Locating the Auteur in Rituparno Ghosh's Dahan
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Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Vol. 13, No. 2, April-June, 2021. 1-12 Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V13/n2/v13n242.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.42 Published on June 26, 2021 Infidelity to True Story and Novel: Locating the Auteur in Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan Akaitab Mukherjee Assistant Professor, School of Social Sciences and Languages (SSL), Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai Campus, Tamil Nadu, India, [email protected], ORCID id-0000-0001-6410-9898 Abstract Rituparno Ghosh (1961-2013), a celebrated Bengali film director who started making film in 90s, often borrows plots from literary and other cultural narratives. The essay aims to explicate Ghosh’s early film Dahan (1997) which is an adaptation of distinguished Bengali novelist Suchitra Bhattacharya’s novel with the same title. Bhattacharya’s novel is influenced by the real incident in which a couple was harassed by four youths at Tollygunge Metro Station in Kolkata on 27th November, 1992. The film also acknowledges that it is indebted to the true story. The essay explicates the adaptation of the two sources by the auteur. It examines the duplication of authorial concerns in this adaptation while following the narratives of two texts. Ghosh remains unfaithful to the literary text and the cultural memory of the true story to establish his authorship. As Ghosh’s films portray the middle class women in patriarchal society, following Janet Staiger’s reconsideration of the theory of auteur in the context of queer movement and identity politics in 1970s, the essay argues that the performance of infidelity to the literary and true story to establish authorship is auteur’s “technique of the self”. Keywords: Auteur, fidelity, Dahan, Based on true story, Rituparno Ghosh Introduction The essay aims to explicate Rituparno Ghosh’s (1961-2013) early film Dahan (1997) which is screen fictionalisation of eminent Bengali novelist Suchitra Bhattacharya’s eponymous novel. Bhattacharya’s novel is based on the real incident in which a couple was harassed by four youths at Tollygunge Metro Station in Kolkata on 27th November, 1992. In the opening credit the film acknowledges that it is also influenced by this true story. The essay explicates the adaptation of the two sources by the auteur. It examines the repetition of authorial concerns in this adaptation while following the narratives of two texts. The essay unveils how Ghosh changes the narrative of the novel when he represents it on screen and establishes the stamp of hisi authorship on the film adaptation. The real incident and the novel represent the victimization of middle class women which is integral part of Ghosh’s authorship, but the adaptation shows his interest to exert his authorial identity. The concept of auteur dates back to the post-war France when the qualities of film adaptations failed to appeal film critics like Francois Truffaut (2008) and others who were associated with the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma (p. 6). In his landmark essay “The Birth of a New © AesthetixMS 2021. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected]. 2 Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2021 Avant-garde: La Caméra Stylo” Alexander Astruc (2012) uses the term “camera-stylo” to illustrate that film is personal expression of the director who uses camera like a pen. This concept gave impetus to the theorizing of the concept of “auteur” (p. 182). Later it was theorized by Andew Sarris and Peter Wollen who define the concept of auteur as repetition of artistic influences, sensibility and vision in the director’s oeuvre. Sarris calls this repetition of the worldview and style as the director’s signature. Janet Staiger (2003) observes that identity politics, feminist and queer movement of 1970s made the identity of the speaker important. In this situation she realized the necessity of reconsidering the definition of auteur. These movements taught that in the field of arts the need of rescuing voice of the author and when it is suppressed, the necessity to strike back becomes important. She asserts that “the author is reconceptualized as a subject having an ability to act as a conscious analyzer of the functionary of citations in historical moments” (p. 49). Moreover, when Staiger discussed about Foucauldian thesis of power, she was well aware of his idea of agency which is explained through anatomization of western sexuality in The Use of Pleasure. She argues that western sexual discourse recommends to follow morality which is nothing but following and repeating code of conduct or self-regulation. This discourse preaches that caring of one’s self is “art of existence” which needs “self-knowledge”. This self-knowledge, according to Foucault (2003), is acquired by “recipes, specific forms of examination, and codified exercises” (p. 58). However, Staiger found that an auteur not only secures his/her self in the space of power-struggle, but the subject takes care of his/her self by repeating the narrative style. This repetition is the “art of existence” which keeps the author alive and this practice is well appreciated in the society. Furthermore, following Judith Butler’s revision of J. L Austen’s speech-act theory, Staiger (2003) states that this repetition is a performative statement which creates impact on the discursive system (p. 50-51). As Ghosh’s films primarily give voice to the suppressed minorities like women and queers, Staiger’s interpretation of the agency of auteur seems suitable to understand Ghosh’s authorship. However, Rituparno Ghosh’s authorial intentions are unequivocally reflected in his oeuvre. His films consistently portray middle class Bengali women and borrow the plots from literary sources of different languages. Apart from familiar women centric plot, his films occasionally remind Satyajit Ray’s films and Rabindranath Tagore’s literary world or musical genius. Indeed the women centric theme in his films, especially the struggle of female subject in patriarchal society and the portrayal of marital relationships remind Aparna Sen’s films. However, Sangeeta Datta (2016) catalogues other aspects of his authorship which he repeats in his films such as: the dinner table conversation, the performer and their alteration, hidden meaning of music, film within film and suggesting an unknown expedition of the protagonist or the characters. As an auteur Ghosh repeats these narrative devices in his films which narrate different stories or present different contexts, yet the narrative of all the films seem thematically same because of this duplication. In his essay “De la Politique Des Auteurs” André Bazin (2018) illustrates this proclivity of an auteur: “whatever the scenario, he always tells the same story…let’s say he has the same attitude and same moral judgments on the action and on the characters” (p. 25). Unfortunately in his interviews and articles Ghosh never unveils his ideas on auteurism. The presence of authorship in adaptation inevitably reminds the issue of fidelity which is often considered as a parameter to evaluate an adaptation. Post-millennial discussion on adaptation theory rejects this process of evaluation. Theorists like Deborah Cartmell, Linda Hutcheon, Robert Stam and Thomas Leitch dismantle the moralistic approach of fidelity criticism and prefers to treat adaptation as intertextuality to establish the creativity of adaptation. Deborah Cartmell (2012) declares that adaptation is an “art form of democracy” (p. 1). However, David T. Johnson (2017) in 3 Infidelity to True Story and Novel: Locating the Auteur in Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan his essay “Adaptation and Fidelity” makes us aware about a counter-narrative which consciously endorses the fidelity debate. He argues that “if fidelity studies to be rejected, but if our discourse inevitably retains the residue of fidelity, a concept that is anathema to its very identity, then what is to become of the field?” (p. 98). He recommends a comparative approach from a theoretical perspective which meticulously avoids evaluation, analysis of “adaptive system” through a comparative study and “belief study” which again tries to understand the reception of the source text. These approaches show that Johnson is treating adaptation as a postmodern art and the methods of analysis has similarity with Hutcheon’s “adaptation as adaptation”, overall theorists’ faith in intertexualiuty and Stam’s “intertextual dialogism”. The difference between Johnson and others is Johnson boldly illustrates the relevance of fidelity, whereas there is “ritual slaying” (p. 95) of fidelity or a dualism in the writing of other theorists. Though the title of the essay uses the term “infidelity”, the analysis of the essay does not return to the moralistic approach to prove that the film adaptation is inferior to the literary text. In this context the term “infidelity” indicates an auteur’s liberty to borrow from different cultural texts and eagerness to re-narrate the story to establish his authorship. Thus the essay applies the term fidelity in the sense Johnson uses and examines the authorship of Ghosh. The question of fidelity is inevitably reminded during analysis of a true story adaptation. Understanding the complexity of evaluation of true event adaptation, Linda Hutcheon (2006) states: “The seeming simplicity of the familiar label, ‘based on a true story’, is a ruse: in reality, such historical adaptations are as complex as historiography itself” (p. 18). Unlike any printed book, the true story is neither a creative work nor an organizationally sanctioned text. The adaptation of the true story and evaluation of its fidelity to the original create further problem because in most of the cases it is difficult to know the true story and as a consequence it is strenuous to judge the faithfulness to the original.