Art deco building Eros Theatre, Bombay
Darius Cooper
C
inema chose me in my mother’s womb on November 2, 1949, exactly one day before I was actually born. That auspicious day, my mother’s younger brother decided to take her to see a film at Poona’s elegant Westend theatre. My mother had had a very difficult week. My father was very far away working long hours on dangerous railway tracks and bridges. And I was being stubbornly difficult in her womb. So, at 9:30 p.m., my uncle Russy, took his favorite sister Ernie, to the movies. Later accounts confirmed, not only that she enjoyed the film very much, but so did I! In fact, I caused so many upheavals in the dark that night that my poor uncle had to rush my mother straight from West End theatre to Koyajee’s Nursing home where, at five minutes past five, early in the morning, on November third, I was born. The only tragic aspect of this magical drama was that neither my uncle nor my mother, in the excitement, could ever remember or recall the name of that film which I had enjoyed so much from deep inside my mother’s womb. But there it was. The pact with cinema and cinéphilia had been sealed.
In the primary stages, my pubescent cinéphilia was created out of a steadfasting state of loneliness in the leftover British cantonment town of Poona. This particular cinéphilia took the form of an uninterrupted ritual where I would have an imaginary communion with a filmic universe, twice every week, at the cantonment’s only two theatres that showed American and British films, the Westend and the New Empire. A third theatre, Alka Talkies, which stood near the Lakdi Pool Bridge, which divided the Anglophile Poona from the Chitpavan Peshwa Pune, played its part in this enactment a little later. The distinctive feature, however, about my earliest cinéphilic taste was that it embraced the serious films that these theatres showed only between Tuesdays and Thursday and the popular entertainment movies slotted for the Saturday and Sunday weekends. So a popular John Ford film like The Grapes of Wrath was enjoyed on Sunday at the Westend, where as a serious Ford like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence awaited my curiosity at the New Empire on a Wednesday. Alka Talkies became a cunning filmic Kawab mein huddi or bone in the mutton addition. All those American and British films that were rejected by the conservative and fastidious Parsee managers of those two cantonment theatres, it eagerly picked up, and then cleverly distributed them over an entire month. They printed these effectively on postcards and mailed them to “its loyal patrons” like myself. So even as I was watching Leslie Caron and falling in love with her as Fanny at the Westend on Sunday, I knew that Fanny would soon be replaced by the lovely Angie Dickenson as Jessica on Friday at the Alka Talkies.
Cinema, at this stage of my life, was also very important for my sentimental education, especially since I went to a privileged co-ed Senior Cambridge School funded by American Methodists. In such a dual westernized environment, being cultured mattered as much as earning good grades or marks in class. And it was here that cinema came to my rescue. I remember the film that really stirred within me, without my knowing it at the time, my very first critical juices. It was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I remember startling my fellow students in the eighth standard by making an impromptu speech, during debate hour, where I justified the attack that the birds make on the humans in Hitchcock’s film. Pamela Dougherty, the young and attractive class teacher intern, who had come all the way from the Nilgiris, was equally startled and delighted because she too had arrived at the same conclusion independent of me. “And they are not the big birds, like the vultures, but the small harmless ones like the love-birds, the pigeons, the doves, even those crows that we love to throw stones at. It serves us right for being so callous with them!” I remember, finishing triumphantly. That moment would be something, I am sure, Pamela, as a teacher, still cherishes: that wonderful instant where student and teacher irrevocably become one. Cinema was to repeat this magic, once more, in the first year at St. Xavier’s College, when I denounced in an essay, the first man walking on the moon and insisted that man would forever be imprisoned in the fetus of his own limitations, exactly like that star child at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey. This time, the teacher was Nisha da Cunha who publicly proclaimed that she was glad to find that in the classroom there was that one rare student who dared to agree with her on this moon man tasmasha.
But I learnt other things from cinema as well in those early impressionistic years. The movies that I saw gave me important tips about how to present myself with dignity. It was from movies that I learnt how to make my motor-mechanic blue and white school uniform look good on me, especially when it was raining, like how Humphrey Bogart made the raincoat look dignified on him, even when it was raining, and his girlfriend had abandoned him, at the last moment, on the train pulling out of Paris, in Casablanca.
There is a hidden Dorothy in all cinéphilics. Going to the movies was like going on an Oz-like adventure where I wanted to be abducted, first by the serious films on the weekdays, and then by the entertaining ones on the weekend. These double abductions served memorable indemnities. I would imagine being Melina Mercouris’s boyfriend in Capri, between Tuesday and Thursday, but Never On Sunday, when Gina Lollabrigida danced only with me in an abandoned villa, once again in Capri, in Come September. Paul Newman’s meanness angered and troubled me a lot in Hud during the weekdays, but what terrible parents poor James Dean had in East of Eden: a Bible thumping father at the dining table—imagine facing him every evening, and a mother, who was the madam of a brothel!! That sure did ruin my Sunday evening, but I remember, eagerly going to the nearby Irani ice factory for an entire month hoping to run into a sullen James Dean there. Maybe he would have helped me steal some additional ice since so much was permitted east of my Pulgate street ‘Eden.’
My academic cinéphilia was born in the big metropolitan city of Bombay where I first experienced my initial exile from home between 1966 and 1980. It was actually inaugurated by a tall stranger, Suresh Chabria, at the water fountain, on the first floor of St. Xavier’s College. He had sought me out over a remark I had made in class in relation to Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The conversation had then steered to the sudden drying up of Hollywood films in Bombay, around 1967, because the theatres had not renewed their licenses. “Thank God we saw Robert Mulligan’s Mockingbird at the Metro,” we both simultaneously proclaimed. Orphaned by the loss of my proverbial Hollywood diet, I was delighted to learn from this tall man, that I should become a member of a very good film society called The Film Forum and be exposed, not only to Hollywood, but to all the great international films of which I knew nothing. That same evening I promptly met him at the Tarabai Hall, behind Marine Lines station, and became a Film Forum member. The very first film I saw that evening was a Canadian film called The Railroader directed by one Gerald Potterton and featuring the return of the great Buster Keaton. From that evening onwards, Tarabai Hall became that Mecca that I returned to again and again for years to come. It was there that the first academic discussions of films ensued; it was there that an insatiable curiosity for all kinds of international cinema was created; and it was there that “feverish movie-going” as Susan Sontag called it, forged a very private circle of friends with whom I still continue to share my cinéphilia long after Tarabai Hall and Film Forum closed its doors on us.
Most of the films that we were exposed to by the film societies were predominantly European. But here, one has to acknowledge other integral sources whereby the ubiquitous presence of all those extraordinary films from Europe, literally flowed into our native bloodstreams. First, there were the two significant cultural organizations: namely, the Alliance Française, that showed the best of French cinema on the ground floor at Churchgate’s Theosophy Hall on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the Max Mueller Bhavan that exhibited the best of German cinema on Tuesdays and Thursdays, outdoors in the garden of a lovely Parsi villa on Napean Sea Road. Then there was the new NCPA Complex that was being constructed at Nariman Point. Touched by cinema’s hava, it hired a private mini-theatre at Warden Road, and collaborating with the National Film Archives in Poona started exhibiting, once every week, a grand historical coverage of world cinema. This made the slumbering British Council and the United States Information Services waken from their Rip Van Winkle slumbers and both wasted no time in hopping on the cinematic bandwagon that was literally creating nouvelle waves in Bombay. They unleashed an appetizing gravy train that started all the way from Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, and the Ealing Studios early classics and continued with all those latest Hollywood and British films that had tragically stopped arriving at the regular movie palaces built by the great Hollywood studios because of the recent license fiasco.
The memorable film-society evenings at the Tarabai and the Gowalia Tank based Tejpal Hall, however, remained unique. They were looked forward to after a hard day’s application at one’s college books in the college and university libraries. First, there was the thrill of watching a much awaited film “on the sly.” We had readied for this for months by the oft repeated ritual of spending most of our weekends reading about these films in expensive journals like Sight and Sound, Film Quarterly, Films and Feelings and others at the cramped Film Forum offices at 421 Hind Rajasthan Center at Dadar. This dedication so impressed the founder members, Basu Chatterjee and Arun Kaul, that they decided to launch Close Up, Film Forum‘s own version of Cahiers du Cinéma in which our first academic and impressionistic essays on films were published.
Since we were all students on very tight monetary budgets, each of us decided to become members of only one film society so that we could find a way of smuggling the whole gang of fellow film-lovers on one film-society membership card. The three most prominent film societies in Bombay, then, were Film Forum, Suchitra, and Anandam. To witness those extraordinary films that all of these would be showing, on a particular day, the whole gang would turn up at the respective hall and sit inconspicuously, usually in the nearest Irani café. The valid member of that society would now enter the hall, show his card, and linger for a while and chat up the film society’s secretary who was at the gate inspecting all arrivals and departures. Then he would go into the auditorium, sit for five minutes, and then exit the hall telling the secretary he was going to the café for some refreshments. He would then pass his card to his waiting friend, in the café, who would then repeat the same ritual. Since most of our faces were familiar to many of the secretaries because we turned up, every weekend, at the offices of the Film Forum society where they too dropped in, it was presumed that all of us were members of all three societies.
After a while, all the film secretaries, I’m sure, were on to us, but they pretended to look the other way because there was something authentic about our love for cinema. They considered our carnivalesque chicaneries as an act of genuine ‘good faith,’ an existential madness that was repeated and enacted week after week with a shameless, almost Sisyphian kind of regularity.
In spite of the good work that Bombay’s three film societies were doing in generating a rousing aesthetic film consciousness, a significant part of this enthusiasm, I must confess, remained problematic. All three societies did try to initiate study group meetings, where members were encouraged to discuss films and film related issues and concerns. We attended many of them, which sadly proved to be actually very disappointing. Very few members came, and most of those who did attend were novice film-makers who wanted their first clumsy forays into celluloid to be screened and appreciated. When the time came for serious discussion, instead of analysis, argument, and some kind of critically engaging dialogue, verbal slinging matches usually broke out, often leading to gossipy behind the scenes information being publicly divulged. The film per se was sadly forgotten in the settlement of personal accounts, petty rivalries and incessant jealousies.
All three societies boasted large membership, but what drove seventy percent of this vast coterie usually revolved around two prominent questions often asked by a prospective new-comer: Did the film-society screen only “foreign films?” And would it be showing only those films that under prevalent Indian Film Society Rules had never been “censored?” Much as one would want to dissuade these claims, the search for a meaningful cinema through which one could chart one’s personal growth, was often substituted and at times, ashamedly submerged, by the keenness merely to see and ravish bare flesh or gratuitous violence. But in spite of this multitudinous crassness, there was amongst isolated groups (and ours was just one of them) a genuine search for various kinds of epiphanies that could not be denied them. I vividly remember, twenty to thirty people buying, along with us, the following cinema books that were lavishly displayed, for the very first time, in the foyer of the Strand Cinema. They were all being sold by Strand Book Stall at a special 20% discount for all film society members. In half an hour, the shelves advertising the following books, were quickly emptied:
In the Cinema One series: Jean Luc Godard by Richard Roud, Joseph Losey on Losey by Tom Milne, Luchino Visconti by Geoffrey Nowell, How It Happened Here by Keirn Brownlow, The New Wave by Peter Graham, Alain Resnais and The Theme of Time by John Ward and Howard Hawks by Robin Wood were all bought for twelve rupees each.
In the Movie Paperbacks series: Luis Bunel by Raymond Durgnat, The Heavies by Ian and Elisabeth Cameron, Stroheim by Joel W. Finler, John Ford by Peter Bogdanovich, Laurel and Hardy by Charles Barr and Franju by Raymond Durgnat, all priced at nine rupees and forty-five paise were sold out during the intermission! So, it was not all philistines that cinema inspired to gather at the film-societies’ Sodom and Gomorrah film reviewing halls!
What made you an authentic cinéaste in such a climate was when you learnt how to enter a film, and for this act to be properly accomplished, you required many kinds of doors. The three Film Societies in Bombay and the four Cultural Organizations I have alluded to were, for us, those first emblematic doors—those primary buland darwazaas! What they made possible to us was the physical and mental act of actually seeing the same film over and over again in order to discover, with every new vision and (re) vision, most of its carefully hidden secrets, once the proverbial and obvious story-line was understood and dispensed with. Sometimes it was to calculate how the music followed the characters around. Why, for instance, was Edith Scob’s waiflike character always accompanied by Maurice Jarre’s haunting flute whereas Thérèse Desquereux always measured her quiet desperation, to the accompaniment of Jarres’s poignantly played piano keys? Would the sudden slamming of the church-door at her marriage ceremony still shock Thérèse and us, the first time we heard it, in the crammed hot and sweaty Theosophy hall of the Alliance, and the first time she heard it, in that awful claustrophobic church in Georges Franju’s Thérèse Desquereux? It was strange how Werner Herzog’s monumental jungle in Aguirre: The Wrath of God extended far beyond the rectangular parameters of that open-door white screen and literally spilled all over into the cultivated garden of that Parsi villa when it was first shown to us. The line separating our garden from his jungle seemed to have been mysteriously swallowed up. You could, for example, experience the sheer joy of cinema, when you witnessed the spontaneous anarchy of the crazy Marx Brothers, in the air conditioned mini theatre of the USIS. But next week, you would simply cross the road, and in the Masonic building opposite the USIS, you would experience the sheer agony of cinema, as you entered and exited the painfully emptied universe in Robert Bresson’s films.
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Bombay, itself was a very interesting city when we were going through cinema’s and cinéphilia’s golden age, in the late sixties and early seventies. In addition to unusual cinema, it offered us unusual books, bought for a song, on many of its dusty pavements, and unusual long playing records picked up from tailoring-joints that often fronted for all kind of unusual smuggled merchandise. But cinema, somehow, was what was always held by us as the most sacrosanct. And then the movie palaces magically renewed their licenses, and Hollywood films started streaming into the metropolis once again, and we plunged into them with the same kinds of fervour as we did with the ‘other’ cinema. So like the pious and promiscuous pilgrims of Chaucer bound for Canterbury, we all went to the shrine of good old Excelsior Theatre, that we had not visited in a while, one Sunday morning to see Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers, at a special screening arranged by all the three film societies. We came out of that long film, utterly dazed and excited, and feverishly discussed each brother’s radical choices over the nine rupee ‘sizzler’ steaks we ordered, playing all the time with the pebbles of that lovely garden Excelsior Café, so different from the wasteland where Rocco’s eldest brother rapes Rocco’s girl, and Rocco does not move his trained boxer’s arms, either to protect himself or his girl who will, in another wasteland, inspire her rapist lover to also fulfill his last desperate role as her final and inevitable crucifier.
One month later, we would return to the same majestic theatre, on yet another Sunday morning, this time to see with another group of people, a Hollywood film, coming to us very late (because of the licensing scandal) and having just one showing—Stanley Kramer’s The Ship of Fools. What was so special about this film were two of its major stars, the French actress Simone Signoret and the German actor Oskar Werner. It would be interesting, we argued amongst ourselves, to see them together in a Hollywood film. Sure, Simone Signoret had become fat and puffy, but who could forget her luminous beauty which was still there, all intact, even though we had recently witnessed it in her very first film, Casque D’Or by the Frenchman Jacques Becker? We had heard and seen Oskar Werner speaking and behaving like a Frenchman, also recently, in Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. We wondered what his English persona would be like in Kramer’s film? But above all of this, we were so grateful to be in a city that offered us more than two versions of beauty, of presence, of self, of youth and recklessness, followed by age and disappointment. How thankful we were to a city that presented cinema to us, both as our wife and as our mistress. Cinema was Pudovkin’s mother on certain misty cold days in Bombay and it was Wilder’s Sugar Kane on some like it hot Bombay nights. We talked of cinema, in our favorite city, in the same breathless way that Mizoguchi’s prostitutes talked about Marilyn Monroe, in between their clients, in his last film The Street of Shame.
In his autobiographical essay, “In Settlement of All Accounts,” from Prison Writings, Regis Debray defines “cinema (as) that other bloodsucker, (which) would land beauty in our laps whenever we wished for a few pieces of silver.” What the Film Societies and the Cultural Organizations did was to make us determined seekers of this beauty in all the films we saw, discussed, read and wrote about. And we often found beauty in the strangest of places like Jean Seberg’s exquisite arm-pits, as she washes her arms, after selling her newspapers in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, or that astonishing arm that James Dean raises, almost like a frightened animal, for Natalie Wood to clutch, as her ex-boyfriend dies in his burning car at the bottom of the Hollywood canyon in Nicolas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause.
We were always in search of that elusive beauty that a film would suddenly and mysteriously provide, and once we found it, we would follow it all the way to see where it actually took us. The camera ceased being an instrument when it followed this kind of beauty. So did the creative process of editing. It didn’t matter if it was invisible, in the classical Hollywood sense, or dialectically synthetical in the Einstein sense. There had to be a film of beauty coating it in the way images followed each other, right up there on the screen. It is for this reason that, as Debray so rightly points out, “our best and most sincere moments were those spent in front of the screen.”
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If, for example, we had been contemplating the perplexing subject of love, there was a difference, we were shown, in loving someone abstractly as the weary Communist reformer Yves Montand loves the fiery polemical Marxist student Genevieve Bujod. Their one night of intimacy theorises their bodies: his old and tired, and hers young and vibrant into isolated geometrical shapes and sizes. They come together only as arguments, isolated by the detail of an eyebrow here or a nipple there. Vertical shapes tilt over horizontal ones in the complete absence of any kind of totality. But when this same man offers himself, much later in the film, to the woman he has initiated and shared love with, over all these years, no abstraction of any kind is allowed to intrude. Steadfast emotion occupies the screen’s center and the margins. These two bodies are presented whole, complete by themselves and completed further by their coming together with a permanent sense that reconfirms their past and makes it so memorable in their present. Only Alain Resnais could have taught us these important lessons of love from his film The War Is Over.
Those who profess to be “enemies of innocence and the imagination” have never really experienced cinema or cinéphilia. When Satyajit Ray’s Charulata trained her opera glasses and brought her husband’s magnified image within her touching distance, how he broke our hearts with his casual neglect of such a vital and innocent woman he was pushing, without even knowing it, into a reckless and dangerously imagined adultery. And how we flinched with shame when the deranged father of Ritwick Ghatak’s Meghe Daka Tara, in a wide-angled moment of sheer terror and beauty, pointed his finger at us and shouted “I accuse…” but could not complete his devastating verdict, since all who were gathered in the courtyard with him were equally guilty, even if their imaginations had consciously rejected their victimization of the innocent Neeta, coughing herself to her inevitable death, in the isolation of the family outhouse.
After reaching its peak in the mid 1970s, the Film Societies Movement and the cinema dispensed by the Cultural Organizations went, with the advent of the coming 1980s, into a steady decline, and finally, a complete collapse. What signaled this was the cancellation of The Oberhausen Film Festival that Bombay’s three Film Societies regularly organized, once a year, at Matunga’s Shanmukhanada Hall. In this much awaited festival, we saw all the films that had won major awards for that particular year, in all the world’s leading Film Festivals. Suddenly, in late 1970 and early 1980, when it failed to take place, we knew in our bones that finally the end of our golden cinema period had arrived. No more would we be mesmerized by Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night or the early epic masterpieces of Andre Tarkovsky in which nature and man mourned their monumental exile. The restless tracking shots of Miklos Janscho that revealed naked women being whipped as they were made to run the cossack gauntlet, or the hussar’s horses exploding from the edges of the wide screens to cut down the last of the brave rebels trying to escape, and Zanusssi’s fables of academic friendship celebrated like the Structure of Crystals were all now hopelessly tombstoned in our unconscious. Before our empty cinematic consciousness, a curtain had finally descended.
The imaginative people who ran Bombay’s great Hollywood movie palaces were afflicted by this plague as well. Some got old and retired. Others died or quietly faded into the sunset. Like Ethan Edwards, the doors of the great Hollywood cinema, firmly and sadly closed on us. Hollywood that had given us, in the words of one of Citizen Kane‘s narrators, “the loot of the world,” was now embroiled in the cold and ruthless calculation of Marx’s “cash nexus.” Men in terelyne shirts and sharkskin suits took over our magnificent dream factories, spielberging and lucassing a new kind of cinema whose predominant color was cashed in box-office dollar green. Prehistoric dinosaurs, enormously jawed mammals, and awkward jedai knights now ran rampant all over our sacred white screens. In our recurring nightmares, Hamlet burst from his mother’s chambers, admonishing all of us “get thee, and get thee fast to a nunnery or to a monastery.” Finally the bell had tolled. It was over! All good cinema was gone. Yes, gone with the wind. In the dark, a kiss was no longer a kiss, a sigh was no longer a sigh, the fundamentals of great cinema, just did not apply!
The three Film Societies that had been gingerly holding on, soon followed suit. Most of its dedicated organizers and faithful secretaries left or quit. Those who left became successful film-makers, or opened their own private businesses, far away from the enchanting world of celluloid. Those who quit were just plain tired of empty cinema halls that no longer attracted any kind of crowds. They could not compete with something horribly new that had recently arrived in the city, the VIDEO machine and the VCR tape. Your living room, whether it was in a smuggler’s shack at Dharavi or in an elegant apartment on Warden Road, now became your private movie theatre. If you wanted to see “a serious film” or even a “hot film” you didn’t have to go all the way to a Film Society showing at some hall. You merely went to a friend’s house. He, in turn, took you to a clandestine garage, where in the parking lot of the manager’s office, pirated videos from all over the world were being circulated at an exclusive price. And you could keep them and watch them for an entire week!
Cinema’s dark ages spread through the cultural organizations as well. None of the new audiences were interested in the new wave films of Europe anymore. They were not interested or curious to see how Godard’s new Marxist work compared to his earlier Hollywood homages, and who the hell was this Godard, anyway? They were not going to renew their membership fees if you persisted in showing any film of that crazy man, Herzog. Hours and hours in the desert where nothing really happens and how can you watch a film when the entire cast is hypnotized?
Genuine film passion took its last final breath and walked over a cliff, like in The Seventh Seal, without a backward glance, straight into Cocteau’s magical mirror, never to return.
Will the Maltese Falcon of great cinema—”the stuff that dreams are made of”—ever fly in our skies once again I honestly don’t know. All I know is that when it flew, once upon a time, we were those of the fortunate few who enjoyed it and we learnt a lot from it.
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Darius Cooper is a Contributing Editor, The Beacon More by Darius Cooper in The Beacon
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