"Film in Colour(s)" - THE PEACOCK: The Prof (24 November 2019)

When’s the last time you saw someone dark-skinned in a South Asian film. I don’t mean “dusky.” But really, really dark? To say that Indian subcontinental cinemas have a predilection for actors who are light of complexion is, well, hardly enlightening. 

Such beauty standards are reinforced by the appearance of female and male Bollywood movie stars in commercials where they shill skin-lightening products. There’s no subtlety in the message here: one cannot be dark and lovely. To be as beautiful as the movie stars, these advertisements urge, one has to chemically (ouch!) transform something as fundamental as their skin colour.

Beauty standards apart, the very technology of film has itself been historically predisposed to whiteness as the norm. Kodak, which in the mid-twentieth century monopolized the sale of colour film in the United States, used what was known as the Shirley Card to decide on the right skin colour balance when developing film in labs. Named for an employee who served as its model, the woman on the card is a white brunette whose skin tone became the “normal” against which film was colour corrected. There was no equivalent system to determine if the skin tones of people of colour were properly represented photographically. 

Though by the 1990s Kodak created a Shirley Card featuring Asian, Black, and Latina women, the upsurge of digital photography ensured that this more racially diverse yardstick fell by the wayside. “The result was film emulsion technology that still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions,” Harvard’s Sarah Lewis writes in “The Racial Bias Built into Photography” for The New York Times (25 April 2019).  

Though more research needs to be done on how skin colour standardization in photography was calibrated in other parts of the world, the global reach of Kodak likely proliferated the colour canon that company originated in the United States; other non-US film-producing companies may similarly have been partial to lighter skin tones as the default. These biases that normalized lighter skin hues as standard also informed moving film technology.

Lewis finds that though advancements in digital imaging are better suited to shooting diverse skin tones, television shows and films that feature darker skinned people employ a variety of lighting techniques to ensure accurate representation. As an example, she cites the work of Black American director Ava DuVernay, but also Insecure where, in addition to special lighting, the HBO show uses reflective moisturizer on its actors because “dark skin can absorb more light than fair skin.” 

Developments in the more precise depiction of skin colour on film not only speak to the growing diversity of filmic storylines and cultural representation, but also its importance. “Why does inclusive representation matter so much?” Lewis queries; she concludes: “You can’t become what you can’t accurately see.”       

In 2013, actor Nandita Das endorsed the “Dark is Beautiful” campaign which counters Bollywood’s over-representation of light-skinned talent. Taking issue with the equation of beauty and representation, Anjali Rajoria writes for Round Table India (21 August 2013), that while “Dark is Beautiful” may challenge industry bias, it perpetuates dominant notions that divide women based on looks, class, and caste. In turn, this leaves no room for something as challenging as the subject of acid-attack victims, which is the basis of Uyare (2019), a Malayalam film at the festival. By over-valuing the “commodity of ‘Beauty,’ we create a sense of insecurity in the women belonging to the out-group,” Rajoria avers.

Cinematic representation, then, is most effective when it captures the multiple shades of diverse lives. The beauty of such potential is more than skin deep.

From The Peacock.

"2046, The Past" - THE PEACOCK: The Prof (23 November 2019)

The year is 2046. Outside, there is a place where nothing changes. An intergalactic train can take you there, but only one person has ever returned. Inside are the ghosts of the past. In between exist memory, melancholia, and myth. 

This is Hong Kong, neither past perfect nor the future progressive, as speculatively rendered in the film 2046 (2004) by Wong Kar-wai. Considered an oblique follow up to his earlier In the Mood for Love (2000), which was set in the 1960s, the disjointed stories of the director’s later film circulate betwixt everlasting nostalgia and the impending unknown. 

The year of the film’s title signals when Hong Kong’s special administrative status ceases. A colony of Britain until its 99-year lease of the region ended in 1997, Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese rule was buffered by an allowance for it to function in semi-autonomy for another 50 years. However, what the last few months have made evident to the world is that Hong Kong’s youth seek sovereignty. 

Long before this year’s pro-democracy protests and the Umbrella Revolution of 2014, films from Hong Kong have grappled with questions of cultural and political uncertainty. May Fung’s meditation on these matters takes on a mystical quality in the short film She Said Why Me (1989). Most recently screened publicly as part of the exhibition Five Artists: Sites Encountered (2019) at Kowloon’s M+ Museum, the digital print fossilizes the grainy quality of the original VHS recording, rendering it even more esoteric. In it, a woman walks from an ancient temple located in Hong Kong’s countryside to the towering architecture of the busy city. As she makes her away across the enclave’s landscape, beginning at a site that is emblematic of tradition and the past and finishing in the present of urban modernity, her steps are hesitant despite being upon the familiar terrain of her homeland. She is blindfolded. Arms outstretched, her sightless perambulation hints at Hong Kong’s indeterminate future. 

Made in the years before Hong Kong’s handover, Fung’s work captures the anxieties of a land on the precipice of change. At IFFI 2019, other films similarly portray contemporary angst across the globe. All produced this year, several of these features make their Asia or India debut here in Goa. The festival’s opening film, Italy’s Despite the Fog, springs from the crisis that has brought political refugees to Europe’s shores. Hearts and Bones is also about refugees, but in Australia. Climate change is the subject of the eleven short movies that comprise the multi-country Interdependence, while an environmental apocalypse wreaks havoc in The Halt/Ang Hupa from the Philippines.  

Occurring in 2034, The Halt’s cataclysmic view telescopes current fears into yonder years, mirroring the unstable narrative of the futuristic dreamscape that is 2046. These forward-looking films urge us to look back from the future. As today’s Hong Kong struggles to establish its political will, the cinematic legacy leading up to this moment envisions multiple possibilities, even if tentatively. This, not in didactic storytelling, but in the very form of the films that emerged in this period of ambiguity.  

Writing about 2046, Roger Ebert remarked on how the film was late to arrive at Cannes 2003: “[T]he final reel reportedly arrived at the airport almost as the first was being shown. It was said to be unfinished … [T]here were skeletal special effects that now appear in final form, but perhaps it was never really finished in [Kar-wai’s] mind.”

The future, then, as this may suggest is uncertain precisely because its past is always present, forever a time to foresee differently.

From The Peacock.

"Roller Reel" - THE PEACOCK: The Prof (21 November 2019)

Martin Scorsese rubbed fans of the Marvel franchise the wrong way when he said of the superhero films that he saw them less as cinema and more like “theme parks.” Speaking in an October 2019 interview, the famed director explained that he didn’t feel Marvel films were the usual stuff of human experience traditionally seen on screen. But Marty seems to have forgotten that one of his own films has been incorporated into an amusement park. 

Cinecittá World, opened in 2014, is built on the site of Dino De Laurentiis’ former studio, Dinocitta. Situated just outside Rome, the theme park is a tribute to the involvement of Italians in cinema. An Italian American, Scorsese’s nineteenth century-set Gangs of New York (2002) provided the inspiration for the look of Cinecittá. Both the film and the park hark back to Hollywood’s Spaghetti Western era of the mid-1960s, so called for the involvement of Italians, such as Sergio Leone, in the making of the sub-genre. Ennio Morricone who composed the soundtrack for films of that time also did the music one hears at Cinecittá.

Yet, isn’t it intriguing that it is the Western, a film genre so emblematic of America, that informs Cinecittá’s attempts to pay homage to Italian cinematic heritage? 

Sure, the genre of the Western suitably provides the backdrop of adventurism that amusement park-goers crave, replete as it is with fantasies of taming the wild and encountering savages (never mind that these are natives defending their homeland against marauders). But there’s more to be gleaned of how the Western sets the stage for a roller coaster ride of conflation between national sentiment and the movies at theme parks.

Let’s depart Italy’s Cinecittá and enter Bollywood Parks Dubai (BPD). Established in 2016, BPD is the only theme park in the world to pay tribute to India’s film industry. But just like Cinecittá relocates the American Western to Europe, BPD brings Bollywood to the Emirates. And if America had its Spaghetti Westerns, then 1970s’ India cooked up the Curry Western – films that use the ethos and look of the Wild West as the setting for desi drama. 

The most famous of these was the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Sholay (1975). One of the rides at BPD recreates the film’s tale of two petty crooks conscripted by a retired policeman to protect his village against dacoits. As part of the ride, guests shoot at bandits on a screen which mirrors the look of the film’s frontier aesthetic that could be mistaken for a scene from a Spaghetti Western. Considering, though, that the lawless west of Sholay is actually the east, how does one tell the Indians from the cowboys? 

What’s more, on my visit to BPD, nearly every one of the park-visitors involved in the pretend shootout on the ride was Arab or South Asian, the latter making up the largest demographic in Dubai. As much as amusement parks may seem separated from the “real world,” I had to wonder if the simulated violence I was witnessing might somehow reflect a bit of the tensions of the outside world, especially with South Asians outnumbering Arabs in the Emirates. Further, the curious spectacle of South Asians shooting people who looked like themselves on the video game-like ride itself made me muse if there was a caste/class angle to ponder. 

Inadvertently, the Curry Western, as it is employed at BPD serves as a metaphor for the westward frontier crossing of South Asians into the Middle East, possibly along with multicultural frictions. At Cinecittá, the Spaghetti Western is reminiscent of the immersion of Italians into American culture, presaged indirectly by the journey of Columbus. That original Italian thrill-seeker, who erroneously “discovered” the region, much to the detriment of indigenous peoples, had gotten lost on his way to the Wild East. Even as history and the tensions of the outside world are never fully excluded, theme parks immerse participants into cinematic realms, the vicariousness of film-watching translated into a physical experience of fantasy.

As for the Marvel movies being “theme parks,” Scorsese may not be far off the mark. Aren’t superheroes after all just cowboys in capes?

From The Peacock.