The Cheeky Guide to Instant Art-House Success
Note: The following post is taken from the archives of PassionForCinema.com, a much-loved platform for cinema enthusiasts. This is being republished here in the spirit of archiving, historical significance, and sharing important conversations with the readers who may not have had access to the original site. The author of the post is PROJEKT iVIEW, who published the post on June 3, 2007 at 3:30 am.
“All Artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn how to Draw?” – Banksy
Chapter One – The Art House Cliché
Every niche has its own cliché – it’s the stereotype that keeps the niche alive and commercially viable for artistes to cater to. So whether you are into filmmaking or film studies, you do need to acknowledge the existence of this stereotype and choose whether or not cater to it at some level. That is not to say fresh grounds cannot be broken – but to accept that it’s a phenomenon that meets any success much rarer than we’d like to imagine.
After all, how many Iranian films have you seen that are about the urban Tehranian elite and their problems – as against films about vulnerable, poor and golden hearted villagers, small-towners, and people of the working class and those living on the brink of or below the poverty line? How many Mexican or Brazilian films have you seen that are not about poor kids, repressed youth, and suppression induced crime and are not entirely or partly based in favelas? How many African films have you seen that are not about labour exploitation, AIDS, drug abuse, riots, crime, repressed tribes and are not entirely or partly based in Kibera? How many Eastern European films can you remember that are not about political or religious ideology or the fragmented / alienated lives of low income groups in a conspicuously war-ridden / post-war / communist / post-communist society?
The answer, with a few groundbreaking exceptions is generally, NONE. If there was ever a world cinema match-the-column it won’t take any self respecting cinema lover longer than it takes to say mise-en-scène to connect Palestine and Israel with the subject of Suicide Bombers and Religious / Political Introspection.
That’s not to say that other classes, types of people, cultures and their issues do not exist in these societies, nor does it mean that good films exploring these “other” subjects are not made. What it means is that Western Europe and the US are not very interested in them (an alliance that pretty much rules our imagination). All pragmatic observation clearly points to one plain fact – when it comes to the “rest-of-the-developing-world”, the West is more than mostly interested in its poor – not a real-life interest as much as the curious interest in an amusing hunger artist (an interest, it invariably and ironically, manages to rub off on the rest-of-the-world). The reason behind this fascination is an entirely separate branch of philosophical anthropology or world history (the latter largely concerns itself with invasion, imperialism, guilt and lot of QT-style blood and gore).
We’d rather limit our examination to the recipe of instant international recognition and arthouse success. You’ll find in the following chapters the right ingredients and tried and tested readymixes with straightforward microwave usage instructions.
Chapter Two – The Art of Flattery
Human condition, generational conflict, minimalism, anti-plot, loss of innocence, doppelganger and identity, non-linear narrative, multi-perspective, alternative realities, collective amnesia, social schizophrenia – the very fact that these terms exist, bears witness to the fact that these themes and forms have been observed so often in films that there is a need to categorically define them.
Every time an academician invents a new term, a new phenomenon comes to existence, the same way a disease taking lives for generations only comes into existence only upon laboratory classification. Multiple observation and definition thereby makes the world of unknown suddenly accessible, understandable and therefore, manageable and no longer scary. Corollarilly, it implies that the more lexis you flex (themes, categories, genres, imagery, memes, theories, phenomena, allusions and generally interesting sounding adjectives in English language), the easier it is for you to pass off as a serious film scholar, without having to spend thousands of dollars at NYU or change your last name to Bazin.
After noticing an obvious lack of anything remotely interesting in a clearly over-celebrated film (IMDB > 7.5 / Rottentomatoes meter > 80% / Top 100 Lists / Golden Palm, Lion, Ape / Film School cult / Master Director’s new work / Acclaimed masterpiece – in its ascending order of peer pressure), you might sometimes find the honesty and instant enlightenment to see through the film’s bluff and call it so.
Sometimes, however, you might just be too scared to be honest or too unsure or both, and left with only one option – to lie – for all you know, you are just a part of the emperor’s vast audience and they’ve all sung songs about his new invisible-to-others clothes. So you won’t be able to get away by just lying and calling it “awesome”, oh no. You’ll have to talk about its visual poetry; hunt for three shot sets of sequences to call them haikus or compare its broken imagery to the poetry of T S Elliot, look up the net to find if the acting style is Noh or Kabuki, neo-realist or if it has roots in the French revolution. Is the form Brechtian? Goethian? Kafkaesque? Self-reflexive? Is it structured like a fugue? Or simply go for extremely generic and cool sounding infallible terms like “meditative” and “introspective”. You might want to talk about the myopia induced by social alienation in a post-war / post-industrialisation urban setup.
You’ll have to intimidate your readers / friends into believing that what they saw as illogical, stupid, regressive, pointless, or out rightly boring is actually the deeply self analytical nature of this redemptive deconstructive examination of the human condition.
Here’s a cookbook of some readymade phrases that you can freely plagiarise in your critiques, using a little common sense and a little Wikipedia –
Urban dystopia, social collective memory versus individual perception and the fickleness of both, loss of innocence and alienation, toll of war and isolation, poetic imagery, human frailty, soulful examination, moral code, ethereal atmosphere, eviscerating intensity, understated beauty, profound insight, impossible to describe with words, intimate, intensely personal film on the process of healing and catharsis, dark comedy about obsession, revenge, redemptive drama, replete with subtle irony, cerebral and not corporal, poignant and heartbreaking portrait, haunting exploration of, paradoxical, self-reflexive, profoundly moving testament, allegorical, metaphorical, momentary abstraction, hyperbolic character study, chiaroscuro, mise-en-scene, montage, catharsis, doppelganger, dénouement, intelligent, comprehensive, deconstructive, postmodern, idiosyncratic, magical realism, collective amnesia, articulate, fluid, lucent, illuminating critical evaluation, contemplative introspection of the subversive, transgressive, confrontational, and provocative…
You won’t be surprised when people will start noticing things that even the makers failed to.
Chapter Three – The Choices
And so do camera angles, montage techniques, narrative forms, acting styles, etc. Innovation is the most abused term in the English language after love. Conformation is often mistaken as innovation – conformation to the norms of alternative, independent or high art so that the elite audiences of these arts can easily decode it and appreciate it and pride themselves for being among the very few connoisseurs with the ability to do so.
Yet every once in a while a filmmaker writes in a handwriting so refreshing that it feels like a new language that we can immediately speak. Yes, reinvention is always possible. The same overused themes are revisited with such brilliance of craft and mastery of art that your temporary suspension of disbelief threatens to take over your permanent world view – and sometimes it does! Unfortunately, genius is an item number played not to often. Found often is a code of symbols taught by artistes over years, till the audiences no longer require the babel fish of an analyst in their ear for comprehension. Code becomes language and a pattern emerges…
Casting and make-up
Weirdly handsome men; Unconventionally beautiful women; High cheekbones; A mild stubble; Deliberate uglyfying of otherwise beautiful people with make-up.
One can go on and find many such repeated motifs in other aspects of films as well – for example, the other day when I was watching a film about suicide bombers with my friends, we unanimously predicted that the blast in the end will be depicted with an abrupt silence and a blank screen – and eureka! It did!
Chapter Four – The Four Varnas
There are four broad subject categories (The Divided, The Downtrodden, the Divine and Bollywood) for Indian films that will definitely receive a Western nod:
The Downtrodden: The mother of all clichés – the Holy Grail of the Indian arthouse export – the staple diet of world cinema – infallible, if politically correct and emotionally manipulative enough, its success resting in the extremely perverted human need to feel sorry! Social repression, abject poverty, drug abuse, exploitation, reaction, low income groups, the handicapped, slum dwellers, orphans, sex workers, child labour, child abuse victims, people living below the poverty line, criminals produced by social forces, repressed castes, repressed sexualities, eunuchs, rape victims, the marginalized, the under privileged, the suppressed, the ultimate underdog. – some examples – Salaam Bombay, Bandit Queen, Water, Fire, Dharavi, Meghe Dhaka Taara, Bhavni Bhavai, Ankur.
The Divided: Religious fundamentalism, social division, partition, riots, class politics, terrorism, racism, casteism, victims of the state, social reform activism, religious orthodoxy v/s spiritual renewal. A sub-category of this genre works very well among the Indian arthouse audiences, but not as much abroad – Political divisions –Corruption v/s integrity, idealism v/s reality, communism v/s state supported capitalist forces, labour v/s factory owners, etc. – some examples – Khamosh Paani (Pakistan), Train to Pakistan, Drohkaal, The Terrorist, Parzania, Fire, Black Friday.
The Divine: Spiritual exotica (and erotica) and cultural Exotica – Kamasutra, Khajuraho, Himalayas, Dharmashala, Ladakh, yoga, kumbh melas, colourful melas, karma, reincarnation, Krishna, Buddha, Shiva, ritualistic theatre, the old order, mythological renderings, kitsch art (truck art, firecracker package art, matchbox art), folk music, rajasthani deserts, benares, the Ganges, spiritual journeys – Siddhartha, Kamasutra, The Warrior (UK), Samsara, Utsav, Himalayas, Ayurveda.
Bollywood: Bollywood as we understand it and as the West perceives it are two different things. It’s the amusement from the entirely brainless and the novelty of the entirely pointless, out right stupid and yet, so uninhibited and celebrative, that fascinates them. Smart Indians have cashed on the kitschy fad and made the song and dance routine more accessible to the West – either by spoofing or quoting. Eg. Monsoon Wedding, Bollywood Hollywood, Bend it Like Bekham, Bride and Prejudice, Bombay Boys, Bollywood Calling.
Dénouement
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