New voices on screen

In the second and final part of the survey of this millennium's great films, MAITHILI RAO says that cinema will survive into the next century.

OTHER auteurs - Michaelangelo Antonioni, Frederico Fellini and Bernardo Bertolucci - quickly outgrew their neo-realistic beginnings to find a their unmistakably unique voices. Fellini is a filmmaker you love passionately or hate with equal fervour. But you can't be indifferent because he makes art and entertainment out of his unapologetic self-obsession. He conveys not only his passionate engagement and despairing dis-engagement with his art but subtly shifts gears and makes it universal in film after great film, "La Dolce Vita", "La Strada" (where the incomparable Giulietta Masina breaks your heart with her gamin charm and gallant optimism) and "81/2", Fellini's masterful take on his own career. Fellini found his felicitous alter ego in Marcello Mastroianni and one of cinema's great collaborations enriched our viewing experience.

Some films become cult films for other filmmakers, quoted endlessly: overtly, slyly, subversively and in a spirit of celebration. "Blow-Up" is the most accessible film in Antonioni's bleak abstractions of reality. Antonioni's constant icon, the enigmatically lovely Monica Vitti is absent here. Her absence is filled with a breathtaking use of striking colours in a film that works like a thriller set in swinging London.

The Italian auteur who commands international backing today is Bernardo Bertolucci, including the Chinese government collaboration in making "The Last Emperor". But his masterpiece is undoubtedly "Novecento/1900", when the post "Last Tango in Paris" reputation (or notoriety?) got him stars of the stature of De Niro and Depardieu in an ambitious epic that encapsulates the early decades of this century through the life and fate of two men born on the same estate when the new century dawns. Through the vicissitudes of their lives, the viewer becomes privy to the process of history. The other side of Bertolucci, the passionate poet who brought a poet's sensibility to cinema was honed in a series of superb films like "The Conformist" and "The Spider's Stratagem". "1900" is the work of political maturity and poetic expression. The result is a true epic when there are far too few genuine epics.

If anyone doubted the stamina of cinema in the age of television, "Cinema Paradiso" (1988), Tornatore's loving reaffirmation of faith in the power of movies to enchant and inspire is heart- warming. It is tempting for every film buff - and aspiring filmmaker - to see himself in the young protagonist who watched movies from the kindly projectionist's room in a small, one- theatre Sicilian village. Tornatore pays a funny, affecting and affectionate tribute to the many stars and directors the young boy devoured with such voracious appetite and audiences everywhere have responded to the director's sheer love for cinema.

Though the British have been overwhelmed by Hollywood and their best actors gained international recognition only after working in American movies, their undoubted auteurs have been David Lean - master of the small, bitter-sweet classic like "Brief Encounter" and grand sweeping epics like "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Dr. Zhivago"; Powell Pressburger who made the exuberant fantasy of afterlife in "A Matter of Life and Death" as well as the disturbing essay on voyeurism in "Peeping Tom". But it is Carol Reed's "The Third Man" that makes into the ranks of the great films of the century. "The Third Man" is not merely one of the best thrillers ever made from a Graham Greene screenplay specially written for the film but where many talents (Orson Welles, the actor is the foremost among them) came together for a moment of cinematic felicity. This darkly atmospheric mystery set in war-torn Vienna has an unintended charm which surfaces over Greene's bitter script with its characteristic undertow of Catholic guilt.

Hollywood's renaissance in the Seventies brought into being Coppola, Spielberg and Martin Scorcese - auteurs respected for their creative vigour and envied for their success. Scorcese's collaborations with De Niro in "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull"; Coppola's widely influential mafia sagas, the two Godfather films that reinterpreted film noir as new American tragedies; and Spielberg's artistic validation with "The Colour Purple" and "Schindler's List" have restored artistic credibility to Hollywood's derided commercialism. And Hollywood hasn't stopped spawning whiz kids who attain cult status with their witty post- modern remakes of old genres. Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" has had imitators in established filmmaking countries - our own "Satya" for instance - and a comparatively new industry like Indonesia where "Kuldeshak", a palpably pathetic tribute-cum- rework of "Pulp Fiction" was unleashed on unsuspecting Mumbai audiences at a recent festival.

To the cinephiles of the Seventies, Fassbinder and Wim Wenders offered a new, ruthlessly honest and stylistically brave introspection into German guilt over Nazism. Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun" is too fraught for post-modernist tastes but Wim Wenders has made the movie into a parable for our times. His "Wings of Desire" is a whimsical and metaphysical meditation about the nature of love when an angel who hovers over Berlin falls in love with a trapeze artist. Exorcising Nazi guilt has given us one of the greatest European films that transcend the setting to question the price an artist pays for collaborating with fascism. The Mephistophelean bargain recurs in European literature and theatre time and again but not in cinema. That is, until Istavan Szabo came up with "Mephisto". The theme is the gradual corruption of a gifted actor who mortgages his integrity for a meteoric rise in Nazi Germany. Szabo incorporates real life references for authenticity and invests the narrative with the resonance of art imitating life. Theatre- within - film is used to great effect and the film revealed Brandeur's tremendous talent to an international audience.

As other cinemas flowered into full artistic expression, the great pioneer of epic cinema fell into the sterile swamp of socialist realism. A few Russian auteurs braved the state control of Soviet Russia and had to wait for glasnost. But one name towers over all. Though Tarkovsky's "The Sacrifice", the last testament and summation of all that has gone before was made in Sweden, the filmmaker himself could never be anything but Russian. The deep religiosity and mysticism which is part of the Russian psyche is most profoundly expressed in the seven great films Tarkovsky made in a career spanning 24 turmoil-filled years. His films are dense with philosophical speculation and metaphysical abstractions but these are revealed through a poet's sensibility and a filmmaker's artistry. Tarkovsky called cinema sculpting in time and he sculpted poetic images of matchless beauty.

"Mirror", Tarkovsky's most personal film, recreates the elegiac sadness of remembered childhood and "reconstructs" those memories through the perspective of the narrator, who is the filmmaker himself. Tarkovsky's transitions are poetic mediations between the narrator's present and the unresolved past. The brilliant device of casting the same actress to play the protagonist's mother and wife bridges the past and present with a luminous intelligence that goes beyond obvious Freudian readings.

Poland provided the largest number of eminent migres - Roman Polanski is the darling of the international set - to the rest of the film-making world. There is the iron-willed Andrej Wajda who has stayed on - except for brief departures - through all the political turmoil and crippling deprivations of a country caught in the force of history. Wajda's "cinema of moral concern" plunged him headlong into capturing the Solidarity Movement, risking the wrath of official censorship in "Man of Marble".

Kieslowski is the one modern master to whom critical acclaim came quickly. It was the "Decalogue", the retelling of the Ten Commandments in a bleak housing lot in modern Warsaw that revealed the poet-philosopher who cut uncomfortably close to the bone with his acute observations of despair and moral ambiguity. "Three Colours: Blue, White Red" is a trilogy that attests to the creative vigour and cinematic rigour of an austere sensibility and original mind. The trilogy is far more lush but again, shot through with his signature themes of irony and elusive, refracted meanings.

It is said history is condemned to repeat itself as farce. Could farce be the only way for a filmmaker to cope with a history that mimics Kafka's moral nightmare? How does an enormously talented auteur like Emir Kusturica pick his way through the mine field of ethnic massacres of what was once Yugoslavia? He is a Bosnian who is persona non grata among Muslims and Croats for not being sufficiently anti-Serbian in "Underground". Here is a film which invents the cinematic equivalent of the theatre of the absurd on an epic scale with a cast worthy of a Russian novel.

To summarise the un-summerisable, "Undergound" follows the life of two friends, Marko and Blacky from the time the Germans bomb Belgrade in 1941. One of them goes underground with his band of resistance workers and only an accidental explosion brings this immured group to the surface in 1991, to the horrifying reality of the non-existence of a country as they knew it. Kusturica's exhilarating surrealism to grapple with history as it is being made is as valid as a more partisan attitude.

The Balkan war impinges strongly on Theo Angelopoulos, cinema's equivalent of the great Greek dramatists. With three deeply meditative films that form a loose trilogy - "Landscape in the Mist", "Suspended Step of the Stork" and "Eternity and a Day" - on the constant immigrations and search for a home in this troubled land where no man can be an island, is a master waiting for wider recognition outside the festival circuit.

Meanwhile, a world exposed to the great Japanese triumvirate has grown more receptive to other eminent Japanese filmmakers since then. Shohei Imamura's "Ballad of Narayama" is a stoic but pitiless depiction of the plight of the old who embrace solitary death after they are abandoned by the family when they become a burden. Nagisa Oshima has been most stridently modernist in his examination of contemporary Japan and courageous in his expose the Japanese army's brutality in "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence".

Cinema spawns new auteurs and mints new icons every year, if not few months, in some film-making corner of our globalized world. When cinema is in its second century, the old canon which has frozen over time needs to be thawed - just a little - to risk accommodating remarkable recent films from other, non-traditional countries - like Argentina, Australia, China, Iran, New Zealand.

Magic realism is Latin America's greatest contribution to literature. But the varied and divergent film cultures of the continent have floundered in their attempt to translate the untranslatable collage of memory and myth, history and the dailiness of everyday life, poetry and faith, unto the screen. Fernando Solanas comes closest to this challenge. "The Journey" has the sweep of history and the bite of sharp satire, the immediacy of a personal story and the distance of epic narrative. Solanas takes his protagonist, a teen-aged boy, on a journey from the extreme tip of South America north to Mexico, to search for his father as well as the roots of his ancient history. The stunning sweep of the camera captures the threatened magnificence of a magical continent.

Two films from the antipodal countries have made tremendous impact. Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is a ravishingly lovely film that teases you with its languorously erotic, unsolved mystery set in a girl's school in the decorous 1900s.

New Zealand's Jane Campion disproves a charge levelled against women directors that they lack creative spatial ability, the imaginative vision to organise space for the camera frame. "The Piano" conveys a cornucopia of images, redolent of a sense of space and time, to tell the dramatic story of a woman's repression and passion, revolt and liberation.

The two filmmaking countries that have made international waves over the last decade and half are Iran and China. It is as if the outside world's perception of a repressive state machinery has spurred filmmakers to make extremely original films that are true to a national sensibility and yet speak a universal language.

Zhang Yimou's "Raise the Red Lantern" starring the gorgeous Gong Li centres round the passions and fate of a new bride in a fortress like house and the period setting is encrusted with enough subtexts to keep us engrossed.

Chen Kaige's "Farewell, My Concubine" uses the art and artifice of The Peking Opera, the symbiotic relationship between art and the performing artiste, to interpret the turbulent decades from 1925 onwards without pulling any punches, through the fascinating story of two boys apprenticed to the Peking Opera.

The most feted auteur on the international festival scene is Abbas Kiarostami who has taken Iranian cinema's studiedly low key art to new heights. The transparent simplicity of his films makes an art of artlessness. Kiarostami brings the trained eye of a graphic artist for composition and movement right from "Where is the Friend's Home?" through to "Close Up", "Under the Olive Trees" and "Taste of Cherry". What is most unique to Kiarostami's films is the spontaneous building up of a coherent, multi-layered narrative through small incidents told with episodic casualness. This is a quality shared by other outstanding Iranian films. They say more by saying less and most successfully through children in order to circumvent strict censorship. Cinema will survive well into the next century.

MAITHILI RAO

(Concluded)

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Section  : Entertainment
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