Monthly Archives: July 2020

Indecision (Duvidha)  Mani Kaul (1973; India) Raisa Padamsee, Ravi Menon 

viewed 10 July 2020; Mubi Streaming during the great plague – it is also on youtube

Films are made from within the ambient influences in which the culture of any production is immersed. The influences of advertising, electronic games, the velocity of communications and high tempo resolutions all play significant roles in conforming the structure and content of contemporary Western films.   In ‘Indecision’ Mani Kaul has absorbed into the flow of his imagery, into his characterisation, sound, colourisation and story something of the traditions of the shadow puppet theatre of Rajasthan. It is a film grounded in the popular culture of its time.

The core to ‘Indecision’ is Kaul’s conceptual rigour and the discipline with which he has put together in film his rendering of an old folk tale. The film comprises a singular expression of this style of Indian story telling.   It retains the integrity of the tradition and creates something new enduring and magical. The imagery drawing on the interplay of startling bright sunlight and shadow is an expressive painted canvas against which the ideas implicit in the film play out.  

One of the key ideas played out in ‘Indecision’ is the notion of story. Today the idea of story is conceived as something personal that has particular role in the construction of individual identity. But there is an older literary tradition both oral and written, in which stories are a collective resource that challenge and open out developments of the psyche. Western film scripts have mostly latched onto modern usage, many scripts simply designed as accounts that justify the subjects action providing a rationale for outcomes. Fairy tales and stories such as told in ‘Indecision’ are in James Baldwin’s terms, real stories. There function is not so such to resolve particular situations or to provide answers to an individual dilemma. The point of these stories is to open the psyche up to questions that do not necessarily have answers, and both questions and the answers to these questions always lie somewhere within the insights of the self not the mechanics of the narrative.

It seemed to me that Kaul’s film owes something in form and structure to shadow puppet theatre. As in shadow puppetry the pacing of Kaul’s shots is slow and the movement smooth; every shot in the film is a carefully contrived statement as in shadow theatre; in shadow theatre as in folk tale, the characters are types rather than individuals; and lastly, as in Rajasthan shadow puppetry, there is a vibrant interplay between sound and picture. This latter relationship is key to the energising of the film. Kaul’s sound track breaks the deliberate visual pacing with upbeat intense rhythmic folk music or alternatively a cacophony of sounds from the natural world: mostly bird call but also insects. The dynamic between these irruptive sounds and the paced back shots is key conceptual idea underlying ‘Indecision’, and in Kaul’s hands this device is used to wonderful sparing effect and never overplayed.

The main setting of ‘Indecision’ is a huge white villa, a sort of house of bones and its presence looms through the film as a presence in itself. Its exterior walls and facets brilliantly reflect the sunlight, dazzling and disorienting, challenging the viewer’s perception.   This setting alternating with Kaul’s shot selection comprising densely coloured big close-up’s with unexpected overhead shots seems to be part of the design adopted by Kaul to keep the audience off balance, to break up their cognitive patterns and working through disruption of image to challenge perception and understanding.

‘Indecision’s’ narrative may in some respects be a simple folk tale but within Kaul’s telling there are multiple layers of meaning and alternative psychic perspectives demanding a flexibility of mind that is alien to the rigid psychic structures of many contemporary films that carry the banality of one message.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Wheel of Time     Werner Herzog (2003; USA; Doc)

viewed Mubi streaming 4th July 2020

where are the people?

Werner Herzog is a film making machine. It’s mostly docs these days but his output is somewhat variable and many of his movies are little more than formulaic exertions that sacrifice their subject to the eye of the camera, creating films that are little more than spectacle. What Herzog often produces is coffee table material that sits comfortably both in the schedules of American TV and within the liberal white ethos.

Herzog’s interest in the anomalous and crazed has led to movies like Little Dieter and Wings of Hope, revolving around idiosyncratic individuals and their stories, energised by both implicit and explicit meanings embedded in the material.  

But The Wheel of Time renders a huge Buddhist festival in India as spectacle, a series of images that exploit the exotic setting of Bodghaya to film the course of Kalachakra initiation. After seeing the film I felt I was no wiser as to what the Kalachakra initiation was than before. In the footage shot in India, I saw a lot of images and heard various replies to Herzog’s questions. I saw the Wheel of Time Sand Mandala being built, I saw the emotional intensity of the crowds who filed past it, I saw it broken up reduced back to the particles of sand from which it had been built and then tipped into flowing waters. I saw a series of symbolic actions. But they came across as no more than a number of gestures at which to point the camera. And likewise the other images captured through Herzog’s gaze: the pilgrims and acolytes practicing full devotional prostrations; the endless shots seeking out old men’s faces; the shots of food being prepared and eaten communally, acolytes rushing this way and that. What this Bodghaya material does convey is that this is a religion that is located within the people, Buddhism’s energy joy oneness and immanence comes out of the people. Which is why I found it disturbing that Herzog, in India continually turned the camera onto individuals, seeking out ‘faces’. As if ‘faces’ in themselves are anything other than the last recourse of a bankrupt imagination.  A vacant affect image.

It felt like Herzog going through a tick list of necessary requirements for the film to sell. To meet the National Geographic Channel requirements, you gotta have interesting ‘faces’ and landscape. And Herzog supplies landscape by breaking out of the Kalachakra material and cutting away to another event altogether: a Buddhist pilgrimage to the sacred mountain, Kailash. More spectacle in spectacular scenery. In his familiar voice over style Herzog informs us about centres and links the Mountain Kailash as a centre, to the centre of time symbolised in the Kalachakra Mandala. Given the Dalai Lama’s reply to Herzog’s question about centres, this is typical trite doc info, justifying the exploitation of exotica, the presentational syndrome that dominates Herzog’s movie.

When asking questions Herzog is reduced the crass formulas of American TV presenters. If this was intentional, perhaps as parody of form, then Herzog forgets that you can’t parody something that is already a parody. He asks the Dalai Lama if the centre of the Kalachakra Mandala is symbolic of the centre of consciousness; he asks him, what is, his ideal dream of an ideal world; he asks some devotional monk who has just finished lighting candles: if he is praying for us; if he has reached ‘Enlightenment’ – as if it were some kind of shopping destination. Herzog’s questions reflect the vacancy of the outsider looking in.

In one sense, the film works best because of the unforeseen postponement, due to the Dalai Lama’s ill health, of the Kalachakra Initiation the year Herzog filmed in Bodghaya. The postponed initiation ceremony was reconvened in Graz the following year. Graz in Austria, on the other side of the world, the flip side of reality. And it is the two discordant settings, the one India the other Europe that strike the real notes of interest in the film. The contrast between the gathering in Bodghaya and that in Graz is remarkable, as is the change in the filming style and type of shots used to document the event.

The event in India is a massed expression of faith, a chaos of desire and excitement that coalesces into sudden moments of serenity. The monks acolytes and believers taking part are characterised by energy, lack of material possessions, total belief and a familiarity with the collective life of communal bowls to prepare and eat food. In Bodghaya the event is individual devotion in the midst of collective tumult.

In Graz, the Kalachakra initiation event looked like a conference of middle ranking business executives. Whereas in Bodghaya all was noise lack of order and spontaneous impetuosity; in Graz all was quiet well ordered and polite. Buddhism in Graz was regular Europeanised.  In Graz everything was done by the book and the feeling generated was that in this manifestation of Buddhism something had been filtered out, there was a lacking in connection to the overflowing nature of life. In Bodghaya, tumult generated by the vast crowds characterised the initiation proceedings. In Bodghaya the people were present. In Graz they were absent.

As the ceremony moved to Graz, Herzog’s filming changed. The choice of shots became more respectful conforming to European sensibilities.  In Graz there were no shots of the assembled Buddhists eating, there were few close-up, in the face shots of people that so characterised the filming in India, there were no shots of people in awkward or unusual positions nor did he ask the people there the sort of crass questions he had asked of people in India.   The filming was distant, non intrusive. Europeans don’t like being filmed in this type of situation. They may be caught out! Perhaps this was an intentional structured comment on the part of Herzog; or perhaps he implicitly knew he could not get away with the liberties he took in filming in India.

Herzog’s ‘Wheel of Time’ was able to show these differing faces and experiences of Buddhism. The differences between the business managers and the Asian devotees. For the Europeans the people are absent from their practice, for the monks their practice takes place amongst the people. But Herzog didn’t seem to be very interested in pointing to these differences, nor at asking how these differences affected the way in which he shot his material and the ethical considerations put into play by comparative data collection in different cultures.  

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk