Sivamani on Suitcase

I finally heard Sivamani live at an informal, unticketed performance at the Tamarind Art Gallery two days ago. The master percussionist from India plays with an infectious energy and an ingenuous enthusiasm that I was glad to witness at close quarters (later, I also made mildly cheesy fan pictures with him).

He is in the country for a performance in Florida in early July and is city hopping to vacation with this family. Dressed in a shiny black and blue ensemble designed by his wife (who was present and is gorgeous), he created rhythms with various instruments and on varied surfaces: The Octoban, the Darbuka, a ridged metal plate hanging from his chest, and umm... a suitcase.

Novelty and the New Indian Cinema

A scene from Ray's Pather Panchali (1955)

When New York’s Lincoln Center hosted the Satyajit Ray retrospective two months ago (First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy, April 15-30), I got a little anxious about the stagnant image of Indian cinema for art house cinephiles the world over. Ray’s films are undoubtedly brilliant and they deserve an even larger audience than they now enjoy. But I often wonder if Ray’s stature stands like a giant barricade in the way of other Indian cinema. For festival curators, it is so much easier to stick to an oeuvre that has been certified as genius; to screen and analyze films that have scholars and numerous books devoted to them. Pather Panchali, Ray’s first film itself won the Best Human Document award at Cannes in 1956. Today, his neorealistic world is synonymous with Indian art house. For international audiences, when it comes to Indian cinema, there’s Ray and there’s Bollywood kitsch. And then, there’s white noise in between.

MoMA’s recently concluded New India film exhibit (June 5-18) sought to draw attention to the celluloid space in between. The two week film exhibit had sixteen contemporary feature-length and short films on its program. Put together by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator in the Museum’s Film Department and Uma da Cunha, guest curator, the exhibit was conceived on the heels of the success of MoMA’s 2007 India Now exhibition.

The organizers managed to have several film folks introduce their films, including actors Naseeruddin Shah and Abhay Deol as well as filmmaker Nandita Das. Recent commercial Bollwood releases such as Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance and Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! were screened along with eloquent social films such as Megan Mylan’s Smile Pinkie—a film on cleft lip surgery and the 2008 winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

The selection was studded with several brilliant picks but it lacked a clear mission: Was the fact that the films were new enough to mark them for inclusion? Or was the criteria new themes and new issues? Did the films necessarily have to espouse new styles of filmmaking and crossover genres?

At the opening reception on June 5, both curators seemed wary of narrowing down to one reason. Evidently, each film was meant to stand in for a different sort of new Indian cinema. Some didn’t: Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar, for instance, is an overdramatized period film like several other Indian period films.

The selection of the opening film, however, was baffling. The festival opened with first-time feature filmmaker Megan Doneman’s Yes Madam, Sir, a documentary on one of India’s most inspiring public figures, Kiran Bedi. Bedi was present at the premiere and won the audience over with her humour and witticisms. But the documentary itself—trite and underreported—didn’t justify its position as the opening night film. Bedi has been turning down documentary requests for 15 years now, why she would choose someone as inexperienced as Doneman ( who admitted to having read her film camera’s manual on the way to Bedi’s place in the train) to make a documentary on her life is rather inexplicable. And why this documentary, with no fidelity to the theme of the exhibit, would mark its opening is even more inexplicable. Still, the film makes for an interesting watch simply because the events in Bedi’s politically-charged life make for fabulous material.

Negotiating the diverse terrain of new Indian film is a daunting task. The fact that MoMA’s film department attempted to tackle it is impressive in itself. But then, the unfocussed programming also explains why Ray reigns when it comes to India-related festival programming. With Ray, you can’t go wrong.

Cross-posted from my NYC Diary on Mumbai Mirror.

Woody Works

With Whatever Works, Woody Allen is back to the good old quirky New York comedy after an array of Euro-themed fare. Though I enjoyed both Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) despite their faux sophistication, the films gave the impression that Woody was on a vacation. And now, he's back.

In what appears to be a self-portrait of the director himself, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David, star of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and the co-creator of "Seinfeld") plays a cantankerous self-proclaimed genius who meets a naive Southern girl, Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood). Beyond the several minor plot points, it is a story of how these two unlikely characters manage to love each other.

Yellnikoff is a cynical divorcee who spends his time having metaphysical discussions with his bunch of uninspiring friends. When Melody lands up on his doorstep, hungry and homeless, he is persuaded to let her live with him and eventually ends up marrying her.

What is ironical is that though Yellnikoff starts and ends the narrative with long, to camera monologues on "seizing opportunities" and " going with whatever works," his overtly grumbly persona doesn't really seem to living those ideals.

Though the characters are exagerrated and absurd ( Yellnikof repeatedly claims to have been close to winning a Nobel Prize), the film has an old Woody quality to it. There are the mindless New York cafe scenes, the ménage à trois, the Village art circles and the circumlocutious philosophical ramblings. And then, there is the sudden happy ending.

But it's good to be back in New York.

And I spent the afternoon thinking it was a hoax...

Likely because I didn't want to believe it. Why? Because Dangerous, at the age of eight, was the first audio cassette I ever bought. And because back then, "You remember the time" and "Thriller" were movies in themselves.

A friend at The South Wing puts it succinctly:

“Thriller” is a product inextricably linked to the era it helped define; it is a movie in miniature from when music videos could be interesting in their own right. I remember I found it hair-raising as a five-year-old, and I find it funny now; but I like it no less."

Dastangos find magic in lost poetry

Picture: Danish Husain and Mahmood Farooqui narrating dastans. Photograph courtesy Siddharth Sirohi from the Dastangoi blog.

The stage was set with a white divan at the center. Brocade cushions and ornate silver drinking bowls flanked its sides. In the true tradition of their art form, the Dastangos (storytellers) started their performance with an ode to the wine-server. But the angrakha-clad Dastangos weren’t in a royal court in Lucknow, or a village square anywhere in North India in the 16^th century. Indian actors Mahmood Farooqui, Danish Husain and Naseeruddin Shah were at the Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium at the Asia Society headquarters in New York City instead. And here they performed Dastangoi—an ancient form of Perso-Urdu storytelling on June 7-8.

The performance, Dastangoi: The Adventures of Amir Hamza, was part of the ongoing Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas festival in the city (June 5-14). The festival seeks to present the kaleidoscopic richness of Islamic arts and culture by bringing together Muslim arts from across the world—from Morocco to India to Indonesia—for this ten day festival of arts and academics. The Dastangoi performance was the Indian thread of this multicultural tapestry.

The June 8^th event was sold out (as was the one on June 7^th). A packed audience waited in anticipation, because even the extensive literature on the pamphlets left much to be explained of this extempore-style storytelling. For many, it was their first-ever Dastangoi performance. Dehli-based writer and performer Mahmood Farooqui, who directed the performance, elaborated on the tradition before the show. He asked the audience to make eye-contact with the performers, to articulate appreciation verbally instead of clapping and he asked them to let go and believe in the fairytale world that he and his collaborators were about to evoke.

It was an evening of magic: Exotic beauties, seduction and trickery came together in the narration of the tales of Prophet Muhammad’s uncle Amir Hamza. The actors created these fantastical worlds without musical or visual aids. It was only their words, intonation and gestures. Dastangos never leave their seats.

The performers, it seemed, were disappointed with the relatively staid audience who remained quiet and formal. The audience that didn’t know that the performers would have obliged requests to go on. They couldn’t be blamed. The setting of the Wallace Auditorium was hardly conducive to the contrary. Dastangois seem more befitted for an audience comfortably seated on woven dhurries, at eye level with the narrators, relaxed and in full grasp of the language and history. Here, most were distracted by the English super titles being projected on a screen behind the performers. Everyone there seemed ready to appreciate, and were there for that very reason, but somehow it wasn’t an ideal fit: A jigsaw puzzle with one part a little too big to fit into the other.

Read the full post in my NYC Diary on Mumbai Mirror.

A strange New India

I wouldn't say that the New India is synonymous with terrible film. And so, I don't know why MoMa's New India film exhibit opened on Friday, June 5th with a rather tasteless documentary: "Yes Madam,Sir."

The film is the first to document the life of Kiran Bedi—India’s first elite policewoman, a pioneering jail reformist and the winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award (Asia’s equivalent to a Nobel Peace Prize). Made by a first-time Australian feature filmmaker, Megan Doneman, it flouts all conceivable documentary norms: The scenes from Bedi’s personal life seem staged and even scripted, there are sensational closeups of sick street children on the streets of Delhi for no apparent reason and no one except Bedi and her family are substantially interviewed on camera.

Bedi has been turning down requests by documenteers and biographers for a while but finally relented to let a novice make a film on her controversy-ridden life. In her address to the audience after the film's screening, Doneman shared that she bought a film camera on the way to Bedi's place in India (and read the manual on the train). Bedi might have her reasons for this pick, but they're hard to understand. Someone with a better background on Indian politics would have been a better pick (and someone with a better handle on documentary filmmaking should have been a given).

The film still makes for interesting viewing simply because scenes from Bedi's posting at the notorious Tihar jail and her recent U.N stint in New York are fun but there need to be laws—or smarter curators—to filter fraud documentaries.