WHY I WRITE: ESSAYS BY SAADAT HASAN MANTO (15 page)

The film calls itself
Zindagi
, or life. Life is not about a man and a woman. Life is about action. Life is a struggle. Life is about staying alive. This loser of a hero, who has an MA and who sings like an angel, could have earned thousands of rupees a month if he had chosen to work instead of whining. He knew how to perform magic, but he’s shown winning only a counterfeit, two anna coin and wandering about the streets. I regret that it was
Ms Heroine who was killed off in the end by the script. I wish Ratan Lal had gone instead, a useless man. He loves her but curses the society.

Had I been the society, I would have slapped the fool so hard he wouldn’t have had the courage to stay an unemployed vagabond.

And another thing I didn’t understand. When her father thinks she has done this great thing, he makes over all his wealth to Ms Heroine. She promptly begins to give it all away to charity. As an act this is fine, but what aspect of her character was driving her to do this? Was she doing it to get into heaven? It’s all a mystery.

Khwaja Abbas says those who go to watch
Zindagi
should carry two handkerchiefs with them. I agree.

One to wipe your tears, the other to wipe Barua’s!

– (Originally published as
Zindagi — Isi Naam
Ke Ek Film Par Review)

What Bollywood Must Do

What would Manto have made of Bollywood? I don’t think he would have been surprised by the fact that it remained in Mumbai (he would be amused by the city’s renaming). He understood quickly and instinctively that this was the only place in the subcontinent that was both civilized and liberal to support an industry that could only blossom on the cusp of immorality.
Manto
would perhaps have been disappointed and pleased at today’s Bollywood. Disappointed because the higher aspects of what he expected from the business never materialized except in what we know as art or alternative cinema. He would have been pleased because film has been the most effective medium for spreading ideas, more than print. In this essay, he sets ideals for the industry he worked in and loved, and had to let go when he later moved to Lahore.

In 1913, Mr D G Phalke made India’s first film. He thus began the art of filmmaking in the subcontinent. It was his dream to bring cinema to India and the dream was realized when he sold his wife’s jewels to raise money.

However, the dream that the progressive youth of India have seen has still not come to fruition. There is but one reason for this: the people in charge of moviemaking here are old-fashioned and simple-minded. They have neither the desire nor the intention to progress. No art can come out of this lot, whose lives are like still waters.

India’s youth, whom I am representing, who want to explore every aspect of life, who want to soar in flight despite having their wings clipped, aren’t satisfied with the state of filmmaking.

They are witless children, yes, ignorant of the ways of the world, true, and vagabonds, perhaps. But the desire in their hearts, the eagerness on their faces is worth something. It should make the fat-walleted businessmen, who control the Indian Motion Picture Congress, ashamed.

But in fact these young Indians are thought to be sick. And indeed they are. They are infected with love for their country. They want to mount the chariot of the State and see India delivered to its destiny, where other great nations already stand. They are willing to die for this.

They don’t have the clinking coins of the businessmen but they flash a more valuable asset: the crimson sparkle of their blood. This is madness, but it should be respected. India needs it.

We want good films. We want great films, such as we can put up against the work from other nations. We want every aspect of India to shine. This desire burns in us and we cannot separate it from our being.

Before its revolution, Russia was in a worse state than India. There were no sign of either literature nor poetry. But in a short burst of genius, Russia produced her Wali, her Mir and her Ghalib. And so it is also with her films. Russia has produced directors of such greatness that they will remain a source of pride for all humanity.

But for the last twenty-five years, made of 9,125 days, what have we got to show? Can we put on display our directors? What about our writers, who exist by ripping off the writings of others? Can we show our movies — all of them copies of American films — to others?

No.

India should make Indian films. We don’t at the moment. Take our social films, made by the dozen today. Are they really Indian in their sensibilities? No. You hardly see any “Indianess” in them; often characters dressed in western clothes to appear American and the reverse, a western actor wearing dhoti-kurta. These absurdities are called social films, just as our actors refer to themselves as ”artists”.

Art has not been defined in India. The Lord alone knows what it is thought to be. Art is a paint-filled tub into which everyone dips their clothes. But this isn’t really art and such people aren’t artists. The other word bandied about is “masterpiece”. If everyone in the studio, from the director to the fellow who hammers nails into the set, is an artist, it is also a fact that every Indian movie from
Raja Harishchandra
to
Sitara
is a masterpiece. Because of this, art has lost its value and masterpieces have depreciated. Here are my observations on our movies and what is needed to improve our cinema.

Films and Producers: analysis and criticism of India’s filmmaking is published regularly. But the press doesn’t really help here. This is because the film press is focussed on its business, which is to make money. And the advertising in such magazines is mainly from producers. We have many papers and magazines but no real journalism. This will change when we become less barbaric as a nation, and this in turn will come only after the populace is finally exposed to the thinking of intellectuals.

There are many ways of educating a nation, but there is consensus that film is an important one. It is easy and efficient to communicate a message, even one that is complicated, through movies.

Texts weigh heavy on the individual and for most children, so does schooling. It is no different in college, of course. But the message that might take months of studying to properly understand, however, might be passed on in an instant through films.

India needs entertaining movies that also educate, exercise the mind and introduces us to new ideas and new thinking.

At the moment, our producers believe in nothing but profit. This is fine as it is after all a business, but we must complain. First, very often third-rate films are produced and screened in the belief that they attract more viewers and bring in more profit. This notion is misplaced. Entertainment is
produced
; it doesn’t produce itself. If there are many among us who like cheap entertainment, it is the doing of our producers.

There isn’t great interest in stories of sorcery, mumbo-jumbo and magic as our producers think. People want to see something that concerns them. The purely physical is always transient, and how many of us still remember the stunts of Master Vithal?

What we need is films that teach, not ones that make us forget. Films that make us love our language, our nation. We want the pages of humanity to be opened before us. Can’t our producers do this? Can’t they make profits by doing this?

Need for brevity: looking at the length of our movies from the silent era, it appears our producers think that unnaturally long films are preferred by the audience. Perhaps there is some truth to this. But the fact is that this is the age of being to the point. When a film’s story can be completely revealed in seven or eight thousand feet of film, what is the point of extending it to 15,000 feet?

What happens when this is done is obvious. Like a piece of rubber which can only be stretched so far and no further, the film’s story snaps. It loses the integrity that it had in the shorter version.

However skilled a movie’s director may be with the digressions that extend the movie, he cannot succeed in improving the original.

A longer film must necessarily have longer dialogues. The actors will be forced to slow the pace and the plot will appear stupid. Longer movies also take longer to make and cost more money.

Films that could be made within 60,000 or 70,000 rupees take a lakh to finish. And if they flop, they seriously damage the producer. The other thing is to make a lengthier film, producers and directors introduce unnecessary song and dance. This is supposed to prettify the film but the aim is rarely, if ever, achieved. The additional money spent in shooting is not justified by the result. Songs and scenes have a place and time. Removed from these, they lose their meaning and beauty. So it’s important that our producers make their films shorter.

Cutting their 18,000-feet movies in half can produce a revolution in moviemaking. To set a two-hour programme, our producers should follow Hollywood. Before the movie, a newsreel or a reel or two of cartoons should be shown, as is also the case in Europe. Audiences are kept informed of the latest news from other nations.

Here, we have been needlessly watching lengthy films for twenty-five years. It’s time to end this chapter.

Stars: for thirty years, the masters of Hollywood have puzzled over this question — is the star more important or the film? So intensely has this been debated that the very thought of it now raises emotions. Perhaps the one valid response to this question would be to ask: ‘What is that you just said?’ It’s as absurd as asking whether the chicken came first or the egg. If a satisfactory answer to this can be found, we will no doubt also be able to figure out whether the film is more important than the star.

Frank Capra, the famous director from Columbia Pictures, recently expressed his views in an English newspaper regarding this. He said: ‘I’m with those who think that the film is most important. It is the film that makes the star and the biggest star cannot rescue a bad film.’

This is obvious but here in India, people are not in complete agreement with the statement. The best way of looking at it is to ask: ‘How are stars formed and with what?’

Capra answers this most interestingly: ‘If producers handed me all their money and said – “Now make us three stars”, I would be at a loss. I have no idea where to get a star from.’

In the silent era, Hollywood’s stars came from anywhere — hotels, factories and offices. Now, in the time of talkies, the supply ended because more skill was required. Here in India, stars came from the stage or the brothel. In the future, just as it happened in Hollywood, the supply of stars is going to end here as well.

Anyway, we were talking about what is it that results in the making of a star? Capra, who has directed the biggest stars of Hollywood, says that casting a film right is what produces a star. In his opinion, a Chinese character must only be played by a Chinese. Similarly the part of a man who is handicapped must be essayed by one who actually has that particular handicap.

I agree with Capra. We, you and I, can play ourselves better than we can someone else. Capra has given many examples of what he means, including that of Gary Cooper. He says Cooper presents himself on screen in true colours. That is to say, in real life because he is of good humour and classy, he can communicate that without much effort.

So a good and sensible casting makes stars out of actors. That of course is not the end of it
because right casting merely doesn’t produce a hit film. Other things are required and as a viewer, you are familiar with what these are. Good actors and technicians are of course crucial. Till everything is in place, a hit film will not be produced. Just like a very expensive watch must be put together flawlessly for it to be able to tell time accurately all the time, a film in all its minutest parts and components must be perfect.

Directors: the biggest problem of Indian cinema is the lack of stylish directors. All storytelling requires a certain sense of style. It is this which separates the work of one writer from another. It is no different for films and their directors. In the absence of this individualism, films will resemble one another. Indian films have been screened for some years now, but there have only been a handful in which we can observe the style and individualism of a director. The rest have been put together in much the same way, and their makers have neither seen things differently nor originally.

We may surmise that the problem was that the producers hired less than competent directors who themselves didn’t understand the story and its narrative. Nor have they been able to make their audience understand.

Many films are made and shown in India these days but truth be told, few of them are really “films” if judged against the craft of filmmaking. Most directors have no sense of imagination. They only know close-up, mid-shot and long-shot. This they set about to do with the story in hand, bringing the camera every so often to the heroine’s face. They don’t really understand the idea of a close-up and where it should be deployed.

They are like writers who indulge in meaningless word play.

If an Ernst Lubitsch film is shown without credits, we can still identify it from the comic scenes and the smallest details. In an exotic outdoor location, when we see a heroine flitting about like a butterfly, we can feel the heart
of D W Griffith, a lover of nature and the outdoors, aflutter behind the camera. Similarly, Eric Von Stroheim’s love for realism cannot be hidden. Many such examples can be given of directors and their individualism. Almost every Hollywood director has his own sense of style and this is the reason for his success.

In India, such a director is a rarity. Only two come to mind, Debaki Bose and V Shantaram.
Rajrani Meera
,
Puran Bhagat
,
After the
Earthquake
and
Vidyapati
, in all of these you can see the dreamy vision of Bose.

Similarly, Shantaram’s love for grandeur and allusion, his two favourite themes, is always on display. A film which shows them relentlessly can be identified as the product of his Prabhat Film Company. This is why he is our greatest director. Nitin Bose is not on this list because he isn’t really a director so much as he is a showman.

Acting: acting is the ability to show various moods and emotions. Like poetry, painting, writing and sculpture, it is one of the fine arts. There are of course those who will disagree, like Tolstoy and his followers. They don’t consider the work of stage and cinema as art. Tolstoy stands apart in thinking this way. But each to his own.

Acting is as ancient an art as storytelling. Good acting is to convincingly recount and imitate the emotion felt by another.