Remember the travails the Tamil actress, Ms Khushboo, went through for airing her personal opinions on pre-marital sex in the not so distant past.

There are lessons to be drawn in these and other incidents involving the victims of moral panics and the perpetrators of violence against individuals who want to walk the extra mile in their expressions of their socio-cultural environments.

The first pointer is the victims are almost always individuals. And not even once the self-styled guardians of Tamil culture could raise their fingers against media organisations which have gone zillion millions ahead of the extra miles walked by Mr Samy and Ms Khushboo. All the tamil channels, barring Makkal TV, are now into the business of airing the most culturally degenerative programme content possible in their prime time slots. After what Sun TV did in their infamous soft-porno coverage of the infamous godman, Nithyananda on March 02, 2010 in their prime time evening news programme, the acts of individuals like Mr Samy and Ms Khusboo do not merit comparison. The lurid commentary and soft porno video of the godman with a woman in bed in what was a main news slot in a mainstream channel was too much to stomach for the shocked and pulverised children and drawing room audience members in the homes of lakhs of Tamil television viewers across the world. Something more depraved than this can not be committed by individuals like Ms Samy and Ms Khushboo as their films were not targeting vulnerable drawing room audience members like children. There were not even whimpers of protests from the self-styled guardians of cultural police against the irresponsible behaviour of Sun TV. As far as I remember there was only a quick reprimand from Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M Karunanidhi about the limits exceeded by the channel in its coverage of Nithyananda and a stray story in the Tamil newsper, Dinamani against its coverage on that infamous evening. And more shockingly, for several weeks, one Tamil weekly, Nakkeeran, sought to up circulation figures by putting in its issues and wall papers soft-porno images of Nithyananda and his alleged partner. I saw school going children gazing deeply at those images in many newspaper shops. The weekly also posted what Sun TV aired on its website and went on a publicity drive to highlight its doings on the website as if it was a noteworthy contribution to Tamil culture and society. This weekly took to another culturally depraved plane what Sun TV telecast in loops for days together. As these are media organisations with their innate clout, political and otherwise, the moral panic whistle blowers do not have the courage nor the willingness to take to protests against them. They were silent as a stone when Nakkeeran and Sun TV went to town with their soft-porno coverage of Nithyananda. But they could pounce easily and merrily on individuals like Samy and Khushboo as they are as vulnerable as any individuals in society.

Ranjani has previously written on the Bombay film poster, but this paper works specifically on Amitabh Bachchan, and it creates a visual map of how cinema responded to societal changes in the 1970s, and also traces Bachchan’s rise to stardom through the film poster.

The essay is four-pages long, and you have to go to the bottom right corner of the page and click on ‘next’, a link that isn’t very visible on the page.

Click here to access the essay.

Perhaps this is why Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli [Live] came as something of a shock, something that successfully turned the trajectory of the very texture of popular Bombay cinema. Peepli [Live] tells the story of Natha (Omkar Das) and Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav), brothers whose ancestral farm lands in the village of Peepli in Mukhya Pradesh are about to be auctioned off in order to pay their debt. The brothers are told about a government scheme where the families of farmers who commit suicide are paid compensation in the amount of one lakh rupees. This is when Natha decides (with the help of his not-so-innocent brother) to commit suicide. As news of his decision spreads, local and then national news channels decide to project this issue as one that can turn the upcoming election around. Hordes of news vans and reporters camp in Peepli to cover the first ever live suicide in the world.

The film has contemplated the ‘event’ of death in a way that popular Hindi cinema has avoided for the longest time. While there is an encounter with the event of death, death, in this film has been stripped of all its finery and ritual – it is not poetic, it is not romantic, and there is no better world that the dying man goes to. He is quite simply, forgotten. The two deaths in this film are of secondary and tertiary characters, and are, at one level, somewhat predictable. The lack of spectacle in these deaths, worked in with the masterful use of an indifferent silence is instead used to underscore the inability of the media to actually understand, cope with and represent death.

While the action of the film is based in the countryside, it is really about the relationship of the urban middle-class with their rural counterparts. What is our link to the villages – it is the media, which itself is embedded in the aesthetic and psyche of the city – it is colourful, there is bling and there is a supposed reason for every sentence uttered (in this case, TRPs). News, as the cliché goes, is a product, which is entrenched in a careful system of commodity production—demand and supply. Rizvi, herself a journalist till fairly recently, has sharply critiqued this system of producing news. The desperate need for stories, the need to get ahead and the loud, unfeeling reportage depicted in the film is greatly detailed but also gives way to some moments that seem like they got out of the director’s hands as the desire to make a scathing point took over. What is more striking is her use of silence in the midst of the general din, bringing attention to the media’s inability to access and therefore report the truth, whatever that is.

The most poignant aspect of this film is its tone. Rizvi has used a texture of satire that has been missing from the mise-en-scene of Bombay cinema for  a while. The careful handling of satire becomes evident in the way it is sewn into the tragedy of the film. Rizvi uses the seemingly meaningless, small, non-event to convey the dripping irony of the situation. My personal favourite is the moment with Natha’s son asks him whiningly, “Bapu tum kab maroge, batao na kab maroge…jab tum mar jaoge main thekedar ban jaaonga” (Dad when will you die, tell me when will you die… when you die, I’ll become a landowner). The darkness that comes out of this humour is never ending, and Rizvi has braved this no exit approach that has been visible only in the work of Anurag Kashyap (his early phase – Paanch, Black Friday and No Smoking to be precise) and Dibakar Banerjee (Love, Sex Aur Dhokha) in the recent years. Despite frames drowning in natural light, there is a sense of doom that envelops this film. Rizvi’s refusal to embed Peepli with a childish idealism was a welcome move. Her film offers no hope, and certainly no solutions. There is, instead, an insight into our modernity and the dominant discourse about development.

Rizvi has worked immensely hard on the visual landscape of her film. Be it the newsroom or the village, there is an attention paid to details – in costume, in dialect, in the songs, in relationships – that is rare in Bollywood. There are some moments in the film that are beautifully crafted, her use of colour for impact is brilliant in certain scenes, for instance the long lines of white ambassadors carrying politicians that cut their way into the green and brown on the village is particularly striking. I was also stunned by the quiet surveillance of the space of the village once the reporters have left – the camera pans over a literal and metaphorical mess as the carnival folds, leaving behind a deathly silence. The change of scene to the city, which has its own definition of spectacle, is what the film closes with – where Natha, once a celebrity is part of a nameless crowd. He isn’t physically dead, but he may as well be.

In a joint invitation between the Department of Social Anthropology, the Centre for Film Studies and the Institute for Iranian Studies, acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf visited the University of St Andrews 24 June 2010.

The event involved a screening of Salam Cinema, followed by a Q&A session and a more intimate reception afterward. During these, Makhmalbaf discussed the practical aspects of filmmaking, and the role of cinema and culture in shaping political events, which is particularly important given his prominence in the Green Movement in Iran.

Salam Cinema, which Makhmalbaf made in 1994, follows the auditions of ordinary Iranian citizens who show up in response to an ad placed in the newspapers announcing open auditions for Makhmalbaf’s latest film. Makhmalbaf, played by himself, teases out the participants’ desire to be involved in cinema by asking why they want be cast in his film – the usual response being a declaration of love for cinema.

Though Salam Cinema is an accessible film for any audience, Makhmalbaf explained the political undertones for the viewers at St Andrews. Often during the film, Makhmalbaf would ask the would-be actors to cry on command, which mimicked the post-Revolutionary Iranian government’s request for its citizens to cry/purge themselves in order to become closer to God.

In a brief introduction to the film and afterwards during the Q&A, the director explained that he wanted to counter the image of Iran as being home of only religious fanatics. Instead, he wanted to show that most citizens in Iran are ordinary people, just like anywhere else in the world. This is perhaps most clearly evidenced when the would-be actors do not immediately burst into tears, filled with fervent passion, but react just about how I imagine most of us would: an awkward, failed attempt at crying on demand from a non-professional.

Later, the director illustrated the more nuanced side of his politics. Before the 1979 Revolution, Makhmalbaf was jailed by the Pahlavi regime. After being freed during the revolution, he went into politics for six months, but decided that he could do more good for the Iranian people working with culture, and so he became a filmmaker.

Makhmalbaf explained that he believes political reform is not enough to solve the problems of a country, but rather that the peoples’ minds must change first, and political reform will follow. This was clearly seen in Salam Cinema, with the director’s explanation that he wanted to change how the international community viewed the people of Iran.

Makhmalbaf was an extremely generous guest, speaking with a large group of excited cinephiles at the reception, and even taking the time to speak one-on-one with anyone interested. I was able to chat with Makhmalbaf about my favorite film of his, Marriage of the Blessed. He excitedly explained the technical details of how he portrayed the protagonists’ insanity through quick cuts and changing makeup. As he tells it, during this phase of the film, the protagonists’ makeup actually changes subtly between each shot. I’m not sure I noticed that on previous viewings, which gives me good reason to go back and re-watch one of my favorites!

Passionate about the craft of filmmaking and justice for people around the world, Makhmalbaf was an energetic and energizing speaker. He left any aspiring filmmakers with this bit of advice – and I think this applies to other aspects of the study of film as well – you can learn the technical side of filmmaking in a three-month course, and with digital filmmaking the equipment is more accessible than ever, but good films come from being dedicated to the subject of the film, to living the subject of the film.

It seems then that Makhmalbaf’s past experience, from being a political prisoner before the Revolution, to acting today as a spokesperson of the Green Movement, is integral to the efficacy of his films as they endeavor to change the way people think and to prompt positive social change.

From: http://www.kino.com/metropolis/

Film prints that have been lost or damaged are referred to as orphans, and for seven years now, the Film Studies Department at New York University  Tisch School of the Arts, has hosted the Orphan Film Symposium. According to an informative article on the Museum of the Moving Image website, “What once simply identified those film works that have been abandoned (however inadvertently) by their owners, rights-holders, or “parents”—newsreels and ephemera, unreleased and unfinished works, home movies and stag films—now serves as a catchall for any work that exists outside the mainstream of commercial cinema. Indeed, any film whose future is in jeopardy—due to its diminished status in film history or its low priority in the usual operations of the archive—could be classified an orphan.”

It’s a wonderful report of the 7th Orphans Film Symposium. Click here to read the full article.

It can be accessed here.

The new issue of Wide Screen is now available. Click here to access it.

With the internet, social networking and myriad other options, the mapping of stardom has changed over the last few years. Namrata Joshi of Outlook has written about the role of marketing in selling stars and their films. Have a look here.

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethekul’s film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Weerasethekul has previously made films like Syndromes and a Century and Letters to Uncle Boonmee. Other winners include Juliette Binoche for Abbas Kiorastami’s Certified Copy, Javier Bardem for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, Elio Germano for Our Life by Daniele Luchetti. The Best Director prize went to Mathieu Amalric for Tournee.  Click here to access the complete report by New York Times.