Reviewed by C. Bruna Mancini
http://www.anglistica.unior.it/content/lidia-curti-and-susanna-poole-eds-schermi-indiani-linguaggi-planetari
In the Introduction to his celebrated Colonial India and the Making of
Empire Cinema (2000), Prem Chowdhry observes that “empire cinema”
(including productions of the 1930s and 1940s by both British and
Hollywood filmmakers), provides the major manifestation of the classical
binary opposition between colonial Self and colonized Other, encoded
in colonialist discourse as a dichotomy necessary to domination. Empire
films contributed to a vision of the Empire which emphasized “the unique
imperial status, cultural and racial superiority and patriotic pride not
only of the British but of the entire white western world”. Thus cinema
emerged as the most influential propaganda vehicle in order to maintain
the status quo in Britain and its colonies. Films like The Lives of a Bengal
Lancer (1935, by Henry Hathaway, with Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone,
and Richard Cromwell), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, by Michael
Curtiz with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Patrick Knowles), Wee
Willie Winkie (1937, by John Ford, with Shirley Temple, Victor McLaglen
and C. Aubrey Smith), The Drum (1938, by Zoltan Korda, with Sabu,
Raymond Massey, Roger Livesey), and Gunga Din (1939, by George
Stevens, with Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr) served
to prevent non-alignment, sociopolitical changes and revolt, while
sustaining the importance of the strategic role of British presence in the
colonies – India, in particular – for the ‘protection’ of the native inhabitants.
After all, as Winston Churchill affirmed on 18 March 1931, in his famous
speech “Our Duty in India”, the British people had to fight hard in order
to maintain their “Indian Empire” and not to be led blindfold into a trap;
obviously, their “mission” had a religious as well as a highly moral
connotation, strictly connected to their glorious past and to the untamed
spirit lodging in their breast:
What spectacle could be more sorrowful than that of this powerful country
casting away with both hands, and up till now almost by general acquies
cence, the great inheritance which centuries have gathered? What spectacle
could be more strange, more monstrous in its perversity, than to see the Viceroy
and the high officials and agents of the Crown in India labouring with all their
influence and authority to unite and weave together into a confederacy all the
forces adverse and hostile to our rule in India? … It is a hideous act of selfmutilation,
astounding to every nation in the world. The princes, the Europeans,the Moslems,
the Depressed classes, the Anglo-Indians – none of them know
what to do nor where to turn in the face of their apparent desertion by Great
Britain. (emphases mine)
Using the encoding/decoding model masterly developed by Stuart Hall,
based essentially on “dominant”, “negotiated” or “propositional” responses,
Prem Chowdhry also demonstrates that, in the Thirties, Indian spectators
inhabited a realm of ramifying differences and contradictions, stretching
from acceptance to resistance. But this question seems even more complex
if we consider that, as Lidia Curti puts it in her Introduction to Schermi
indiani, linguaggi planetari, India’s devastated and partitioned territory –
a diversified continent in terms of climate, geography, language and culture,
putting into question the very concept of ‘nation’ – also makes the
expression “Indian cinema” an abstraction; the term reflects the
diversifications of a place which is in fact a complex connection of different
countries and cultures. Curti observes how:
the various historical constructions show a cinema that is linked from its very
beginning to traditional forms of Indian theatre, with its interweaving of natural
and supernatural, its fixed frontal positioning, its frequent use of close ups and
stylization. The general intention – at least before the arrival of sound – was
that of maintaining the characteristics of live theatre, through the presence of
a narrator in the cinema and intermezzos of music, dance and song, elements
that were to become an essential part of Bollywood film language. This hybrid
narrative technique, with its interpolation of songs, dances and comic sketches,
also goes back to classical Sanscrit theatre and popular religious ceremonies.(12)
Moreover, after Independence, the Indian government mainly
reproduced the inequalities and subalternity of the so-called ancien
régime, exerting a “dominance without hegemony” to recall the title of
Ranajit Guha’s renowned book of 1997; subsequently, many migrants
from the Indian subcontinent reached the former ‘centre’ of the Empire,
building new multiethnic urban communities which had to face a never
dormant resurgence of xenophobia, hostility, and violence. The movies
realized by Hanif Kureishi, Stephen Frears, Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair, and
Gurinder Chadha perfectly portray this hybrid “geography of diaspora
and multidiaspora”, also considering its “transversal passages”; because,
instead of a unidirectional displacement from the colonies towards the
so-called motherland, many migrants paths touched Uganda, Madagascar,
Guyana, and the Caribbean. Curti asserts in this respect that for the
“directors, both male and female, who had been born and brought up in
Britain, often with mixed race parentage, this implied a temporary return
to a ‘home’ that was no longer home in the full sense of the term, in
order to find their roots or, more probably, to set their films in their land
of origin”(22).
Thus the filmic corpus becomes the real post-colonial, ‘in-between’
space, in which ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ can reciprocally observe each
other and provide feedback. Several interesting examples of this productive
and intense cultural exchange are attentively analyzed in the present
volume. I refer in particular to “Linguaggi e percorsi in Aparajito di Satyajit
Ray” by Fiorenzo Iuliano (27-43), “La ‘scrittura’ cinematografica di Hanif
Kureishi” by Annalisa Spedaliere (63-80), “L’altra India: Fire di Deepa Mehta”
by Laura Sarnelli (83-95), “A casa e altrove: il cinema di Mira Nair” by
Alessandra Marino (97-115), “Il cinema di Gurinder Chadra” by Serena
Guarracino (117-137), and “Mitografie di riscatto femminile: Banditi Queene
di Shekhar Kapur” by Raffaella Malandrino (139-154), each of which
concludes with a list of “Key words” and “Things to Ponder”, clearly aimed
at stimulating further discussion. The questions raised range from contacts
between the different cinematographies and/or cultures to concepts of
identity, gender-genre and subalternity, and again to the centre/borders,
empire/nation, global/local oppositions. Constant references are also made
to the rich critical apparatus developed in the fields of Cultural, Postcolonial,
Subaltern, Feminist and Post-Feminist Studies.
In short, as Susanna Poole writes in her Afterword, “Bollywood come
cinema ‘altro’”, if a film is a “stratified construction” in which different
languages, stories and temporalities cross and come to a new life, the film
spectator is also to be considered as a cultural construction, a complex
crossing of languages, (his/her)stories, spaces, and times. Hence Bollywood
too, a popular cinema with few aspirations to becoming experimental, can
create disturbance, destabilization, and (positive) crisis. In fact, its multigenre
representation does not respect all the conventions of ‘our’ narrative
cinema, constantly putting into question – both metaphorically and stylistically
– the classical Occidental viewpoint, centered on the identification of the
spectator with “a main male protagonist”, in Laura Mulvey’s words, and a
straight progression of the story line. Thus, in a way, Bollywood ‘exceeds’ –
in Edward Said’s definition – the norms of the Occidental (film) culture,
questioning our deepest beliefs and certainties, and depicting a reconciled,
non-existent national imagery in order to create an idealized community as
well as a coherent (and necessarily mythical) national identity:
In a territory inhabited by about a billion people talking over 800 different
languages and belonging to a multiplicity of ethnic and religious groups,
Bollywood offers a world view that in its absolute unreality may be shared by
all. ... But the production of a homogeneous, coherent identity bears with it a
form of violence: the exclusion of the internal ‘others’, the affliction shared by
numbers of former colonies rebuilt as nation states. (164-5)
This temple of dreams and desires – as I would define Bollywood cinema
– is the ‘cinema of otherness’ par excellence (“un altro cinema, un cinema altro’,
ma anche il cinema di un altro”, Poole writes, craftly playing with
the term ‘altro’/other). In fact, in Imag(in)ing Otherness: Filmic Visions of
Living Together (1999), S. Brent Dale affirms that: “A cinema of otherness
would be one in which the structure of production and the style of a
finished film would necessarily be different than what we are expecting
to see, indeed, what we have been trained to see. For those of us raised
on Hollywood cinema, a cinema of otherness would be unrecognizable”.
Using different narrative modes and techniques (from those of the
Occidental ‘norm’), based upon a different way of viewing, different
rhythms, the mythical re-invention of the past and the instability of personal
and collective identity, Bollywood creates an unattainable dream:
Faced with the partial failure of the emancipation of the Indian people,
and the substitution of colonial power with that of the multinational
companies allied to local governments, the dream of an equalitarian,
independent country has given way to the dream of Bollywood. Only the
perfection of its artifice, together with its absolute cultural recognizability,
allow it to represent for millions of Indians an ideal motherland India, an
India of absence and desire.(175).
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