Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend & Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

BECOMING EPIC: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

A film series conceptualized by Elroy Pinto and supported by TARQ

Produced by

F35/36 Dhanraj Mahal, CSM Marg, Apollo Bunder, Colaba, Mumbai 400001. www.tarq.in

CONTENTS

02

Introduction

06

Chapter 01

16

Chapter 02

22

Chapter 03

32

Chapter 04

44

Chapter 05

56

Author’s Biography

Introduction

02 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

BECOMING EPIC - MYTH, LEGEND AND FOLK TALE THROUGH COLOR AND SOUND Before Cinema was to be burdened with an identitarian ideology, there was a burgeoning process of amalgamating myth and folktale into its form. Historically, every art has combined ideas of the myth and folktale into its style, we see this form flourish in theater until cinema was birthed. However, of all art forms, cinema has been the most accepting of various ideologies and perspectives, so it may never be cast in chains into the purely representational and hyperexpressive. Similarly, it flows between several classical arts without being claimed by one, in particular, colour and sound.

In the films that I have selected

for this programme, I have tried to approach them from a Bachelardian perspective. The early philosophy of Gaston Bachelard may have involved with scientific theory and the pursuit of the break. The break as understood here was an epistemological break which was developed right from his early works on LautrĂŠamont (1939) and the Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938).

Despite the overwhelming popularity of The Poetics of Space (1958) very little of his work on the elements and the Imagination gets any reference or mention in film theory. He took on the elements of water (1942, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter), air (1943, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the imagination of movement)

Introduction | 03

and earth (1946 - Earth and reveries of Repose & 1948 - Earth and reveries of Will).

Ultimately his style of writing that developed in the process (becomingmetamorphosis) continued as his work on Fire underwent updates right till the end of his life. Bachelard did not explicitly write about cinema and most of his work on the elements revolves around literary criticism. He has left behind a body of work from which one may drink eternally. Bachelard finds a difference between metaphors, that are ‘mere mental illustrations of perceptions’ and a concept called ‘images proper’ which he feels ‘are the utterances of an essential dynamism’. Mary McAllester says Bachelard ‘reinvents man, against idealism, beyond conventional notions of subject and object’. By looking at man as a de-centred subject that gets his imagination from something deeper within nature, Bachelard achieves his ‘subversive humanism’.

His work addresses the relationship between dreams and myth and utilized that to create complexes based off on a poet’s style. I have attempted to apply his work onto discovering poetic images that may be present in the films. Each filmmaker

approaches his work from precinematic forms, such as, literature, painting, music, theatre, opera, architecture. Only in understanding cinema through these forms can one realise the epic form in cinema.

COLOUR In the west, color is subjugated by discourse in favor of the line.

The suggestion that line is closer to perfection and color is a distraction and even, to some extent, “feminine” is prevalent since Aristotle. GrecoRoman religions of Dionysius and its successor, Orpheus, propagated a cyclical element of birth, death, rebirth and oneness with nature (Mother Earth). While an eschatological religion like Christianity suggests a oneness with the Divine (holy Father).

The masculine thus subjugates the feminine. Early cinema had yielded little to no discourse on black and white as colours in cinema. Most people regard black and white films as “colourless”; a brilliant flash of white light may bring forth a discovery on screen or the black shadows of a mysterious figure may engulf us with horror. Therefore, the arrival of technicolour is a mere expansion of colour and not its birth.

04 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

SOUND There are a multitude of differences between Western Classical and Indian Classical music, yet it unifies on the same foundation of seven notes.

These foundations have, over a period of time, been influenced by folk music and integrated its forms into classical idioms. In cinema, the presence or absence of sound refers to a certain musicality, which is found in both, western and indian classical music.

and reframe the discussion around it.

My intention here is to reflect on the legendary and the contemporary, the traditional and the experimental, folk art and classical art.

MYTH The depiction of folktale and myth in the cinematic form gives cinema the freedom of experimentation with colour, sound and temporality.

The canvas that cinema presents to depict folktale or myth is vast and is capable of sustaining an epic in myriad of ways. However, commercial ventures of most myths are merely backed by large CGI armies clashing at each other in congruence or they are drenched in layers of theatrical melodrama merged with expressionistic acting that compromises the magnitude of the myth or the folktale.

The films and filmmakers that I have suggested below have made sincere efforts to raise cinema from plain representation to redraw the canvas

Introduction | 05

Chapter 01

Alexander Dovzhenko’s Folk tale becomes the Epic

A brief note: This essay is keeping in mind the original nature of the film, as a Silent era film.

The soundtrack was added onto the restored print only in the 70’s.

BRESSON ONCE FAMOUSLY SAID, “THERE IS NO SILENT CINEMA! IT NEVER EXISTED”.

Ukrainian filmmaker, Alexander Dovzhenko’s silent epic Zvenigora made in 1927 encapsulates a thousand years of history, myth, and revolution it encompasses a collective unconscious by conjuring a multiplicity of images familiar to the Ukrainian people. A primary archetypal character takes centerstage by seamlessly weaving the form of his storytelling rather than introducing new characters to establish a narrative. In Zvenigora he takes up the Duma, an epic sung poem based on folk traditions. The Duma is applied as a device to address to re-tell a history not entrenched in conventional narrative but in a complex structure. This structure is reflected in the rhythmic arrangement

of shots and the movement between frames. It also encompasses the graphical arrangement of nature in shots and the movement of figures within these frames.

Dovzhenko’s own ideology, while he was deeply entranced with nature he was raised as a Christian and while he remained largely agnostic, he returned to his faith in later years. In his persecution by Soviet authorities and his contemporaries in Ukraine, Dovzhenko saw common threads with the life of Jesus Christ, a fact confirmed by his biographer to me. This raises the Christian iconography (such as the image of a Christ like figure both during the invasion of the nationalists

Chapter 01 | 07

on the Bolshevik backed village and the worship by the grandfather of a Christ like image before a tree) present in the film to resonate with a deeper signification in Dovzhenko’s life and the life of the imagined identity of his country.

Lacking a conventional linear narrative in Zvenigora, Dovzhenko works towards an interlinking genealogy of history with rituals and practices.

The film, hence, follows episodes that , construct a history of Ukranian people, composed with images of daily life, rituals, construction sequences, revolutionary ideologies and myth. For Dovzhenko, a dialectical materialism in film cannot satiate just movement in the abstract, but must encompass the movement in the life of his people.

In the opening sequence we are introduced to Dovzhenko’s distinctive style in which he utilises epic retardation, a literary device by which an action is slowed down or repeated for emphasis. In the Duma, the verb completes a sentence, the action of a character at the end of a sequence thus achieves the highest signification, as opposed to the preceding movement.

In his writings, Dovzhenko expresses

his concerns in cinema by illustrating three concepts instrumental to his work 1) the respect for the intellect of the audience, 2) the dangers in perception of the audience’s passivity and 3) the freedom to arrive at independent conclusions. For instance, in the opening sequence the previously mentioned archetypal character is introduced as an old man and later called the grandfather, presumably, Dovzhenko was perhaps acknowledging his grandfather, whom he revered as his hero. He is taken in by a group of Haydamaks who entrust him to find them the buried treasure nearby. Immediately we take note of the attire worn by the Haydamaks, a Kobzar, a musical instrument is utilised by the Haydamaks to appease them. The Kobzar is a key instrument of the Duma. The use of the Kobzar even serenades the host of Polish nobility that are mounted on the trees, a comment about the Poles being landowners. When the Cossacks decide to hunt the “Poles”, they are met with radical success in a comical scene where the bayonet’s aim is unimportant to upset the order. A few

08 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

moments later, a treasure is revealed but has a guardian whose movement on screen is in stark contrast to the movement of the Haydamaki and the grandfather as well.

Dovzhenko believed in the mystic origins of life, considering his deep relationship with nature, he spent his formative years growing up on a farm in Kie. In his biography, he speaks extensively about the soil and rivers of his country. The unpredictability of nature opened up vistas of thought for him and as such this is reflected in his cinematographic adaptation of nature. Dovzhenko made it no secret that the Ukraine identity was of importance. For this reason, he builds every scenario in the film with a careful surveyance of nature around man.

The french philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, spoke of the phenomenology of imagining, as something that had to be released from the Cartesian or idealist remnants (I think therefore I am) and had to be reinstituted as “I imagine therefore I am”. Bachelard believed in a subversive humanism, that Richard Kearney1 puts it as, “which conceived of the human being as a de-centered subject nourished by a poetic power which transcended its control”.

Dovzhenko reinvents man, against idealism beyond conventional notions of subject and object.

This de-centering of the human being is a constant thread through Zvenigora, it is no surprise then, when we see the alignment of shots of nature, only the highest attention is paid to the most oneiric moments.

As a child bathes in a river, a cow and her offspring view the child. Who has not thought of urinating in a waterbody as a child? Dovzhenko is not merely displaying images of rural life, he highlights the ones coming from the naivety of childhood.

As a dialogue in the film reads “We would have grown like the corn on the fields, unless…” with this statement and the following sequence in which the grandfather archetype now occupies the position of a village elder, warns them about the cyclical variance of life. A war is depicted by the tears in the eyes of a mother. In a general sense of the term, montage develops itself through thesis, an anti-thesis, their collision builds into a synthesis, both in rhythm and in sequence. Even though we will EISENSTEIN, S., & LEYDA, J. (1947).

The film sense, by Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1

Chapter 01 | 09

translated and edited by Jay Leyda.

New York, Harcourt, Brace & World. have viewed the film through its 1973 restored version that has a soundtrack provided, one may consider watching it without the sounds or even subtitles. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin’s Mother, had garnered fame through the Soviet union and relied on a faster pace of editing.

Battleship Potemkin retained an Average shot length (ASL) of about 2.7 seconds and Mother of about 3 seconds. Cinemetrics have been underutilised in film studies, but a deeper introspection on these durations might provide us a clearer insight into the minds of the film makers. Zvenigora by contrast has an ASL of about 5 seconds. This distinction in the ASL, illustrates a uniqueness in Dovzhenko’s style, sometimes wrongly attributed as poetic. This divergence provides space for an emotional silence to be created.

Along with the musical images that he juxtaposes and the colors he evokes through the traditional garb of the frocks of the maidens. In our mind this fuses with the later images of pure concrete and industry furnace which forge a rhythmic association as graphic blocks of reality.

scenarios, such as in the past with the Haydamaki, through the water to interfere with the fertility ritual in what seems to be the most poignant depiction of an empowered in the feminine. The lady on which Dovzhenko focuses on is Oksana, during the depiction of the Ivan Kupala festival in which young ladies hop over fire and then cast away wreaths with a candle down the river, we bear witness to an empowered feminine.

In his essay on Zvenygora, Ray Uzwyshyn talks about the distortion in temporally disparate timelines. The process is complicated a step further by his usage of the same actress who previously portrays the hapless Oksanna, here Dovzhenko urges one to look beyond the conventional presentation of facts as history, deeply probing a single narrative and instead of promoting a grand narrative of the country, he allows for multiplicities to enter into the fold.

Just as the grandfather seems capable of traveling between several

10 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

“In zvenyhora, roksana is conflated with temporally disparate historical narratives linked by similarity of theme: the duma of maria bohuslavska; an earlier arrival of polovtsians and varangians to kyivan-rus (circa 870 a.D.); The subsequent historical controversy surrounding kyivan-rus’s origins (18-20th centuries) and an interweaving with later historical periods involving cossacks and the ‘haidamaky’ raids.”2

Chapter 01 | 11

In this sequence there’s a multitude of devices that he employs in the form of the image, double and triple exposure, superimposition of events, slow motion, and intricate camera masks, which is used to layer both myth and legend, as the very earth on which it is based upon. A triple repetition is part of a device of epic retardation and no doubt that finds its way right into the actual ontology of the image.

The grandfather has two grandsons who have almost two opposite ideologies – The revolutionary Tymishko and the nationalistic Pavlo. Pavlo learns about the story of Ray Uzwyshyn, Zvenyhora A visual exploration (source: online) Zvenigora (literal translation ‘The Ringing Mountains’) through the grandfather and dreams of taking the treasure buried deep within the crust of the earth. His brother Tymishko joins the Bolsheviks, fights in the world war and goes ahead to engage in scientific study to better understand the secret of Zvenygora. Pavlo, heads to Prague where he entertains and swindles a hedonistic group of elites who would gladly pay to see him shooting himself inducing a surrealistic spectacle. Beyond binaries of good and 2

evil, Dovzhenko saw these characters as ideologues that were problematic to label as absolutes. Pavlo does hint that the intellectuals in the west did not care if the Bolshevik revolution crippled the burgeoning Ukrainian identity. They could look no further than their own visceral pleasure.

Eventually, the film draws to a close with Pavlo, now in a daze looking to destabilise the new train that passes over the mountain of Zvenigora and sends his grandfather who in a hypnotic state proceeds to destroy the train mythologised as a fire serpent.

Temporally and spatially Zvenygora unfolds and presents the agrarian and the industrial landscape.

The biological rhythm of the body of Dovzhenko’s characters are entwined with the social, cosmic and natural or ecological worlds they inhabit. To quote a relevant passage from Henri Lefebvre3:

12 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

“The social rhythms are culturally and historically conditioned and include rhythms of eating and sleeping, working hours, breaks and holidays. These rhythms are learned, but of course affect the biological rhythms (and vice versa). The same applies to cosmic and natural/ ecological rhythms, such as the rhythms of day and night, months, seasons, plants and weather systems.�

Chapter 01 | 13

But the industrial provides no relief and is masculine, whereas the agrarian is a cohesive functioning of the masculine and feminine through the family.

As a film, Zvenigora develops (to borrow a term from Bachelard) in ‘images proper’, these are utterances of an essential dynamism of being. These ‘images proper’ are assembled together to bring form, event and substance in a comprehensive cinematic vision.

From the montage of daily life that we view in an early chapter of the film, to the rhythmic shots of the workers of industry, Dovzhenko is working towards combining biology with sociology, as Kepley mentions, “biological (natural) processes are used to convert a radical social process into a natural (and inevitable) one”.

Dovzhenko’s aesthetics are based in the mundane interactions with nature that man had to confront with the advent of modernity, we see this when Pavlo faces while he travels to the city LEFEBVRE, H., ELDEN, S., & MOORE, G. (2015). Rhythmanalysis: space, time, and everyday life. London, Bloomsbury Academic. and in a dizzying sequence, we take in the sights of the city in a manner 3

identical to Ghatak’s depiction of the city from Subarnarekha. In Zvenigora, nature views man back, not a passive component but an active part, as it the bark of the tree becomes a viewer of the grandfather and his grandson as they pay respect to nature and a deity, or the Haydamaks riding away are spotted from a very high placed position, the same level as the tree that has been looked upon earlier.

One must confront the presence of the reverie in Zvenygora, while Sartre designates the ‘Reve’ as being synonymous with pure negation of reality. Bachelard designates imagination as a constant re-creation of reality. The imagination as reverie is thus associated with the emergence of being itself. Imagination after all, precedes even the logically deduced memory. The reverie of the grandfather eschews the time in which Pavlo has suddenly become a ‘villain’ and paints his horse white while pillaging a nearby village.

It is in reverie that the real is surpassed and the movement towards a new reality begins. The aperture in which being takes leave and launches into a becoming. The aperture of the eye of the camera similarly re-creates a reality, a representation that can

14 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

open the imagination of a viewer to multiplicities, then this becomes clear that the perceived unrelated episodes of the film move together in a continuous becoming. One that opens the mind to every moment and not subjugated to a single narrative.

In this manner, one can continuously re-discover poetic experiences in the film. Images have a metaphorical life of their own and in order to appreciate the radical transformation of these images from real to film, one must be ready to forge a private history for the sake of re-establishing a history of the nation through the power of reverie.

If we are to now go back to the first chapter of the film, we will begin to see the non-linked and almost absurd feel to the film. An old man is enlisted to find treasures he claims exists, he finds a gold cup that instantly turns into a piece of broken glass, gold disappears and becomes nothing, they find a mysterious door that opens itself up to a mysterious guardian who haunts the lands and creates an explosion by which everyone falls asleep, they all hug the ground, as if to mimic the action of a child holding onto a mother’s breast. The actions that follow bear no direct consequence on the prior action. In fact it develops without direct logical thought, we are

already in the reverie of Dovzhenko.

Dovzhenko’s valorization of characters ranges from the from the actions of the grandfather to the actions of the maidens at the second chapter, to the epic of Roksanna and the chapter in Prague. Bachelard views that the imagination valorizes the world. In this very concept, one presupposes a positive content in the imagineer’s mind. Dovzhenko’s model of poetics is identical in this fashion as one capable of giving and taking, a projection and a discovery is possible. As Richard Kearney states, “A centrifugal exodus towards things and a centripetal return to the self.”

As much as the Duma is a work of epic poetry it has its own musicality present in its structure. Dovzhenko famously designed sequences to not function around the simple x and y axis but to move along a trajectory, several instances show the grandfather cutting across the landscape of Ukraine, in Dovzhenko’s view he was working towards actualising the lyrical intonations of the Duma, through the rhythmic movement and gestures of his protagonists as well as the movements of the camera and what movement it captured.

Chapter 01 | 15

Chapter 02

Frantisek Vlacil’s Valley of the Bees and the formalistic exercise in Sound and Black and White

Frantisek Vlacil’s visionary epic, Valley of the Bees begins with an eccentric relationship between the honey bees and the characters of the film. The hexagonal prismatic comb introduces us to the drone of the bees on a microscopic level. Vlacil opens up the film by taking us through shots of the surrounding nature in an almost X-ray like manner. He first figure we see are of Ondrej in close up and when the young boy makes his entrance into the estate for his father’s marriage we see his figure through a long shot.

This movement from the micro to the macro is of importance as Vlacil uses his cinematography to delve into the interior of his principal characters.

Lenora, the mother to be, watches a dramatic exchange between the

father and son, wherein Ondrej pranks his father, and his father in anger retaliates by throwing the boy to the wall. In fear of his actions he commits his son to the Order of the Teutonic Knights. As Ondrej vows his life to the Order, the walls of the castle are subject to a careful introspection as a Knight walks past from one passageway to another. Even as he gets up and sees the blade of the sword hanging in front of him, one may see the childlike exuberance that Ondrej exudes.

It is here that he befriends the older Armin who shares his soul and their friendship evolves as a brotherly love. Despite the hints of homosexual tension between them, one may even view the sequence of them holding

Chapter 02 | 17

onto each other in the ice cold Baltic Sea as a conduit for knowledge being imparted. Armin teaches him the meaning of austerity with the waves pounding their lower extremities as they lay naked. In a shorter sequence, we bear witness to Armin showcasing his affection towards Ondrej as he feeds him his piece of fish for lunch at the castle.

As one of their brothers, Rotgier attempts to flee the confines of the castle, we are further shown the desolate land that occupies the space outside. In the first of its sequences, Vlacil delves into ellipsis as certain actions happen off camera. Rotgier is punished for attempting to abandon his duties in a very stark manner, he takes a few steps backwards as he falls down to his death only to be mauled by wild dogs below.

As Ondrej escapes from the castle the following morning Armin wakes up to a fresco that details an instant from the life of Christ where he asks for water from a lady. There is a sense of foreboding present in the film, as Armin sets out to find Ondrej he comes across a blind woman who offers him a drink of water and tries to analyse his condition.

After a period of searching for Ondrej, Armin comes face to face with him in a bloody encounter with a family

of yeomen and coal miners. Ondrej however has no intention of going back as he feels he has made enough reparations for the actions in his childhood and must now return home to go back to his father’s estate. As he returns back he finds that his father has passed away with the estate proceeding towards an advanced state of decay. It is in this land of Bohemia that Christianity has a closer affinity with Paganism. We see witness ‘Whit Sunday’ being celebrated, a holiday that till date is celebrated in traditional Catholicism as Pentecost. We also see the blossoming love between Ondrej and his mother Lenora. Despite the union being deemed unholy by Christianity, the priest named Blasius gets them married.

Armin wants no part of this and decides to take matters into his own hands. He meets Ondrej on the day of their wedding and eventually ends up murdering Lenora. He is them promptly fed to the wild dogs. Ondrej acquires a change of heart and does go back to the order to honor his brother’s last wish.

One of the purposes of this write up is to go beyond simple dichotomies of Christianity versus Paganism. Most writers on the film have commentated on this particular aspect. Due to the film being set in the 13th century, European history moves towards the end of the medieval times, which

18 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

resulted in the final disappearance of the Mother Goddess cults. As the masculine grip of Christianity starts to pervade the landscape, in the film we are reminded of the poverty that leads to cannibalism and a deeper concern is raised as morality is to consolidate its presence on Western thought. One may turn to D.D. Kosambi1, for an accurate description of Western thought and literary tradition, “European cultural and literary tradition based upon prowess and—later — love, or to put it crudely: violence and sex.”

In this regard Ondrej represents a more Paganistic Christianity which is still closer to the Mother Goddess cults whereas Armin brandishes a foreign Christianity. One that is borne out of the masculine, one that is created by the Knights who fought in the crusades for belief. The harshness of the desert landscape has changed Christianity into something far more austere. Time and time we are reminded of this degree of sacrifice one must make in the name of God to be able to secure his blessings. But Ondrej and Armin don’t just represent two sides of the same (Christian) coin, they are the site on which present day Christianity has been built up on.

KOSAMBI, D. D. (1962). Myth and reality: studies in the formation of indian culture/ by D.D.Kosambi.

1

Bombay, Popular Prakashan.

Aside from obvious Christian-Pagan conflicts, the wild dogs form a key aspect of the film. One may turn to the poetry of Lautreamont for inspiration on this subject.

“Then dogs, driven wild, break their chains and escape from distant farms. They run all over the countryside, a prey to madness. Suddenly they stop and, wildly anxious, their eyes burning, they look around them on all sides.”2 Ondrej’s father falls down from his horse, only to be eaten alive by his dogs. Armin is butchered almost instantaneously by the wild dogs near the end of the film. Thus the wild dogs are depicted as eschewing time completely. The will to live becomes a will to attack that is never satisfied and is displayed in all its frank hostility. The dogs in this manner are completely unbounded by time, compared to the masters they serve, they experience a liberated time. The

Chapter 02 | 19

animal instincts that Christianity aims to suppress has been overcome in an instant by the wild dogs in the film.

At this point it is important to take note of the different musical spaces created by Vlacil through Zdenek Liska, an important Czech film music composer. Liska was inspired by Folk music and as such the estate of Ondrej is depicted through the bees dominating the soundtrack on a layer.

The castle of the Order is spatially developed through the repetitive chants and a recurring motif bathed in Latin words, obviously in praise of a higher power. These sound spaces are then placed in their native visual spaces and later on an interplay of these develops through the already layered soundtrack that constitutes dialogue, monologue, sounds of the sea and other elements.

LAUTRÉAMONT, DALÍ, S., & DENT, R. J. (2011). The Songs of Maldoror.

[Washington, D.C.], Solar Books.

Among the recurring motifs of sound, the element of earth and water is commented and visualised in multiple instances. We are told by Armin that in his travels to the Holy Land during the crusades, he had managed to carry some soil back which he wears proudly around his neck. This bears a constant reminder of his duty and towards the end of the film, where Ondrej failing to recognise the ‘value’ of the soil allows 2

his wife to play with it, speculating that it is sand from the sea. In this case, a matter of faith is accentuated, belief elevates the soil from mere sea sand to holy land soil. Water is presented as tranquil streams in Bohemia and the raging sea near the Castle of the Holy Knights. Both water bodies do not necessarily reflect the interiority of the characters they are with, but serve up extensive evocation for the viewer. Armin is a combination of these elements in a way, it is only one remark in the entire film that brings these elements together. In one poignant instant, he speaks about the unquenchable thirst he has had since he returned from the Holy land, he dips his face into a stream in which the earth is visually present and so is water.

The visualisation follows patterns of chiaroscuro design where light and darkness are polarised to extremes.

The day after Rotgier meets his end, Armin finds his way out of darkness and into a highly saturated image of the white light that blinds both the viewer as it does Armin. In an identical sequence, Ondrej moves to the Garret (attic) where he opens the windows and pure white light is thrust onto him, a scene that completes Ondrej’s journey from the castle to his keep.

The attic considered to be the coldest part of the house is also the most distant, traditionally one did not live

20 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

in it, but Ondrej is used to a certain distance between people, a trait nurtured at the castle no doubt. Here a quotation by Bachelard 3holds true: BACHELARD, G. (2014). The poetics of space. Internet Resource “In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer.

Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting�

3

A quiet night spent in the attic, connects him, on the soundtrack with the waves of the sea beating along the coast. A sound so far removed from his present surroundings but a reflection of his interior and his reverie. Ondrej oscillates between day dreams of being caught by Armin, sounds of his duty to the Holy Order.

He enjoys the luxury of being a Lord to his own people as well. On an excursion to the forest with Lenora, she proclaims the priest will marry them in the church, in an instant he sees an inscription on the rock in front of him which almost instantly reminds him of his duty that he has abandoned.

The Priest forms a conduit between two traditions, between the Pagan and the Christian. He treads a fine

line between loyalty to the church and loyalty to his people. Blasius, a derivative in all probability from St. Blaise, a saint who achieved mythic configuration by his acts of healing of the sick. By several accounts in European countries, Blaise was a man who cared for animals and man, equally. He is known for being a saint of the wild beasts, it is then no surprise that Blasius is the priest who takes on the strictness of the church through his interaction with Armin.

Even though Armin would have the world die to overcome the loneliness that one experiences, Blaise implores him to look beyond such fixed worldviews. He realises that his parish will come to an end if he does not play favorites with Ondrej and thus strikes a deal - donations once a year for the unholy marriage of Lenora and Ondrej.

The culmination of the film is in the sequence earlier as Ondrej sees Armin being eviscerated by the wild dogs he retreats. He closes the door of the room and passes until only his outline is visible against the darkness, on the soundtrack we hear the panting of the dogs, the dogs that eviscerated time have become tired. This transposition of the interiority to the exterior forms the end of the cycle of the film, as life begins completely anew for him, when he returns to the beach by the castle of the Order of the Holy Knights in the final scene.

Chapter 02 | 21

Chapter 03

Ashik-Kerib and Reveries towards childhood

“EVERY EFFECTIVE BEGINNING IS A SECOND MOMENT” - NOVALIS The materialist philosopher of the Imagination, Gaston Bachelard in his book titled, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie speaks about the imagination which has always been considered as a faculty for forming images. He argues, “it is rather the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception, of freeing ourselves from the immediate image; it is the faculty of changing images.” In this essay I will attempt to find an isthmus between the childlike images attributed to Parajanov’s Ashik-Kerib and the Bachelardian approach to reverie and poetic images.

a minstrel who has to earn riches before he can get the hand of his beloved, Magul-Megeri. As Ashik-Kerib begins his journey, his long time rival Kurshud-Bek tricks him into parting ways with his clothes and convinces the village that Ashik-Kerib has died.

I would like to note the presence of Persian arts and artifacts, such as miniature painting, calligraphy, inlaid wood work and elaborate metalwork objects right from the opening sequences. On the soundtrack we encounter the strumming of a lute as these objects pass by the opening credits.

Ashik-Kerib, inspired by Mikhail Lermontov’s 1837 story is about

The film unfolds itself in nineteen sequences. Loosely titled, the names

Chapter 03 | 23

aren’t the driving forces behind the composition of sequences but act merely as suggestions. In the first sequence we view what will become a repetitive force of poetic composition.

Parajanov anticipates a change from an art form to a life form, as we see the fruits placed on a wedding table turn to stone. It is no secret that Parajanov was influenced by Persian miniatures when he conceptualized the film, as a book then, each of these sequences hold a page of great detail. Just like the miniaturists, he controls his palette well, not using rich nor glossy colors too extensively.

He restricts the colors to earthy tones, reds, blues, purple, yellow finds sparing use. He carefully composes not just the arrangement of colors but also the lines and patterns in which they unfold. Even in sequences where Red plays a prominent part such as when Ashik-Kerib knocks on the doors to pray but finds no entrance, the cool blues of the mosque doors act as a deterrent, preventing red from completely absorbing the frame.

While harmonising colours he avoids shadow play on the characters, as we are aware, Persian miniaturists avoided directive lighting and held themselves from drawing shadows.

This in a way obliterates perspective as traditionally depicted in painting,

and perhaps what drew him to the form of miniature paintings. This may further explain why he picked the region Transcaucasia when he made his feature films, aside from him being born to an Armenian family in Georgia.

The syncretism present in these areas are breathtaking. Persian miniatures, derive certain factors from Byzantine art such as illuminated manuscripts wherein the lighting is even throughout the composition without any shadowplay. The Transcaucasia area also offers up the syncretism present in the architecture, one example we will look at later on.

Parajanov was a student of Alexander Dovzhenko, the grand master of the Montage In the sequence titled ‘a vow in the blue mosque’, Parajanov frames the minaret at an angle into a tri zoom movement, a homage probably to Dovzhenko’s work. Also in the mosque, the camera traces the floral and vegetal patterns on the wooden interiors, this is a similar effect to the layout one experiences in a miniature on the borders of the painting. He moves along the pattern and does not diverge from the ornamentation.

Parajanov continues his development of sequences through miniature

24 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

movements as two examples from the next two sequences come to mind. In the sequence of the minstrel going away to earn money the dance sequence plays out in the center from a top angle, if one views his sister holding his lute, she moves along in an axial manner from X to Y. This kind of movement is not characteristic of typical movements on screen but would be in line with how one could view the subjects in a miniature.

When Ashik-Kerib moves away from his village he passes through a herd of sheep, the camera does not move closer to detail the conversation between Kurshud-Bek and him, instead it maintains its distance, keeping the beautiful Azerbaijanian landscape in front of us. One may even view the movement of Ashik-Kerib across the river in the same light, as the figures of human body are not the key elements in composition. The individual in depth can make even the smallest of particles a totality.

At this point, an image one should notice is the lute and when it moves past the camera along the x-axis.

Prior to that we see that Kurshud-Bek has tricked his rival into giving his clothes and his lute. As the lute’s fate is shown, it is an image that draws us closer to the travail of Ashik-Kerib.

Bachelard identified in Shakespeare’s work the movement of Ophelia’s body in the water. A similar movement occurs in the film as the lute, a prized possession of the minstrel is flowing into the unknown, a key part of himself is flowing away. The Ophelia Complex, developed by Bachelard, identifies it as a symbol of feminine suicide. The flowery death of Ophelia is an image that is a “meditation on our last voyage and on our final dissolution”1 according to him. In Parajanov’s context, the image stirs in us a similar dissolution of the most important part of the minstrel’s life.

What would he do without it?

Ashik-Kerib’s mother loses her eyesight at the mention of his alleged death and gains her eyesight at the end of the film when she meets him; in either case a distinct colour movement takes place. In the sequence when she is told of her son’s passing the camera loses its focus and ends up staring at a black pomegranate. When she gains her eyesight at the end of the film it arrives through a movement of the stained glasses.

In the original story of Ashik-Kerib, there is very less mention of the specific places he played at. The sequence where we are introduced

Chapter 03 | 25

to Aziz and Vale the guardians or patrons of minstrels form a curious set of angels one may view in several traditional Persian miniatures, as Ashik-Kerib sleeps with the animals he is told to go and play at the marriage of the blind. The blind seek him through his music, they are guided by the rhythmic reverberations of his music. After that marriage he is asked to play at the marriage of the deaf and the mute. The initial shot of the waterfall in which a metal jug rests at the bottom of the fall, Parajanov creates the idea of us being in a vacuum. Ashik-Kerib sings at the wedding, a rational mind would only think of the absurdity, but a poetic mind dreams of a scenario in which music is not only a privilege to be attended to just by the ones fortunate to hear or vocalise. So while he plays, Ashik-Kerib is offered fruits from the deaf and the mute, the emphasis is on people enjoying the sounds, they gesture it in the same manner of that in silent cinema.

BACHELARD, G., & FARRELL, E. R. (2006). Water and dreams an essay on the imagination of matter. Dallas, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

The further one goes toward the past, the more indissoluble the psychological memory-imagination 1

mixture appears. To participate in the existentialism of the poetic, one must reinforce the union of imagination and memory. To do that, it is necessary to rid oneself of the historian’s memory which imposes its ideative prerogatives. It is no living memory which runs along the scale of dates without staying long enough at the sites of memory. Memory-imagination makes us live non-event situations in an existentialism of the poetic which gets rid of accidents. It is not the helpless feeling of the fish, but the rhythmic movement of the fish he wants us to take a look at. There is a shot of the waterfall again after the fish struggle, returning them to the water, but now the sound of the water has been returned to the fall (As opposed to the vacuum it created earlier) The environment and the being are coherent, water is now transformed, it goes around the fish, envelops it. It is clear that Parajanov’s enchantment with the world is fantastic, to enter into his reverie does not merely mean we must translate poetic images but it means the image must contain that arc of enchantment.

To view the wedding sequences one may get the impression of viewing an “authentic” wedding ceremony in Azerbaijan but this is not true2.

There’s no ceremony that functions

26 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

that way, so why does Parajanov conceptualise the world and ceremony in that manner? One may never speak of a definitive answer but to consider the imagination. I would like to quote Gaston Bachelard at length here:

“Imagination is always considered to be the faculty of forming images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception, of freeing ourselves from the immediate images; it is especially the faculty of changing images. If there is not a changing of images, an STEFFEN, J. (2013). The cinema of Sergei Parajanov. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10764568.

2

unexpected union of images, there is no imagination, no imaginative action. If a present image does not recall an absent one, if an occasional image does not give rise to a swarm of aberrant images, to an explosion of images, there is no imagination. There is perception or memory of a perception, familiar memory, the habit of colors and forms.

The fundamental word corresponding to imagination is not image but imaginary. The value of an image is measured by the extent of its imaginary radiance. Thanks to the imaginary, the imagination is essentially open, evasive.�3 Chapter 03 | 27

Thus, Parajanov has replaced the perception of the world with admiration, through this admiration he has received qualities of what is to be perceived.

As Ashik-Kerib encounters people of power throughout the film, the father of Magul-Megeri who gleefully and emphatically turns down the marriage proposal. The Sultan Aziz and the Nadir Pasha directly claim to be over the minstrel, “I have triumphed”. For Parajanov, these characters may not be based in any epoch, for him they are not bound in any time either. The time and age of these men no longer hold any sway over memory for him. The seasons in which Ashik-Kerib continues his journey serves as fundamental markers, by not giving a recorded time prominence, Parajanov’s return to childhood is through pure memory.

What did the lighting look like that day? Did it snow? Thus the experiences of the traveling minstrel create a certain degree of reminiscence.

An evocation through pure memory.

As James Steffen has noted in his wonderful book on Parajanov, speaks about the experienced Orientalism

of Parajanov, I would like to propose a slightly differentiated way of BACHELARD, G., & GAUDIN, C. (2014). On poetic imagination and reverie. looking at the manner in which Parajanov looks at the past. We are aware of the impact of miniature paintings on his work, for one to go towards the past, “the more indissoluble the psychological memory-imagination mixture appears”4 Thus to be a part of the poetic Parajanov reinforces the union of imagination and a national memory.

3

He does not view his film as a historic film, he rids the film of a historian’s history, it is no living memory that runs along the scale of dates in Ashik-Kerib, “memory-imagination” thus helps us understand the view of the world through Parajanov’s eyes even further.

One needs to appreciate the work of Dzhavanshir Kuliev, the Azerbaijani composer whose soundtrack incorporates the wonderful Alim Qasimov, a leading exponent of the classical form of Muˇgam (multi- movement suites containing improvisations on traditional modal scales). The soundtrack contains

28 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

electronic music and instrumental music, it has traditional ashugh music and even borrows Schubert’s Ave Maria.5 While the film has been shot in a variety of locations all over Azerbaijan, one would like to discuss the presence of the Ateshgah of Baku.

The Ateshgah has been utilised in the sequence of the minstrel performing a choreographed sequence, followed by a dual female performance slightly later. The Ateshgah of Baku within its walls holds holy scriptures of three religions - Islam, Zoroastrianism and Sikhism. While this syncretism is only alluded to with a shot of the fire at the top of the structure and the trishul next to it, Parajanov does not play on it too much. Most of the sequences are filmed in ruins, and it is precisely these places that have fallen into ruin or disruption over the centuries that hold within their walls the burden of a historical realm.

BACHELARD, G., & RUSSELL, D. (2010). The poetics of reverie: childhood, language, and the cosmos.

Boston, Beacon Press.

4

5

STEFFEN, J. (2013). The cinema of

Sergei Parajanov. http://site.ebrary. com/id/10764568.

Every sequence holds the entire film in itself, just the way the complexity in a miniature reveals itself in a single frame. The film is a continual process, not a fixed end goal, not a narrative.

Parajanov is not merely satisfied with creating an evasive view of his imagination. He expects it to be a voyage into his world, within every frame we understand our inner being, this is a dynamic reverie induced

by Parajanov. This dynamism of the imagination, this movement is not a mere metaphor. The reason why one connects with Parajanov in the childlike reverie he induces is because as we feel it within ourselves, this effortless imagination pursues us to connect with an enchanting vision.

It is then not surprising to view Ashik-Kerib in a way that these images contain within them his childhood.

To try and bring them together under causality or as coincidences would be a mistake. “Reverie shifts blocks of thoughts without any great worry about following the thread of an adventure”6. The dream, is thus not a function within Parajanov’s cinema, he saw that the dream always wants

Chapter 03 | 29

to tell a story, the reverie moves past that static thought. One may even look to Sayat Nova, a film acknowledged as a deeply autobiographical work of his.

The childhood of the poet in that film forms a crucial point of departure for Parajanov to invite us into his own childhood. It is thus the nucleus of his early years which serves to bring his imagination and memory together.

The childhood, “binds the real and the imaginary, that it lives the images of reality in total imagination�. As in every dreamer there is a child, who magnifies and stabilizes, this reverie tears itself away from history and establishes a new dimension, it situates it outside of time, making it foreign to conventional manner of time. Parajanov is that child and within his work, so are we.

BACHELARD, G., & RUSSELL, D. (2010). The poetics of reverie: childhood, language, and the cosmos.

Boston, Beacon Press.

6

30 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

Chapter 03 | 31

Chapter 04

The subversive use of sound and colour in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s

MEDEA The myth of Medea has been the subject for several films over the years, although very few illicit the response that Pasolini did when he made his adaptation in 1969. A year earlier he made a film in India titled, “Notes for a film on India�. He envisioned the story of a Maharaja who had fed himself to a starving tiger, the second half of the film dealt with the family of the Maharaja ridden to poverty and their challenges accepting the change in their social status and in caste. The first half of the film would contain several sequences in which ritual came together in the old world to retain a magical symbolic image. The second

half explored the problems faced by modernity a world coming to terms with new found independence and its contrasting purview of hunger and overpopulation. Pasolini did not view time or history in a chronological form, in fact like the philosopher Walter Benjamin he attempted to work against the unified idea of time that was propounded in the western world.

His film on India and his use of time as a tool to disrupt the narrative led him to interpret Medea in similar form.

Based on the play by Euripides, Pasolini’s Medea begins with a tale of Jason (and the Argonauts) invading

Chapter 04 | 33

Colchis where they attempt to bring the Golden Fleece back. Jason has been raised by the centaur Chiron and we are made aware of Pasolini’s attempt at a genealogical view of time.

The mythological angle portrayed for the sake of posterity is completed in the first ten minutes. We are shown a young Jason all of five years of age listening intently to the centaur as the word precedes action or, “the word becomes flesh” 1 as John 1:14 the film progresses. The colour tones for this particular sequence are restricted only to brown, green and blue - all represented in their natural appearances. A crucial dialogue given by the centaur states, “It is a complicated story, because it is full of deeds, not thoughts” and this serves to make a deeper comment about history and how it is laid out for future generations. As years go by in moments, Jason comes of age and the centaur is no more. In fact he has lost his mythical status and has become a “normal” human being. Jason has now become modern man. Modern man has no predilection with nature, in fact the words said earlier by the centaur, “When nature is not natural, all will be lost” suggests what happens to all modern men; they have given 1

up the mystery in nature to embrace rationalization. Natural images for ancient man thus form the crux of his existence. They also form a source of the phantastic, for him. One must take note of the absence of background sound, in fact this is the only sequence in the film where no music is present, aside from ambient diegetic soundtrack.

As Jason goes back to claim his kingdom, his uncle asks for the golden fleece and should Jason be successful he will be handed the kingdom. Before Jason can begin his quest, visually we are in Colchis. Pasolini shot the Colchis sequences at Cappadocia in central Turkey, the “fairy chimneys” or rock pinnacles (caused by the natural erosion of wind and rain into the soft volcanic rock) consists of several underground dwellings, several of these dwellings contain byzantine cave churches that have frescoes embellished onto them.

Pasolini displays natural rock formation along with coloured stones as markers, the tones do not shift dramatically. In fact for most of the sequences shot here, the colour remains in the major scale2, a term used by Corbusier. The major scale consisted of ochre yellows, red, earths, white, black, ultramarine

34 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

BATCHELOR, D. (2007).

Chromophobia. London, England, Reaktion. blue and some of their derivatives.

This sequence is captured in an anthropological study of the rituals adorned by the tribe that Medea belongs to. In an elaborate sequence we are witness to the Dionysian ritual of sacrifice to bless the crops for the coming season.

The soundtrack meanwhile undergoes rapid shifts between several cultures, there’s use of Tibetan chants, Persian santur, Balkan choral music, traditional Japanese music as well.

Here, one believes that as a man from the West, Pasolini deliberately layers the soundtrack which such indistinguishable music. The act function as a subversiveness towards preconceived notions of the ‘archaic’ world of Colchis. The exotic or rather the portrayal of the exotic develops itself into pastiche on the soundtrack.

By juxtaposing multiplicities of music, the entire sequence distorts our viewing capacity, as voyeurs, we view the ritual dismemberment for the benefit of the crops. These sounds then form a deep association with the mise en scene as they will find repetition on later sequences of the film where there is only an allusion to sacrifice. This sequence continues, 2

where the ruling family (Medea and her parents and younger brother) are humiliated and even beaten up.

At this point, Medea emphasizes the seed’s importance and that the seed must be reborn. Colchis is then clearly marked as a cyclical based society, one on which several of the older religions such as Dionysus and Orpheus were based on. Archaic religions had this marked way of living in commune with the rhythmic patterns of seasons and the cosmos. Jason and the white man are thus oblivious to this line of thought, as we shall learn later in the film.

Contrary to epic depictions of capitalistic cinema in Hollywood, Jason and the Argonauts are rash, bullies, incompetent to the point that they cannot even mount wild horses. They traverse the terrain of Colchis as marauders and pillagers, taking whatever wealth they can for themselves. As a rich man is about to get looted, a sudden burst of lavender pierces the center of the frame.

While the pillaging continues, the anthropological probing continues, the fields are to be worked upon.

The rulers and the people share a common table while having their meals. For a moment in time, this montage features the archaic society

Chapter 04 | 35

as being peaceful and ‘civil’ whereas the barbarians are Jason and the Argonauts. In the following sequence Medea traverses to the house of worship where she encounters Jason for the first time, she is taken aback and instantly falls in love. What follows is a montage in which Medea’s inner life is described, her affinity with her people explored through the shots of her and the moon. The turmoil continues as she finally makes up her mind, when she does, nothing is the same. Pasolini’s deeply evocative shots of the landscape here are to be noted, as he develops the relationship not between Jason and Medea, but describes the relationship between Medea and nature.

Medea, for the moment, gives up on her beliefs and, with the help of her brother, steals the Golden Fleece for Jason. Jason is shown to be quite lackadaisical about the entire event as he has not performed any heroic deed to achieve this. In the original reading of the myth, Jason performs several tasks before he can be granted the fleece. Pasolini rejects the tasks and takes further liberty with the treatment of the myth for his film. While the Colchians give chase, the soundtrack arrives at a familiar sound when her brother is sacrificed as well. This

ritualistic sound is not unfamiliar to our ears. As Jason and the Argonauts view the brutal hacking of the brother, Medea distributes his body parts at different locations, in a scene identical to when the Sparagmos ritual occurred on screen.

When the Colchians discover the dead body and its parts of the prince they immediately start traversing the landscape trying to put his body back together accompanied by a Dhrupad piece. Dhrupad is a part of North Indian classical music and there have been mentions of it origins from the 5th century onwards. It was the first form to have developed over centuries of worship of nature.

Dhrupad relies heavily on an equidistant placement syllables placed in time. Its performance typically consists of an alap, jor and jhala, with each part, creating an acceleration of rhythm. The alap has no meter running through it and this is what we hear. Further research with the Gwalior gharana vocalist - Amarendra Dhaneshwar has yieled that it is most likely Raga Bairagi-Bhairavi. Bairagi is a pentatonic raga (5 notes are sung) and as such the pentatonic raga’s come closest to everyday speech.

Furthermore, due to the bol-alaap that we witness, one may add that this is

36 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

a musical phrase or expression that in this raga can be used to evoke pathos or any deep feeling. It is with little doubt that Amarendra Dhaneshwar says, that it is most likely to be the Senior Dagar brothers, Ustad Nasir Moinuddin Dagar and Ustad Nasir Aminuddin Dagar, famous exponents of the style in India and have performed extensively abroad. Dagarvani or the style in which the Dagars sang the Dhrupad was revolutionary.

In a standard duo performance, both singers complement each other, but in the Dhrupad tradition, they are viewed as two solo singers, performing together.

As Jason and Argonauts return, Medea travels with them to the new land. Medea is the first to take note of the absent rituals of her fellow travelers, she berates them saying she can find no center and she wonder how they don’t praise or bestow any glory on any element of nature.Even the ground she steps on is depicted to be cracked, and bereft of any lushness. While she moves away, the tone of the sound changes, now we hear only the stringed instrument being played by one of the Argonauts.

Medea experiences a lost connection between her nature and the natural.

She exclaims, “I cannot hear the

earth”. There is a similar quick double close up in which an earlier sequence she had given herself mentally to Jason. Like a returning conqueror, Jason spends the night with her. As the fleece is now given to his uncle, who still refuses to give the kingdom back and remarks that it is time for Jason to learn that even kings are not meant to uphold every word they say.

Jason casually remarks that the fleece without its cultural relativity means nothing, the fleece that was one adored is now thrown on the floor, losing its mystical powers. Medea undergoes a transformation in her garb, as her royal clothing is taken off, and she is now ‘converted’ into one of the civilised people that she is surrounded by. In the next short sequence, Pasolini turns the gaze over as Medea is now the surveyor of Jason’s body as he lies next to her asleep. In the distance we see a new city.

Jason has an intense debate with his mentor the centaur Chiron. For the very first time he sees both aspects of the centaur, the sacred and the profane. As an allegory to Jason having no connection between the sacred in nature anymore, there is no interaction between the man version of Chiron and the sacred

Chapter 04 | 37

centaur version of Chiron. He can only converse with the now desecrated version of the centaur. Chiron tells him that they both stand for certain things and most of those have undergone a change. The archaic world that Medea left behind is present even in the most logical of men, modern man has just chosen to ignore it (the same way Jason does), it is in this way that Man stands to reject his ownself from time to time. Chiron tells Jason that he knows he loves Medea and that he must reconcile the turbulent time she undergoes so that both of them can live together peacefully. One may read this as an allegory between man’s inner conflict between accepting a world of pure reason and a world of magic, resolving this will bring benefit to all. In the next sequence we finally view a change in colours, but here we see a dynamic scale being applied, “citron yellow, oranges, vermillions and other ‘animated’, ‘agitated’ colours;” as Corbusier referred to them. We also get to see emerald green and other ‘madder’ colours (as Corbusier referred) which are traditionally depicted in an exotic country, or rather what one expected from the archaic world. Pasolini plays the subversive and turns the use of colour around, denouncing western practices when it came to application of colour.

Ten years have now passed and for Medea, reality is no longer real The words uttered prophetically by the centaur at the start of the film, are reiterated as he predicts what will unfold.

As the film progresses, Jason decides to further his ambitions by marrying Glauce and continuing his legacy there. He learns from his uncle that no King may keep every word and so despite his love for Medea, he must put his own interest above everything.

Increasingly, Medea starts to revertto her real ‘self’. In conversations with her maidens she reveals that she still holds powers that she had in Colchis and through the worship of the Sun. In earlier societies, the Sun was accorded the highest respect.

For instance in India, Agni is of prime importance for worship. While several debates of the film tend to focus on the two possibilities of the ending. It is clear that the first is a manifest of Theon’s greatest fear that his daughter Glauce will burn in the flames of Medea’s hatred and he would be consumed with her. Medea does manage to inspire some degree of suicide in Glauce, but it is left largely to be a psychological end that dictates her death. Theon passes away with his daughter. It is important to note that

38 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

the sound when Glauce kills herself is identical to an earlier motif used during the ritual killing in Colchis.

Medea prepares the final ritual of cleansing, she won’t let her children be tainted by their father’s presence any more. While some scholars see this as infanticide, it is clear that every hint given by the visuals (shots of the stove and the knife) indicate that this will be a ritual purification. She sits before the sun in the same manner in which she did probably once at Colchis. With the first rays she sets fire to everything and the sound we hear reflects and in our minds “confirms” that this is a sacrifice. In a manner of speaking, Pasolini offers the very sound it self to ritual through the film.

The consumption of the self in the flames is also a tenet held very highly by several religions. Be it in the works of the Sufis with the idea of “Fanaa” or the Moksh that the Buddhists preserve for all their life. Life is set up in a cyclical manner for the people of Colchis and for Medea. One may view her action as the ultimate sacrifice or killing of her children, but her actions in one’s eyes move beyond that, as if for life to affirm itself again, for the seed to be re-born again. Everything must be prepared to be given up.

Pasolini brings life into film - wherein life was to be understood through the social and historical conditioning of human perception. Flesh, pain, cruelty and death are words that one thus associates with this vicious reality that Pasolini works towards. For him, film is not merely a playful technique of images but a form of expression that could be mobilised to move against the universal and idealised concepts of the early 20th century. Hence when we see Medea, one moves through it as fragments, for the whole was not of interest to Pasolini. This is why Medea is a beautiful explosion of the self into fragments. Pasolini saw the oppostional and interstitial - the interval between two sequences in which meaning was present. In his famous essay on the montage Pasolini says, “montage operates on the film’s material what death operates on life”.

It is necessary to quote him at length below:

Chapter 04 | 39

“It is thus absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives (with which we express ourselves and to which we attribute the greatest importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations among discontinuous meanings. Death performs a lightning quick montage on our lives; that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other

40 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

possible contrary or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, converting our present, which is infinite, unstable, and uncertain, and thus linguistically indescribable, into a clear, stable, certain, and thus linguistically describable past (precisely in the sphere of a general semiology). It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive. “3

Chapter 04 | 41

Since our life is full of possibilities, it is only in death that we are able to give meaning to our own life. It is thus only in the death of her children and presumably, herself that Medea gives meaning to her entire life.

To further this idea in this context it will be necessary to go through the act of the the purifying flames of the Sun. For in the purification brought by the sun, it takes us closer to understanding the Novalis complex4 of Gaston Bachelard. In his work on the Psychoanalysis of Fire he builds a complex in which the poet Novalis writes:

“Assuredly I was too dependent on this life- a powerful corrective was necessary ... My love has been transformed into flame, and this flame is gradually consuming all that is earthly within me.�

To embrace the eventual destruction of the self is as important a thought as it is an action.

PASOLINI, P. P. (2007). Observations on the long take. The Cinematic. 84-87.

4 BACHELARD, G., & FRYE, N. (2015).

The psychoanalysis of fire.

3

42 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

Chapter 04 | 43

Chapter 05

Towards a micro-tonal aesthetic of sound and colour in Kumar

Shahani’s Khayal Gatha Khayal Gatha begins with a recording of Raga Shankara by the doyen of contemporary Gwalior gharana Pt. Krishnarao Shankar Pandit.

The bandish is picturised with a rose coloured window in the background, ensconced in a Gothic structure.

Indian Classical music relies on the presence of a tonic (drone) provided by the tanpura and in this frame, the tanpura is at the center. With the tonic set on the tanpura before us, the singing begins. Kumar Shahani had embraced Khayal through the Gwalior style of Hindustani classical music.

He began his early learning under his close collaborator, Neela Bhagwat, an eminent singer of the Gwalior style, and then for a longer duration under the guidance of a senior Gwalior

vocalist, the late Pt. Jal Balaporia.

The Gwalior style of singing in particular is known for its gliding between notes, these glides are not merely the passing on from one note to another in a text but consist of certain forms based on the pattern chosen for elaboration. There are at least eight different styles of movement from one note to another. Thus, the structure of the ragas are important but for the Gwalior singer, the bandish or song text presents the greatest of canvas for presentation. The choice of ragas and bandishes are the basic exploratory features of Khayal Gatha. A further study of the poetry and its associations with the movement on screen, fused with the colours may yield more, but that won’t be explored here.

Chapter 05 | 45

In Khayal Gatha, we witness in order of performances;

RAGA

TONE

Yaman Kalyan

Heptatonic

Hameer

Hexatonic

Bhoop

Pentatonic

Gaud Malhar

Pentatonic

Megh

Pentatonic

Sarang

Pentatonic

Bageshri

Heptatonic

Malkauns

Pentatonic

Bihag

Pentatonic

Kafi (occurs twice)

Heptatonic

Miyan Ki Malhar

Pentatonic

Bhairavi (occurs twice)

Heptatonic

* Colour hues vary drastically

46 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

INSTRUMENT / VOCALS

COLOUR VISUALISATION ON SCREEN*

Instrument

Red and Cream / Beige

Vocal

Brown, White and Red

Vocal

Yellow, Red, Blue and Green

Vocal

Green, Yellow

Vocal

White, Red, Hues of Green

Instrument

Purple, Beige, Green

Vocal

Purple, Brown, Blue

Vocal

Brown, Green, Beige

Vocal

Cream, Golden, Ivory, Maroon, Olive Green, Yellow

Vocal

Black, Red, Yellow, White

Vocal

Blue, Brown, White

Vocal

Green, White, Blue, Red, Brown

Chapter 05 | 47

This transition of the colours in a larger scheme or pattern unfolds from Brown to Red to White to Purple to Blue to Red to to Orange to Purple to Yellow to Blue to a final Red. The colours are not as clearly specified as mentioned above, in fact every colour is recreated in a variety of hues. Every colour is thus explored through the microtonal, a facet common with Indian Classical music. Visually these general pattern of colours evolve along an imagery that is static in its outlook of colours. For instance, micro tones of greens are provided along with the beige/cream of the monuments that can border on brown and yellow in the deserts mixed with the sky blue and grey skies. This being the dominant color palette, Kumar picks a certain colour to blitz or waltz past our senses.

When colour arrives in nature it flawlessly maintains an overarching structure and within it, in the micro tonal nature of one tree blooming we will find a variety of other trees not in bloom. Nature’s rhythmic structure is still fundamentally open to every moment. It is in this overarching structure that a few drops of blood fall onto a wheatish human skin and while matching the beat of the tabla on the aural, Kumar discovers the presence of colour within nature. This also ties in with what Eisenstein said about colour:

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“The problem is not, nor ever will be, solved by a fixed catalogue of color-symbols, but the emotional intelligibility and function of colour will rise from the natural order of establishing the colour imagery of the work, coincidental with the process of shaping the living movement of the whole work�1

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Thus colour for Kumar is not an embellishment provided to beautify but specific colours arrive and move through the screen through carefully controlled choreography. The colours have no direct connection with the ragas and bandishes presented, what they do have in common though, is that they are introduced for evocation.

For, in evocation is the centrality of indian classical music, the khayal and the cinema understood. The pace of the bandish (taal provided by the tabla) has a great impact on the movement of the characters on screen. During Raga Bageshri, Roopmati learns Baaz Bahadur’s departure and begins to pine for him, this is realised through the sound of Tilwada (16 beat) taal. This is then matched by the movement of the camera and carefully choreographed movements of Roopmati as she dissects the arches in a purple Anarkali dress and twilight blue in the nature.

In another instance, the Sergei Eisenstein, “Colour and Meaning” in The Film Sense, trans.

Jay Leda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1942 wanderer/student explores Raga Megh, in a faster paced Teental with varying hues of green. . This further illustrates the idea that each Raga 1

is not bound by a certain rasa and every bandish is capable of eliciting microtonal shades of feeling and emotions. One may consider that Megh is a Raga associated with the clouds and the impending rain, despite the obvious imagery that Kumar Shahani could draw from, he prefers to focus on the green hues over the grey or blue tones.

As an extension, even though Roopmati commits suicide on the Raga Malkauns there is a shade of sensuality present as a maiden from the water carries a ring on which she can end her life.

There is a layered approach taken in the sequence when Roopmati and Baaz Bahadur meet for the first time.

We hear the play of words between “piya” (lover) and “aah” (come) with “jah” (go). From a conversation with my guru, Neela Bhagwat, she revealed that the play of “aah” and “jah” is meant to evoke the indecision in the mind of Roopmati. When the two words merge they form “aahjah”, a more delicate and endearing form of calling a loved one. Both words also have vowels present which can be elongated as per the mood.

Thus Kumar Shahani, in such a simple moment demonstrates the sophistication present in language,

50 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

sound, colour and visual. As we see Roopmati’s indecision is exhibited by a constant switching forth between earlier scenes. This play on words and the elongation of the vowels thus depicts the split of the woman’s mind and immediately reveals the intricate thought process of a human being.

Kumar acknowledges the shared expressions between Kathak and Khayal. The development of Kathak sequences is marked by the presence of Birju Maharaj, a senior Kathak exponent. Kumar inserts his body as an object within the lightest of blues frame embedded into the blackest of blacks.

THE BESTIARY OF KUMAR SHAHANI In his work on Lautreamont, Gaston Bachelard develops a thesis based around the usage of animals in Les Chants de Maldoror (1896). He refers to them as Lautreamont’s Bestiary.

Similarly, in Khayal Gatha, Kumar arranges a wide network of both vegetal and animalistic images, the animal has no performatory role in the film. In fact, much like the idea of tectonisation in architecture, he refers to movements by animals or status of plants as having a reflective ability in man and his movements. This provides a further subtext on which one may base a study of Kumar’s

Bestiary. The litheness of a deer builds itself into the gait of the two females (one of whom is the tribal princess Mrignayani).

Soon after the slight training session in archery, the muscular action is connected by the monkey landing on the arrow. A variety of simians have had a profound impact on the lore, religion and rituals in Indian and East Asian cultures. My interest is not in the historical, religious value of the monkey but rather in the action performed (off screen) by the monkey.

In a frame after that we witness the poison from a snake providing an interim rest to the deer like movements of the tribal hunters.

The snake observes its movement on the hay and a second later (off screen the action takes place) the hunter drops to the floor in pain. We also hear the sounds of a peacock while witnessing a moving shot of a tree.

In a little less than ten minutes, Kumar has produced intense dynamogenesis into the screen, aside of that of the human beings present. These unrestrained, instantaneous and swift acts of aggression unleash energy and are direct projections of the will.

The restoration of the primacy of man, and his comment about man’s position within nature is a returning allusion

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in the film. This cyclical foundation resonates with other areas too as many allusions are built to the return of the Shadjam (Sa) note.

In modern society we are told and taught that are our animal instincts must be subjugated and controlled.

Kumar in many ways like Lautreamont contradicts moralistic conventions, these animal instincts can create an exuberance in the imaginative and it is in the Imagination that one may encounter a realm of possibilities.

Rather than provide a Euhemeristic view of the animals, one may look at them as pure actions within metaphors, liberated from direct meaning but realised only in the exertion of force. For the viper or serpent is only a sexual fantasy of the classical psychoanalytical type, but as the film progresses we realise that the venomous activity is hardly about instant cruelty, in fact it could be viewed as a form of perfidy.

Kumar’s bestiary hosts a wide variety of animals, birds and insects (for the sake of ease I will include the volucrary functions of the birds and presence of insects in the bestiary).

The horse for example does not find a direct representation until a variety of shots in which one hears a horse

galloping, the tracks of a horse are shown. Hence, Kumar alludes to a perceived hierarchy of senses that dominates conventional discourse.

By disallowing a direct representation of the horse he predicts the arrival of a horse at some point. For the imagination to flourish one must be like a farseer, thus the young boy, our wanderer mounts his horse and rides into the future, displaying the strength and the vitality of the horse.

In a later sequence we will watch a horse being left free, one gets to experience an angular litheness, something opposed to a Bergsonian ‘graceful’ litheness, something akin to the movement of the vegetal.

It feels that the acceleration from this intermediate form is deliberately eliminated.

Most of the avians depicted in the film are noticeable on the soundtrack until much later where their movement becomes pronounced as nature takes a precedence even over the film, in the final ten minutes of the film. Roopmati when confronted with the arrival of the student and the female figure performing a riddle like ritual once again in front of the student. Both scenes are linked by the movement of the bird, the Indian parrot (rose ringed parakeet) in this case is also

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known for its sexually dimorphic disposition. They are also capable of performing human speech, even though in the case of the parrot we hear the intense fluttering of its wings as it takes flight in both occasions.

In both cases the bird as a figure becomes flight itself, as that flight allows for escape and builds a case for an activistic imagination.

Through poetic reverie, Kumar overcomes the erudite reverie to rediscover poetic primitivism. This primitivism reflects itself in the art form of Khayal. The Khayal had a syncretic history and drew rhythms from vernacular languages, speech of women, work rhythms, it linked the classical and the folk. In the film we come across the development of Khayal from within the Dhrupad.

While the Dhrupad flourished in the court of Raja Mansingh Tomar, “the court of Hussein Shirqi of Jaunpur had been a part of the early evolution of the Khayal. The local ‘Cutkala’ form of traditional Indian art song was interwoven with the ‘ravish’ (genres, repertoire and style) of Amir Khusrau, which had come to Jaunpur with the Chisti pirs of the Sultan”2. While Kumar’s film draws exclusively from the Madhya Pradesh accounts of Khayal, it is important to note of the

layered origins of the Khayal as one hears them today.

BARLOW, J., & SUBRAMANIAN, L. (2007). Music and Society in North India: From the Mughals to the Mutiny. Economic and Political Weekly What the visual creates for the camera is a representation of a certain reality, Kumar speaks of the filmmaker as a creator of signs. These signs are to be understood as broad brush strokes, within which he fills the hue with a composite layering of music, sound, speech, architectural remains, animalistic and vegetal movements.

For Kumar the beautiful cannot be just reproduced. It must be produced and it must borrow its constituents from life forces, matter. Energies that first undergo a transformation and then a transfiguration3.

2

For a form like Khayal that thrives on the song-text (bandish) and bases a lot of its compositions on the sliding of a note on a vowel, Kumar also eliminates a pattern from emerging in the film.

He includes frequent references to the cries of animals and birds within the area. The cry in a manner is the antithesis of language4. For cries are essentially direct, let’s refer to a larger quote by Bachelard in his essays on Lautreamont.

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“The linguistic play stops when the cry returns in its initial strength, with its gratuitous anger clear as a sonorous and energetic cogito: I cry out, therefore I am an energy. On the contrary energetic primitiveness demonstrates that cries are not rallying calls or even reflexes. They are essentially direct. A cry does not call-it exults.” If we further this reading into Kumar’s bestiary we immediately can call several examples within the film where the cry of the bird has been suggestive to another space. There is a sonority of the nerves that is in pure impulses calling out to something deeper within nature and man.

BACHELARD, G., & FARRELL, E. R. (2006). Water and dreams an essay on the imagination of matter. Dallas, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

3

BACHELARD, G., DUPREE, R. S., & HILLMAN, J. (1986). Lautréamont.

Dallas, Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

In trying to understand how Kumar formed his bestiary and the deployment of animalistic and vegetalistic devices is a movement away from classical symbolism.

By emphasizing a synthesis that does not arrive at its name too 4

soon, by focussing on the mundane processes that get too easily dissolved. He conjures up a new language in bloom, one developed rhythmically and not visually only. In a way Khayal also stands as a definite symbol of a call to return to vital impulses and primitive poetic images.

C.G. Jung had noted that it “is almost impossible to escape the power of primordial images” and hence it is not hard to realise why children in the city invariably have animal toys for themselves or that the “quickest way to describe a human aberration was to compare it with animal behaviour”5.

Kumar’s view ultimately of the world breaks away from Man and focuses only on nature, with several shots of a shorter duration he eschews the pace of the film to deliver the film to nature first, before the de-centered figure of man shows itself right at the end.

If one notices the spatial specificities, one will note the bird and shots of water take precedence, the shots of the trees, reflect what is around.

Thus it ‘doubles the world and doubles forms, it also doubles the dreamer, not simply as a vain image but through her involvement in a new oneiric experience.’6 The bird in the sky

54 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

and the fish in the water occupy similar dynamic spaces, for the mind of a child these two animals move within the ‘realm of impulsion and motor imagination’

BACHELARD, G., DUPREE, R. S., & HILLMAN, J. (1986). Lautréamont.

Dallas, Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

manifest itself in each successive and yet individualised moments. In Khayal Gatha, forms are not delineated and are produced through a process rather than simple reproductions. They are induced by movement, built by colour and and infused by sound.

5

BACHELARD, G., & FARRELL, E. R. (2006). Water and dreams an essay on the imagination of matter. Dallas, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

To conclude, one may infer that in conventional cinema forms are elaborated and built up on a cause and effect relationship. The building up of animalistic and plant rhythms in the film, make it move in the direction of a pure aggression or pure poetic movement. Kumar interprets the will to attack in a different dramatic understanding, it relies on the uncertain. While avoiding dualities, the movement of the snake provides pain but when the poison has been removed through pleasure (human lips; sucker like device of a leech) it brews a moment of closeness between the women on screen. We see the erotic and the aggressive 6

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Author’s Biography

56 | Becoming Epic: Myth, Legend and Folk Tale through Colour and Sound

Elroy Pinto is an independent film researcher and works primarily within the realm of film art. His previous research focussed on the formulation of time and space in art and music through the cinema of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani. Elroy been studying the Khayal idiom of Indian classical music, which has its roots in the Gwalior gharana, under the tutelageof the senior vocalist, Neela Bhagwat. His ongoing research paper The Confluence of North Indian Classical Music on the Cinematograph through the films of Kumar Shahani was selected for the Film-Philosophy Conference 2016, University of Edinburgh.

Elroy is presently co-editing the english translation of a monograph on Sharadchandra Arolkar, a stalwart of Khayal Gayaki and providing research support to film-maker Kumar Shahani on his upcoming project.

Previously, Elroy was a guest lecturer for understanding cinema, an introductory module on world cinema, to the undergraduate students of Wilson college, University of Mumbai. Between 2007 - 2008, Elroy worked as a Programmes Assistant for Breakthrough’s Tricontinental Film Festival and was the curator of the South Korean New Wave Cinema Festival at Alliance Française de Bombay.

In 2011, Elroy completed his masters in Global Cinemas and the Transcultural at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has lived and worked in London before moving to Mumbai in 2015 to pursue his film praxis. Elroy is currently working on his short film.

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www.tarq.in