BOX-OFFICE SUICIDE

- Bombed cultures and the pin-minded First-Worldist

THE THIN EDGE - RUCHIR JOSHI

Often simple moments are the most revealing. In 1993, I made a film
called Tales from Planet Kolkata and was invited to show it at the
Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany. The film was a take-off on the
different image-straight-jackets Western media have constantly tried
to fit around Calcutta, and an examination of the motives from which
these attempts came, whether the culprit be a brilliant cineaste like
Louis Malle in 1969 or a no-hoper, kino-carpetbagger such as Roland
Joffe in 1992. In putting together the film, we used a variety of
cinematic quotes and visual languages, from tongue-in-cheek quotes
of Ray, Ghatak, Coppola and Antonioni to clips from Sixties British
TV newsreels to patua performances by Dukhhoshyam Chitrakar.
The film showed in competition at Oberhausen, and the response
from the viewers and the jury was gratifying.

As I went into the question-and-answer session the day after the final
Ray behind Antonioni
screening, I had every reason to assume that this international
audience and I were on the same page, at least as far as this kind of cinema was concerned: we
were all au fait with different non-commercial, anti-narrative strands of cinema that included
film-makers such as Dziga-Vertov and (Calcutta‟s beloved) J.L. Godard; we accepted that a
modern film-maker had not only the right but, somewhere, a moral duty to explore and push the
form; we had all, I assumed, gone far beyond the need for simple join-the-dots explanations to be
woven into a film itself. It was a foolish assumption on my part. Among the intelligent questions
— and the praise, from which no artist‟s ego is immune — came this one from a German film
critic: „How can you make a film like this? How are we here supposed to understand all these
obscure references to your culture!?!‟ The man wasn‟t being merely sharp, he was well and truly
furious, completely and utterly incensed. It took me a few moments to process it, and, in turn, his
question suddenly turned me incandescent with rage.

I thought of all those film-society screenings, of watching Bergman, Godard, Fassbinder,

Tarkovsky et al, and coming out and trying to decipher and decode all those references
completely internal to the cultures from which those films had emerged. Why was I, a Calcuttan,
supposed to try and make sense of an extremely long-drawn-out slow motion shot of a wooden
table in a pine forest overturning, throwing off a loaf of bread and a jug of water as it flipped?
What the hell were these marionette-like figures doing, frozen decoratively in a vast palace
garden, and why should I have been interested? What was the significance of a woman blowing
up herself and her house as she bent forward to light her cigarette from the gas range? What
journey had I taken that brought me to a point of thrill when a woman came out of a photo-booth
and said, blandly, the words: “Masculin. Feminin.”? I had a good answer to these questions, but
my own question was: why were we, all of us, as Indian or Asian or Third World artists,
supposed to stay corraled in the narrow pen of the „universal humanism‟ i.e easily readable,
mainstream, Western-structured narrative?
I can‟t recall the exact answer I gave the cretinous critic, but I remember it was satisfyingly
scathing. Most of the audience laughed and applauded, one or two others even taking issue with
the man in impassioned German. But if I thought I was participating in a new dawn of free
exchange and fluid transfer of expression between the North by North-west and the South, I was
going to be comprehensively and repeatedly disillusioned. What the man had signposted by the
tone and content of that single question was the following:

a) The rules applicable to you of the South are different from the rules applicable to us in the
West.

b) This is true not just of politics and economics but also of art or any creative endeavour.

c) Political and economic power resides with us — the customers. You, as a supplier from a
needy part of the world, are also the supplicant. We, therefore, have a right not only to demand
that all exotic artistic fruits of the world be brought to us, but also that they meet our stringent
conditions in terms of shape and size. Or, to put it differently, we want a home-delivery of
meaning, just as we want home-delivery of pizza, chow mein or tandoori chicken. In future,
please make sure we don‟t have to make any unseemly extra effort such as reading connected
books, seeing additional films, attending lectures or checking the net in order to decipher what
you are trying to say.

d) We, on the other hand, retain the right to make and say exactly what we want in the arenas of
art and culture, and we expect you, you little parochials, to see, admire, aspire to understand and
to genuflect. Because, of course, we are and forever shall be the centre of the universe.

Now, it‟s true that for every pin-minded First-Worldist, there are many many Westerners who
absolutely do not share this „value-system‟. But what continues to shock is the way some people,
people you would least expect to, unconsciously fall into the trap of cultural racism. Currently,
I‟m reading a wonderful book called Heat by Bill Buford who was the editor of Granta
magazine for 16 years and, before that, the fiction editor of The New Yorker. In this book,
Buford‟s recounting of his foray into a high-pressure NYC restaurant kitchen is marvellous, his
exploration of traditional Italian food fascinating, and some of his dscriptions, of food, of
humans, and of the strange processes linking the them, are gripping. But there‟s a tiny but telling
blip. While researching the development of the Italian corn cereal called polenta, Buford tries out
a pre-Columbus, i.e pre-corn, recipe: „Traditionally polenta is a winter dish…but after a bowl in
its barley form I came away with a grim historical picture of what January and February must
have been like for most of humanity, miserably sustained by foods that were colourless and sad,
like the season‟s sky.‟

Most of humanity, Bill? January and February colourless and grey for most of our ancestors? All
our food, then, sad? Or do you, by „humanity‟, mean only the sorry, backward, post-medieval,
primarily Caucasian, population of Northern Europe? Yes, he meant just that, and yes, if pushed,
Buffardo Bill may even correct himself. And anyway, you could argue, this is trivial, or, if you
like bad puns, a trifle. But the fact is, it‟s but a short transit from most of humanity eating grey
polenta to the words of a widow of a WTC victim speaking to BBC World on the fifth
anniversary of nine-eleven: “2, 749 people were murdered that day, and I want a world-class
memorial to commemorate those lives,” says the woman, quite understandably in sorrow, yet
quite remarkably poised and articulate, “…young, healthy, able people who were murdered here
that day, and I want the world to come here and pay its respects.”

Yup. Uh-huh. Sure. Me too, I want the world to pay its respects to innocent victims of butchery.
And pay its respects especially at each and every one of those locations wherever young, healthy
and possibly able people were cut down in their thousands, never mind all those places where the
old, infirm and disabled met an arguably less untimely albeit sudden end. Where shall we start?
And from how long ago is allowed? Johnson and Nixon‟s Vietnam and Cambodia? Menachem
Begin‟s Palestine? Ronald Reagan‟s Africa? Madeline Allbright‟s „acceptable collateral damage‟
of a 100,000 dead kids in Iraq? Or do you insist we stick solely to Osama bin Laden and George
bin Texas‟s downtown Manhattan?

Some might find the connection between a critic‟s reaction to an Indian art film and a grieving
widow at Ground Zero a bit tenuous. So let me put it another way: what Osama and gang did that
day was the ultimate kow-tow to Hollywood narrative, a ginormous climax with crashing planes,
smoke, fire, collapsing towers, screaming crowds running down the avenues, they took the finale
from a mainstream blockbuster (how eerily ironic that word now becomes) movie to its ultimate
logic; on the other hand, the slow and meticulous ten-year-long blockage of crucial medicines to
Iraq is, perhaps, a hard-to-follow, minimalist, avant-garde performance, and a B-52 bomber,
sitting many thousands of feet above the earth, dropping napalm on a carpet of green tropical
jungle doesn‟t quite have the same narrative payload; perhaps what is also created by these and
other acts by Western agencies is a set of references internal to each bombed culture, references
which are hard for outsiders to decipher — box-office suicide, in other words, and not something
that can compete with the mother of all box-office suicides.