Third World film making and the West 9780520056909, 9780520056671

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Note on Titles (page xiii)
Introduction (page 1)
Part One: The Social, Cultural, and Economic Context (page 5)
1. Third World Societies (page 9)
2. Culture and National Identity (page 21)
3. Cinema and Capitalism (page 35)
Part Two: Theory and Practice of Third World Film Making (page 51)
4. The Beginnings of Non-Western Film Production (page 55)
5. Individual Authorship (page 73)
6. "Third Cinema" (page 87)
Part Three: National Film Industries (page 101)
7. The Indian Subcontinent (page 105)
8. East and Southeast Asia (page 135)
9. Latin America (page 163)
10. The Middle East and Africa (page 189)
Part Four: Cinema Astride Two Cultures (page 227)
11. Satyajit Ray (page 231)
12. Youssef Chahine (page 243)
13. Glauber Rocha (page 255)
14. Yilmaz Güney (page 269)
15. Ousmane Sembene (page 281)
16. Jorge Sanjinés (page 293)
Conclusion (page 305)
Notes (page 313)
Bibliography (page 327)
Sources for Photographs (page 363)
Index (page 365)

Citation preview

Third World Film Making

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Beginnings of Non-Western Film Production 65 doubled this level of output by 1970. The countries producing 50 films a year

were joined in the 1970s by Thailand, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. Iranian . production reached its peak of 90 films in 1970, and Turkey—by far the largest of the Middle Eastern cinema industries—reached almost 300 features in 1972. This increase in output in the industrializing countries of Asia more than compensates for the sharp decline in output (in numerical terms, at least, though not necessarily in terms of investment) in the two countries that were once the world’s leading film producers, the United States and Japan. Indeed, world output is estimated to have risen from under 3,000 films in 1955 to over 4,000 by 1975, over half of this total coming from Asian studios.

Third World Commercial Cinemas Pioneers like Dadasaheb Phalke can be hailed as innovators, and their work causes no real critical dilemmas. Dilemmas do arise, however, after the coming of sound, when films of a totally undemanding kind begin to pour from the sometimes primitive studios of the non-Western world. The evaluation of the

great mass of Arab, Asian, and Latin American films since the 1930s— particularly such forms as the Hindi song-and-dance film, the Egyptian musi-

| cal (such as those starring the dancer Samia Gamal and the popular singers Farid el-Atrach and Abdel Wahab), or the Brazilian chanchada (a combination of comedy and music, often crude)—is enormously difficult, since there exists no accepted critical methodology with which to handle such films. On the one hand, the sheer volume of material is immense: there are literally tens of thousands of such films; on the other, the fact is that very little of this production has ever been shown outside the national or regional boundaries and so tested against standards other than those implicit in its manufacture. It is a local cinema, conceived and made for immediate consumption by local audiences, who have generally shown themselves enthusiastically receptive. But it has given birth to virtually no accompanying critical writing or theoretical speculation of the kind Hollywood has provoked, only to reactions of a thor-

oughly negative kind. Created for a mass audience and apparently fulfilling no more than an entertainment function, these films are the cause of great unease on the part of Third World critics and film makers, even—and perhaps especially——those concerned to define and promote a “‘national’’ cinema. For these critics and film makers, rejection of the standards implicit in a

local cinema is the beginning of an authentic film culture. In judging local products, the critics often reveal most clearly the extent to which they have subconsciously assimilated Western values and modes of thinking about cinema. Such an approach could only be reinforced by the European critical reception of the rare products of Third World industries that received some limited showing in the West. For example, three 1952 films that were

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Beginnings of Non-Western Film Production 67 internationally shown—Mehboob Khan’s Indian Savage Princess / Aan, Lima Barreto’s Brazilian The Bandit / O cangaceiro, and Manuel Conde’s Philippine Genghis Khan—were seen merely as exotic novelties that produced no ques-

tioning of Western assumptions of cinematic superiority. | There are three main criticisms leveled at such commercial cinemas in the non-Western world. The first is that the local cinema creates a totally unreal filmic world. This view is most often expressed in terms of denunciation, as in the keynote speech delivered by the Indian actor Utpal Dutt at the opening of an international symposium on cinema in developing countries held in New Delhi in 1979: — An Indian hero in a blonde wig and latest Bond Street clothes making love to a heroine who seems to have shopped for clothes in New York last week—that’s their conception of Indianness! . . . You know, they will not be able to give a local habitation and a name to any of their all-conquering heroes; he has no surname, lest he should be identified with any particular region of India. He dresses as no Indian dresses, he floats on a cloud, it is just not possible to argue } and tell the makers of films that only by being intensely and wholly regional can one be truly Indian."

Even where blind imitation of the West is replaced by conscious parody, the

unequal relationship persists. The Belgian-born film critic Jean-Claude , Bernardet, now a naturalized Brazilian, expresses this second criticism particularly well: To parody is to recognize one’s momentary inability to replace the imposed model with another. . . . The aggression consists in reducing the model to the

level of the underdeveloped. What then happens is a simultaneous devaluation , of the imposed model and a self-devaluation. Thus this parody presents an image of the underdeveloped which is perfectly acceptable to the oppressive model, for it seems natural to the latter that the underdeveloped should see

, themselves as ridiculous, grotesque and cowardly." Where instead of taking disembodied aspects of Western culture the film makers strive to base their work on traditional themes and ideas, a third common criticism is that this tradition is false. Much of the work of colonizers in India and Africa went into creating an invented tradition that would legitimize Western structures of authority. Even where this is not the case, there is always the danger that the aspects chosen will be precisely those which, even before the introduction of cinema, had already been debased into ‘“‘folklore,”’ aptly defined by the Moroccan critic Abdallah Laroui as ‘“‘a sub-expression which perpetuates, in the midst of expression itself, the inferiority of a society | which it claims to express.”’ There is obviously a great deal of truth in these criticisms, and they could be echoed with regard to a great deal of Third World commercial cinema. But

68 Theory and Practice a negative approach of this kind does not exhaust the interest of such productions. An example of the folly of blanket rejections of Third World entertainment cinema, and an indication of what can be discovered when a critic does investigate his native cinema, is S. Theodore Baskaran’s detailed study of pre-1945 Tamil cinema in South India. His analysis shows that during the first decade of Tamil sound film making (which began in Madras in 1934), the strong influence of popular drama led to a cinema that “emerged as a factor in the political life of the country.” '’ Stage performers—especially singers— who had taken part in direct political action were drawn into the cinema, and several political figures and intellectuals gave it their support, enabling Tamil cinema to begin to reflect the patriotic and political aspirations of the people. While remaining in form and style primarily an entertainment cinema, the Tamil films of the decade up to 1945 were in many cases patriotic works meriting serious consideration: The challenge of foreign rule and the awareness of the need for social reforms as a part of the society’s efforts to meet this challenge profoundly affected Tamil cinema. . . . By supporting nationalistic ideas on the screen, films reflected the

popular attitude of the times and often gave shape to vague political inclinations. The cinema lent a new emotional aspect to the political situation by handling melodramatic patriotic themes on the screen."

The effectiveness of this form of popular cinema, in which patriotically inspired songs played a key role, is borne out by the prompt response of British censors. Other positive aspects of Third World commercial cinema are captured by Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes who, in a discussion of the chanchadas of his native Brazil, notes that the relationship between these films and the spectator ““was incomparably more lively than with the corresponding foreign product,”’

involving “an intimate relationship of creative participation.” '* By shifting the argument to the question of audience response, Salles Gomes throws fresh

light on “the ambiguity of the Brazilian critic’s position with regard to his country’s film production”: The national film is a disturbing element in the artificially coherent world of cinematic ideas and sensations which the critic has created for himself. . . . Angrily attacking or defending in order to encourage, directed by an awareness of a patriotic duty, the critic always reveals the unease which fills him. All these

attitudes, above all destructive sarcasm, are used to veil the deepest feeling which his national cinema provokes in a cultivated Brazilian: humiliation.°

A more questionable approach to Third World cinema in Africa and Asia has been the uncovering—or, more precisely, the construction—of a “realist tradition” to be set against what is viewed as the mindless escapism of the popular commercial cinema of the time. In this way, Erika Richter sees Kamal

Beginnings of Non-Western Film Production 69 Selim’s The Will / Al-azima (1939) as the forerunner of a tradition of realist film making in Egypt that is continued in the work of Henri Barakat, Salah Abou Seif and Tawfik Saleh and perhaps finds its culmination in Youssef Chahine’s The Land / Al-ard (1969)."’ Similarly, some of the key Indian direc-

tors of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt and Ritwik Ghatak, have been wrongly viewed as mere precursors of an “Indian neorealism” that finds its fullest expression in the first films of Satyajit Ray, beginning with Pather panchali in 1955. Thus we find the French critic Henri Micciolo writing, in his otherwise sensitive and perceptive study of Guru Dutt, that ‘“‘one can only regret that Guru Dutt was never to make his own Pather Panchali.”’ * Although Italian neorealism obviously had a great influence on Ray himself, it is becoming increasingly clear as Third World critics and theorists publish their own accounts of their national cinemas that such “‘realist traditions” constructed by Westerners involve a distortion of both the film maker’s relation to his national industry and the particular qualities of his work. Still another way of dealing with the purely commercial cinemas of Asia and Latin America is to apply criteria developed in the last few years for dealing with Hollywood, since moralizing rejection was until recently as characteristic of critical approaches to American movies as it currently is of analyses

| of Third World commercial cinema. Both forms of entertainment cinema are products of capitalist systems that reflect certain of the aspirations of the underprivileged members of society who make up their mass audience. With this starting point in mind, a twofold approach can be adopted: firstly, probing the reasons for the evasions that characterize such cinema, and secondly, looking analytically at the imaginary worlds and structures of feeling that the films _ Offer. Richard Dyer, who sees entertainment in terms of “the stuff of utopia” — that is, alternatives, hopes, wishes, dreams—points out that while entertainment “offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide,” it does not simply present models of utopian worlds; “rather, the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized. It thus works at the level of sensibility.” "’ Dyer’s organizing categories of entertainment—abundance, energy, intensity, transparency, community—could certainly be applied to the all-India movie. Dyer links these “‘utopian’” solutions to a series of real social needs, which are themselves created by capitalism: scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, manipulation, and fragmentation. Since commercial film production in the Third World normally competes with imported foreign films without attempting to change the Western-established social function and definition of cinema, the lines of analysis that Dyer’s approach opens up could be extremely fruitful. But none of these approaches is a substitute for a criticism that will relate

Third World commercial films to the issues concerning society and culture raised in Part One. Though these cinemas are “‘national”’ in the sense that they are financed by local capital and create products destined largely for a local

70 Theory and Practice audience, they have little if any connection to the definitions of the demands of a “national culture” as formulated by Cabral or Fanon. Equally, they are “popular’’ in the sense of reaching a wide audience, but as examples of mass culture in its most basic sense they have no connection with the term “‘popular cinema” as used by Latin American film theorists. One way these Third World national cinemas can be understood is through an examination of their economic and class origins. That is, as an expression of the attempt by local capital to establish commercially viable production structures, these cinemas reveal both the lure of Hollywood as a model to be emulated (but which is all too rarely understood) and the crushing financial power of Western film interests. The limitations of these national industries stem from the overall context in which they are situated, for, as Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes has observed, “‘Cinema is incapable of finding within itself the energies which would allow it to escape from its state of underdevelopment, even when a particularly favourable circumstance provokes an increase in the

production of films.” ”° ,

Approaching the films themselves in class terms, we can trace, beyond the stylistic divergences and differences in surface detail, a unity of approach and conformity of values that relate directly to the petty bourgeois aspirations of the bulk of the film makers. Though occasional film makers working within the commercial industries—Salah Abou Seif in Egypt or Emilio Fernandez in

Mexico, for example—come from poor and underprivileged backgrounds, while others—most notably the Indian film maker, Prince Pramathesh Chandra Barua, son of the Rajah of Gauripur—stem from the aristocracy, membership of the urban petty bourgeoisie can in general be taken to describe the film maker’s achieved social status. Petty bourgeois culture does not explore or even acknowledge the contradictions contained in such a concept as nationalism. Instead, nationalism is seen simply in terms of an opposition to a foreign aggressive force (such as the British Empire): this foreign power may not figure explicitly within the text, but it can be held implicitly responsible for all current woes. A national spirit will be seen as inspiring all men of good faith, as a factor uniting rich

and poor, and hence as a veil to mask social contradictions. Since such an entity cannot be adequately represented in contemporary terms (its oversimplifications would be too apparent), there is often a retreat into the past, to a tradition seen as incorporating the essence of the “‘national spirit.”” But after the dislocations that inevitably arise from Western dominance and colonization, such a “tradition” (where it once existed) is no longer accessible except in terms of the most rigorous intellectual exploration. Too often the “‘tradition” presented in petty bourgeois culture is at best a debased form of earlier

values (often depicted in terms of nineteenth-century commercial imagery and popular literature) or at worst an unwitting echo of a “tradition” in fact invented by the colonizer.

Beginnings of Non-Western Film Production 71 This blurring of the traditional is balanced by an ambivalence toward the modern. Despite the affection with which petty bourgeois artists turn to the past, they themselves are part of the modern sector of society, incorporated into a cash economy, and, in the case of film makers, even using an imported Western technology. The customary response to this threatening ambivalence is to portray society as a given, an entity that is static, unquestionable, and immutable: the depiction of any forward-looking source of social change is impossible. The center of gravity is always the urban petty bourgeoisie itself, from which the bulk of the intended audience will be drawn. Peasant life is as remote as that of the local rulers, and depictions of either are likely to be detached and externally observed (or invented) rather than drawn from inner knowledge. The values celebrated are precisely those of petty bourgeois life: individualism, with an emphasis on stability and order within the family and on material achievement in the world of work outside it. As in so many Western films that share this ideological perspective, rebels will be either reconciled or annihilated, women who assert themselves either tamed or destroyed. Since this world is itself a fabrication, a construct in which the realities of contemporary society have been reshaped to conform to the structures of a commercial entertainment formula, there is no need for film makers to move outside a studio-created world. Characters in a story can be turned into richly drawn roles for stars, emphasis can be placed on exuberant dialogue and verbal interplay, and, since the end of the narrative is assured, the story’s progress can be interrupted to make way for the songs and dances that constitute an - essential part of the commercial formula. We have here a form of production

that deals ostensibly with the key issues of a true national culture: language, ! | tradition, society. But the approach can be most clearly defined in terms of its multiple refusals: to look directly and critically at contemporary society, to adopt a standpoint rooted outside the particular class position of the artist, to make real use of local traditions of narrative (in terms of the handling of time or the creation of space), or to break with formulas designed to do no more than extract a commercial return from the audience. It is only when we have a clearer and better documented grasp of the organizational structures and implicit ideological assumptions of Third World commercial film production that it will be possible to begin to evaluate the range of personal achievements to be found there. Despite the limitations of our current knowledge in the West, one can point to a succession of highly talented and successful film makers whose work goes far beyond the constrictions of the individual film maker’s class position and calls into question the glib assumptions of petty bourgeois orthodoxy. As examples of work produced over five decades that is as estimable as that of many of the most revered of Hollywood professionals, one might cite the dramas, marked by a mix of commercial calculation and left-wing idealism, produced by Sun Yu in Shanghai before 1937; the romantic melodramas of P. C. Barua in late-1930s

72° Theory and Practice Indian cinema; Emilio Fernandez’s sympathetic portrayals of the poor and oppressed in Mexico from the 1940s; the unclassifiable achievements of Luis

Bunuel, particularly in the period from Los olvidados (1950) to Nazarin (1958); Salah Abou Seif’s work over two decades, spanning the late 1940s and

early 1960s, with its urge to offer a truer portrayal of Egyptian society; the very varied films made within the Indian film industry in the late 1950s and early 1960s by two of Satyajit Ray’s exact contemporaries, the romantic ideal- : ist Guru Dutt and the grimly intransigent Ritwik Ghatak; the action-packed period films made within the Hong Kong film industry and culminating in A Touch of Zen/ Hsia nii (1969) by King Hu; the melodramatic flamboyance and commercial calculation of the films of the Filipino Lino Brocka in the 1970s; and the tight narrative control of the work of the Argentinian Adolfo Aristarain in the 1980s. This listing is by no means exhaustive, indicating merely some of the more striking individuals whose work has a personal style and flair that

transcends the limitations of the conventional commercial forms in which they are constrained to work and against which their achievements must be judged. These film makers, who have accepted the challenge of working within the industry and who have used its accumulated skills as the basis for conveying their visions, are no less admirable because since the mid-1950s, we have found individual voices of a very different and more westernized kind in Third World cinema. Their work in the mainstream of commercial production, often full of immense visual excitement and always emotionally engaging in its use of melodramatic forms, rewards re-viewing today.

Individual Authorship 5

Popular and art cinema were falsely made out to be irreconcilable opposites, when what were actually being discussed were ‘‘commercial’’ and “‘elitist’’ cinema. Our objective was a realism which would

transcend this tendentious duality. In it we were joined by other non-cinematic groups all of whom shared our aspiration towards an art which would be simultaneously popular and of high quality.

: Fernando Birri As can be seen from the previous chapter, the emergence of non-Western commercial film industries is not limited to a single period—say, the 1930s to 1950s—-and the 1980s problems of self-expression in the newly established cinemas of Asia would seem to be very similar to those experienced decades before in Egypt or India, Brazil or China. While non-Western industrial development does not follow the pattern set earlier in the West, there are certainly marked similarities between individual industries emerging in different countries of the non-Western world over a long period of time but in response to very much the same international economic pressures. Though the impetus toward the industrialization of film production and the creation of a local cinema to fill local needs is far from exhausted, for the past thirty years at least, other possibilities of expression have been at times open to film makers from the non-Western world who wish to take a more individual stance. These openings, which existed nowhere before the mid-1950s, relate very directly to the changes in the balance of world power in the decade following 1945, which allowed the emergence of a distinctive “third world” identity.

World War II was an even greater stimulus to industrialization in Latin : America and Asia than was the 1914—18 conflict. Both the allies (in India) and Japan (in Southeast Asia) fostered production that would aid the war effort. Import shortages and the closing of traditional trade routes led to a diversifica73

74 Theory and Practice tion of local manufacturing, much of it controlled by local capital. As the old empires crumbled in the East, the new sense of nationalism that swept first Asia and then Africa gave a fresh impetus to the drive to industrialize. One of the striking features of the years immediately following World War If was the dismantling of the European empires and the granting or seizing of independence throughout Asia. The 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent led to the emergence of the independent states of India and Pakistan. Even more momentous was the Chinese Revolution, completed in 1949 by the communists under Mao Tse-tung. The Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia had weakened colonial ties, and in some cases the occupiers had fostered nationalist movements and granted limited autonomy. As a result, a number of previously occupied countries quickly achieved independence: Indonesia in 1945, the Philippines in 1946, and Burma in 1948. Ho Chi Minh’s proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 was followed by the eventual defeat of the French in the first Indo-Chinese War, with the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Not surprisingly, it was the Asians who were the prime movers in the 1955 Bandung Conference of twenty-nine Afro-Asian states, the first of many such gatherings to assert a Third World identity and to condemn colonialism and racial discrimination. In the Arab world, the overthrow of King Farouk in Egypt in 1952 and the appearance of Gamal Abdel Nasser, first as prime minister (1954) and then as president (1956), seemed to point the way ahead, particularly when Nasser emerged from the Suez crisis of 1956 with strengthened credibility. In North Africa, Morocco and Tunisia both achieved their independence in 1956, while south of the Sahara the first moves were made toward the decolonization that led to independence for Ghana in 1957 and for Guinea in 1958. In Latin America, which had been largely independent for a century or more, there was a setback in 1954 when the democratically elected government of Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala was overthrown in a coup organized by the U.S. Fruit Company and the CIA. But in compensation, the 1950s saw two rare examples of real social revolution: in 1952 in Bolivia, where the MNR (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) under Paz Estenssoro set in motion key reforms, and above all in Cuba in 1959, with the overthrow of the corrupt dictator Batista by guerrillas under Fidel Castro.

independence and After These events were reflected in a new sense of personal and national identity, shared by film makers as much as by politicians. By 1955, as we have seen, the industrial base for film production existed in many parts of the nonWestern world, and in the wake of the increase in levels of film production, individual film makers from Asia, Latin America, and Egypt began to achieve

an

ndividual Authorshi 75 * C7

l realities i hel n 1 e traditions mers of the mid-1950 |e newco Ihe 9 ed this breakthrough all cam that droKke iti ression of their national real!Sies I Ww »

of the local entertainment-film

0 mm aireaing establ iti countries r fmoromready and, . e new film makers themselves, hin e

~ s who achieved thi

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roduct r y O ya. 5!ito .Torre Ray (b. 1 i _ Nilsson (1 2 8 gentina and Lester J . m Le public osocial i yi concern, a never Yl: 1Ze Lanka St h' een explicitl i | contradictions of Third- World b witnin osin ; * ’ ries ar i V Cal individu iti nitio al qualities, do no cinema. a : ming prolificallyAl t changing st cases, a strong local industr y rh V

gly by films from the West than by loca

p> ions. Amon g names mind that spring im ose a £ mediately th om . rom India,to Leopold are 924-7 (since I Cey e ; r James Peries (b. 1921)onfrom . ork, Character ects the tensions and icti political. It simply r O ourgceois elites from, gnoradical radicalalternati a native Moreover ay Torre Nilsson, and Peries are | = weal indiv; film makers who, for all their ery dividual q , do not call for a thorough-going redefiniti f : re able to continue filmi i twenty films 1 regimes and so ibuild upV een an oroeuvre of fift y yyears. /

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5

120 National Film Industries (1925—76), another Bengali, was marked for life by the partition of Bengal, which cut him off from his native Dacca. In a hectic twenty-four-year career littered with abandoned projects, Ghatak completed just eight features, including some of the key works of the Indian 1960s cinema. An uncompromising Marxist whose films are remarkable for the total absence of foreign influences, Ghatak dealt in his major works, especially The Hidden Star | Meghe dhaka tara (1960), with human disasters that had their starting point in the division of Bengal. His attempt to create a popular national cinema within the confines of the Indian film industry was, however, a failure, and he died—a bitter, disillusioned alcoholic—at the age of fifty, after completing one of the most harrowing of all filmic self-portraits, Reason, Debate, and a Tale / Jukti takko ar gappo (1974). In contrast to these figures, doomed by their romanticism or intransigence, Mrinal Sen (b. 1923), Ray’s exact contemporary, is a _ survivor. But his initial attempt to establish a name for himself within the Bengali film industry, with eight features between 1956 and 1967, met with no success. It was only with Bhovan Shome (1969), independently produced with funding from the Film Finance Corporation, that Sen was able to show himself to be a major director and begin the series of films that have made him an internationally respected figure. Since the early 1960s the Indian film industry has developed in various contradictory ways. The Bombay all-India movie in Hindi has remained the commercial focus, though the number of Hindi films produced (114 in both 1950 and 1980) has not kept pace with the huge overall expansion of production. Bombay remains a high-risk investment area: budgets are normally at least four times as high as those of commercial film making in other regions and may at times be twenty times as high. As elsewhere in a gambling situation, the huge profits of the fortunate few are paralleled by the equally spectacular losses of the majority of investors. It seems generally agreed that the bulk of the risk capital is provided by investors from outside the industry, who frequently end up with an expensive imitation of last year’s hit feature that flops at the box office. The difficulties of hitting just the right note for an audience are enhanced by the frequent delays caused by the star appearing in perhaps a dozen other films simultaneously and the experienced producer making the most of a situation that allows him to charge the costs of his expensive — life-style to a project funded by someone else. Bombay is often referred to as India’s Hollywood, but despite the deceptive regularity of its output, it has little in common with the heyday the Hollywood studio system experienced from 1930 to the mid-1950s. There the financing was long-term, the control was vested in the New York financiers and the Hollywood heads of production, the stars were kept under tight studio control, and the whole structure was held together through the vertical integration of production, distribution, and exhibition. Despite its size, the Indian film industry has not taken its capitalist methods this far. Its organizational struc-

The Indian Subcontinent 121 tures still echo those of the chaotic pioneer days of cinema in the West around

World War I—when fortunes were made by marketing The Birth of a Nation—rather than those subsequently devised by the Hollywood studios. The riches of this overinflated and often formula-ridden cinema still remain to be fully explored, since Indian critics tend to ignore it now that they are offered a choice of “alternative” Indian cinemas.

The first of these alternatives is offered by the regional cinemas, which have developed remarkably in the postindependence era. The Bengali and Marathi cinemas, which were among the first to be established and seem to have had the richest pioneering development, have remained fairly constant in their output, with around forty films a year in Bengal and under twenty in Maharashtra (the Bengali cinema having been particularly stunted by the loss of half its audience through the 1947 partition). But at the same time there has been an explosion of film production in the four southern states of India, to the extent that three of these regional cinemas surpassed Hindi cinema in the numbers of films produced in 1980. In the period from 1950 to 1980, Tamillanguage cinema (in the state of Tamil Nadu) rose from 19 to 140 films a year, Telegu cinema (Andra Pradesh) from 18 to 133, Malayalam cinema (Kerala) from 6 to 127, and Kannada cinema (Karnataka) from | to 50. Since most of this production is based in Madras, this city has become the most prolific film producing center in India, and indeed in the world. An assessment of this production is far beyond the scope of this book, but a recent study of Malayalam cinema does offer some insight into the organization of regional production.” There was no early film making tradition in Kerala. Only two films were made there during the silent era and just three Malayalam-language films in the years up to 1947. When India was divided into linguistically based states in 1956, production stood at a mere half a dozen films a year. It was not until the early 1960s that output began to rise, reaching 31 in 1965 and 44 in 1970. The late 1970s saw a veritable explosion of film making, which reached a peak of 127 in 1980, and this growth went hand in hand with a similar increase in the

| number of film theaters. There are a number of factors contributing to this growth. The Kerala state government has given support to the cinema as a means of fostering the Malayalam language, and investment capital has been readily available from locals who have made money working in the Persian Gulf. In the 1970s producers hit on a formula which gave Malayalam cinema a bad reputation but very wide distribution, making a series of “sex”? films with

titillating titles like Sexy Dreams / Rathi nirvedam, Her Nights / Avalude ravukal, and A Night in the Rest House / Satharathil oru rathri. But basically, Malayalam films are budgeted to recover their costs from the local market,

occupying around three-quarters of the screen time in Kerala’s cinemas. In | Kerala, a state with high literacy but very little industrialization, film is one of the largest industrial enterprises, and in a way rare elsewhere it has captured a

rural audience: in 1978 only 9 of the state’s 969 cinemas were located in the

122 National Film Industries capital, Trivandrum. Though the Kerala State Film Development Corporation has worked to develop studio facilities within its own boundaries, most studio

- work is carried out in Madras, the traditional political capital of the south. Though working on a far smaller scale than the all-India cinema, the Mala-

yalam film industry is organized along the same lines, with independent producers, investors from outside the industry, a plethora of small distributors, and its own array of stars who appear in film after film. Recent years have seen the growth of a kind of cinema that, while remaining within the commer-

cial format, has begun to treat social themes. In 1984, for example, Kerala contributed six films (more than any other state) to the nationwide selection of twenty-one features that made up the Indian Panorama at Filmotsav °84. These included K. N. Sasisharan’s The Other Shore | Akkare, a comedy about the impact on local society of returnees from the Persian Gulf; P. Padmarajan’s In Whose Nest | Koodevide, which looked at the position of women in society; and K. G. George’s Lekha’s Death—A Flashback / Lekhayude maranam oru flashback, an investigation of the suicide of a teenage film star based on a real

incident in the early 1980s.

Though Malayalam cinema is typical in its rapid expansion in the 1970s, there is no one pattern of development for India’s regional cinemas. What is remarkable is that films are now made in virtually every corner of India and in a staggering range of languages (twenty in 1984, including Malvi, Briybhasha, and Maithili). In 1982, even the remote state of Manipur, which had made just nine films in all, beginning in 1972, achieved its moment of glory with the

international showing of Aribam Syam Sharma’s My Son, My Precious / [magi ningthem, a touching drama which stood apart from 1980s trends and adopted a tone and technique that directly recalled the realist film making style of the 1950s. While much of the impetus for cinema has come from state administrations, there has also been crucial input from the national government. The 1960s saw the setting up of a Film and Television Institute (located in the old Prabhat studios in Pune) and a national film archive. The government took on a direct involvement with the industry through the establishment of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and Indian Motion Picture Export Association

| (IMPEC), whose functions were merged in 1980 under the umbrella of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). Thanks to this active government support, international film festivals have become a regular part of _ India’s cultural life, arrangements are made to screen Indian films abroad, and

a number of ambitious film projects have been state-funded in whole or in part. Thus, onto the regional pattern of development is superimposed a second “‘alternative” cinema: the New Indian Cinema, consciously fostered by central government initiative. Underlying this new cinema is a total hostility toward the commercial industry: the New Indian Cinema is “‘the creation of an intellectual elite that is

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The Indian Subcontinent 123

itionininIndia. India.” * Its farehetheCal keenly aware of the human condition ts forerunners Calcutta Film Society and Ray’s first feature, Pather panchali, which was com-

pleted only thanks to a grant from the West Bengal government. This example has now been widely imitated in India, and government and state aid for pro_ duction has been plentiful, but such initiatives have never been accompanied

e ° ° ° ° . e * o ‘ * * *¢ e ° °> ° e» * o e Pd e ry ° . 6 e * e i : ee9*°®e

by a similar development of an art house exhibition circuit. Whereas the qualities of Ray’s film allowed it to find its audience, both in Bengal and worldwide, many films of the New Indian Cinema have been esoteric works that never reached any audience, either at home or abroad (apart from isolated festival screenings). The output of the new generation, a dozen years or more after Ray, reflects the dichotomy of the two other founding fathers to whom the movement has looked: the intransigent Ritwik Ghatak and the more flexible and commercially minded Mrinal Sen. The range of films produced is remarkably wide, and a wholly personal note is to be found in the work of a striking number of the new film makers, many of them graduates of the Film and Television Institute at Pune. In the fifteen years after Sen’s Bhovan Shome (1969) was financed by the Film Finance Corporation, the rigid separation of film art from the film industry has meant that none of the government-funded newcomers has been able to offer

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29. Lester James Peries: Changes in the Village /Gamperaliya (Sri Lanka, 1964)

The Indian Subcontinent 131 working as a writer and journalist, he began his film making career with three short films shot in London in 1949-50. When he returned to Ceylon in 1952 it was to join the Government Film Unit set up by the British documentarist Ralph Keene. He left in 1955 to work as an independent feature film maker, forming a team of collaborators who continued to work with him on subsequent projects. His debut film, Rekava, was a conscious revolt against the predominant style of Indian studio production, showing the clear and acknowl-

edged influence of both British documentary and Italian neorealism, with which he had come into contact in London. For all its lasting interest, Rekava was not a success with local audiences, and Peries’s career was slow in getting under way. He made only two further films in the first decade of his directing career, The Message / Sandesaya (1960), an epic set at the time of the Por_ tuguese occupation, and Changes in the Village | Gamperaliya (1964), a first literary adaptation. But he was later able to complete thirteen features in the eighteen years spanned by Between Two Worlds /| Delovak athara (1966) and End of an Era / Yuganthayo (1983). In this time Peries has confronted the problems of the international English-language coproduction (in The God King, 1975), but more often he has filmed literary adaptations, including a trilogy from novels by Martin Wickremasinghe and Leonard Woolf’s colonial tale Village in the Jungle | Baddegama (1980). His characteristic style has been summed up by Derek Elley: ““He lacks the polemic anger which motivates much Third World film making and is clearly uninterested in large tableaux. His is the cinema of simple contrast, subtle shades of feelings and emotions—in short, lives which reflect larger conflicts being played out just out of view.” * The political changes in Pakistan after the 1971 defeat, like the establishment of military rule under General Zia in 1977, appear to have had only a limited impact on Pakistani cinema, which since 1947 has shown little if any marked national identity and absolutely no political awareness. Production remains around a hundred films a year, sixty in Urdu and most of the remainder in Punjabi. Javed Jabbar (writing in 1977) saw no break in Lahore film production in 1971, despite the horrors of the civil war, but rather an unbroken continuity following the exclusion of Indian film imports in 1965. After this ban, Pakistani cinema “‘was given the fullest possible protection to develop an artistic and commercial independence,”’ but “‘twelve years of protection have had almost the opposite effect: inspired imitation gave way to outright plagiarism; the straitjacket became normal attire.” »* Administratively, the 1970s saw a variety of developments in Pakistani cinema following the Indian example. In 1973, film was transferred from the

Ministry of Information to the Ministry of Education and Culture, and the Pakistani National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) was set up. The

NFDC assumed control of the issue of import licenses for the purchase of raw |

132 National Film Industries film stock as well as of the import of foreign films into Pakistan. It also fostered some cultural and film society activities. Among the NFDC’s more interesting attempts to break out of the narrow

confines of purely local production was the invitation it issued to Jamil Dehlavi, the Western-educated son of a diplomat, to make a feature film in Pakistan. After studying law at Oxford and film and television in the United States, Dehlavi had attracted some attention at film festivals with a short film,

Towers of Silence. Returning to Pakistan early in 1977, Dehlavi was. able to , enjoy considerable freedom during the shooting of The Blood of Hussein, } thanks to his foreign. coproduction funding and connections. But when General Zia seized power, he had to smuggle the negative out of the country, and, his passport having been confiscated by the authorities, it was two years before he could make his own escape. Although the completed film has never been allowed a screening in Pakistan, Dehlavi was able to return in the early 1980s to begin a second feature, Maila, which purported to be a documentary on local circuses and folk festivals but was in fact a reflection on the Bhutto years and an indictment of military rule. Dehlavi’s intentions were discovered, and again he was able to make his escape with the material already shot. The film, eventually completed with funding from British television, shows all the

marks of its disjointed production and Dehlavi’s understandable ambiguity of | feeling toward Bhutto. Development was muted too during the 1970s in the newly independent state of Bangladesh. Zahir Raihan, whose Glimpses from Life had been a patriotic success in 1970 and who was the main architect of a scheme to develop a truly national cinema in Bangladesh, mysteriously disappeared in the aftermath of the fighting in 1971, and his plans came to nothing. Instead, with film production protected from Indian competition and trade practices as dubious as in India, the Bangladeshi film industry became a favorite focus of investment for war profiteers and speculators. In the early years of independence, production was fairly steady at around thirty to forty films a year (mostly lowbudget and in black-and-white, and all made in Bengali). A peak of fifty-one films was reached in 1979, when movie theaters numbered about 290 (an increase of 100 since 1971). Little of this output is of more than local interest,

except the Indian director Ritwik Ghatak’s sole feature shot in the region where he was born, A River Called Titash | Titash ekti nadir naam (1973), five feature films shot between 1973 and 1980 by Alamgir Kabir, and a first ' feature, made in a style echoing Satyajit Ray and neorealism, which achieved some showing abroad, Shaik Neamat Ali and Mashiuddin Shaker’s The Ominous House / Surja dighal bari (1979). State involvement has been fairly limited in Bangladesh, apart from the establishment of a National Film Institute and archive in Dacca and some steps to stamp out the more outrageous instances of plagiarism (Kabir estimates that over 70 percent of the films pro-

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, The Middle East and Africa 193 the new regime recognized the efforts of the young intellectuals of the 1970s “to start a kind of sober and meaningful cinema” but found that “‘the themes and approaches of these avant-garde film makers were too abstract to attract the masses of filmgoers.”’ Particular venom was reserved for the routine production of the shah’s era, “‘a commercial film making of the lowest order. Film after film dealt with the lives of thieves, prostitutes, plunderers, drug dealers, etc., and sought to attract and entertain an illiterate audience by presenting scenes of sex, violence, dance and music. The low cost of this type of films __ aroused the interest of many profiteers who were in fact illiterate persons running brothels and cabarets.” * The new regime was not, however, against the cinema as such (described by Khomeini as “one of the achievements of civilization’), and production resumed at around a dozen films a year, mostly, it seems, tales of the revolution shaped as adventure stories. There is a close connection, too, between political and economic changes and the development of cinema in Turkey. The Lumiére representatives visited Istanbul to demonstrate the cinematograph at the Imperial Palace in 1896, and public screenings occurred in a cosmopolitan district of the city the following year. But cinema was slow to establish itself in the Ottoman Empire. It was not until 1908—the year of the revolution by the Young Turks, which led to constitutional changes and far-reaching modernization—that a permanent cinema was established in Istanbul by a Rumanian, Sigmund Weinberg, the local agent of Pathé. Although Weinberg shot some documentary footage before World War I, the film generally regarded as the first national production (and a reflection of the growing strength of Turkish nationalism) is the 104meter documentary Demolition of the Russian Monument at Ayastefanos / Ayastefanos taki Rus abidesinin yikiligi, shot in 1914 by a Turk, Fuat Uzkinay (1888 — 1956).

During 1914-18, much of the impetus for film making came from one of the country’s major modernizing forces, the army, and when the Army Film Center was established on the German model in 1915 by Enver Pasha, Weinberg became its first head. In 1916 he began shooting what was intended as the first Ottoman feature film, Marriage of Himmet Aga/Himmet Aga’ nin izdivact, but at the outbreak of war he was expelled as an alien, and the film was not finished until 1918 by his successor, Fuat Uzkinay. By then two other feature-length films, The Claw / Pence and The Spy / Casus, had been made by Sedat Simavi (1896—1953) for the National Defense Association. 1918 saw the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which had entered the war on the side of the Germans, and the state was threatened with dismemberment by the victorious allies. There continued to be limited film making during the struggle for inde-

pendence (1918-23), and the first private film company, Kemal Films, was established briefly in 1922. But the first five years of Kemal Atatiirk’s secular republic saw no film production at all in Turkey. _

194 National Film Industries The revival of Turkish film making after the founding of Ipek Film in 1928 coincides with a period of economic growth in the country as the petty-bourgeois Kemalist forces began to build the basis of a state-capitalist economy during the 1930s. Under the leadership and control of the rising national and petty bourgeoisies, the state’s resources were directed towards the develop-

| ment of an industrial economy that would open the path to an “independent” national capitalism. Throughout this period, Turkey’s economic position improved substantially —foreign firms were nationalized, capital goods—producing

manufacturing industries were set up and efforts were made to mechanize the agricultural sector.’

The principal film maker for Ipek was Muhsin Ertugrul (1892-1979), director } of the Municipal Theater in Istanbul, who made twenty films between 1928 and 1941, including the first Turkish sound film, The Streets of Istanbul / Istanbul sokaklarin, in 1931. Ertugrul’s theatrical style set the pattern for younger directors, but production remained low—under six films a year throughout the period up to 1948, when changes in taxation began to make local production profitable. This was also a time of great prosperity for some, as $1 billion of U.S. aid was poured into Turkey between 1948 and 1952 (Turkey joined NATO in 1952). _ The 1950s were a period of rising production—from two films in 1947 and nineteen in 1949 to between thirty and forty a year by the early 1960s. This

growth provided the basis for the emergence of Turkish cinema at international film festivals in the 1960s, as when Metin Erksan (b. 1929) won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1964 with Dry Summer / Susuz yaz. In addition, the 1950s were an important decade; the political change of 1950 (the election of the Menderes Democratic government) “led to big changes in art, cinema and culture generally. Broadly speaking, Turkish movies up to that time had been dominated by people from the theatre. In the 1950s, directors like Atif Yilmaz and LiitfiO. Akad started rejecting theatre actors and using people from the street. They also started choosing subjects from real life, everyday subjects.”’ '° It was these changes that drew Turkey’s best-known director Yilmaz Giiney (see chapter 14), into the cinema in 1958 as a writer and actor for Atif Yilmaz. When, after a spell in prison, Giiney turned to directing in the late 1960s, the Turkish social scene was undergoing fresh transformations, many of which served to support an expanding film industry. As two U.S.-based critics point

out, ,

The 1960s saw a rapid transformation of both the economy and social life, echoed by a vigorous intellectual debate concerning the directions and goals of both the economic base and ideological formations (e.g., politics, literature, cinema) of Turkish society. The decade was dominated by a massive influx of international capital, a rapid increase in urbanization, and a political enfran-

The Middle East and Africa 195 chisement of the masses according to the liberal terms of the 1961 Constitution. Between 1960 and 1970, urban population increased by 5 million."

Film output reached its peak in 1972, when no less than 298 feature films

, (mostly quickly shot on low budgets in as little as five days) were made. Young Turkish film makers began to make international reputations, including two collaborators of Yilmaz Giiney, Zeki Okten (b. 1941) and Serif Goren (b. 1944). The domestic audience numbered one hundred million, and there were

fifteen hundred indoor theaters and seventeen hundred open-air ones (used only in summer). As a cheap and accessible form of entertainment, Turkish films were very popular with the mass of the population and sold well abroad. Though there was political censorship (intense at times), the censorship code in other matters (based on that in Mussolini’s Italy) was interpreted sufficiently liberally to allow a proliferation of pornographic films (variously estimated as a third or a half of the total output), a situation virtually unique in a country where the principal religion is Islam. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, film production was an area of activity neither dominated by direct investment by

foreign companies nor supported or tightly controlled by the state. But the market was still dominated by the four or five hundred imported films (mostly

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« * » ° ° 7 J il / J Le [ } J j 1 i ) i

evidence that Chahine’s Christian upbringing or English-language education made nim feel any fess Of an Bg yptian. n the contrary, hile he is able in his

later fil t ff ivid trait fE ti b d,h far | t

ease with non-E tian subjects and settings. His film on the Algerian war

amtia/ Jamia ai-Jazairtyya (1 which was shot entirely in E {, was

bjected t itici in Al d ite th ident si it f hi

among his least important works. His best work is profoundly Egyptian

though this does not that he has b ble t k easily in his nati

countr y. e three major Ims he comp eted in the late 1970s all had to be

>- 9

°* °* e° *: * e

made 1n coproduction with the Algerian state film company,.ONCIC; yet in each case the su ject, settings , ang actors were tota y gyptian.

Unlike Satyajit Ray, who spent fi ing Path hali and

wh de his first feat fi th inst f Indi ial cinema, Chahine entered the film industry as an assistant director immediate y upon nis r eturn from the United States. B y the age of twent y-four he *

had completed first aS feata di t ther Amin Baba /Amin p 1S firsthis reature director, Father/Amin Baba (1950 min ( ), concerned to cep working an to remain in touc it is audience. me nas

Youssef Chahine 245 shown on several occasions that he feels the exclusion of Arab films from European screens very keenly, but he is understandably far more bitter about the 80 percent of screentime that foreign films traditionally enjoyed in Egypt. He knows all too well the defects of the traditional Egyptian commercial film, but at the same time he is emphatic in his insistence that it is the responsibility of Egyptian film makers to make works accessible to a mass audience. Symptomatic of his attitude is his acceptance of the commercial failure in 1958 of Cairo Station / Bab al-hadid—a remarkable film that is generally regarded as

the best of his early works—and his subsequent resolve to work in a more _ popular style. Similarly, when it became difficult for him to set up projects in Egypt in the mid-1960s, he moved to Lebanon for two years, even though he

dislikes working abroad. ,

While all Chahine’s work shows his awareness of the commercial context, it

is also intensely personal. Indeed, as his technical skills have increased, he has allowed more and more of his intimate emotions and attitudes to emerge—

in this sense, Alexandria . . . Why? and An Egyptian Story /Hadutha misriyya (1982) are the culmination of his work over thirty years. From the first, he showed an interest in the psychology of the individual, and madness and

schizophrenia are a constant feature of his work. At the same time he has shown an increasing concern, firstly to situate these traumas socially and then to attempt the more difficult task of offering an analysis of the interaction of

the individual and society. The growth in sophistication from the straightforward social realism of Cairo Station to the much more complex (though perhaps less successful) allegory of The Choice / Al-ikhtiar (1970) at the beginning of the 1970s is significant in this respect. Although he admitted in 1970 that his politicization had “developed haphazardly,” his concern with politics reaching its culmination with The Sparrow/ Al-usfur (1973) in the early 1970s, this development has not led to the adoption of any abstract theory of society. His films continue to depict a living, contradictory reality: indeed, his latest, and arguably finest, films achieve a quite remarkable fusion of the political and the personal. Because of this sense of growth—of the development, change, and continuity of thought from one film to the next— , Chahine’s work demands a chronological treatment that relates the films to the social and political changes Egypt has undergone since the 1950s. Chahine made his feature film making debut in 1950, that is, two years before the overthrow of King Farouk. Despite the social and political disorder of the country, this was a time of expansion for Egyptian cinema, and Chahine was able to work without too many constraints (as he later wryly admitted, ‘‘It wasn’t at the beginning of my career that I made my worst films, but right in the middle” ). Chahine’s stance at this time seems to have been essentially apolitical, and his films were concerned largely with individual rather than social problems. He depicts himself in An Egyptian Story as having been obsessed with achieving fame abroad and with success on Hollywood’s terms. Chahine

246 Cinema Astride Two Cultures did draw one lasting value from the Farouk era: the abiding stress on toler-

ance, so apparent in Saladin/Al-nasir Salah al-din and Alexandria .. .

Why?. 7

Given his social origins, it was natural for Chahine to welcome the Nasser revolution of 1952, since at first this was essentially a bourgeois nationalist movement without an articulated ideology. In the spirit of national renaissance and renewed patriotism, the film industry flourished and took on a new seriousness. In the 1950s, serious writers such as Naguib Mahfouz (who worked with Chahine on Jamila, Saladin, and later, The Choice) and the socialist novelist Abderrahman Sharkawi (author of The Land/Al-ard) began to involve themselves with cinema for the. first time, opening the way for the production of films reflecting the life of ordinary people. The problem for Egyptian intellectuals—Sharkawi apart—was their own lack of knowledge and contact with the peasants who formed three-quarters of the population. Chahine has been very honest about the limitations of his approach. He regards Black Waters/ Siraa fil mina (1956) as one of the best of his early films but admits its weaknesses: “‘For the first time I interested myself in the workers’ world. Without

understanding their problems, it’s true. I really liked them, the workers. I found they were good guys and I wanted to tell a story taking place among them. But there were still many confusions in my mind and it’s only later that I’ve come to see that it wasn’t enough just to like the workers.” ! Analogies can be found between Chahine’s celebrated Cairo Station (1958) and the work of the neorealists. There is the same sympathy for the poor and oppressed and a like attempt to link personal problems to social conditions. Chahine admits a debt to the Italians: ““De Sica and Zavattini, in one sense and without knowing it, helped us enormously since we were able to stress that it was only thanks to neorealism that the Italian cinema had achieved an international reputation.” * Like Bicycle Thieves, Cairo Station was rejected by those whose problems it presented, and Chahine, like De Sica, was attacked in certain film circles for having shown aspects of reality that gave foreign audiences a bad impression of the Arab world. The crucial limitation of both the De Sica—Zavattini team and Chahine at this period is the inability to go beyond mere description of individuals and offer an analysis of society as a whole. Symptomatic of this is the concentration on social outcasts rather than on activists. Though one of the leading characters in Cairo Station is a trade union organizer, the labor theme is subordinate to the psychological break-

down of the crippled and sexually frustrated newspaper vendor, Kenawi, played with considerable force by Chahine himself. Nevertheless, the frankness of this portrayal is remarkable in the context of Arab cinema of the 1950s and anticipates the openness of the self-revelation of the two late autobiographical works. The early 1960s in Egypt were marked by two developments: the formulation of the concept of Arab socialism by President Nasser, and Nasser’s emer-

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