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<br><br>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<b>by a.s. hamrah</b></font>
<br><br>
<td valign="TOP">
<br><br><font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+1">
<font size="+2">W</font>hen most North American movie-goers think of Indian
cinema, it's the neo-realistic, Jean Renoir-influenced depictions of
poverty by Bengali director Satyajit Ray that probably come to mind.
Another, much bigger Indian cinema is emerging in the American
consciousness, though, and it stands in wild contrast to Ray's sober
dramas. The Bombay-based, or Bollywood, film industry has finally exploded
into mainstream American video stores with the release of Mukul S. Anand's
no-holds-barred 1992 epic <b>God Is My Witness</b>. This Hindi musical,
like Bollywood product generally, is everything a Ray film isn't.<br><br>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+2">I</font>n fact, Ray's final work, a remarkable, sedate film also from 1992 called <b>The Stranger</b> (newly available on tape) is in every way the antithesis of <b>God Is My Witness</b>. Whereas Ray is introspective in his talky, philosophical investigation of Indian attitudes, Anand's movie bursts out in song-and-dance numbers, and poverty is just another plot point. <b>The Stranger</b> is an intimate chamber drama; <b>God Is My Witness</b> attacks space from every angle with a mandate to relentlessly entertain. Those
filmgoers who expect Indian movies to keep their humble and sincere place,
watch out: <b>God Is My Witness</b> makes even Hong Kong shoot-'em-ups seem
detached.</font>
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<td valign="TOP" width="160"><font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+1"><b>Real Indian cinema can easily short-circuit brains locked
into the filmic India of Merchant/Ivory movies.</b></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<br><br><font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
Satyajit Ray on the set of <b>The Stranger</b>
</td>
<td valign="TOP"><font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<b><font size="+2">G</font>od Is My Witness</b> is a powerful, albeit
wacked-out work in its own right and the perfect introduction to Bollywood
aesthetics. It was the biggest movie made in India up to that time (1992),
and since Hindi cinema works under a rigid star system not unlike America's
during the reign of the studios, <b>God Is My Witness</b> features India's
two biggest stars. They are the impressive Amitabh Bachchan (the John Wayne
of the subcontinent), who speaks with the voice of a god, and the beautiful
Sridevi, a strong-willed actress with impossibly large eyes. She, in a
crazy star-turn, plays both Bachchan's love and the couple's own daughter.
The plot, a typical masala-mix of family melodrama and action-adventure,
takes place over a twenty-year period in locations ranging from Afghanistan
and Nepal to places that could only be created in a Bombay studio. The
movie's divided into two sections and clocks in at 193 minutes — only
slightly long by Indian standards. Smashed into this spectacle are eight
mind-blowing musical numbers. Since Indian cinema operates under a strict
production code that forbids even kissing, these set pieces replace
intimate contact with a sledgehammer suggestiveness that's staggering in
its energy and creativity. Utilizing Hindi pop that's just as willing to
freely plunder the popular culture of any place on earth, these musical mini-epics transcend the "wet sari" numbers usually associated with Indian commercial cinema.<br><br>
<b><font size="+2">E</font>vita</b>, ridiculous in an entirely different
way, it's not. Let's face it, in America today, the very idea of making a
musical seems foolish. In India, they pull it off dozens of times a year,
with a visual brilliance surpassing supposedly more sophisticated, and
certainly more capitalized Western productions. <b>God Is My Witness</b> is
the best musical ever made that foregrounds a rotting goat corpse in its
first scene. It's not there to evoke poverty, though. It's just the ball in
a rugby-meets-polo-style game called buzkashi.
</td>
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<td valign="TOP" width="160"><br><br><font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
From the film <b>God is my Witness</b><br><br>
</td>
<td valign="TOP"><font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+2">I</font>s there necessarily an invidious contradiction
between the acknowledged poverty of India and its opulent, garish film
world? Sure, many Westerners adopt this stance when they're first exposed
to these films. (Real Indian cinema can easily short-circuit brains locked
into the filmic India of Merchant/Ivory movies.) India's cinema is
commercial with a vengeance: Some of the most creative filmmakers in the
world practice their craft there on a scale long ago abandoned by the West.
And yes, in a country that produces somewhere around a thousand films every
year, one could easily use its dumbest, most exploitative movies to prove
the social uselessness of India's film industry, especially when so few of
them are seen by non-Indian viewers. But it's time to stop condemning the
allegedly oppressive aspect of mainstream Hindi filmmaking. The idea that
these films are the opiate of the world's poorest masses is unproductive,
and it obscures the excessive, crackpot beauty of what may be the world's
most vital national cinema. Poor economically, Indian audiences are wealthy
in imagination. As outrageous as Hindi musicals are, the attitude that
Indian cinema would be better served by an Indian <b>Dead Man Walking</b>
seems even more outrageous.
</td>
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<br><br>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>From the film <b>Hello Photo</b><br>
photo © Nina Davenport</td><td valign="TOP">
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+2">I</font>n Bollywood director Shekhar Kapur's 1995 <b>Bandit
Queen</b>, it may have something akin to that, though. <b>Bandit Queen</b>
is the ugly flip side to both <b>God Is My Witness</b> and <b>The
Stranger</b>. Bollywood films have been called "curry westerns" because
they draw heavily on the operatic violence of spaghetti westerns. <b>Bandit
Queen</b> does just this, perhaps to a fault. By turns harrowing, lurid,
and arty, <b>Bandit Queen</b> is a masala movie of a different kind. It's
based on the true story of a woman named Phoolan Devi, who went, against
her will, from child bride to notorious outlaw. And it's not a musical,
though it boasts a beautiful score by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It's a movie
that disproves any simple Ray/Bollywood dichotomy while showing how
in-your-face melodrama may be inimical to Indian film production. <b>Bandit
Queen</b>, with its careful delineation of sexist Indian oppression, its
brutal rape scenes, its lush photography, and its acting styles that veer
from the subtlety of Seema Biswas's Phoolan to the back-lot Bollywoodisms
of most of its villains, confused American viewers, to say the least, when
it was released here in 1995.<br><br>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+2">A</font> couple of North American indie co-productions have
attempted to explain Bollywood to Westerners through satire and parody,
with very mixed results. Indian-Canadian Srinvas Krishna's 1993
<b>Masala</b> and Indian-American B. J. Kahn's 1994 <b>Bollywood</b> fail
to convincingly put across any meaningful point of view, critical or
celebratory. The films themselves are as generic as their titles: They may
have their hearts in the right place, but all they prove is that Bollywood
moviemaking is highly resistant to parody. After all, how can a filmmaker
spoof something that has pastiche hardwired into its very soul? Bollywood
still awaits its own <b>The Bad and the Beautiful</b>, or even its own
<b>After the Fox</b>.<br><br>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+2">B</font>ut there's an American documentary, of all things,
that may help outsiders get a handle on Bollywood's place in Indian life.
Called <b>Hello Photo</b>, it's been playing in festivals worldwide since
its 1994 completion. Made by Nina Davenport, it's an exquisite verité
contemplation of the vast Indian spectacle, and it pays special attention
to Bollywood filmmaking. Davenport, who is fluent in Hindi, spent about
fifteen months in India, travelling throughout the country and
photographing actors and crews at work on Bollywood sets. She visited
twenty-five of them in a relatively brief period, something unprecedented
for a westerner, and which coincidentally parallels the frenetic schedule
of a Bollywood star. This whirlwind tour is hardly evident in her calm,
keenly observed film. Mixing color and black-and-white footage in a
non-dogmatic way, <b>Hello Photo</b> presents everything from workers in a
jute factory (it resembles a film lab or a projection booth) to religious
seekers possessed by spirits, circus performers, erotic sculptures,
prostitutes, and students in a school for the blind. The impression the
film leaves is of a country possessed by the spirit of filming and being
filmed. Everywhere Davenport sets her camera, people stare back, trying to
decide if they're unimpressed or fascinated.
</td>
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<tr>
<td valign="TOP" width="160"><font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>Interested in finding out more about Bollywood and its larger-than-life
stars? Try checking out some of the Bollywood-oriented gossip magazines on
the Web (like CineBlitz), or a couple
of the hundreds of Web sites put up by devoted fans: one person's favorite
Bollywood
links, for instance, or the first page of the Bollywood Movie
Database. These are just the tip of the iceberg: Explore!
</td>
<td valign="TOP">
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+2">I</font>ndia is a savvy, street-smart culture," Davenport
told me in a recent interview. "That's why they're good at making movies.
It's a movie star culture. The fans mix hostility with worship. My place
there, as an American woman constantly shooting film, was similar. That's
what I tried to put in this film." Her juxtapositions of daily Indian life
and Bollywood fantasy-making reveal the strangeness and the familiarity of
the culture that produced <b>God Is My Witness</b>.<br><br>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<font size="+2">Y</font>ears of Satyajit Ray films have conditioned
American film lovers to expect subtlety, nuance, and the calm observation
of life's vicissitudes from Indian cinema. They've been misled. It's no
wonder popular Indian cinema, with its action, wild musical numbers, and
outright melodrama, seems so far out. Ray's <b>The Stranger</b>, though a
perfect film in many ways, only tells part of the story. <b>God Is My
Witness</b> completes it.<br><br><hr><br><br>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
Filmmaker and critic <a href="mailto:hamrah@hermenaut.com">A.S. Hamrah</a>
lives in lower Allston, Massachusetts.
<br><br>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
© 1997 A.S. Hamrah, All Rights Reserved.<br><br><hr><br><br>
<center><b><font size="+2">Ordering Information</font></b></center>
<font face="arial," verdana, helvetica>
<br><br>
<b>God Is My Witness</b>: <a href="mailto:scpromo@ix.netcom.com">Scarecrow
Video Collection, Inc.</a>, 5030 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105.
Telephone: 800-797-5901. Or check out their
Web site.<br><br>
<b>The Stranger</b> and <b>Hello Photo</b>: <a href="mailto:firstrun@panix.com">First Run Features</a>, 153 Waverly Place,
New York, NY 10014. Telephone: 212-243-0600.<br><br>
<b>Bandit Queen</b>: Evergreen Entertainment, 6100 Wilshire Blvd., suite
1400, Los Angeles, CA 90048.<br><br>
<b>Masala</b>: Fox Lorber Home Video. Available through Orion Home Video, 1888
Century Park East, Los Angeles, CA 90067-1728. Telephone: 310-282-0550.<br><br>
<b>Bollywood</b>: Soni-Kahn Productions, 2324 Port Durness Pl., Newport
Beach, CA 92660. Telephone: 714-745-7893.
<br><br>
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