With conflict as the pivot

For serious film-makers of the East, violence is a major theme. Familial feuds and trials are not bypassed either, observes GOWRI RAMNARAYAN, who attended the recent Asian Film Festival, Cinefan 2001, in New Delhi.

IT IS often said that Asian cinema is oriented towards family relationships and home values. What emerged from Cinefan 2001 (August 26 - September 2), the annual festival of Asian films organised by the Asian film quarterly, Cinemaya, New Delhi, was that the serious film-makers of the world's largest continent see violence as a major theme.

Nothing new, you say. The West has been peddling it in mainstream and sidestream tracks. And haven't we seen it all in Bollywood versions?

But then, the "Asian'' violence is not the neurosis/psychosis of the sick mind as in the West. Nor is it cast in the popular mould of conflict, suspense, climax and resolution of masala movies. There is no intention to titillate. Instead, what you get is the explosion of despair over centuries of repression &151; caste driven, racial, religious, feudal, colonial, economic... Often, the family is foregrounded to project the film-maker's inner turmoil over the external disorders. Sometimes the protest &151; direct or indirect &151; also carries a note (inadvertent?) of resignation.

No, the family is not ignored or bypassed. But swamped by the global currents of pop culture, young people in Korea, Japan or Taiwan, no longer perceive the family as an unbreachable unit. If our generation knew the break down of the extended family, the present generation sees cracks in the nuclear family. More over, the leitmotif is not one of individual alienation, but of communitarian displacement.

Dysfunction is not confined to the disintegrating family or clan; it causes rifts between communities, civil strife and war. It destroys the security that true civilisation promises to human and non-human life. The crowded global village depends on harmony for survival. But it is the beast which stalks the cities, scorches the village landscape.

Take ``In the Shadow of the City'' (Dir: Jean Khalil Chamoun, Lebanon, 2000). Civil war drives 12-year old Rami and his family from their village home to Beirut. The boy works in a cafe, whose Christian owner gives up her trade when her musician friend is shot dead abruptly. The little girl Rami loves with all the passion of the very young, is lost in panic-stricken evacuation. Finally, the boy has no option but to join the factional fight. He is witness to wanton hostage taking, more wanton killing, and the plight of a woman with a child living through the nightmare of not knowing whether her husband is alive or dead.

Choric visual pans record the gashed, gouged out, gaping neighbourhoods. You become an impotent viewer of the senseless self destruction of a place and its people, of actions continually replayed across the world. Chamoun's narrative and visual sequencing have an old style straightforwardness. The cuts are clean, the pace is steady, the view direct. Yet he shows how a single man of courage with an active conscience, can make a difference. Rami saves a few lives. When the war ends, he limps along, while the sharks and goons are back in power in different guises.

Cinefan also showed that the committed Asian film-maker could succeed when opting for a form other than the catchier grids. Predictably, the memorable examples were from the early 1990s work of the Iranian auteurs Abbas Kiarostami and Darioush Mehrjui. But ``To Be Or Not To Be'' (Kianush Ayari) stood out for its adaptation of propagandist documentary format to yield new meanings. The opening scene has young Anik urging families to overcome prejudices to donate the hearts of the brain dead for those who (like herself) can find new life with the gift. Ayari adroitly gets past the stringent censors of his country, whether in a scene of murder (as a video clip), or in subtle disparagement of gender and religious discrimination. The young man's heart is gifted to an Armenian Christian woman.

Other festival award winners ``Demons'' (Dir: Mario O'Hara, Philippines) and ``A Poet'' (Dir: Garin Nugroho, Indonesia) tried to break new ground in their form, and used poetry to shade the blackness. There was sharp contrast in their treatment of the bestiality of military regimes. The former employed sexual perversion to underscore the devilry. There is only a one way ticket to hell, where evil takes over beyond redemption. The miasma of magic realism ended in a satanic blast of violence.

"A Poet'' avoided explicit violence in the true life account of the imprisoned poet Ibrahim Kadir, who found a voice to tell the world of the over 50, 000 men and women massacred by the Indonesian army with CIA support. Kadir played himself, not only with an intense feel for the tragedy he had known first hand, but also for the audio-visual medium in which he expressed it. The film brought its own nuances to the symbol of the poet as the victim, recordist and protestor against man's inhumanity to man.

The need for better distribution and exhibition for Asian films is often stressed. But Cinefan showed that they also require ruthless editing. At times the director framed scenes with irksome deliberation as if to say, ``Take note!" In his anxiety to avoid fast cutting and formula trends, he went to the other extreme where the pace was heavier than the content, with overlong visuals dissipating idea and emotion.

With a dusty Anatolian town for his location, the opening film "Clouds of May'' (Dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2000) had Muzaffer returning home to pull reluctant parents into his film project. Ceylan was impishly savvy in recording everyday conversations which really consist of two parallel monologues, each speaker following his/her own track. He also shows how selfishness in life is no bar to sensitivity in art. How else could Muzaffer have made such a heart warming video film on his parents? But the tired ploy of the film-maker looking at his craft made for mannered self consciousness. Without acute, self analytical editing the narrative became uneven, slack, sluggish.

Sometimes what seemed artificial at first developed a meaningfulness along the way. Set in dim lit, seedy rooms and streets, ``The Orphan of Anyang'' (Dir: Wang Chao, China) was unflinching and intense in depicting the desolation and the vulnerability of deprived waifs. Characters became props, underscored in nondescriptness. The extreme slowness, the deliberate fades and cuts created a slide show effect. But somehow, what started out as the tedious tale of an unemployed factory worker, taking on the job of looking after the illegitimate child of a hooker, made you sit up. The vision had wit after all, and the tenacity to wait for the moment of self confrontation.

The other film from China ``Song of Tibet'' (Dir: Xie Fei) was interesting more for its being banned in China and for its remote, colourful location. The Pakistani film ``Mujhe Chand Chahiye'' was a pitiful copy of Bollywood. Rare or not, such screenings are simply not worth the effort.

Not all the films sought forms different from Western models. Outright Hollywood clone ``House of Angels'' (Omer Kavur; Turkey) had a photo journalist on the run after photographing a mafia murder. Peter Brooks' celebrated ``Mahabharata'' turned the Indian epic into Shakespearean stage play. ``Betelnut Beauty'' (Taiwan) a local tale of youth going astray without the familial support structure, used swift rhythms and trendy pace for the doomed romance of the street seller of addictive betelnut and the boy who joins the gang. ``Sunday's Dream'' (Japan) dealt more obliquely with the same theme, of a son who has no job, or home with his divorced parents.

"Spinning Top'' (Dir: Teck Tan, Malaysia) focussed on multi- racial co-existence (Malay, Chinese, Indian) in apparent harmony. As youngsters belonging to different creeds dream together of hitting big time with their music band, legal bars and more primeval prejudices are churned up to prevent marriage between childhood friends. The visuals and sounds accented the discords of modern life, more persuasive than the clumsy attempts to invoke culture myths (in the dance of the sea nymphs who must return the fishermen they love back to the shore as they belong to the land).

With the financial constraints of niche festival efforts, Cinefan managed a fair choice of 55 entries, though it missed some acclaimed films like ``In the Mood for Love'' (Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong), Edward Yang's ``Yi Yi", or Marzieh Meshkini's arresting debut, ``The Day I Became a Woman". The opening and closing ceremonies, despite the presence of ministers, were short, crisp. The neat catalogue deserves special mention. But projection at the main venue (India Habitat Centre) was unsatisfactory; many of the films were sliced off at the top or bottom as the screen space could not accommodate the entire frame.

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