One or Two Things About 'Chauthi Koot'

The first shot in Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot is a nod to a similar shot in Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti. The camera’s gaze is fixed on the windshield of a moving bus. Our attention alternates between the windshield and the road ahead. We pay attention to the windshield and don’t merely glide through it to look at the road for narrative clues. The shot sets the tone for the rest of the film – a film in which the camera looks at things not because they propel the narrative forward but because they are things which exist in the world inhabited by the film's characters, thereby shaping the characters’ perception of their world.

Soon after, Gurvinder Singh cuts to an angular shot of two men standing on the floor of the bus, looking away from the frame and towards the windshield and the road. It only takes a few seconds into the shot to establish that the men are looking away from the frame. But Gurvinder Singh does not cut once the obvious is established; the shot lingers. We spend more time looking at the men as they gaze away from the frame and towards the road. This lingering on the two men brings their gaze into sharp focus as an object which inhabits the visual space together with other objects and which confronts those objects as it perceives the world around it. In addition to this, the characters’ gaze away from the frame creates a space beyond the edges of the frame, which is brought to life as we linger on the shot. The maneuver of making the characters look away from the scope of the frame is carried out throughout the film. It is essential to the film’s conceptualization of its characters as subjects who are hemmed in between the militants and the state during the insurgency in early 80s Punjab. The characters always look away from the frame in anticipation. As they look away, an interior self which is not in harmony with its surroundings emerges; that self always look at things long and hard to make sense of them. And when the filmmaker is in no hurry to cut but lets the characters’ gaze play itself out in time we see the human subject more closely. 

Cutting soon, when the action or the basic sense of the image has been established, is narrative cinema's modus operandi. Gurvinder Singh is clearly against narrative cinema and it's conception of time. There is an optimum time a spectator needs to read a cinematic image. When that time is reached and the image understood narrative cinema cuts to the next image, and the next as it goes about putting shots/images together to create a scene or a sequence for the benefit of the unfolding story. This quick reading of an image is a simple reaching out to find in the image traces or evidence of a world already configured and understood by the spectator, whose gaze has settled down, accepting the meanings handed  down by narrative cinema. Looking, in such a scenario, is not about the experience of looking at things for themselves, but about a spectatorship which looks at things to validate its pre-conceived meanings about them. 

For instance, a cinematic image of a ‘sorrowful’ face of an old man is quickly understood as ‘sorrow’. The filmmaker cuts from the image the moment the optimum time required to read the image is reached, reducing the old man to the way in which we understand ‘sorrow’. If the old man signifies ‘sorrow’ to us, the fact is that we have stopped seeing him as a being present in the physical world. Our attention cuts through him and we aim at the abstract concept of ‘sorrow’. We forget him. We have not even perceived him. We have subsumed him in our consciousness, where he has lapsed into us as ‘sorrow’. We have not seen him as a being present in its surroundings. Chauthi Koot, on the contrary, makes us look at the human subject closely in time, where we find it in constant attrition with the objects around it. It is, then, difficult for us to say that we know or understand that human subject. The film is an invitation to us to give up our habits from conventional narrative cinema and look again.

Fan: A Review

In a Shah Rukh Khan film the usual method of creating cinematic fiction can't work. Cinematic fiction is usually created by introducing a character, putting it in situations with other characters so as to create its uniqueness/reality and then setting it off on an 'inner' movement as the story unfolds. For this to work it has to be assumed that the audience has come to the film with a clean slate and is willing to surrender itself to the film's unique world. But Shah Rukh Khan's function in the audience's lives is less as an actor and more as a mythical being who exists in all sorts of images around them. The audience has ascribed meaning(s) to his face to the effect that the moment he appears for the first time in a film it is the meaning of the myth which takes over and not the unique world which the film is trying to create. With Shah Rukh Khan any effort to create a character in a unique world is bound to fail. The conditions for such a thing don't exist. Those who make films with him don't see this and think, of course, he will play the character like Shah Rukh Khan but essentially the character is a unique thing in the world I have created. This is a step in the wrong direction.

Fan at least seems like a film which is trying to work along with the mythology of Shah Rukh Khan by accepting the meaning that he brings to a film even before one starts conceptualizing it. In the film an obsessive fan chases after a film star, both played by Shah Rukh Khan. The mythology of the film star that the film creates is through actual clips of his interviews and references to his life and films. The film star in the film is no one but him. But the film presents the film star as a fictional character called Aryan Khanna. And once he is Aryan Khanna he is not-Shah Rukh Khan, at least in the fictional scheme of the film. But then, who is Shah Rukh Khan whose mythology Aryan Khanna has borrowed? The film does not want to tell us. This fictional maneuvering in the film destroys the very foundation on which it stands. It makes sure that Shah Rukh Khan, who is the actual subject of the film, does not enter the film, except for some stray references. The treatment of the subject could not have been more non-serious than this.

The character of the fan is also Shah Rukh Khan. But why is he Shah Rukh Khan? What was the idea behind making him play the film star and the fan? The film is not clear about why that choice was made. If the idea was that most fans model themselves on film stars and try to look like them then they should have got an actual fan who looks like Shah Rukh Khan to play the part. In fact, there are two or three such fans who look like him in some candid shots in the film. And it arouses great interest the moment they appear on screen. No matter how different you make Shah Rukh Khan look with the help of prosthetics and VFX, for the audience he is still Shah Rukh Khan, and not a character called Gaurav. Since both the characters played by Shah Rukh Khan are not meant to be Shah Rukh Khan in a film which was meant to be about him, the energy that was going its way when the film was just a concept gets diffused. Pointless fictional stance piled upon pointless fictional stance.

A Note on Kapoor and Sons

Kapoor and Sons is about a family of four - mother, father and the two sons. The film begins by introducing a precarious familial equation between the four, in which each is distraught with the other but there is an underlying belief in the family, a sort of centre which they can't help but believe in till the film reaches a breaking point where each realizes that the necessary performance to hold on to things is not possible anymore and their essential truth is that they are each against all. This forms the first two Acts of the film. In the third Act the film moves towards its end with an effort to pick up the broken pieces and re-install the centre of the family. This offers a happy ending to the audience, an uplifting touch after the truth of the matter was clearly stated at the end of Act 2. 

What does it mean when a film which was made with the intention to alienate the audience from the grip of the idea of the family ends somewhat happily? One way of looking at this is to say, yes, the film tries to reach a happy ending. But the fact that at the end of Act 2, its breaking point, it made us look at the centre of the family as something arbitrary which is in place only after a great coercive force acts upon everyone involved shatters the belief system of the audience and simultaneously opens up other alternatives. The ending of the film is not the obvious and logical end of meaning making for the film, that it completes itself only when we know how it ends. So, irrespective of how the film ends it has made the arbitrariness of the family system visible. But to this one might say that the damage to the audience's belief system is not something that can be credited to the film. The belief system already exists in a damaged/suspicious state before the audience has entered the cinema hall. The audience is in possession of an interiority which has the cognitive ability to see through things. 'Holy' ideas such as family, love, marriage are suspect even if the audience feels a greater tendency to align with them. The truth need not be told to the audience, it is already in possession of it. So, a film which follows the formal pattern of a beginning, middle and end, designed in three Acts, to simulate a movement of highs and lows (the lows being moments of truth) which will end on a high is premised on a great underestimation of the intelligence of the audience. This assumption about the audience dictates the formal movement of the narrative as the film treats something that the audience already knows as a great moment of truth which has to be reached. In such a narrative scheme a happy ending is not a mere convention which must be ignored in favour of the film's moment of truth which preceded it. It is actually an important experience that the filmmaker wants the audience to have after the film has told them the truth. And its function is similar to the conservative function in the audience's lived experience which makes it ignore what it knows and desire the very things it knows as false. The purpose of this argument is not to suggest that a sad ending should be preferred over a happy one.. But to say that the register in which a happy or a sad ending becomes possible is specious.

If filmmakers approach their subject assuming what the audience already knows as given filmmaking can begin in the true sense. They will then approach their subject with the intention to extract its form, which lies sedimented within the subject itself, instead of trying to fit their ill thought out subject with already existing forms. Filmmaking can then become a medium for thought and we can move away from films like Kapoor and Sons for which the force of filmmaking is merely to use cinematic grammar to establish how things appear in our lives. The hand-held camera moving around the house with the family of four as they speak over each other in an argument represents a familiar way of being for families. The only cinematic effort in Kapoor and Sons is to establish this common phenomenon and say, see, this is how things unfold at home with our families. This is bad realism. It's like hearing the same old story in the same old way again and again. Given the shit Bollywood throws at us Kapoor and Sons might appear refreshing. But we need better films than Kapoor and Sons before the poor realism of 'new wave' Bollywood takes over our lives and seriously damages our looking abilities.