Expressive Esoterica

PHANTOMS OF PHOSPHOR (2023)

In 1895, inspired by the current topic du jour; which was to further investigate the stroboscopic principles explored with the zoetrope, and other contemporaneous devices that exploited our human persistence of vision, Auguste and Louis Lumière, in a Promethean move, invented the cinematograph. One of the earliest, and perhaps most profound experiments helmed by Lumière was Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (Lumière, 1895), which can now be asynchronously viewed as a singular, predominantly uncorrupted cinematic representation of actuality; a documentary - the workers operate on the virtue of their own agency as they scurry to enjoy their short reprieve before the travails of the following working day - absent is the accosting, performative behaviour one may observe if it were filmed in the 21st century, as for all intents and purposes, the workers, to be prosaic, are not yet acquainted with the role of the cinema and how time, framing, and thus reality can be manipulated. Whilst in its infancy, it must be noted that photography, an antecedent of the cinema, did very much exist, so it would be dismissive to assume that the very concept of surveillance is absent from the workers comprehension - that being said, however, due to this particular document existing in such an embryonic stage of the very notion of optic surveillance, we are presented with what is a platonic ideal of actuality in flux. In spite of this, however, if we were to view these experiments as pure exemplar representations without perversion, it would only be of service to the vitiation of the autonomy of the filmmaker; Lumiere articulated his gaze by setting up the camera in a specific spatial geometry that would adhere to his idealistic vision of how reality should be represented - that is to say nothing of course of his command of when time itself should begin and end. Autonomy is granted to the workers, as they embody a mercurial urge to escape the factory, they do not, however, escape the documentary gaze -

“For the real does not wait, and notably not for the subject, since it waits on nothing from language. But it is there, identical with its existence, noise in which everything can be heard, and ready to burst over what the "reality principle" there constructs under the name of the external world.” (Lacan, 1976-77)

- subjects are freed from the bonds of time, but they are not liberated from eternity, instead, they are interned within the liminal confines of a bell jar; the subjects are rendered a mere Sisyphean gesture of recurring labour.

This proposition serves as the foundation for all forms of cinema; the idea that we are simply unable to capture what is real, and in lieu of this, we must embrace the cinema as an ekphrasis; to capture the spirit of actuality, and not its surface. This understanding of the cinema is perhaps why documentary aesthetics that blur the lines between fiction and reality (vérité) are so prevalent in popular narrative cinema; as documentary ultimately failed its inveterate conquest to be a pure representation, and leaned into the form’s more superfluous tendencies over the years. It would be unscholarly, however, to suggest this is documentary's congenital birthright to be pure; as all art is inherently a corrupted abstraction of phenomena due to the intrinsic human intervention involved in the very practice of the craft (in this case, filmmaking).

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” (Gellner, 1983)

In 1947, the colonised nation of India jubilantly declared its severance from the imperialist rule of Great Britain. This newly liberated dimension of national identity catalysed the resurrection of centuries of a culture atavistically rendered Thanatoid, through the hegemonic credence of the crimson-stained Union Jack. Whilst the covenant between nations necessarily decreed a bureaucratic separation, one must not benight the socio-economic reverberations of expansionist regimes, and their enduring consequences - for the bequeathal of sovereignty from a ruling power begets a congenitally entropic circumstance as a nation strives toward renovation from the hitherto ashes of capital - accordingly, the looming spectre of yesteryears political requisitions remain firmly resolute in combating any such progress; as the arms of yore unwaveringly encroach upon foundational virtues that pathed the odyssey for India.

Such gross indignation for India’s cultural bedrock under colonial rule served as inspiration for a new century of art, as artists such as Jamini Roy, Satyajit Ray, M.A. Abbas, and Ritwik Ghatak, approached the canvas in search of spiritual atonement, and new contemporary values in keeping with the newborn century that no longer was in the hands of their captors; values that possessed the optimism of the will - for the indelible locus of the arts lays firmly reposed within the dialectical praxis of the eternal, sanctimonious quest for a universal truth, and thus, a universal justice - be it with pertinence to the political or personal.

"Culture is something that is the effect of the production

of cultural explanations, and cultural explanations are

produced also because a certain culture needs to be

fabricated, a monolithic explanation of the group needs

to be fabricated"

Post-colonial Indian cinema, as a purely cultural phenomenon, formulated a discursive nexus for the negotiation of the feasibility of beginning tabula rasa in an otherwise disrupted, fractured, decolonised nation. For India, perhaps more than any other colonised republic, this proved to be a tumultuous endeavour due to the intrinsic nature of its role as a polyglot nation, and the myriad aporias inherent within - how can one cinematic language, for instance, encompass a country of over 100 mother-tongues, and the philosophies that sculpted them? This is perhaps why the cinema, as a uniquely visual apparatus and stimuli is far more successful than those of the printed word - for spectacle is a universal language that unites the personal with the political. With spectacle, we grant the seduction of retrospective aesthetics, we erase the historical amnesia transmitted from the spectre of colonisation, and imbue plausibility to the mythic - for the language of antiquity ultimately triumphs any notion of contemporary thought. This does raise the pertinent quandary, however, as to whether or not by virtue of this; spectacle encourages cinema to manifest the role of an Ars Poetica reactionary politicum. Heidegger wrote:

“When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it transmits is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial "sources" from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand” (Heidegger, 1927).

A populist auteur may very well perhaps utilise such nostalgia to bemist the lens of any such aesthetic; and thus epistemological progress - instead, opting for a mode of filmmaking that vitalises the zeal of dewy-eyed sentimentalism, hearkening back to a romanticised by-gone era, however, this supposition would only be at the service of the erasure of the artists will as philosopher to emulsify histories role in shaping and tempering society into its current state; to reflect upon the times in order to calcify the virtues of antiquity, and formulate more progressive, contemporary ethics in keeping with modernity.

Perhaps more so than any other filmmaker in the Indosphere, these factors are fragmented throughout every nook and cranny of all that reflects light into filmmaker Raj Kapoor’s lens. In 1951, Indian cinema’s foremost virtuoso, Mehboob Khan (an antecedent of the century of class-conscious cinema to follow), withdrew from helming a passion project of noted marxist screenwriter Khwaja Ahmad Abbas due to alleged conflicts in casting the lead roles - though this fact seems to transcend any formal document and merely remains within the phantasmagoria of cultural pop-mythology. As a consequence of the fracas, Abbas withdrew the script from Mehboob studios, and was soon approached by forthcoming actor-turned-director Raj Kapoor to direct the project instead. Kapoor had spent the last decade fashioning his star alter-ego after a one Charles Chaplin; the ‘tramp’ that possessed the facade of the quotidian vagabond through Rabelaisian bon mots and chameleon smiles - a playful corruption of structural norms that embodies the spirit of the people as an abstraction of their acute disenfranchisement with the class system that has been unwittingly structured around them. During his inauguration of the project, Kapoor, in a gesture of pure artisanal ecstasy, cast his grandfather Dewan Basheswarnath Singh Kapoor for the role as the judge, his father Prithviraj Kapoor as the lawyer, and younger sibling Shashi Kapoor to play Raj’s younger self. Not only did the Kapoor dynasty firmly rooting itself into the text lend to further auteurist analysis, but most notably, it was at service of forming a treatise on Marxist theories of the perversion of the family unit under the dogmatic principles and commodification of a peoples under the spectral phantom of capitalism; the prevailing corruption of familial nurture.

Kapoor further extrapolates upon these Marxist themes within Awaara’s extensive narrative - the film follows Raju (a whimsical sobriquet of Raj; a notable parallel in keeping with Charles ‘Charlie’ Chaplin’s moniker), a child born of perceived honourable status (the son of a lawyer), turned Mumbian gamin, as he is cast asunder, liberated from what is presented as an immaculate, principled world, only to be abdicated into a society whose structural identity is at loggerheads with his existence as a prospective aristocrat turned Dostoevskian vagabond - the film is ostensibly concerned with the roles in which these opposing structural forces of the family unit and society plays in shaping the destiny of man in the face of antiquated order. Kapoor’s command over Abbas’ script lilts between the dialectics of politics, realism, and spectacle, in an attempt to absolve the sins of a man due to the failings of a broken societal infastructure - a story of which can only be unduly diminished by way of any formal prosal account.

The film is by in large structured around the tribunal of Raju in the court of law, and deftly interwoven with the events preceding in a narrative appareil that is in some measure analogous to that of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Michael H. Hoffheimer wrote:

‘the film’s popular appeal and enduring iconic status are rooted

in an ambivalent presentation of law both as a modern institution capable of

resolving public conflicts and as a traditional institution capable of restoring

the moral social order or dharma’ (Hoffheimer, 2006).

Kapoor renders the invisible order of the semiotic space of the courtroom as a causal link between the law of the father, and the law of the land; dramatising the forum once occupied by empire, now ensconced by the capitalist-afflicted state, and the enduring suffering of the people. Kapoor looks to settle the dissension by drawing upon centuries of aphoristic soliloquys from mythic texts such as Vyasa’s Mahabharata , in praise of dharma, and themes with pertinence to Nehruvian socialism. Raju is presented as a flaneur; a pure symbol of independence, however, despite his virtues, his amenable sensibilities instilled by the corruption of the familial unit, leads him astray into a life of transgression and malfeasance due to the aberrant malformation of class infrastructure that favours capital over the fundamentals of Heidegger’s theorem of Dasein. This further lends to a structuralist analysis, as the lineage of the vagabond is not defined by providence, nor blood, but class. The figure of the father, and thus the law, is consistently presented from low angles - he is seldom cut between dialogue upon eye-level; denoting the recalcitrant attitudes of the state apparatus, as he quite literally gazes off into the distance; focusing instead on the structure, as opposed to the subject. Conversely, Raju is shot from a higher angle; a semiotic gesture that renders the subject a microcosm for the struggle of the proletariat.

The cinema of India, despite the insular meditations of Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray, is largely defined in popular conscience by the use of musical interludes as an inculcation of the texts central thesis. The musical sequence liberates the film from a modest representation of actuality, in favour of documenting its own creation and reception - thus functioning as a form of Bertolt Brecht’s deconstructive distancing effect. Throughout the film, Raju, and his lover; Rita, are consistently composed with the celestial backdrop of the moon, relating their romance to eternity and, as symbology succinctly dictates; love. During a dream sequence that commences Awaara’s most balletic movements, Rita, an expression of matriarchal values and a fruit of aristocratic virtue, sings for the peasant Raju in an impassioned cri de coeur; “This moonlight is like fire without you.”, “Do come”. In this instance, the moon is no longer rendered simply as a symbol of romance, but a mercurial form of societal conscience - the ever-present lucent pearl in the sky encompasses the collective body of irreconcilable love due to the false consciousness imposed by the class system that stubbornly isolates them from one another. Indeed, Raju and Rita are no longer exemplifications of the reductive notion of star-crossed lovers, but manifestations of social divide under capitalist regimes. Raju’s hitherto Romeo ostensibly seeps into the shadow of Raskalnikov, as the moon haunts each vignette - a reminder of that what is here is now, and may always be. What follows is a labyrinthine tapestry of hypertrophic images, relating the raging inferno of injustice to the eternal, mythic figures from Valmiki’s Ramayana, as well as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. This Dionysian environment of cataleptic viscera functions as a semiotic petit mal; allowing the viewers to surrender to the spectacle which so deftly delineates the inscriptions of capital upon the newly-liberated nation - a foremost instance that spectacle is indeed the synthesis of the personal and the political. The conclusion of such mellifluous digressions further instills the hush of death upon the picture, engendering and empowering further introspection of the remainder of the filmic text.

Raju’s closing monologue during the final court scene looks to unbraid post-colonial Indian society - his call to action necessarily postulates that the law has no conscience; that it merely functions on a plane that transcends humanitarian sensibilities; a simulacrum of fallacious virtues that have been deemed favourable cultural desires only to preserve the custody of capital and formed from the basis of a corrupt cartographic illustration of antiquated geographic values. During this speech, Raju is now similarly composed from a lower angle just as the judge was throughout the film's opening procession. Whilst the judge gazed toward the facade of the structure, however, Raju now gazes towards the horizon, as a narrative and thus ideological solution that unifies the people beckons towards India - a gesture that is most typified in the socialist realist tradition of Sergei M. Eisenstein. Despite the revolutionary sentiments Raju espouses, however, and the awakening of the judge to his misdeeds, the film mournfully ends with Raju, once again, being cast aside under lock and key.