Book Reviews

GURU DUTT (1925-1964) by Henri Micciollo, L'Avant-Scene du Cinema No. 1 58, 1 975 . Price not stated. (In French).

Foreign critics of Indian art generally look for a spurious Indian ness: to fulfil their aspirations of contact with an exotic, mysterious Orient or to sigh over images of poverty in masochistic delight. Henri Micciollo is a rare exception. During his four-year-stay in India, he became one of us, seeing films in the specific context of the country, relating them not only to the influences from within and without but also to the problems that film makers face everywhere. The fact that his choice fell upon Guru Dutt for his first monograph is itself a measure of his discrimination and under standing .

For more than a decade · now, film enthusiasts have tried to under stand the special place that Guru Dutt occupies in Indian cinema-but with out much success. His art does not fall easily into the categories that are hallowed by our cultural elite. It is neither revivalist nor realist, in any sense in which the terms are used. Its popular appeal, Whenever it had any, was because of the Devdas syndrome which lasted till the early sixties among our middle-classes. The hero, not unlike others of his kind in popular litera ture and films, inflicted untold suffering upon himself-all in the pursuit of lost purity. The construction of Guru Dutt films was as outrageously melodramatic as that of any other Hindi film. As M icciollo puts it, there are really no genres in this cinema: Hindi cinema is a genre unto itself. Usually, whatever the Hollywood genre inspired in a Hindi film, it was dissolved into the melange which producers and distributors have concocted for audiences. Guru Dutt accepted all of its conventions, including the comic scenes, the dances and the songs. The paradox is that his work is signi ficant. No wonder that M icciollo describes his career as an exemplary and 'douloureuse' ·adventure.

It was an adventure of a romantic, looking for purity in a world of civilised corruption (the content of his work). attempting a hopeless re conciliation between a personal vision and the tyranny of the market (his experience as an artist). In a sense, no" theory is more suitable for an analy sis of Guru Dutt's work than the auteur theory developed during the most intellectually fertile post-war period in France. For Andre Bazin and his friends the cinema was like nature asserting itself in spite of the constraints of civilisation. For some of the film-makers, who went on to practise it, abandoned the need for, even ' the possibility of, meaningful discourse in the cinema .

Fortunately, M icciollo's handling of Guru Dutt's complex career makes no such oversimplifications. It takes from the auteur theory only that which is worthwhile: the growth of the author- cineaste, in the con text of a system that contradicts it. In fact, like his studies on Robbe-Grillet a nd other individual works in the cinema and in literature, Micciollo goes

69 beyond the auteur theory to emphasise structure and the significance that can only emerge from such an analysis. Thus, even in f ilms that he does not rate very highly, such as Baazi, he is not indiffe rent to the meaning con tained in the angles and sequence of images: "the title- sequence states that the theme in a conventional but clear style, the depe rsonalisation and pleasure of gambling and the violence between the players". Again, he notices the personal signature of Guru Dutt who appears briefly as some one on the way to 'tramphood' (clochardisation) .

The sympathetic understanding of the earlier minor work leads to a truer, firmer understanding of the three major films of the artist. As a result, even the description of the action in Pya asa, Kaa gaz Ke Phool and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam is not a mere recounting of the sequences. It is able to evoke the tensions created in the melodrama without making them look pathetic. The meaning emerges through repeated equations that form them selves into neat correspondence. Thus, the fascination for auto-destruction in his films taking on different forms. The equation of the poet, the film-maker, the. witness-narrator. The rejection of even such a simple social unit as the family. The conclusion that 'true' recognition is necessarily posthumous, stated in Kaagaz Ke Phool in the actual demise in the director's chair and, in the other two films, by narrative symbolisation. It is only in the light of such a methodical approach, supported by internal evidence, that criticism and comment can rise above mere impressions or opinion.

The integrity of Guru Dutt's work begins to appear, in spite of the compromises that Micciollo so correctly regrets . The comedy sequences, some of them widely known to be dictated by the demands of distributors, remain more or less at the grotesque level. The songs and dances, however, are both well-integrated into the script and executed with the finesse of a master. Guru Dutt's early apprenticeship with Uday Shankar, mention ed in the brief biographical sketch, stands him in good stead. The anguish of the actor-director is constantly evidenced: the scrapping of half-com pleted projects, the nurturing of film-ideas until the final realisation after a decade.

Micciollo notes the constant concern for verisimilitude even within the melodramatic framework, the underplaying that characterised his reluc tant performances. In both the films where self-destruction accomplishes itself, the technique of the flash-back is used. The Christ-like simplicity of his heroic characters and their inevitable suffering, the near-tramp's rejection of society reveal the influences that Guru Dutt most completely interiorised .

Inevitably, a s Micciollo points out, Guru Dutt's art is one of plain tiveness, rather than of protest. The romantic opposes the individual to society. The suffering is exalted and internalised to the point of total rupture. - As an artist-martyr, he takes on the suffering of others, but canr.ot agitate against it. Society itself is seen as a group of individuals, at best families, never in terms of class antagonisms. Of great relevance, however, to today's debate on the interaction between the film-maker and his 'audience', is

the despair of Guru Dutt that this necessary exchange is th\Narted by the manipulation to \Nhich the public is constantly subject. This brutal realisa tion in someone \Nho engaged himself completely in the endeavour should make us examine our pretensions of communicating \Nith a large audience. We could be fooling ourselves or deliberately sustaining illusions in a 'public', already so completely repressed by their conditions of existence.

Guru Dutt, like others before and after him, used the melodramatic form to reach his audiences. Built upon coincidences, upon outrageous situations \Nhich replace the ordering of tragic fatalism, melodrama has 'successfully' engaged the middle-classes' helpless individualist notions of the \Norld. But, as Micciollo says, Guru Dutt manages to lift it from the plane of the ridiculous, because of his O\Nn obsession \Nith death. More over, unlike others \Nho \Nish to retain melodrama for purely commercial reasons- sometimes, amusingly, \Nith socialist realist intent-Guru Dutt imparts to it the quality of a nightmare.

I hope that this little monograph \Nill be translated and published in Hindi and English and that it \Nill lead to further examination of the melo dramatic form. We tend to dismiss it too lightly, but it is perhaps of great sociological importance. Ho\Never, the sociologist \Nill be ill-equipped to understand it unless our critics give it enough attention and our film-makers do not hide behind the facade of realism. Only then \Nill the sociologist clear ly enlighten us on the specific nature of the philosophical and social content \Nhich emerges from the melodramatic handling of various themes. One also hopes that other foreign critics \Nill follo\N Henri Micciollo's example and join us in our efforts at understanding and changing the cinema from \Nithin.

The last t\No festivals in India have demonstrated that the best of our \Nork stands far above the average international standards, including many European a\Nard-\Ninners, and that unlike our predecessors \Ne have no reason to cast ourselves in the image of pandits abroad. Their vision \Nill be corrected by our o\Nn social transformation and by those \Nho, like Micciollo, re-interpret Indian art to them.

-KUMAR SHAHAN!