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Feminist Film Theory. Both Forms Are Seen by Many (Western/male)
Feminist Film Theory. Both Forms Are Seen by Many (Western/male)
almost every case (Baaz perhaps excepted) they chart the social
1
Quoted from A. MacLeod in Signs, 17, 3, 1992 by Shoma. A.
Chatterji, 1998, Subject: Cinema, Object: Woman, p. 222.
2
Melodrama is ‘used to describe cultural genres that stir up
emotions’ often structured around tragic notions and ideas of good
and evil, and focused on the family: ‘In melodrama, the emphasis is
not on the psychology and lifestyle of a unique individual but on the
functioning of characters in situations that push their emotions to
extremes. Melodrama needs to be read metaphorically rather than
for its literary or other values.’ (Dwyer, 2000 p. 108.)
films are among other things pleas for the social acceptance of
and contestations of the colonial legacy, of the family and its feudal
middle class – popular cinema, and because they are not dedicated
strong women, but are not feminist symbols. In some ways, Guru
almost mythic status, in which his own romantic view of the tortured
artist is read onto his films. Nasreen Munni Kabir, in her biographical
later films, suggesting that ‘Guru Dutt’s films, starting with Pyaasa,
seemed to reflect his own emotional life.’6 She reads Guru Dutt’s
just 39. It is hard, from this distance, to establish how much of this
5
Nasreen Munni Kabir, 2005, Guru Dutt: A Life In Cinema.
6
Ibid., p. 107.
7
Neither Guru Dutt nor Waheeda Rehman, nor any of their
colleagues, has ever confirmed any relationship beyond the
professional between them. It was said that Waheeda, a Muslim,
was insistent that she would marry a Muslim; and in any case Guru
Dutt was by then a married man. Abrar Alvi says that they were
barely speaking by the final scenes of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (Saran,
2008).
independent of their autobiographical element. Nevertheless, there
Kabir’s book also points to sources of influence for Guru Dutt, from
Dutt and director of hit 1943 film Kismet. These, along with a
his years with Guru Dutt,9 suggest the many western influences on
8
Abrar Alvi wrote the script for Mr & Mrs 55 and was credited as
director of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, including winning a Filmfare
award, but it is generally accepted (though denied by Alvi) that the
film was ‘ghost-directed’ by Guru Dutt himself, a position I have
accepted in the context of this dissertation.
9
Sathya Saran, 2008, Ten Years With Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi’s
his work. His enjoyment and admiration western films, and his
and, as Darius Cooper points out, his ability to lift and reinterpret
scenes from western films.12 In his own essay, ‘Classics and Cash’13
(1961), all indicate his ability to draw inspiration from a wide range
Journey.
10
Cited in Kabir, p. 86. A Hollywood film: no date or director cited.
11
Cited in Kabir, p. 55. Jaal was based on Riso Amara (1949),
directed by Giuseppi De Santi, according to Guru Dutt’s brother.
12
Darius Cooper, 2005, p. 5, for example, he cites Dutt’s use of
‘screwball comedy’ and also similarities to Citizen Kane (Orson
Welles), as well as Mozart’s 40th Symphony in G Minor, (p. 80-1),
Singin’ In The Rain, and others (p.82, 85).
13
Reprinted in Kabir, p. 209-13.
of sources. They also suggest that his eye was on an international
Cooper goes on to say: ‘All his films show a very conscious adoption
were about human emotions and they don’t change.’ And his
themes are those of modern life: the city, relationships, poverty and
14
The only film with religion as a motivation for action is Jaal, which
is set in a South Indian Christian fishing community (see Kabir, p.
50). Other films, for example Pyaasa, also contain Christian
references. The characters, however, are from a range of faiths and
are not seen practicing their religion. As Kabir points out, “Guru Dutt
always showed a secular India in which his screen characters, all
belonging to different castes and creeds, interact freely.” This
statement doesn’t include Chaudvin Ka Chand, a Muslim social
directed by M. Sadiq and produced by Guru Dutt, which I have not
generally speaking included in this analysis as it doesn’t bear all the
hallmarks of a Guru Dutt film.
15
Kabir, 2005, back cover blurb.
cinema theory or feminist criticism directly.16 Theories of melodrama
20
See E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), 1998, Women in Film Noir, and
particularly Sylvia Harvey in Kaplan. The readings of women specific
to post-World War II US/European situations do not apply with the
same effect in India and the understanding of the ‘vamp’, while
borrowed in Guru Dutt’s films, is reworked in much less sexually
threatening Indian style but is set against different standards
including nationalist meanings, for example.
21
Rosie Thomas defines the ‘social’ as: ‘the broadest and, since the
1940s, the largest category and loosely refers to any film in a
contemporary setting not otherwise classified. It traditionally
embraces a wide spectrum, from heavy melodrama to light-hearted
comedy, from films with social purpose to love stories, from tales of
family and domestic conflict to urban crime thrillers.’ (Rosie
Thomas, 1987, p. 304, quoted in Prasad, 1998, p. 46). Prasad
explains how the social became the dominant form and included
fragments of other genres within itself, during the period of
transition from studios to independent producers (late 1940s, early
1950s).
22
Exhibiting a fatalism and passivity typical of the Devdas tradition
originating from the Bengali writing of Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay and picturised by P.C. Barua (1935), Bimal Roy
(1955), and more recently Sanjay Leela Bhansali (2002). For this
reason, Devdas is the film Suresh is making in Kaagaz Ke Phool. The
Devdas tradition is a self-referential trope indicating great Indian
cinema and tragic heroes. Dutt’s films followed on from the Devdas
era but his male protagonists in Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool, and
also for example in songs in Baaz and Mr & Mrs 55, exhibit many of
the same qualities.
Ludhianvi.23 Thus, Guru Dutt’s films may have a western sheen in
and Indian musical styles with often highly poetic Urdu lyrics) with
and local dialect, and some of their the visual modes, for example
23
Ludhianvi wrote lyrics for Baazi, Jaal and Pyaasa.
24
Mixture (of genres, styles, song and narrative, separate elements,
different influences etc), see for example Dwyer, 2000, p. 106;
Pendakur, 2003, Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology and
Consciousness, p. 169.
25
Guru Dutt was innovative in making songs integral to the plot.
26
See Vasudevan (ed.), 1998, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, p.
108, re: Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949). A tableau is a static, posed
arrangement of figures on the screen in symbolic relation to one
another, often seen frontally, as in religious symbolism or a
mythological film.
27
Darshan is the practice of looking at devotional object or being,
based on an exchange of looks between worshipped and
worshipper, and the notion of seeing and being seen. Darshan is
given by the person/deity being looked at, and taken by the looker.
Prasad, calls it a ‘message from the symbolic’, while Dwyer explains
it is ‘dissimilar to elite western disembodied, unidirectional and
disinterested vision’. Darshan interrupts the cinematic gaze and
notions of fetishisation; and as Gabriel (p. 102) argues, it ‘precludes
the possibility of voyeurism’ because it is a two-way process. See
also Prasad, p. 75-7; Dwyer and Pinney, 2000; and Dwyer, 2006, p.
19.
Guru Dutt’s films are also situated firmly within the social, cultural
shape of the new Indian nation loom large within his films, from
modes of citizenship and utopian ideals for the state’s role and
28
The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. See Patricia Uberoi, 1996, in P.
Uberoi (ed.) Social Reform.
29
See for example Maitrayee Chaudhuri in Patricia Uberoi (ed.)
1996, Jyotika Virdi, 2003, The Cinematic Imagination, and Partha
Chatterjee, 1993, The Nation and its Fragments. Chatterjee argues
that Indian nationalism’s focus on women as the locus of
differentiation from the colonial power, upholders of tradition and
essential Indianness, and symbols of the nation, was in part because
women were associated with ‘home’ as opposed to the ‘world’ – the
male domain – where colonial rule had applied. It was also a
material/spiritual dichotomy. ‘Nationalists asserted it [the colonial
power] had failed to colonize the inner, essential, identity… which
lay in its [India’s] distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture.’ When
home/world was seen as divided into gender roles, Chatterji says,
this gives the framework on which nationalism responded to the
question of women, thus making women bearers of the spiritual and
symbolic production of the nation. (Chatterjee, 1993, p. 121).
Jyotika Virdi (2003, p. 67) says: “The female figure as mother and
nation also embodies sacrifice and forebearance. Fixing the figure of
the woman in this context within the national unconscious occurred
culturally along with the idea of reclaiming a reinvented “Indian”
past.’ Why, she asks, have women been constructed so relentlessly
in this idealised mode in the period following Independence, when in
other respects Indian cinema was relatively progressive? Her
as well as cinematically (as nationalism was contested through
and Mary Ann Doane.31 Mulvey’s study provides the foundation for
masculine one and bearer of power within the film and between
32
See Judith Mayne and Julia Lesage in Thornham (ed.), and
Thornham’s own commentary, p. 111-2; See also Annette Kuhn in
Thornham (ed.), p. 161.
33
See Gabriel, 2005.
34
My own approach to feminist analysis is based on literary theories,
which share many of the same psychoanalytic, structuralist and
socialist roots with film studies, including the works of Julia Kristeva,
Luce Irigaray, Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bhakhtin, along with
theorists from Kate Millett to Mary Daly and Toril Moi among others,
and on to sociological and cultural studies and postcolonialist writers
such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhaba. I have not
cited these in the bibliography unless they have been directly
quoted elsewhere in the text.
overlooking or eliding problems of race, class, nationality,
Shoma A. Chatterji36 states that she set out to write her book
western feminist cinema theories onto Indian film, and that women’s
36
Chatterji, 1998, Subject: Cinema, Object: Woman. A Study of the
Portrayal of Women in Indian Cinema.
37
Jain and Rai (eds), 2002, Films and Feminism: Essays in Indian
Cinema.
Karen Gabriel38 looks at the sexual economy of Indian film since the
has been made, for example, of the iconic role of Nargis as Radha in
38
K. Gabriel, 2005, Imaging a Nation: The Sexual Economies of the
Contemporary Mainstream Bombay Cinema (1970-2000).
39
See Gayatri Chatterji, 2002, Mother India; Vasudevan in Uberoi
(ed.) 1996, p. 97; Chakravarty, 1993, p. 149-56; Dwyer, 2000; and
Mishra, 2002, among others, on the iconicity of Nargis/Radha in
Mother India. Vasudevan quotes a publicity release on Mother India:
“The woman is an altar in India. She is loved and respected,
worshipped and protected. Be she child, a wife, a mother, or a
widow, she is so jealously protected that the entire culture of a
nation revolves around her person.” Mishra calls her a
‘supermother’ and a ‘semantic and structural invariant’ in Hindi
cinema. The role was consistent with and symbolic of the
mythification of the essence of womanhood – defined as
motherhood – in nationalist thought (see p. 14, n. 29 above). Indira
Gandhi later also adopted an association with Mother India to call on
values that would embue her with populist power, when she
claimed: “India is Indira”.
women’s roles as central to their thesis,40 perhaps because of the
India and women are too diverse, yet are held together symbolically
Similarly, texts specifically on the works of Guru Dutt have not given
Indian popular cinema, and cites also the findings of a Delhi feminist
‘good’ woman did not work or assert herself, but remained directed
44
Ibid. The full quote reads:
which they are founded and use these criteria as a reference point
films, a reading that shows where Guru Dutt consciously broke the
workers, colleagues, citizens.”
45
The notion, and deification, of the ideal woman is all-pervasive in
Indian culture. Dwyer (2000) says the ideal is Sita-Savitri – the
submissive and faithful wife, drawn from Hindu myth, and that
conceptions of sexuality are different from those in western culture.
Dwyer and Manjunath Pendakur (2003, Indian Popular Cinema:
Industry, Ideology and Consciousness) both also quote the Laws of
Manu, which define women as ‘not fit for independence’, and view
their sexuality as dangerous unless it is controlled and positively
channelled by marriage where women are subjected to mandatory
sex with the aim of reproduction. Chatterji gives a range of different
feminine ‘ideals’ from goddesses in myth including Sita, Draupadi
and Radha (see chapter 1 in Chatterji (1998)). Dwyer also quotes
the 18th Century Stridharmapaddhati (Guide to the religious status
and duties of women), which exhorts: “Not only may a woman not
worship any god other than her husband, but she is also forbidden
to engage in any religious observance other than devotion to him.”
(See Dwyer, 2000, pp. 23-7). Gopalan, in Vasudevan (ed.), 2000,
says women are seen as ‘embodying and sustaining tradition,’ see
p. 227.
46
See Julia Lesage in Thornham (ed.), p. 111-12 and p. 115-21. See
also Annette Kuhn and Christine Gledhill, also in Thornham (ed.).
mould in his portrayal of women’s lives, but also where those
excess’ remains.