The 'how' and 'why' of plot plus six songs

THE SHOW started on time at the British Council on Tuesday.

The showman was Rajiv Menon, who dished out his lecture, in true fillum style, as he interspersed his narrative with song, dance and drama sequences thrown in, keeping his audience engrossed for some 130 minutes.

Almost a movie of a performance there, though the director preferred to call it story-telling in the ``harikatha'' tradition. Let's start with the ``intro scene'' - how the star of the evening made his entry.

A house-full hall of an apparently well-educated urban audience. The old hope he winds up the lecture on time. The young pray that it doesn't become one of those boring routines. Girls look forward to his talk hoping it would be as good as his looks. And the boys just waiting to take a tip on what it takes to be a man like Rajiv Menon.

The expectations were high. He had to break the ice. He did that quite instantly and with ease as he struck a conversational tone with his anecdotes on what distinguishes Indian cinema from International cinema.

Deepa Mehta once got the jitters when Aamir Khan asked for a story narration session in spite of the director sending him a bound script. With great difficulty, she did that, shuttling between scenes and found herself miserable at the end of the routine, only to have one of the insiders telling her at the end of it: ``Accha Hai (It's Good), Triangle subject... War backdrop''.

``Indian cinema is not written, it is told,'' Rajiv Menon finished his `entry scene' of the evening's ``harikatha''. He then went on to talk a bit about the history and origin of Indian cinema and its link with the choice of the Brits.

He narrated how `Shakunthala' emerged out of all three film industry centres in India then - Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, as theatre first and then movies, setting a trend of mythologicals and stories based on legends and literature.

And how movies thereon took on reforms as a subject, slowly leading to a divorce between literature and cinema. Rajiv spoke at length hoping to demystify the structure of the great Indian fillum, trying to reason out why Indian films are made the way they are.

Primarily because, we insert sequences that provide for ``relief'', a song or comic scene thrown in, diverting from the central plot, the way a `Harikatha' narrator does it when he notices someone in the audience about to snooze.

Thus, in Indian cinema, we have the plot plus six songs and one significant ``Interval block'' apart from an ``intro'' and a ``climax'' unlike three acts or five act structures of International narratives, which is what makes our cinema different from the International cinema, Rajiv told his audience.

Mani Ratnam and Rajiv were shooting the riot sequences for `Bombay'. There was this particular scene where the rioters pour petrol over the kids and try hard to light the match stick which the director told Rajiv (who was the cinematographer for the film) that it was for the ``Interval block''.

It kind of disturbed Rajiv then, whether such a scene would be apt for the interval block. Mani Ratnam then took him aside and told him that it was during the interval when the guy in the loo decides the fate of the film, decides if it's going to be a hit or not.

Earlier, he had pretested the story-structure holding readings with friends and relatives of the crew. That was when they told him it was different, all right but also that the girls would be stupid to fall in love when they are in the lowest ebb of life.

Thanks to the ``interval block'' concept, Rajiv took the `death of the old man' scene that appears in the 8th minute of `Sense and Sensibility' and placed it at the interval block of `Kandukondain...'.

He went on to talk at length on how he used certain motifs and audio cues from the song that would play in the minds of the audience much after they had seen the film. He spoke on how songs could take the story ahead, instead of applying brakes to the narrative, illustrating it with a song from the `Vennilave' song from `Minsara Kanavu' - an idea he hit upon, after studying Broadway musicals.

Rajiv's talk was well-paced, as he weaved the story of Indian cinema and its structure over the years and the intricacies of adaptations. He ran out of time all right, but covered a lot of ground on the topic he was asked to speak on, plus more.

He even wanted to screen parts of `Mother India' to elaborate his point on the history of Indian cinema, but sadly one critic from the organisers side thought it was ``irrelevant''. Anyone heard of `history' being irrelevant to `structure'?

By Sudhish Kamath

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