t find a junior Anand Patwardhan anywhere in the picture. No wonder, these pitching film-makers are often to be found bitching eloquently about Anand and his ouevre. They say Anand’s films are very functional and lack spiritual dimensions. So, to remedy the situation, they go out into the world and try their desperate best to discover the exotic ‘other’.

Vaikkom Mohammad Basheer, the great Malayalam writer, wandered all over India for many years in search of truth. One of his incarnations was that of a sadhu on the Himalayas. Explaining why he quit being a sadhu, Basheer said some people would collect firewood, split it into smaller pieces and use them to start the kitchen fire. These people would not ask Basheer to share in the work; “just meditate without distraction,” they would say. But Basheer still used to get distracted — the very arrangement of avoiding distraction, distracted him.

Indian documentary today is taken seriously by the world because yesterday an Anand Patwardhan happened here. Your ‘spirituality’ became possible due to the ‘physicality’ of Anand Patwardhan’s films. I don’t have to reserve these words for an obituary.

I would like to recall another incident at MIFF. Anand was secretly summoned by the organisers just before the awards ceremony to select a two-minute excerpt from his film which had won a prize. The clip was to be screened at the awards function. The then Maharashtra Chief Minister, Mr. Manohar Joshi, was the chief guest and he would hand out the prizes.

Just when a sequence from Father, Son and Holy War was being shown on the screen where Manohar Joshi — now on stage in a full-sleeved black safari suit — was asking for the blood of a minority community, Anand’s name was called out to receive one of the awards. While the audience cheered, Anand, dressed in his usual kurta-pyjama, shook hands with Joshi and received the award. Anand is an undomesticated political animal.

The sharp edges can be flattened with awards, awards and more awards. But, mercifully, the laws of the market do not apply to Anand. I have always respected him for consciously distancing himself from those ‘dwarfing habits’ about which I have spoken earlier.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/11/the-laparoscopic-cinema-of-anand-patwardhan/

By Chitra Ahanthem
The ongoing Sangai Festival with the theme “Destination Manipur” being organized by the Government of Manipur and fronted by the Tourism Department is definitely creating a lot of buzz around us. A casual glance of the various activities playing out under the festival makes one feel that that the festival, which is aimed at bringing tourists and business opportunities to pitch the state as a destination point is indeed more polished than other Tourism festivals that has happened in the state so far. Local newspapers and some regional newspapers carry stories about the “attractions” at the Festival but there is no blip on any major media outlet. Ironically, the media stories of “attractions” of the festival are not on local artisans or products but on stalls and products from foreign countries! But before this piece ends up sounding like a rant against the festival, let’s do a careful scrutiny listing both the upside and the downside of the festival.

First, the positives:
1.     There was a touch of professionalism in the arrangements made at the main venue at Hapta Kangjeibung. Unlike other editions where the stalls cluttered the ground, they were more organized and left a lot of room to walk around. Having the cultural performances and other evening items inside the Bheigyachandra Open Air Theatre (BOAT) is great thinking, with the Hapta ground being extended in such a manner that one can walk into BOAT. Till last year, one had to get inside the venue ground and then walk outside and then enter BOAT. Taking the performances inside BOAT has taken care of seating arrangements for people while also giving a wide space for people to walk around. Of course, it is another story altogether that the area was used by VIPs to zip in and out of the venue, thereby kicking up dust (both literally and figuratively). But well!

2.     The sight of smartly dressed young boys and girls as stewards is a nice touch. Normally, most functions in the state are marked by young girls trying very uncomfortably to do their job on stage, like tagging the dignitaries on stage, handing gifts and flowers etc el. This festival edition sees professionally trained young people doing the honors. I was very impressed when one young man had the basic courtesy of handing tea to the professional photographers taking shots of an evening performance. Normally, only VIPs and dignitaries gracing such functions are served! Photo-journalists operate to document what is going around them in very uncomfortable positions just so they get that perfect shot, and the least that can be done for them is to have some refreshments served to them. I sincerely hope that it wasn’t a one off gesture and that it continues.

3.     The media center was good for the fraternity to check the latest developments on the festival. One hopes that by the next edition of the festival, the organizers will think of putting in work stations in the media center so that stories can be filed from the venue itself without journalists having to bother with going back to their offices and then filing their stories. All it takes would be to make Wi-fi operational and to provide plug in points for computer laptops.

The negatives:
1.     A tourism festival meant to showcase the best of Manipur’s culture, handloom, handicrafts and its tourist potential featuring stalls selling products being brought in from outside the state somehow does not fit in. There ought to have been more stalls with handicraft and handloom items from the state, rather than those selling shoes and purses. The later could have made their presence in the various other Melas /trade fair that takes place. The organizers should have looked for applications from firms producing local goods and given the platform of the festival for the products to be talked about and noticed.

2.      The festival also features a Photography contest with four categories. I may be mistaken but I distinctly remember that the cash prize amount when it was first announced on various social media sites was different from the amount being attached to the prizes now. The more important factor apart from the matter of cash prize amount is the lack of clarity on the copyright and use of the photographs being submitted for the contest. It is often a norm for one Government department to pay well below the market price for photographs and having the photograph being used by other departments. This is a total infringement of copyright and totally unfair on photographers. The current photography competition does not mention how many times the prize winning photos or submitted photos will be used and whether they would be used only by the Department of Tourism. In any case, Rs 25,000 as the cash amount for the first prize is too low for the photos to be copyrighted to the department.

3.     The separate parking space for media personnel is welcome indeed but the first vehicle that got stolen was that of a media person! It tells you there is not much guarantee that your vehicle will be waiting for you once you get out of the festival venue. And this is in the backdrop of a very strong presence of police commandoes and army personnel. This is being flagged off because if vehicles can get lost despite the huge security presence, then there is an equally serious matter: that security can be breached. One hopes that there is better vigilance for the remainder of the festival.

End-point:
The festival had its funny moments too. Every time any proceeding of the festival was being announced on the mike, the announcer said “phestibel”. I also noticed that most people at the er..phestibel had a common fashion accessory: the patch of cloth over the nose and mouth.; to ward off the dust at the venue. Though the ground was covered by a thick sheet, the entry of vehicles of the VIPs would make people scurry to cover their nose and mouth. I overheard someone say at the festival, “This is crazy! We are paying an entry fee, a parking fee and then eating kanghou bora at hiked rates. Let’s go home.” The other person responded with a “go home and do what? Today is load shedding day.” That conversation said it all for me: if the festival is about getting people to spend their time and money then it is a success. But if the annual Manipur Sangai festival is about bringing tourism opportunities, a lot more needs to be done.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/11/sangai-festival-2011-a-scrutiny/