Patal Lok: Unleashing Hell

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Recently India has seen a rise of metropolitan crime thrillers on digital platforms like Netflix, Hotstar and Amazon Prime. Starting with the trend-setting Sacred Games which came out in June 2018, many others followed such as Mirzapur, Delhi Crime, The Family Man and Criminal Justice. Patal Lok (The Nether World) easily fits into this crop of web series. Produced by Anushka Sharma and written by Sudip Sharma, this gritty and graphic series is directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy and stars seasoned actors Jaideep Ahlawat, Neeraj Kabi, Abhishek Banerjee, Gul Panag, Swastika Mukherjee and Mairembam Ronaldo Singh.

Patal Lok, which released in the middle of the Lockdown this May, cashes in on its huge urban home-confined viewers with a tale that is a heady mix of all that we have seen before and banalised-crime, violence, and testosterone- along with a portrayal of society’s dark underbelly, its middle-class and its elites in almost what can be seen as a formulaic manner.

This representation is one that viewers have now come to recognise as a politically correct and complex representation of the ‘real India.’ Patal Lok, while belting out tremendous performances and keeping alive a wide ken of social representation and nuance, suffers from too much judiciousness in trying to cover all the liberal bases. These formulaic frames of the ‘real India’ with its stuffy allies and crowded slums, its liberal dose of women-centred expletives, its grim realities and toxic family dynamics, the worst forms of caste oppression, transphobia and xenophobia, all appear to be milked for violence that can be packaged on celluloid as verisimilitude for urban viewers. It seemed authentic with Gangs of Wasseypur and Sacred Games in parts but when one is merely invited to look upon graphic and grisly violence as a spectacle, then one wonders what is there to take away from it all. However, watch it for the scintillating performances of Ahluwat, Kabi, Bannerjee and an utterly unexpected Gul Panag.

The first season of Patal Lok has nine episodes each of which is around 45 min. At first sight, it appears to be a story of four suspects, a Muslim man Kabir M. (Aasif Khan), a Nepali woman Mary Lyngdoh (Mairembam Ronaldo Singh), a serial murderer from Chitrakoot, Vishal Tyagi (Abhishek Banerjee ) and a Dalit Tope Singh (Jagjeet Sandhu) who are all from the furthest fringes of society and arrested in connection with a failed assassination attempt of a high-profile Delhi journalist Sanjeev Mehra (Kabi).

The protagonist, Inspector Hathi Ram (Ahluwat) lands the case of a lifetime as he has to find out the motivations of each of these suspects to commit the murder and in that journey encounters characters from different walks of life. His investigations and the slip-ups of his juniors get him suspended while the bad blood between him and his boss, his brother-in-law’s freeloading and his teenage son’s maladaptibility in a posh school, add to his woes. After his suspension, the case is taken up by the CBI and is given a cross-border twist that serves a statist agenda while missing out on crucial pieces of evidence before painting the suspects as terrorists. Moreover, the journalist himself uses the media hype to get a new sponsor for his media house.

In the end, it turns out that the four suspects were planted unbeknown to each other for the sole purpose of facilitating the encounter of Vishal Tyagi, or Hathoda Tyagi under the orders of Bajpayee (Anup Jalota), a local politician. Bajpayee fears that the murderous Tyagi could be turned against him after the death of the only man who could control him, Masterji (Akshay Sharma). The other three suspects are merely dispensable distractions for this motive while Hathi Ram discovers that his own seniors such as DGP Bhagat (Vipin Sharma) are involved in the conspiracy and are unable to carry out the encounter as a media van appears at the spot at the crucial moment.

While the script is racy and the plot well-paced, at the end of the series one is still confronted with one simple question. Doesn’t such an elaborate set up involving politicians, policemen, and a host of other middlemen seem too convoluted to kill one local murderer? Couldn’t Bajpayee have executed the deed discretely in one shot, the way that Gwala (Rajesh Sharma) gets rids of his henchman Firangi ( Abhimanue Arun) who betrays him?

However, there are some truly memorable moments. Patal Lok clearly establishes its theme in the opening scene with the cop protagonist Hathi Ram teaching the ropes to a junior Muslim cop Imran Ansari (Ishwak Singh) while driving a police van at night. Hathi Ram captures the segregation of classist and casteist India with the metaphor of the worlds swarglok (Heaven, where the gods live), Dharti (Earth, where the men live) and Patal Lok (Hell, where the vermin and the demons live), a topography described in the scriptures but which he has read on Whatsapp. Both men are from different generations, and different religions yet share the occupation of the law at the Outer Jamuna Paar Police Station, in New Delhi, an area that largely qualifies as ‘Patal Lok.’

Within the opening scene itself, we see the dynamic between the two. Hathi Ram is the more robust, hardy Hindu middle-class cop, seasoned with the ways of the world and later resorts to liberal doses of violence to discipline both his son and the detainees in his police station. Imran on the other hand, is less imposing, and portrays a gentler and more sensitive masculinity almost reminiscent of Ayushmann Khurrana in Article 15, as he tries to go around situations with tact and sometimes kindness instead of the use of aggression. As a younger cop, with access to an English education, he is at an advantage compared to Hathi Ram even as he aspires to and finally clears his Indian Civil Services exam. Yet he has to nevertheless confront the stereotypes associated with his community both at the level of senior colleagues and higher officers who doubt his professional competency based on his religion.

The four accused themselves have their own gruesome backstories each more violent and brutal than the other. Kabir M, a petty thief, lost his brothers to a horrifying lynching and is himself brutally murdered in jail, while Tope Singh, a Dalit from the Manjhar caste, kills his upper-caste bullies and escapes without realising the hell he has unleashed on his mother. He is also further spurned by his upper-caste mistress Chanda who finds a way to get rid of him by getting him to take the assignment that would get him arrested. Abhishek Banerjee plays Vishal Tyagi to eerie perfection with hollow eyes, death glaze, ominous look and all, which we have seen before in his portrayal of the paranormal Fakeer in the brilliant Typewriter series. Tyagi, the son of a farmer, has committed numerous murders with nothing but a hammer and finally finds a mentor in Donullia alias Masterji- a local clan lord. The most poignant character is that of Chini, a transgender orphan who goes through abuse and violence right from a young age and whose wordless presence in the entire series is a little disappointing as more than anything else, it appears to merely serve ticking the box of transgender representation.

As in many crime thrillers, the women in this series are static characters who occupy only a subordinate space be it the anxiety-ridden Dolly (Swastika Mukherjee), Sanjeev Mehra’s wife or Renu (Panag), Hathi Ram’s wife. Both are portrayed in domestic spheres. Dolly never confronts Sanjeev about his affair with a junior journalist Sara Mathews (Niharika Dutt), but instead turns her attentions to Savitri, a pregnant stray dog who she begins to care for. Renu’s way of dealing with her husband’s transgression of slapping her is to slap him back. Even Dutt who gets a significant upgrade from her role of Pearl in Pushpavalli, plays a character who has an affair with Sanjeev (à la House of Cards?) and eventually walks out when her professional integrity is compromised.

The various mythological references in the series from a continuous thread throughout and bring the series full circle. It begins with the description of the different ‘loks’ or worlds and ends with Hathi Ram explaining the importance of Yudhishthira’s devotion to the dog when he refuses to enter the gates of Heaven without it. The trope of the dog is an emblem for Lord Dharma we are told and whether with Donuilla, or Dolly, or Gwala or even Tyagi, the dog emerges as a symbol of compassion and empathy, something which Hathi Ram himself learns at the end of the first season. All in all, the series is watchable (with reservations about the graphic episode 3) for a tight script, a widely cast net of motley characters, racy cinematography and memorable soundtracks such as Kabir’s ‘Sakal Hans Mein Ram Biraje.’

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Kieslowski’s ‘Decalogue’: An Existential Reading

Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s Decalogue, a set of ten short films, is an exploration of the subtleties, contradictions and ambiguities of the Ten Commandments and their significance in a contemporary world. Each episode takes up one commandment and explores the grey areas beyond the realm of right and wrong. By merely enumerating the different episodes without titles, viewers make sense of each commandment in their own way as the director deliberately chooses to leave interpretations open-ended. Much of the ambiguity associated with the films’ subtext has to do with an age of censorship that posed serious limitations. Limitations that Kieslowski saw as a new climate for creativity in order to establish that no law can ever wholly grasp or deal with the complexity of being human. In this write-up, I touch upon some of the short films that moved me in order see the Decalogue not only as a re-examination of the Ten Commandments in a modern context, but also as a text which draws heavily from Sartrian existentialism in the way that “individuals alone are real.”

All the films of the Decalogue share the same setting of a tall housing project in which the characters are confined, almost in the claustrophobic anxiety of Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ or ‘Nausea’. The apartment complex is an ideal set for Kieslowski because his camera is fond of windows, mirrors, reflections of any kind and through any window of the housing project, there are people behind them. But in the films, characters remain masked, unknown to each other, neighbours and strangers at the same time. They meet each other unexpectedly, they drop in briefly from other episodes, run into the key characters into the elevator, leave a message on the phone informing of their absences and asking neighbourly favours. These devices to “inscribe people in the spectator’s memory” as Lucas notes, remind the viewer that human beings after all cannot live independently of each other and any external divinity is merely observatory.

This is portrayed through the character of the mysterious ‘silent observer’ who comes in all the episodes except 7 and 10 of the Decalogue. The use of the silent figure/ God, as Kieslowski remarked was that it has no influence on the action but “leads the characters to reflect on what they are in the process of doing. His intense look at the characters leads them to ask themselves questions” (Abrahamson, np). In many episodes, the silent observer merely gazes upon the characters in critical moments but does not intervene. His passive presence is superfluous within the context of human struggle and anxiety as only human actions and decisions shape events. This we see in the Decalogue 5, A Short Film about Killing, where the silent observer, cognizant of the murder that is to happen doesn’t not avert it or intervene while the lawyer of the murderous youth expresses regret over not exercising his human agency in preventing it.

In Decalogue 1, Kieslowski explores the relationship between scientific rationality and religious faith through an atheist scientist Krzysztof, a man for whom “reality alone is reliable” (Sartre, 42). When his son, who sees a dead dog in the snow, is deeply moved and asks him what death is, he merely gives a biological definition. Death is the cessation of the heart’s pumping of blood to the brain. The boy, Pavel however is not convinced. Kieslowski himself has to say: “In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something” (Lucas, np). Could it be that we have bartered our humanness, even with all our fallible instincts and flaws, for the cold perfection of measured and evaluated decisions taken by machines?

When the scientist loses his own son, it is the same devastating loss that unites him with his Catholic sister in spite of their different beliefs. Kieslowski makes a more fundamental point that while reason and religion, like so many other things, divide us, it is only the endeavour of being human that unites us and binds us together. While the first commandment says “Thou shalt have no god before me”, Krzysztof’s suffering might apparently be justified as a punishment for his ‘worship’ of rationality, but we nevertheless ask ourselves whether he hasn’t paid too dearly for this disobedience. Nor does Kieslowski offer any explicit openings to grace. “Man”, as Sartre says, and Krzysztof of Decalogue 1 seems to agree, “is left alone, without excuse” (34).

Decalogue 2 settles more comfortably into the existential domain. The opening shot is, in an Angelopoulosian manner, an extreme wide shot and reveals the towering buildings of a housing complex in the early hours of the morning contrasted against the frail figure of a sweeper. And in the silence as he continues to sweep the ground, there arises a gentle sense of irony. Though the sweeper sweeps the ground, there is no ‘outside’ in which the dust can be got rid of. The dust will settle again and the sweeper will sweep again much in the futile repetition of Sisyphus’ toils. There is no exit.

The true nature and condition of one of the main characters in this film, a doctor, is revealed through an array of rich and expressive visual cues. He is a man of science and the first shot shows him testing a cactus plant with his hands, a symbol of death, barrenness and futility. As in the case of the father of Decalogue 1, the rational man desperately tries to make peace with his surrounding and unravel himself through whatever little his arid world can provide him with. His despair and reason’s indispensable need to imprison things for analysis can be clearly seen in his room much in the way that Tarkovsky reveals the scientist in ‘Solaris’.

Dorota Geller, a lady who lives right above the doctor finds herself forced to speak to him as her terminally ill husband is under his care. When she asks him if he knows who she is, the doctor curtly replies: “Yes, you’re the one who ran over my dog two years ago.” But it is this sense of loss, as in Decalogue 1, that unites them. Dorota has never had children and now the only time that she is pregnant, it is by somebody other than her husband. She wrings herself to agony in trying to decide whose life is more precious to her. After trying in vain to obtain an appointment with the doctor, she cruelly breaks one by one the new shoots of a young plant on her windowsill as she helplessly watches the doctor walking away. The act of destroying a young plant that is the first sign of life in the coldness of concrete reeking with death and decay seems gruesome but portrayed with stunning cinematic beauty.

In a silent scene, Dorota reaches the threshold of her sanity and her despair is portrayed in silence as she slowly pushes inch by inch a glass of wine to the edge of the table. There is no violence in her touch, but the spectacular shot of the glass as it falls and shatters to the floor into a million specks of light and the wine as it spills out of it gloriously, is reminiscent of Bergman. Even in that moment of dire agony, like in the earlier films of Bergman, Kieslowski gives us an image whose exquisite beauty and splendour transcend that agony.

In yet another example of this beauty, when Dorota learns from the doctor that he cannot know what the future holds, in her frustration she unwitting tries to snuff her cigarette in the matchbox. The matchbox catches fire and there is a bigger flame than the one she tries to extinguish. The doctor’s uncertain reply sets fire to her already burning self and plunges her into greater agony. If her husband dies she wants to keep the child, but if there is a possibility that he will get better then she will abort it, and with it the only chance of being a mother. But the doctor provides no final judgement to help her make a decision and Dorota is left to trust her own instincts.

If a man has committed a crime, however cruel and meaningless, how far should the law draw the line between holding the criminal responsible for his actions and granting him clemency? Decalogue 5, A Short Film about Killing, is an unsettling film about the justice of capital punishment. The protagonist is a young man, Jacek, who is shown throughout the film as a sadist and finally as a murderer. He is callous and impassive; he sees a street fight in which a young man is cornered and beaten up by several others but Jacek merely looks on and coolly walks away.

An old woman asks him to clear off because he is unknowingly frightening her pigeons. But he deliberately runs towards pigeons and scatters them all away while the woman watches on in helpless anger. In an instance of meaningless violence, Jacek looks down from the square onto the traffic that is circulating below and finding a large stone nearby, drops it on a car below. The car honks and goes awry and Jacek doesn’t even stop to look at the disaster he has initiated.

The film is strewn with such incidents of senseless violence and cruelty until Kieslowski makes sure that he has secured the disgust of the viewer towards this character. Eventually Jacek commits a brutal murder of a cab driver for no apparent reason. And yet, however deserving of capital punishment Jacek seems to be because of his crime, the last few scenes of execution leave the viewer in a state of deep malaise. And instead of the moral and ethical satisfaction that justice ought to provide, there is an ever increasing sense of inner discomfort. What we see of Jacek is not the cruel brutal murderer towards whom we harbour hate, but the poor helpless human being who is afraid to die and as helpless as the cab driver whom he has murdered. There is something in that terrible condition of vulnerability that makes us go beyond moral or ethical satisfaction and cry out in despair like the lawyer in the end: “I abhor it, I abhor it.”

Kieslowski’s characters are lonely, inarticulate yet proud people who are capable of reflection. There are long meditative moments of silence where the image is let to speak for itself. In each moment of reflection the character finds itself in the liminal spaces of being and lives constantly in a kind of mental smog. Like Bergman’s Pastor in Winter Light and Jonas who are both filled with different types of anguish and find different ways to deal with it, the Decalogue’s characters meander their way through their despair and finally reach an authentic action emerging through a debate with the self.

This action is nevertheless based on a freedom that is individual and is as the lawyer in Decalogue 2 says, “restricted only by the freedom of others”. And yet, they are cruelly faced with the realisation that they need and depend on others. There is no escape from the nemesis of culture except in the recognition that, although they can never be other than free beings they can also never be self-sufficient; they are free to open their lives-but in anguish-to the influence of the living God, or in pride to deny and repel Him. It is in this condition that both Bergman’s and Kieslowski’s characters find themselves in and proceed to resolve it in their individual ways.

Bergman explores these individual ways of dealing with anguish. Resolutions emerge through conflicts and tumults in the soul, anxieties, agonies, perilous adventures of faith into unknown territories. The reality of their existence proceeds thus from their ‘inwardness’, and not from anything that the mind can codify. Eventually, there is no legislator but man himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of god.

Kieslowski deals with this anguish by touching upon subject matters and situations that link people: “There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. It doesn’t matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it’s still the same pain.” (Abrahamson, np) And it is finally this pain, like all other feelings that link us together. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. Sartre’s Inez also seems to agree: “What’s the point of playacting, trying to throw dust in each other’s eyes? We’re all tarred with the same brush” (No Exit, 7).

Works Cited

Abrahamson, Patrick. “Kieslowski’s Many Colours.” Oxford University Student Newspaper, June 2, 1995.

Corliss, Richard. “The Dazzling Decalogues.” The Arts/Show Business July 27, 1998 Vol. 152 No. 4 Time.com.

Corliss, Richard: The Dazzling Decalogues, The Arts/Show Business, Time Magazine, Vol. 152 No. 4, July 27, 1998.

Cunneen, Joseph: “Kieslowski On The Mountaintop: Ten Commandments from the latePolish director”, Commonweal, Vol. 124, No. 14, August 15, 1997.

Kieslowski, Krzysztof. “A Masterclass for Young Directors 1994.” Documentart, Filmmaking, Cinephilia & Beyond. Transcript. https://cinephiliabeyond.org/krzysztof-kieslowski-masterclass-young-directors/

Lucas, Tim, “‘How Death Will Judge Us’: A Krzysztof Kieślowski Videolog,” in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati, Ohio), no. 30, 1995.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. (tr.) L. Abel. Vintage Books Edition, September 1955.

–. Existentialism and Humanism. (tr.) Philip Mairet. Methuen & Co. Ltd: London, 1970.

Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne’s ‘novel’ Tristram Shandy, born in the latter part of the eighteenth century, found itself in a waning tradition of biting satire of the kind earlier propagated by Pope and Swift. Although it is itself clearly a satire, through its meandering in and out of “scintillating wit and whimsical baffoonery” (Stedmond, 53), Tristram Shandy is nevertheless much more good-humoured than its predecessors. Even its profuse bawdy humour that presents itself almost naively throughout the novel, prompted Samuel Johnson to respond with “Nothing odd will do too long.”

And yet, two and a half centuries later, Tristram Shandy came to be widely regarded as the godfather of modernist literature. Sterne’s wild experimentation with form and voice was a radical departure from the orderly, structurally unified novels of the day, such as Fielding’s Tom Jones, and considerably ahead of its time. Sterne’s childhood was spent following his father’s army regiment around England and Ireland. This early experience of military life was to inspire some of his most memorable comic characters, including the war-game obsessed Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. The satirical and stylistic influence of Rabelais and Cervantes can also be felt throughout Tristram Shandy, whilst the philosophy of John Locke informs one of the book’s key themes: the association of ideas.

The protagonist’s constant straying away from the story, if it could be called a story at all, switching back and forth in time, the smallest of trivialities or comical accidents triggering off the most outrageous fabrications, all contribute to render Tristram Shandy, a novel of digressions rather than of narrative. “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading! – take them out of this book, for instance,- you might as well take the book along with them” (50). And it is in this digression that the novel retains its uniqueness, a uniqueness upon which the author had long deliberated rather than stumbled upon. Thus although the author constantly laments having so much yet to write about, he still cannot check himself from straying into apparently irrelevant incidents. There is an implicit sense then, of the futility of recounting in the first place. This futility of communication seems to occur, not because of a lack of means but because the author takes on the impossible task of writing about his life while living it.

The central irony of the book is that the novel is being written more slowly than the life that is being lived, that while Tristram sits down to pen an incident, he nevertheless lives in a continuum of space and time and his experience keeps accumulating thus always adding to what he has to write.

Through this sort of hermeneutics, Sterne also seems to throw light on the complexity of human beings which are, like Tristram, brought into society by accident, or even through a process so mechanized and regulated that there is almost nothing human about it as suggested in the opening scenes with the winding of the clock. After being thus ejected into the world, human beings have to further undergo the trauma of baptism in order to exist and own an identity. It is Walter Shandy’s “magic bias” that will decide the character of his son through a name. But, Tristram is in fact a victim of several accidents, the biggest of which is probably his birth as not only is he mis-named and de-sexed in the novel, he appears, rather than the protagonist, more as a minor character or narrator whose voice is subordinated to the description of the other characters.

Tristram in the novel is in fact nothing more than a voice and yet it is Yorick that the author speaks through, deserting Tristram almost as cruelly as he does the other characters. The narration of the story is futile not because of the narrator’s continuous existence, but because of the characters in his world who are immune to him even in moments of severe crisis. This was the case when the maid and Dr Slop are trying to attend to Tristram after the window sash incident but fall to quarreling among themselves, leaving Tristram by the wayside. Everyone rides his hobby-horse and thus, not only is there no one to be part of the Tristam’s story, there is no one to listen to him as well. He is himself, like the rest of his characters, riding his own hobby horse of trying to recount a story that is never going to end.

This is where Sterne seems to equalize all his characters and allay a little bit of Tristram’s victimhood in a world in which everyone spins in his respective orbit but nevertheless in the gravitational field of the other. In a tower of Babel-like situation, everyone simultaneously talks about his own life and opinions in a desperate need to be understood and in the end, the confused hodgepodge of voices that is heard is not very different from the narrative chaos that undermines every attempt of Tristram to begin at the beginning. “Tristram Shandy is quintessentially a book about man’s attempt to give a reasonable and definitive form to his experience of the world-and about the inevitable tendency of experience to run counter to man’s formulations” (Briggs, 195).

Upon closer inspection, the narrator’s statements about narrating what he is doing and when he is doing it are seen as somehow “above or beyond the plot, as if these were outside the domain of the narrative proper- as if they existed as critical comments on narrative rather than as part of the narrative itself” (Williams, 1032). The narrator always freely shifts positions. He is self-reflexive in the way that he is aware that he is recounting his life ‘story’ and at the same time keep reminds us about it too. Unlike the self-effacing omniscient narrator, the self-conscious narrator of Tristram Shandy flaunts his whims and narrative agency to the reader. He can have a marbled page in the middle of the novel if he likes, he can have absurd patterns of asterisks or of any other typing symbol that he likes, he can even pretend the novel was suddenly a play and give stage directions to Garrick.

If he chooses, he can refrain from description altogether, then the reader might be at sea when it comes to certain events like the window sash circumcision: “It is in vain to leave this to the reader’s imagination” (377). This kind of narrator is then enormously powerful. Not only does he provide the narrative, but admits that he is as fallible as us, as ignorant. The reader’s interpretation is as biased as the narrator’s. There is no pretension of objectivity or reality. As the title itself spells out, the novel is not just about the life of Tristram Shandy, it is also about his opinions. Any act of narration is necessarily also interlinked with the act of sentience. To ‘be’ is necessarily tangled with the activity of explaining being.

In as much as Tristram may be considered as rhetor, the whole book consists of his “oration.” But this is the rhetoric of a “fool.” And it carries some interesting implications about Sterne’s conception of the nature of his audience. Like Swift in The Modest Proposal, he shocks the more squeamish members by reflecting upon their own underlying preconceptions. One kind of empty verbalism against which both Swift and Pope inveighed was the fulsome praise of the prospective patron. Sterne’s dedication of his first volume to Pitt is, significantly, not fulsome. Sterne was of course seeking a patron of a different kind-the reading public at large. He implicitly dedicates his book to them by titillating their tastes, while at the same time managing to satirize the human foibles involved in that taste. Thus, though dedicating his book to the “Lord Public,” he attempts to unseat that Lord from some of his “Hobby-Horses,” or at least to make him more aware of his “ruling passions.”

“With an ass,” Tristram says in his account of his travels in Volume VII, “I can commune forever.” Not so with jackdaws or apes, for they speak and act by rote. But with an ass, “surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance-and where those carry me not deep enough-in flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural for an ass to think-as well as a man, upon the occasion” (VII. xxxii.). The reader whose responses Tristram can gauge as accurately as he can those of an ass is one who will laugh at certain words in the bedchamber, but abuse them in the parlor. For his sake, Tristram must seek devices whereby he can “satisfy that ear which the reader chuses to lend me,” while not dissatisfying “the other which he keeps to himself” (VII. xx.).

Works Cited–

Briggs, Peter M. “Locke’s ‘Essay’ and the Tentativeness of ‘Tristram Shandy’.”
Studies in Philology, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 493-520.

Stedmond, J. M. “Satire and Tristram Shandy.”Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 1, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century,(Summer, 1961), Rice University, pp. 53-63.

Williams, Jeffery. “Narrative of Narrative (Tristram Shandy).”MLN, Vol. 105, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1990), The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 1032-1045.

Reflections on the Formative and Realist traditions of Film Theory

The cinematic aesthetic for the Formalists was that film is a making. Eisenstein considered the artistic activity to be, more precisely, of “building”. To attain reality one had to destroy realism, break up the appearances of a phenomenon and reconstruct them according to a ‘reality principle’. In contrast, the Realist tradition emphasized looking at life the way it was and to let nature speak for itself. The Formalists were always interested in the question of film as an art and what characterized art in the first place. Art belonged to the aesthetic sphere as an object, which does nothing but exists for our intense perception and contemplation. The Formalists prescribed to art the role of ‘recovering the sensation of life’ and revealing the defining qualities of objects. Thus the technique of art became a means to defamiliarize objects, to make forms difficult and to subordinate objects to the experience of their ‘objectness’. It ‘wrenched objects’ from their normal surroundings and distorted them in a way that called for attention. Technique thus became synonymous with art and deviation was required to stimulate the process of contemplation. With the second wave of Formalism, however, foregrounding required that the technique of art make objects necessarily challenging so that finally, the degree of deviation in an object served as a criterion for art.

Even though both the traditions believed in the process of perception or contemplation of the world, while the Formalist took upon himself to make objects strange in order to force extended attention, the Realist merely offered the viewer the chance for greater contemplation through devices like the long take and multiple plains of action using the depth of field. And it is precisely this continuity of vision that the Formalists, especially Eisenstein strove to break with his theory of montage and shock of attractions. While contrast was important to Eisenstein, Bazin rejected montage, though without discarding editing, in favour of images with depth that offered a fuller image for contemplation.

Although the formalists differ in their ideas of the raw material of film, (Eisenstein with his attractions, Pudovkin with the shot itself, Arnheim with the technical deficiencies that prevent cinema from replicating the visibly real perfectly) the realists more or less agreed that the raw material for film was the visible world around us. It is however interesting to notice the complementary points of views of Arnheim and Kracauer which would amount to saying that while Arnheim sees the glass half empty, Kracauer sees it half full. For Arnheim cinema attains its peculiarities through its technical deficiencies in replicating reality exactly; for Kracauer however, it is precisely the capacity of the medium to record or to photograph reality, although inaccurately, that is its strength and peculiarity. The Formalist theory noted a difference in the visible reality and the capacity to grasp it in various ways, but the Realist theory held that the photographed image was ontologically bound to its object.

Kracauer sees the function of the filmmaker to read reality and his medium justly and employ the proper techniques to find a balance between the two. With the Realists, there is a tendency that not all things in the visible reality are photographable; some things lend themselves to the camera more readily than others. Nature is allowed precedence and it is a pattern in nature that dictates the filmmaker, not his own impulses or desires for self-expression. The fundamental difference between the two traditions also arises from the fact that the Formalists saw film as a tool to convey a particular message. Though Realism was closely tied with social function, film was more a way of seeing the world, a window rather than a frame. The other difference lies in the way both traditions treated their audiences. Eisenstein conceives film as a machine which has predictable results and which is used after a particular end has been envisaged. The Formalist filmmaker designs, constructs, and destroys his elements with his audience in mind. But for the Realist, there is no specific audience, no specific end to achieve except that of showing reality. The Realist’s focus is not on the audience but on the perceived object that is mediated through the medium. Cinema, as Kracauer says, is about the curiosity about reality, not a medium for self expression. Thus, while Formalism uses the medium as a frame to neutralize the world, Realism uses it as a window to see the world.

The limitations with the Formalist tradition as Balazs remarks in the case of Eisenstein, is that it lacked naturalness. Eisenstein and Pudovkin were both engineers and they saw art as a machine with a specific purpose and a precise end. Even though they saw human beings as evolving and devoid of any essences, their notion of constructing meaning by consciously creating, against the naturalism of the mind, an environment for a psychological result supposed that they could control every aspect of the audience’s mind. They defined a specific manner in which they expected the audience to watch the film and interpret the juxtaposition. In his example of the Japanese ideogram, (a picture of a bird and a mouth means to sing, which a picture of a child and a mouth means to cry) Eisenstein knows how to interpret the juxtaposition. But in the case of montage pieces, the viewer is constantly confronted with new and ever-increasing number of alphabets, as it were, in addition to which unlike the static bird and child, the visual content is constantly in motion. In trying to assign a precise role to art, as if it were a work like any other, and in their obsessive fervour to deny realism in a strain similar to surrealists of the same age, the Formalists forgot to leave room for spontaneity.

The usefulness of the Realists on the other hand, lay in the fact that they did not try to manipulate their audience’s reactions. In their belief of naturalism, they hoped to provide a renewed perspective, which aligned the viewer with nature and thus laid the foundation for change. Yet, while Kracauer talks of a balance between Formalist and Realist tendencies, the film could not be the director’s self –expression, he could not exert his imagination. In their belief to see the world as it is, they seem to think of it as given and easily accessible. But the visible reality is not as objective or as obvious a phenomenon as it might seem, as Kracauer realises, because it attains meaning only in a human context as it is finally intercepted and grasped by a human mind. Thus as Balazs finally says, although the two traditions seem opposed to one another, they are ultimately different in emphasis rather than in choice: while the Realists began with reality and the photographic ability of the camera, the Formalists began with cinema’s own language ability, the principle of editing.

Reference:

Andrew, J. Dudley. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. London: Oxford University Press, 1976

Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith & Pudovkin: A Comparative essay

The differences between the techniques of Eisenstein and Griffith, both pioneering filmmakers, arise from the fact that they saw different potentials in the same medium and sought to exploit it for different purposes. While Eisenstein spoke of film sometimes as if it were “a powerful vehicle for rhetorical persuasion” and sometimes as if it were an autonomous art, Griffith’s innovations were simply results of trial and error, practical experiences rather than of theorizing.

Eisenstein saw the screen as a frame rather than as a window. It was a space in which the director decomposed reality into usable blocks or neutralised them, and arranged them to construct new meaning through juxtaposition¹. His theories follow from his basic definition of raw material, which he found to be the different elements or attractions that constituted the shot and were capable of affecting the spectator’s mind. Each element functioned like a ‘circus attraction’ different from the other attractions but on an equal footage and depended on the rest for its significance². The principle of montage determined the juxtaposition of these elements in order to create a specific meaning and a desired psychological effect. Without it the attractions were merely disordered stimuli. Unlike Griffith who used montage to involve his viewers into the action, Eisenstein saw film as a totality with the various elements working in it. While the theme or life principle³ determined the elements’ interaction with each other, it was itself determined by them; they were both mutually dependent and inextricable.

In his notion of dialectical montage, Eisenstein established the binaries of thesis and antithesis that were to be resolved in a synthesis by his spectator. As a Constructivist, he wanted to destroy all sense of inherent fullness of meaning and dynamically construct new significance. Through montage, the filmmaker could shape the mental processes of the spectator by bombarding them with ‘a continuous string of shocks’ coming from each of the various elements of the spectacle. Through this collision of attractions, the audience was forced to actively participate in the making of meaning by resolving the conflicting themes and attaining significance through synthesis. Merely juxtaposition was not enough, Eisenstein thus offered the experience of ‘completing the image rather than a completed image’ in “The Formative Tradition.”

Film, for Griffith, was picture stories. At a time when performance was dominated entirely by theatrical techniques, Griffith combined stage narrative with the Victorian novel, which greatly influenced him, to form a cinematic device. Film was nothing but another medium to tell stories and all its technical aspects were only meant to support the dominant plot. With Porter’s discovery of the shot as the basic unit of film, unlike the previous ‘scene’, Griffith further refined the rudiments of continuity editing that were already at his disposal. Although both, Eisenstein and Griffith were concerned with manipulating their audience, while Eisentein sought to enlighten his audience through colliding shots, Griffith merely sought to hypnotize them with all the glamour that later came to be associated with Hollywood. Unlike Eisenstein, Griffith was not interested in film as an art but with making successful and realistic films. In film, he had found a visual equivalent to the novel and perfected the visual inventory of the medium to enhance storytelling in a manner as vivid and engrossing as a novel. He employed shots of varying sizes, spatial and temporal lengths for dramatic effect and used flash back and point of view shots to heighten the cinematic climax. Through all his inventions and experimentation, he played on the audience’s basic perception of reality and their ability to draw on common established meanings through associations and experience. Unlike Eisenstein’ s conception of confusing the viewer through shocks of attraction, it was imperative for Griffith that the audience understood what he presented to them and related to it. Thus while Eisenstein’s film was incomplete without the spectator, Griffith depended on his audience to voluntarily suspend reason.

Pudovkin, on the other hand, differed from Eisenstein in his raw material for film. He saw the shot itself as the basic unit of film. The filmmaker had less power over his raw material and was at the mercy of the shot. The shot was already inherent with reality and that is what the filmmaker began with. His task was then to make the proper choice and organization of these bits of reality, which already had ‘a definite power’. Even though Pudovkin also believed in producing precise reactions in his audience, the filmmaker’s task lay, not in manipulating reality, but in mediating it to his audience. The sense of the world already existed in the reality captured by the shots, but it was proper editing that could operate upon this sense to produce the desired effects in the audience. It was thus even possible for the filmmaker to force the spectator to experience a film event as if it were a natural event. But unlike Eisenstein’s collision of shots, this was acheived by ‘linking’ them. The difference between the two filmmakers is clearly portrayed in these oft-quoted words of the French critic Leon Moussinac: “Pudovkin’s films resemble a song, Eisenstein’s a scream.”

Notes:

1. Through the influence of the Kabuki theatre, he saw the breaking up of various aspects of theatre into elements for the director to arrange them according to his wishes so that it is the form of the ensemble that contains the meaning. All events are deformed and altered until they retain only their exterior. All aspects/elements become equal .
2. Eisenstein’s colour theory is related to this. He talks of colours being significant only in a relational context. Individual colours don’t have any inherent meanings.
3. In his dilemma to pronounce art and film form as a machine or as an organism, Eisenstein talks of autonomous art being enthused by a governing life principle that dictates the arrangement of montage pieces and thus the cinematic meaning itself. But this notion of organic form endangers the director’s total power to create meaning. To this, Eisenstein gives the filmmaker the task to first discover the theme.

Reference:

Andrew, J. Dudley. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. London: Oxford University Press, 1976.