The international art film
The demise of Mrinal Sen at the ripe age of 95 makes it an appropriate time for us to reexamine India’s art cinema - since he was one of the stalwarts of the first generation of art film-makers to emerge when art cinema became a movement around 1970 due to state intervention, through a film policy under Mrs Indira Gandhi. Before we do this, however, we need to look at what ‘art cinema’ has meant around the world, the defining critical work here perhaps being David Bordwell’s essay ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’ (1).

Bordwell traces art cinema to the post-war era when films began to be made for international audiences (2); even as the dominance of Hollywood had begun to wane international commerce had resumed and film export and production were being facilitated in Europe. He goes on the identify the later Italian neorealist films as the first examples of international art cinema, subsequent examples being the films of directors like Passolini, Fellini, De Sica, Bergman, Kurosawa and the French New Wave. Bordwell goes on to argue that international art cinema explicitly defines itself in relation to the classical Hollywood film. The classical Hollywood film, as is generally known, favoured the ‘invisible style’ in which the delivery of the story was paramount. It ensured this through psychologically defined characters clearly motivated towards certain goals, and cause-effect logic.

As Bordwell proposes, the viewer makes sense of the classical film through the criterion of verisimilitude (is x plausible?), of generic appropriateness (is x typical of this type of film?) and of compositional unity (does x advance the story?). He demonstrates that the international art film positions itself against this mode, leaves causality much looser (as in Antonioni’s The Passenger) and breaks away from the narrative-dramatic structure of Hollywood through a new realism that Bordwell terms ‘life’s untidiness’. As an illustration, a detective about to solve a difficult problem could be killed in an accident abruptly in real life but not in a classical Hollywood film. But the international art film would allow such a possibility. Thirdly, psychological motivation is deliberately left unclear in the art film leaving us to wonder as in Godard’s Breathless in which Patricia betrays Michel to the police without reasons being advanced. Instead of clear-cut goals as in the Hollywood film, art cinema often has protagonists whose viewpoints are naturally aligned with the ‘survey form of the narrative’ – like those of children growing up (Pather Panchali, 400 Blows), prostitutes (The Nights of Cabiria, Vivre Sa Vie) and journalists (La Dolce Vita, The Passenger) or the trajectory of the story is aligned with a journey (Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, La Strada) often marked by an aimlessness (2). The loose structure of art cinema favoured both objective and subjective verisimilitude as in Wild Strawberries where there are inner and outer journeys mirroring each other.

Bordwell proposes that much of international art cinema, in addition to the questions posed by classical Hollywood cinema as part of the process of making sense of it, introduces ‘ambiguity’ as an operating principle (what is the director trying to say?), which is why films by Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up) and Ingmar Bergman (The Silence) are ‘puzzling films’ with unresolved issues like motivation deliberately leading to ambiguity, thereby calling into question the author of the film, his/her personal vision. When in doubt as to a film’s meaning, Bordwell suggests, the audience must read for maximum ambiguity and the nature of the ambiguity would in turn foreground the authorial vision.

It is evident that all international art films are not constructed in the same way and one is fairly certain that Ray or Kurosawa’s films are not ambiguous in the way Godard’s Breathless is. The dream sequence in Ray’s Nayak (in which the film-star protagonist drowns in money) is also clear in its meaning and, in this respect, is unlike the opening dream sequence from Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. It is generic and pertains to the kind of nightmares a phenomenally wealthy man might be associated with in a fable, while Isaac Borg in Wild Strawberries has a dream particular to his individualized psychological state.

But Bordwell introduces another category that he terms ‘modernist cinema’ which is not thematically ambivalent as Godard or Antonioni’s films are, but in which cinematic style is split from narrative structure (3) - as in films by Bresson or Ozu. Robert Bresson’s films, for instance, are not thematically ambivalent but the director devises a style by which even classics (like Dostoyevsky/ Tolstoy) are delivered differently, in a sense enabling us to reread traditional texts and reinterpret them; the self-conscious camera or editing style split from narrative structure in the modernist film is, at the basic level, subject matter and approach kept apart. When a director uses a self-conscious style in approaching the ‘real’ he/she is primarily acknowledging his/her limited role as intermediary between the actual world and the audience.

It must be noted that in these ‘modernist’ films the existence of a world to which cinematic style is ‘applied’ is admitted, as for instance when Robert Bresson replaces background music by real sounds (like the scratching of the pen on paper in The Trial of Joan of Arc). Eisenstein’s use of montage in October is another admission of style as artifice applied to reality. But my proposition here is that such mediation in cinema is a cause of ambiguity since it acknowledges that the actual world is ‘unknowable’ in itself, translating into and ‘ambiguity’ when represented in cinema. Only when a text is deemed ‘ambiguous’ does it demand (surface) (4) interpretation. Still, many more films than those of ‘international art cinema’ or the ‘modernist film’ are subject to interpretation; instances would include the classics of world cinema from Renoir to Mizoguchi and most auteur cinema. The acknowledgment of ‘auteurs’ like Hawks and Hitchcock is an acknowledgment of the ambiguity of some of their films.

Ambiguity, mimesis and Indian cinema
As a passing thought while dealing with international art cinema David Bordwell invokes Hitchcock as a popular director who created an authorial persona equal to that of the art cinema’s numerous authors. Vertigo posits none of the thematic puzzles of a film by Antonioni but it is still deeply ambiguous, leading us to questions about motivation and how our sense of the past is constructed. Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game, La Chienne, A Day in the Country) is another filmmaker whose films are complex and ambiguous because his films are ‘realistic’ in the mimetic sense and mirror complex social currents.

Mimesis is a critical and philosophical term pertinent to the arts that carries a wide range of meanings - including imitation, representation, mimicry of life, and the presentation of the self. It includes a level of observational detail (5) detached from underlying discourse pointed towards a purpose. To paraphrase the general understanding of the notion, art was considered to be an imitation of the world that also allowed for individual expression, i.e.: the subjectivity of the creator of the work of art was accorded a due place. Cinema, because it begins as an imprint of reality is ideally placed to pursue mimesis and the earliest films (by the Lumière brothers) were recordings of events - like workers leaving factory and train entering station. A little later, a magician named George Meliès supposed that since what was projected on the screen was taken to be reality by the spectator, cinema could also promote illusion or the imagined. Where the Lumières made films about workers leaving a factory, Meliès made films like ‘Trip to the Moon. ‘Illusion’ gradually became a way of introducing subjectivity into film and that is what cinema has broadly been – a recording of reality, with subjectivity as a constituent element – both that of the filmmaker and of characters in the fiction. The underlying perception is that the world cannot be known but only approached and the observer cannot be omitted in any exploration of the actual/ physical/ social world.

In India, contrarily, film took a different route when the first films by DG Phalke were neither documentaries nor fantasies but mythological films. Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, or Dada Saheb Phalke as he is usually called, is credited with making the first feature film Raja Harishchandra (1913). The other Phalke silent fiction films to have survived in bits and pieces are Pithache Panje (1914), Lanka Dahan (1917), Sri Krishna Janma (1917), Kaliya Mardan (1919), Sant Eknath and Bhakta Prahlad (1926). Phalke envisaged the future of Indian cinema very differently from the ways suggested by the Lumières and Méliès. He reportedly saw a film called The Life of Christ around Christmas in 1910 and became excited at the prospect of seeing ‘Indian images’ on the screen. A parallel between Phalke’s exercises in film and what Ravi Varma did in the medium of oil painting has been suggested since both of them attempted a recreation of the mythical past to reclaim it as a nationalist proposition (6).

If Phalke, who was preoccupied with establishing and nurturing an Indian film industry was also intent upon bringing ‘real’ Indian images to the screen, these were not any ‘Indian images’; his aim was to introduce the traditional sacred into the space of the colonial ‘modern’ (7) Phalke insisted that his films based on themes from mythology were ‘realistic’ since they were bringing known ‘truths’ to life. Even when Indian cinema moved out of the genre of the mythological film it continued to purvey familiar truths from the epics and puranas, though most of them were nominally set in contemporary times. But what is important is that the sense remained that cinema was not an extension of photography but the recording of a sacred enactment which had instruction for all members of the social order. Since early Indian cinema was an extension of theatre and borrowed most of its conventions we may seek causes in the traditional view of theatre as found in the Natyasastra. What is laid out in this text evidently owes to older beliefs but inquiring into them will be difficult here.

The Natyasastra states (8) that at a time when people were addicted to sensual pleasures, desire and greed, and jealousy and anger, the god Indra along with some of the other gods approached Brahma, the creator, and requested that he create an object of diversion which would be audible as well as visible. Indra asked that all members of the social order be permitted to hear it. When the show got under way, the demons took offence and caused the actors to forget their lines and movements. They contended that the play depicted them in unfavourable light vis-à-vis the gods. In replying to their complaints the creator Brahma articulated the objective of drama and theatre. He explained that drama would be instructive to all through actions and states depicted, and through sentiments arising out of it. There would be no wisdom, no knowledge, no craft, no device not found in drama. This myth about the origin of theatre can be regarded as applying to cinema and relevant to us, that the purpose is not mimetic but to instruct. Since instruction cannot be ‘ambiguous’ Indian popular films do not submit to interpretation.

Given this instructive aspect of Indian popular cinema apparently shared by no other, the
following are some key characteristics emerging:

1. The camera eye is omniscient. There is nothing corresponding to character subjectivity (9).
   
   
2. Instead of the ‘meaning’ emerging in the mind of the audience through the raw material of the story, the story is a vehicle for the relay of a pre-existent meaning (10).
   
   
3. The absence of character subjectivity and the omniscient gaze make suspense and surprise unattractive. How things will happen is more important than what will happen (11), which will be familiar.
      
4. The message relayed by a film is itself a familiar one from the epics, puranas or the utterances of wise men – like the sanctity of friendship (Sangam), the importance of family dictate (Hum AapkeHainKoun…!) or the need to follow the desires of one’s heart in a career (3 Idiots).
   
   
5. The message is not contextual but taken to have universal/eternal validity – like true love being undying.
   
   
6. Indian popular films are nominally musicals but the songs– in accordance with the above – are not ‘authored’ by the person rendering it onscreen but expresstimeless truisms with reliance on familiar metaphors. Onedoes not, for instance, see a song like ‘Pick a pocket or two’ sung by Fagin in Oliver! (1968), which is contextual.
   
   
7. Popular films stage stories as vehicles for meaning and are hence already interpreted. They do not submit to further interpretation.
    

Indian art cinema and Mrinal Sen
David Bordwell includes Satyajit Ray in his examination of the international art film and Ray’s Pather Panchali (1954) may be taken to be a development of Italian neorealism. This film, for instance, does not have a message and may broadly be taken to be mimetic. Its poetic realism is also infused with authorial subjectivity; camera style, as already indicated, tries to differentiate between reality and the authorial vision. The striking sequence in which the arrival of rain is shown begins with a drop of rain splashing on an angler’s bald head (humour, suggesting not the omniscient eye but an individualised viewpoint), and the subsequent wind and storm could well be the young boy Apu’s first glimpse of nature’s fury (character subjectivity). Mrinal Sen is also taken to be ‘realist’ in his approach, but his methods are different.

It has been proposed that the development of art cinema and middle cinema was engendered by the pressure for change within the film industry, which was induced by Mrs Gandhi’s radical initiatives. The ‘period of crisis’ for the film industry whereby its blatant commercialism was questioned apparently began in 1969 with the new FFC policy and it came to an end in 1977 when Mrs Gandhi lost at the polls. The segmentation of the audience initiated in the seventies by film policy was caused by two factors. While one of these was the politicization of the masses in the public space, the other was a state-sponsored movement seeking to give substance to the idea of a ‘national cinema’. The two factors were related and a new approach to film financing emerged as an alternative to the mainstream (12). The Film Finance Corporation (FFC), which had functioned like any other government institution, merely supplementing the budgets of successful filmmakers, now entered into direct competition with the mainstream industry. Only Satyajit Ray who had developed his own aesthetic without support from any institutionalized program had represented Indian art cinema, and the industry declared him a cultural icon without jeopardizing its own position, but now a new kind of art cinema began to emerge.

The two films usually cited as the first successes of FFC policy are Basu Chatterji’s Sara Akash (1969) and Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969). Both were models of simplicity and authenticity and dealt with ‘ordinary people’ in accordance with the virtues upheld by the policy and they may be taken to represent the beginning of art cinema as a movement rather than Ray’s Pather Panchali. Mrinal Sen’s own career may be taken to be in three states – the first with a few commercial films and including a part-imitation of Pather Panchali named Baishey Shravan (1960), the second commencing with Bhuvan Shome and going on to the anticolonial polemics of Interview (1971), and the third beginning with realistic explorations of middle-class life as in Ekdin Pratidin (1979). Baishey Shravan, although it has staged sequences reminiscent of Ray’s film, relies completely on the omniscient camera eye; but it may be helpful to examine the more representative Interview and Ekdin Pratidin instead, to understand Indian art cinema and why it does not fit the international models suggested by Bordwell.

Interview (1971)
At first glance Interview is dominated by filmmaking style and much of its methods may have been inspired by Eisenstein’s October (1927). In the film Ranjit Mallick (played by Ranjit Mallick) is a
personable young man. A friend of the family, who works in a foreign firm, has assured him of a lucrative job in his firm. All Ranjit has to do is to appear in an interview dressed in a western style suit. It seems a simple task but a strike by a union of laundry workers means that he cannot reclaim his suit from the dry cleaner. His father's old suit will not fit him; he borrows a suit but loses it in a scuffle involving a pickpocket. Ultimately he has to go to the interview dressed in the traditional Bengali dhoti and kurta, which will not do, and he vents his ire on a suited mannequin in a tailor’s window that he strips naked. The film concludes as it begins – with a British era statue of a personage on horseback dismantled and carted away. But the story is not related in such a linear fashion and Sen has cuts to film posters and advertisements that promise a fantasy world, in sharp contrast to other (documentary) cuts of teeming crowds and poor people making a living anyhow. The film also has a ‘Brechtian’ interlude in which the protagonist on a tram sees his own picture in a film magazine and the girl reading it recognises him as actor ‘Ranjit Mallick’, and the making of Interview by Sen is also invoked.

October, from which Sen has apparently taken inspiration in Interview, also begins with a statue being dismantled, that of Czar Nicolas II as the Winter Palace is being stormed in St Petersburg. The film is evidently intended as propaganda as Interview is, although in a different sense. Bordwell names Eisenstein’s film as an instance of modernist cinema and the reason is its foregrounding of style, its use of montage. If October is propaganda, the question naturally arising is where its ‘ambiguity’ would come from. To describe the film it was made on the tenth anniversary of the October revolution. It is a recalling of the revolution but, rather than stage it chronologically with a narration, it rather constructs a maze of moments and images including documentary footage from the period. Although most of it is not footage from 1917, the events are not staged in their totality but as fleeting images (the faces of nameless people, crowds breaking through barriers, leaders speaking, telephones ringing) then pieced together to convey a whole. The central event is left to memory, as it were, rather than reconstructed, camera and editing style only in attendance. Even though the film is propaganda, the revolution it is recalling is not reconstructed as ‘historical fiction’ (the way Schindler’s List reconstructs the Holocaust); the film is intent on preserving/conveying the inviolability of the past.

The central event in Interview is not an inviolable one of the past but a piece of didactic, anticolonial fiction delivered in the third person with no component indicating subjectivity. Even at the level of plausibility one finds the film weak since a person facing an interview crucial to his career would take more precautions to be appropriately dressed well in advance rather than run around at the last moment, leading one to suspect Sen’s agenda. Like examples from popular cinema which already bear a message and cannot be further interpreted, therefore, Ranjit Mallick’s story in Mrinal Sen’s film already has a message pertaining to vestiges of the colonial past still contaminating independent India. The cinematic style and the ‘Brechtian’ devices Sen puts in do not significantly alter the purport of the film except add further truisms to those already present in the fiction. One of these, for instance, is the vast gulf between the living conditions in society and the mythology promoted by lifestyle advertising and cinema. The reference to the actor Ranjit Mallick does not serve much of a purpose because we are hardly unaware that the protagonist is not the actor playing him or that it is a film made by Mrinal Sen that we are watching. Notwithstanding bits of documentary footage there is no sense to be had of any kind of inaccessible reality behind whatever is portrayed; this is not mimesis as defined. The film is never in doubt that it is instructing us in a political truth, although this truth is not from the epics or puranas (as in popular cinema) but standard, Marxist-inspired anti-colonialism, which cannot be equated with authorial subjectivity on Sen’s part.

Ekdin Pratidin (1979)
In this film – which recalls Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) – the daughter of a middle-class family who is the sole breadwinner fails to return home one night. Her family – composed of a retired
father, a mother, an unemployed brother, a younger sister in college and two children – worries, searches for her, suspects she has eloped and even fears her dead. Their own future is at stake and that makes their concern even more frantic even as the neighbours notice it and start gossiping. When the girl Chinu (Mamata Shankar) finally returns home early next morning, they do not even make enquiries, so obvious is their relief, but the girl is now aware of what her status is in her family.

Ekdin Pratidin is generally believed to shun the didacticism of Sen’s earlier films and while it is more measured in tone, the way the director constructs his fiction remains the same as in Interview, although without the ‘Brechtian’ devices. He uses a narrative voiceover when he introduces us to the family, essentially tracing the dilapidated old house to the time of Company rule in the 18th century and then going on to the owner and the families inhabiting it. The characters, even as the narrator is introducing them, try to fit their description by comporting themselves suitably. Sen maintains a satirical tone but his focus is emphatically on lower middle-class misery; the actors even compose their faces in accordance with this aim. To give an instance of how pointed the narration is, when the younger sister goes to a neighbouring pharmacy to call her older sister’s office at night, we see a neighbour trying to eavesdrop, then making enquiries and exchanging meaningful glances with some others also present. Sen is evidently making a statement about ‘patriarchy’ here, how a woman’s reputation can be besmirched. The film is shot on location in some of the most decrepit residential locations in Calcutta but its ‘realism’ is more or less confined to this, so insistent is the film on delivering its message.

This leads to ask the same questions about Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, whether it is mimesis and my sense is that it is, although it uses a kind of dramatic acting comparable to that in Ekdin Pratidin. In this film, also about the daughter of the family being sole breadwinner, the other characters are shown to have independent trajectories although they impinge upon her own fate. Her more attractive younger sister marries the man she has been supporting and helping in his career, in the expectation of marrying, but this betrayal happens off-screen and conveys the sense of something no one has much control over. A younger brother loses his leg in an accident and though she has now to support him, he has still suffered on his own from impersonal forces. When the film concludes, the family is on its own through the success of the older son as a musician while the protagonist, who supported him when he struggled, is ill in a sanatorium. She is the focus of the film but there are still plural destinies at work. This sense of plural destinies, it can be argued, implies a world that cannot be subsumed under an essence. Moreover at the centre of the film looms Partition since the family is one of refugees; this central event (like the Revolution in October) cannot be reduced to ‘meaning’ and retains its inviolability. Mrinal Sen may have tried to put colonialism under the British in the same position in Ekdin Pratidin, but the narrator’s satirical tone has already reduced it to a fragment of a message owing to Marxist anticolonialist doctrine. While Ghatak’s ineffable films are contextualized in a historical movement Sen’s films relay eternal messages from political belief.

Conclusion
Mrinal Sen is a doyen of the art film movement in India but unlike the work of Ray and Ghatak it can be convincingly demonstrated that most of the films produced by the movement have borne ‘eternal messages’ like the popular film, although the messages are not from the puranas or the teachings of wise men but from socially relevant texts/ideas, sometimes Marxism. Typical texts would deal with caste discrimination and exploitation, the misuse of state authority, gender related issues, coping with physical ailments and the socio-economic conditions of the marginalized, where the humanist sentiments are already familiar from the media and no explorations can be anticipated. Perhaps the art films to which this would not apply would be some from Kerala - the films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan (Anantaram, Mukhamukham) and G Aravindan (Esthapan, Thampu), among some others; Kumar Shahani (Tarang), John Abraham (Amma Ariyan) and Aribam Syam Sharma (Imagi Ningthem) are others one would recall as makers of films demanding interpretation. But the sense of (moral/political) ‘instruction’ relayed generally remains a recurring feature of the Indian art film and it is this idea of instruction to be relayed by film that makes ambiguity a rare quality to find in the works. International art cinema, as I have already argued, pursues mimesis and very few Indian films – from whatever category – do this. The Indian art film – like most of popular cinema – is already interpreted.