Shumona showed Nikhil Arolkar and me her 20-minute film Atreyee in 2007. I just viewed it now at the end of 2024, a lot has happened....I will be brief.
The entire articulated and violent disagreement within cinematographic practitioners in Bombay is with the relationship between space and time. Mani Kaul and his pupils use Henri Bergson’s durée to an extreme that culminates in the 10 minute opening shot of Amitabh Chakraborty’s Kaal Abhirati. Two comments in this regard: on three consecutive days I saw a copy of Leonard Lawler’s The Challenge of Bergsonism with Mani Kaul at office; and my Prof Nathanael’s (Nathalie Stephens) comment: “Davdit, if you use Bergson as the conceptual methodology in your next paper, I will have to fail you...”
However, there is a school of film in Bombay closer to American avant-garde, where students from Bard and CalArts create an urban English-speaking aesthetic notably, with a jagged editing where the duration becomes an ephemerality keenly agreeing with Gaston Bachelard’s disagreements with Bergson, stated in the book by Bachelard: The Dialectic of Duration. Here Bachelard speaks of the momentary and ephemeral as being as affirmation of Chronos or passing time, as duration was for Aion, or Time as a static Whole. Experimental film makers use time in a jagged way so that the signification of space is repeated, as if it cancels signification, and belongs to a larger transformation spatial configuration, that aligns more with History and therefore socio-economic and political realities, rather than dialectics or metaphysics. This cinema does not ask the classic cinematographic question: What is reality?
With film artists such as Shumona, Ashim Ahluwalia, Kabir Mohanty, Ashish Avikunthak, Bernd Lutzler and cinematographers like Setu and especially (one of the great maestros of cinematography of our time, anywhere in the world) KU Mohanan, there was an experimental film scene in the city otherwise associated with Bollywood. This space no longer exists but one gets a taste of it whenever Gurpal Singh and Pankaj Sudhir Mishra (the model in Naukar Ki Kameez) screen films or curate a DVD I have recently excavated.
Other than that, Elroy did one screening of Vishnu Mathur’s Pehla Adhyay and although it was engaging there was an absence of polemical discussion where one challenges the director. All discussions with artists are about challenging them, and not asking ‘peaceful’ questions, a film screening discussion is meant to be argumentative, if not violent, to question how much the director has sacrificed for the cinematograph. This culture has vanished, like the post-screening of Satah Se Uthata Aadmi where they wanted to beat Kaul up. Such screenings now only happen at FTII when the students dislike a film selected for a prestigious film festival. I take such arguments as the norm, which I have been affected by, when I was rebuked after my own lecture at FTII, where a student said I needed to watch Jurassic Park again. In this regard, I remember being told about a screening of Uski Roti, in which Mr. Kaul in the introduction, told the audience exactly where the exits to the theatre were, and urged them to use the exits as soon as possible.
My contribution has been out of sync sound screening I did at Max Mueller Bhavan of Duvidha which I informed Mr. Kaul about and he was upset, although he pretended to be interested in the technocracy of digital film file and their conversion glitches; or the Om Dar B Dar screening of a poor VCD-VHS with Kiran Rao standing at the side, to watch the entire film standing, and Kamal arriving 1 hour late and sitting on the floor. Iyesha and I informed the guests seated on the chair next to him, to slide one seat to the right, as the person seated on the floor: happens to be the director of the film. Swaroop began the post-screening discussion in a trademark remark as a question: “Can anyone tell me the story of this film?”
Also notable was the dis-enchantment these Bombay experimental film makers had with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose aesthetic of kitsch as sublime, was easily possible in Bombay with the ample subversion of signifiers and images in Bollywood films. This aesthetic is noticeable in the installations of Vishal Rawley, who subverted a sculpture of the peacock with Bollywood songs with a play on the word mor or peacock, in the lyrics of the song. In this sense the remix culture of Om Dar B Dar with sonic images representing the cosmic as fragment in the song Rana Tigrina already have a precursor with Apichatpong picks up as fragmented temporalities in his films set in a-temporal nature. Notably, in Payal Kapadia’s new film this emphasis on a-temporal corporeality is brought out in the public urination sequence and the bodies of the lovers performing sex to make the body itself into a signifier without an immaterial consciousness being connoted.
To take a digression, one can analyze a sequence from Apichatpong’s early short film Anthem, in which the final scene is a circular tracking shot in bright yellow in an indoor badminton court. As the 32mm lens takes a 360-degree trolley, the dance to the sonic techno score becomes more jagged with a rise in the pitch of music, until Apichatpong tracks to players playing badminton at the far end of the court. However, as the tracking shot proceeds more things as dancers and referees in the badminton match make the matter in the shot more and more: an integrated approach, whilst the higher pitches and the subverted sublime moods are subtractive. Apichatpong adds to subtract the refrain as aesthetic sublime whilst affirming that cinema is not high art but kitsch. This is a level of cinema that in today’s era only Apichatpong has, which is what I observe when cineastes of the 20th century give a familiar nod of the head when his name is taken and say the same thing: that he can do things with the cinematograph that they could never do, so they can only be their guides or mentors or professors.
Atreyee uses the modern Indian experience as the English language, the protagonist Atreyee moves to Bombay from Calcutta and must deal with a male energy of brokers and tenants to engage the loneliness. The everyday of protagonist Atreyee is broken up into the same space having multiple variations so that an any-space-whatever creates a material cinema, through celluloid, that creates cinema as destroyed space instead of magnified time consciousness. Notable is the shot of the railway ticket where the numbers of the ticket span an element of Attreyee’s life, as stated on the ticket number from the 1990s to 2003, the year of the creation of the film.
The final wedding sequence is the Event in Atreyee which Shumona mentioned is an absent event with no transformation. In other words, finding a companion and getting married is not a solution to life’s problems. The urban Indian experience, represented by the city of Bombay, that Atreyee represents, is represented through the post-colonial notion of English as being the primarily Indian language. Having said that it is not a film that may be digested by Shumona’s literary contemporaries Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and Vikram Chandra. The absence of the Event is the encounter as swirl relating to Being which is present in Indiana University Press: Studies in Continental Thought in its new Martin Heiddeger translation aptly titled The Event.
Shumona takes Rushdie’s Bombay in Satanic Verses, his best novel, which Rushdie is very eager to make pop-nonsense, and Shumona assumes and implies that there is a static bourgeois culture in Bombay, which uses English and has an extremely specific cinematographic sensorial experience that is absent in the cinema of Bollywood or even the Art House directors where they shoot in Bombay. For example, Shumona shuts off and shuts on the sound to allow the entry and exist of the flux of pop music as Kitsch and destroy the notion of durationality celebrated by the Bergsonist Indian Art House directors. The abrupt jagged editing and random entry and exit of sound as continuity in discontinuity gives a fragment-as-multiplicity approach where one part negates the Whole but repeats itself creating a cosmic resonance.
In this sense, Shumona addresses Bergsonism as the status quo of male chauvinism and the elephant in the room: patriarchy as what the film is about, but the experience of viewing the textures, colors and randomly entering and exiting sound track creates an is-ness making experimental cinema use the similar confusion of thing and thought; and thing as thought that was proved with equations in the Quantum mechanics of Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, and the parallel frames of simultaneity to spatialize time in Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Recently, when students were unhappy with my lecture, a senior professor in college affirmed that she “had studied cinema, and sympathized with my efforts since, in her study, cinema as a subject was immensely difficult and came closest to subjects in physics, such as quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.”
Similarly, many years ago with the arrival of YouTube a physicist posted his responses to Ustad Shahid Parvez’s alaap on sitar in Raga Bageshree, using jargons such as flux, entropy and multiplicity none of which were incorrect, but were coming from a scientist and not an artiste.
I have had the most conversations with Shumona on cinema, more than anyone else, and also shown her my rare favourites in cinema, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse with the famous negative space sequence shot in Mussollini’s NU District in Rome, Jean-Luc Godard’s Germany Year Ninety Zero and most of all, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europe Express with the famous post-structuralist sequence where the protagonist correctly identifies the first object but uses a random unrelated signifier for the other objects suggesting the divergence of language and speech.
In writing out script An Ancient Curse, which I insist to Shumona requires more funding than is right now, I observe Shumona feeling that my formalist, step-by-step methodical procedure of fixed distance shot entropy as lacking any agency or potency. The primordial questions I ask from defining the space in the shot to What is the Self? do not consider the multiplicity of decision making on a real shoot, where there is too much to think about. Having said that Jean Renoir’s comment to Satyajit Ray comes to mind, of showing only necessary things and say few things in a film, but doing the few selected things well, instead of packing too much into the mise en scene. Shumona’s work is different but in the same vein as her sister Sujata who dances to a kitsch Bollywood number Saare Haseen Yahan Nache Nache but through her movements, the dance is more powerful than the packaged music, and is a subversion of the distinction between kitsch Bollywood and Bharatnatyam, which Sujata has trained in.
In Sujata’s piece Lady she uses the beat of a drum imitating Bhangra to give a robotic movement of the everyday in feminism to give distinctions between signifiers as “woman” “lady” “girl” etc and their participation in day to day activities getting up, taking a bath, going to office, working at office etc. Shumona’s best work in Family Tree which is about her own genealogy in Harrisburg but has a remarkable expanded cinema projection of an interview with her father Ram Goel and his struggles as a brown NRI in Pennsylvania that almost seems like footage of a psychoanalytical procedure, and if the image is analysed the familiar Lacanian jargons, made popular by Slavoj Zizek, can be deduced.The most notable jargon in the footage is how there is a counter-transference between Mr. Goel and the viewer instead of the suggested transference of the affection-image as close-up.
Shumona’s other films I am Micro, An Old Dog’s Diary and the film she is presently working on to adapt a random relationship between the script we wrote, An Ancient Curse and any viewer being able to see the relationship of the randomised images shot with the meaning-making of the text, as precisely engaging structuralism but through the unstructured avant garde film. Fundamentally the cinematographic images of Shumona represent like the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, but especially Peter Hutton, a perceptional consciousness, which in Shumona’s case is micro-ephemeral, and a disdain from meaning almost like deliberately reading the detailed synopsis of a Hollywood film before viewing it, so that all that remains when story and connotation and removed is the intensity of the residual matter. For this it is required that the spectator agrees that the modernity of urbanity is what makes cinema a productive medium exactly agreeing with a similar statement made by Wim Wenders.
Devdutt Trivedi is a Mumbai based film scholar.
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