"Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all...I have always
been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more
credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than
to those occurring in dreams...
Man... is above all the plaything of his memory. In the world we live in
everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of
things that will never happen again."
-- Andre Breton
The Assamese movie scene has always been plagued by the lack of
funds and invariably so because of the limited number of Assamese
speakers. One cannot compare Assam to Mumbai, leave alone
Hollywood, since the special effects, editing, costumes, location and
every small technical detail, which are the hallmark of successful
commercial movies, involve a lot of money. And since not many are
going to watch the Assamese movies, it is difficult to make expensive
productions. But there is the realm of the experimental or avant-garde
cinema, which is still unexplored by Assamese directors. Avant-garde
cinema does not require a huge budget; all it requires is a fresh set of
eyes to look at reality in a unique manner and the talent to interpret it
through images on the reel.
The avant-garde movement does not restrict itself to movie making: it
is a new way of looking at reality- a new way of training one's senses
to interpret reality. The avant-garde tried to experiment with various
interpretations of space, time, image, color etc. In fact almost all the
abstract art( with the exception of surrealism and lettrisme ) was
conceived in the realm painting and then was applied in literature,
movie-making, music etc.
Surrealism is different from the avant-garde movement in a sense that
it transcends the avant-garde. Andre Breton, the forerunner of
Surrealist philosophy, wrote "Let us not mince words: the marvelous is
always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the
marvelous is beautiful" and it has been driven by the same philosophy
ever since. Influenced by the study of dreams and the unconscious by
Freud and Jung, the surrealist group believed in the future resolution of
the two states of dream and reality, which are seemingly so
contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a 'surreality', if one may
so speak.
The interpretation of reality or our perception by the Surrealists is most
striking. In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defined
Surrealism as psychic atomism in its pure state, by which one proposes
to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other
manner - the actual functioning of the mind. The surreal film unites the
spatial elements of image and the temporal elements of narrative in a
discourse that deconstructs the usual function of each. Cubism, which
was studied before Surrealism, tried to deconstruct spatial existence of
visual images. Surrealism, instead, pretends to create the illusion of
space and then suddenly turns around and shows that a surreal object
now occupies the same real space.
Georges Melies, David Wark Griffith, Carl Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein
(of the 'Battleship Potemkin' fame), Stan Brakhage, Michaelangelo
Antonioni etc were the trailblazers of avant-garde moviemaking. Stan
Brakhage, perhaps the most prolific and masterly of them all, used
unique narrative styles in most of his movies. For him the color and
method used to film a movie was not a means but an end in itself. His
movies are true approximations of his dreams and visions. They
portray how difficult seeing is to the trained adult eye.
In his own words in an interview, hypnologic vision is what you see
through your eyes closed -- at first a field of grainy, shifting, multi-
colored sands that gradually assume various shapes. It's optic feedback:
the nervous system projects what you have previously experienced --
your visual memories -- into the optic nerve endings. It's also called
closed-eye vision. Moving visual thinking, on the other hand, occurs
deeper in the synapsing of the brain. It's a streaming of shapes that are
not nameable -- a vast visual 'song of the cells expressing their internal
life. Peripheral vision is what you don't pay close attention to during
the day and which surfaces at night in your dreams. And memory
feedback consists of the editing of your remembrance. It's like a highly
edited movie made from the real.
Most of Brakhage's movies are without sound. The movie creates a
rhythm of its own and it hijacks the visual senses to such an extent that
there is actually no need for a auditory distraction. Most of his
techniques, like his mastery of the hand-held camera, painting on the
film-strip, physically inserting tiny images on the reel (like in his
masterpiece 'Dog Star Man'), scratching the film surface to leave
marks and in the movie "Moth Light" even inserting dead moths
between film rolls to create the true illusion of light through the wings
of moths: were not only unique but also were aimed at exploring
human subjectivity in all its varieties. His feelings and emotions are as
closely duplicated on reel as possible.
The most well known of the surreal movies is the 'Un Chien Andalou'
or 'An Andalusian Dog' directed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.
The movie is full of surprises and imagery straight from the dreams. In
one sequence, a woman approaches a cyclist and looks in turn at what
he has in his hand. Close-up of the hand, the middle of which is
teeming with ants swarming out of a black hole. None of these falls
off. It dissolves to the armpit hair of a young woman sprawled on the
sand of a sunny beach. It again dissolves to a sea urchin whose spines
ripple slightly. It dissolves to the head of another young woman in a
powerful overhead shot framed by an iris. The iris opens to reveal the
young woman surrounded by a throng of people who are trying to
break through a police barrier. At the center of this circle, the young
woman, holding a stick, attempts to pick up a severed hand with
painted fingernails that is lying on the ground. A policeman comes up
to her, sharply reprimanding her; he bends down and picks up the
hand, which he carefully wraps up and puts in the box that was carried
by the cyclist. He hands it all to the young woman, saluting her in a
military fashion while she thanks him. As the policeman hands her the
box, she appears to be carried away by an extraordinary emotion that
isolates her completely from everything around her. It is as though the
echoes of distant religious music enthralled her; perhaps music she
heard in her earliest childhood.
Unfortunately most of the movies by Brakhage, Bunuel and other
experimental filmmakers are no longer available off the counter. Most
of them are available only from online stores; if you are lucky enough
you might pick up a copy of "By Brakhage: An Anthology" a
collection of 26 of his selected movies released in May 2003 around
the time of his death. But the fact remains that even though most
experimental films are not very big commercial successes, they not
only are comparatively cheap productions but also raise the standard of
the moviemaking art as a whole. The complex narrative/story of an
avant-garde movie coupled with the uncommon and unsettling styles
used by the masters is often too much for the average moviegoer to
handle. Yet these movies are necessary as they set trends.
Experimental movies, by definition are an experiment, an effort to
push human imagination and narrative styles to the very brink and try
to erase the thin line between reality and fiction. Most of the styles
developed by the avant-garde and surrealist movies are used in
commercial movies in small and diluted doses: in fact studies in
cubism and montage has influenced most of the movie effects and
music videos that we see around us. Without the boldness of the
experimental movies, most of these areas would have remained
unexplored.
The Assamese movie directors can perhaps be inspired by these
masters to invest more effort in experimental movies which might even
raise the standard of international movie-making rather than trying to
imitate the sleazy Bollywood commercial movies which invariably
result in disasters due to financial constraints.
- Contributed by Syamanta Saikia
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