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The Cloud-Capped Star
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It
took many years for Ritwik Ghatak’s classic The
Cloud-Capped Star to be widely seen and recognised outside its home country
of India. What a loss for the global consciousness of world cinema in those
years! Ghatak, who made eight narrative features and died in 1976 at the age of
50, made a type of Indian cinema that is still fiarly unfamiliar to many
filmgoers in the West. It is the not really much like the Indian art cinema
associated with the name of Satyajit Ray, although Ghatak’s films are deeply
artistic on every level. And nor is it exactly like the great traditions of
Indian popular film, the musical and the melodrama. The Cloud-Capped Star is certainly a musical melodrama of sorts –
the French critic Serge Daney hailed it as “one of the five or six greatest
melodramas in cinema history” – but it isn’t pure escapism, or pure
heart-wringing sentimentality either; it exudes a tough, realist sadness.
The Cloud-Capped Star is an angry,
socially-conscious lament for a figure who is presented as typical in a certain
sector of Indian life: the dutiful daughter who sacrifices everything, every
dream and every possibility, in order to pay the way of all the other family
members. This family system, this social system is like a vicious trap that
slowly closes in on the main character, a shy woman named Nita (Supriya
Choudhury). In this, it can indeed remind us of some of the great, subversive
Hollywood “women’s melodramas” of the 1940s and ‘50s: The Reckless Moment by Max Ophüls or All That Heaven Allows by Douglas Sirk.
No
one who profits from Nita’s sacrifice is particularly willing to help her – and
indeed, when it comes to her rather demonic-looking mother, this matriarchal
figure is actually trying to willfully compound the oppression, by directing
the romantic attentions of Nita’s impatient suitor over to her rather less
self-sacrificing sister.
So
these are the familiar melodramatic ingredients: sacrifice, connivance,
thwarted desire, the passing of unfulfilled years in dreary workaholic misery,
and eventually even a blatantly psychosomatic disease, tuberculosis for Nita as
for the Lady of the Camellias, or the heroine’s ‘weak heart’ in Ophüls’ Madame de . (1953). The film dwells in
an almost unrelieved somberness, with a deeply felt sadness welling up
everywhere, particularly as Nita cries to the echoing hills: “I wanted to
live!”
There
are historical and political depths to this film, as in every Ghatak film; but
it is these elements of intimate, family melodrama that I wish to stress in
this brief tribute – not just as a matter of content, but above all as a matter
of form, film language, style. For Ghatak is among cinema’s greatest and most
radical stylists.
Was
1960 the last moment in world cinema history that a man could make such a film
about a woman, about the so-called ‘plight of woman’ – and not only get away
with it, but forge the highest art out of it, an art of deep empathy that
elicits our equally deep respect and admiration? There is a tradition of such
films by men about women, a tradition we have come to love, understand and
value long after it came to an end. This tradition includes films by Cukor and
Sirk and Ophüls, by Rossellini and Dreyer, and most particularly by Ozu, Naruse
and Mizoguchi.
Nowadays,
the gesture is not so easily performed: the guy who attempts to render his
sympathy for oppressed women or for the ‘women’s cause’ risks exposing himself
to attack as a dreaded, posturing ‘feminist man’. We no longer find it noble
that such a man would wish to ‘speak for’ all women, for women’s plight. There
is something almost nostalgic, a pervasive false note, in the return to the
terms of the ‘40s or ‘50s female melodrama in a highly calculated, derivative
work such as Todd Haynes’ queer-inflected Far
from Heaven (2002).
But
before 1960s feminism – as we dimly, perhaps unconsciously recognise – this
type of cross-gender ‘identification’ was indeed, once upon a time, a heroic
thing for a man, these men, to do. Today, it is difficult for even a female
filmmaker (at least in the affluent West) to revisit this territory, in a
necessarily self-conscious way. When, for example, a film such as Martha
Coolidge’s Rambling Rose (1991) tries
to reinvent the story-tropes of an old Minnelli ‘woman’s melodrama’ – when it
shows a mother standing up to the officious, patriarchal man who wants to
perform a clitorectomy on her daughter, when it celebrates a ‘good man’ in the
shape of Daddy Robert Duvall – the throat-choking emotion, the welling-up cheer
that this is meant to provoke does not quite come: the times and the dramatic
gesture do not go together properly any more.
It
is Ritwik Ghatak’s way of presenting this melodrama in The Cloud-Capped Star which is really so special. He is famous for
his unusual stylistic experiments, no matter the limitations of the technology
at his disposal in his time and place. Many of his experiments now seem as if
they were years, even decades ahead of their time. On the one hand, there is a
classical side to Ghatak’s art. We can see this solid sense of structure in his
work on the images. There are evenly paced, lateral tracking shots that
choreograph the characters and their emotions in relation to one another as in
the films of Mizoguchi. There’s strikingly angled close-ups of a face against a
ceiling, as in Orson Welles. There’s a strong use of physical symbols and
dramatic metaphors, such as a train roaring through the background of an image
and breaking the snatched idyll of lovers, like we might see in an Elia Kazan
Hollywood melodrama of the same period.
But
when we move to the soundtrack level of Ghatak’s art, everything becomes more
extreme, fragmented and experimental. The music and the soundscapes of The Cloud-Capped Star are quite simply
breathtaking. The soundtrack is expressionist in a bold and free way:
characters sing as in a musical, but there also discordant blocks of strident,
wailing sound to accompany Nita’s agony; and there’s a hissing, steamy sound
that fades up and down whenever that mother walks into the picture. There is
such an extraordinary range of musical moods and settings across the two hours
of this movie – vibrant, melancholic, suddenly surging up and just as suddenly
cutting off in every scene, almost like in a Jean-Luc Godard film. You feel,
watching it, that you’re swimming in a sound stream, a veritable music of life.
Since
the its widespread appearance in parts of Europe in the late 1980s and early
‘90s, analyses have started to take the measure of this extraordinary,
revelatory work by Ghatak. Raymond Bellour’s magisterial analysis, which “walks
us through” the most intense and poetic parts of the film, is exemplary (an
English translation appears in Rouge, no. 3, 2004). For my own part, when called upon by editor Chris Fujiwara to contribute to a book
on “defining moments in film”, I immediately chose this particular
constellation of images and sounds in The
Cloud-Capped Star:
The face of a man, Shankar, is in profile on
the extreme-left of the frame, singing into the darkness. Halfway through the
shot, the camera moves to starkly reframe the scene: we are suddenly aware that
Shankar and his melancholic sister, Nita, sit close, side-by-side, but turned completely
away from each other; now, at the pan’s end, we see Nita, in profile on the
extreme-right of the frame, singing into the darkness … It would be hard to
find, beyond an iconoclast like Godard, such a perfect demonstration of the
difference between what critic-filmmaker Alain Bergala calls the arrangement of a shot (situating the
figures in a set) and the attack upon
it chosen by the camerawork. Who but Ghatak, a proto-modernist working here
within the traditional genre of melodrama, would have filmed this mise en scène in such a strange,
disconcerting way? The whole of this bleak scene – in which the
ever-sacrificial Nita begs her brother (who is soon to depart) to teach her a
Tagore song – is marked by breaks, ellipses, unmotivated camera movements,
unrealistic pools and speckles of light in a painfully obscure darkness, and
above all a wild sound mix that passes from ambient noise through song to the
echoing lash of a whip that expressionistically conveys Nita’s increasingly
manic despair. Every cut, every sound cue, is an event in Ghatak: rather than simply “establish” a scene, he
restlessly withdraws and redraws it, according to the turbulent pressure of the
emotions within it.
MORE Ghatak: A River Called Titas © Adrian Martin March 2007 / May 2013 |
