REVIEW
The Double
By capturing the life of a stunt man in Kannada films and exploring the adjustments made during film shoots,
Amshu Chukki dwells on the leakages between real and cinematic life, finds K Sridhar.
In his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, Walter Benjamin cites the dramatist Luigi
Pirandello in talking about the metamorphosis of an actor
as they move from theatre to film and start performing not
in front of the viewing public but in front of a camera. “The
film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile – exiled
not only from the stage but also from himself. With a
vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness:
his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived
of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving
about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering
an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence . . .
The projector will play with his shadow before the public,
and he himself must be content to play before the camera.”
Benjamin goes on to discuss how the cinematic image
reproduces every detail of the actor except their aura – for
aura is tied to their presence. The feeling of estrangement
that an actor feels, Benjamin argues, is the same kind that
one feels in viewing one’s reflection in a mirror. But in
the case of the film, the image has become separable and
transportable mediated by a technology that allows for
the final image to be chopped up and pieced together in
ways that it bears little resemblance to the initial material
filmed. The problem is exacerbated when a body double is
used to fill in for the actor in the film’s stunt sequences, for
example. This is a nameless and, indeed, faceless substitute
for the protagonist in the film and is doubly removed from
the character they portray. Theirs is not a shadow before
the public but the shadow of a shadow.
It is this line of thought that Amshu Chukki’s latest
exhibition Different Danny and Other Stories evokes.
Shown first at Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai from the 10th of
March to the 14th of April and then in a truncated version
at 1 Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery from the 10th to the 17th of
June in Bangalore, the exhibition is centred around two
video installations of which the first is about a body double
or dupe from the Kannada film world called Different
Danny. Different Danny is not just a stunt man – he is a
fight director, choreographer and a visualizer who, in fact,
scripts the fights sequence after studying, in detail, the
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site in which he is expected to locate the sequence. Every
detail from the geography of the site to the illumination,
from the choreographed moves to the props used in the
sequence are worked out by Danny even as he acts as
a stunt-man himself in many of the sequences. He is
‘invisiblised’ not just on the editing table: he understands
the line of the camera and his own location with respect to
it so as to make sure that his face is not seen in any of the
sequences. His is a fascinating narrative that runs through
the video only somewhat jarred by the very smooth and
polished script that he is lending voice to. This somehow
takes away from the tonality of the narrative.
The second video reveals a continuity with concerns
that Chukki had shown in his show The Tour, where he
had used documentation of a film city to bring out the
interplay between the worlds inside and outside the film.
Here, he turns his attention to large, independent homes in
the outskirts of Bangalore which become the sites for film
and television show shoots. These houses are not empty:
the residents continue to live inside through the months
of filming and Chukki’s video documents the interesting
spatial and temporal negotiations they have to make to allow
the shooting to continue unhindered but simultaneously
doing a continuous blurring of the lines that divide the
world of the residents from the world of the film.
Chukki complements this video with a set of drawings
displaying architectural plans but overlaid with drawings
that stand alongside the text of a screenplay that the artist
has included. The screenplay breathes in an element
of time into the static architectural plans and seen in
conjunction with the overlaid drawings makes for a very
compelling narrative of its own.
A couple of sculptural installations on the wall that
use the elements of cinematic props and apparatus were
mounted in the Bangalore exhibition. These together
with a set of wall sculptures made of wire were used in
the Mumbai show and seen together the visual logic of the
installations was more apparent. It is a direction that the
artist seems keen to explore more in his future work. /