A few months ago in this column I mentioned the Marathi film Fandry, which ends with a startling image: as his upper-caste tormentors close in on him, the protagonist, Jabya, hurls a stone straight at the camera and the screen turns black.
This Fourth Wall-breaking moment - which implicates us, the viewers, in the bigotry depicted - reminded me of similar scenes from the "parallel" film movements of the 1970s and 1980s, a productive period for what was sometimes known as the Cinema of Struggle. Such scenes can be heavy-handed, but once in a while, when the whole film has built carefully towards them, they work brilliantly. See if you can identify the films that have these closing shots:
An activist who has been murdered, his tongue cut out, appears in the nightmare of a complacent, middle-aged poet. The film ends with the "ghost", blood flowing from his mouth, staggering towards the camera as if bound in chains.
Two innocent men, dressed in prison outfits, walk near the Gateway of India. A patriotic song gives way to the strident sound of drumbeats. The men look at us, make a throat-slitting gesture and drop their heads.
Another urgent, percussive soundtrack: a film about a poor little rich boy - conscientious but too passive to take a stand against his own class - ends with exploited carpet-makers staring at us accusingly.
And just for variety, an opening scene: the actor Om Puri appears on the screen as himself, speaks about the subject of the film we are about to watch, and introduces other crew members. Then the main narrative begins.
The films are Govind Nihalani's Party, Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Saeed Mirza's Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan and Shyam Benegal's Arohan respectively, and these scenes draw on the "detachment" or "alienation" popularised by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. However, the most Brechtian film I have seen from that period is Ketan Mehta's excellent debut feature, Bhavni Bhavai (1980).
Rooted in a tradition of Gujarati folk theatre, this film can broadly be described as a comedy - it is jet-black, absurdist and slapstick in turn. "Ketan's vision for the acting was that it should be like the behaviour of the characters in the Asterix comics," writes Naseeruddin Shah in his recent memoir And Then One Day…, and indeed Shah himself has a grand time as the Raja in the story: preening and swaggering but unable to withdraw a sword from its scabbard and doing high-fives with himself when he learns he has won a war and his queen has given birth to a son. He rolls his eyes, wails when a jester suggests that a dire prediction mustn't be taken seriously.
The prediction in question is that the Raja will die if he sets eyes on the newborn prince. The baby is cast away but found and adopted by a member of the local "untouchable" community and named Jeeva; years later, his path crosses with his biological father's when the Raja is told that the only way to get water flowing in his stepwell is to make a human sacrifice. By this point the allegorical nature of the story is clear, what with the many archetypes and the deliberate comic exaggeration. In a society where the "dirty work" can only be performed by lower-caste, what happens when they take a day's leave? The palace starts stinking to the high heavens, of course, because there is no one to clean the human excrement. But then, something has long been rotten in a kingdom where a whole group of people have to wear spittoons around their necks and drag a little "tail" behind to wipe away their footprints.
"Our homes are burnt, we are treated like animals, and you don't feel anything?" a lower-caste man says in one scene, looking at the camera. "I am talking to all those who are watching from the safety of their darkness," he tells his wife. The words could refer to the moral blindness of people who practise or tolerate discrimination… or to a darkened movie hall in which some of those people sit in comfortable anonymity, behind the Fourth Wall.
This Fourth Wall-breaking moment - which implicates us, the viewers, in the bigotry depicted - reminded me of similar scenes from the "parallel" film movements of the 1970s and 1980s, a productive period for what was sometimes known as the Cinema of Struggle. Such scenes can be heavy-handed, but once in a while, when the whole film has built carefully towards them, they work brilliantly. See if you can identify the films that have these closing shots:
An activist who has been murdered, his tongue cut out, appears in the nightmare of a complacent, middle-aged poet. The film ends with the "ghost", blood flowing from his mouth, staggering towards the camera as if bound in chains.
Two innocent men, dressed in prison outfits, walk near the Gateway of India. A patriotic song gives way to the strident sound of drumbeats. The men look at us, make a throat-slitting gesture and drop their heads.
Another urgent, percussive soundtrack: a film about a poor little rich boy - conscientious but too passive to take a stand against his own class - ends with exploited carpet-makers staring at us accusingly.
And just for variety, an opening scene: the actor Om Puri appears on the screen as himself, speaks about the subject of the film we are about to watch, and introduces other crew members. Then the main narrative begins.
The films are Govind Nihalani's Party, Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Saeed Mirza's Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan and Shyam Benegal's Arohan respectively, and these scenes draw on the "detachment" or "alienation" popularised by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. However, the most Brechtian film I have seen from that period is Ketan Mehta's excellent debut feature, Bhavni Bhavai (1980).
Rooted in a tradition of Gujarati folk theatre, this film can broadly be described as a comedy - it is jet-black, absurdist and slapstick in turn. "Ketan's vision for the acting was that it should be like the behaviour of the characters in the Asterix comics," writes Naseeruddin Shah in his recent memoir And Then One Day…, and indeed Shah himself has a grand time as the Raja in the story: preening and swaggering but unable to withdraw a sword from its scabbard and doing high-fives with himself when he learns he has won a war and his queen has given birth to a son. He rolls his eyes, wails when a jester suggests that a dire prediction mustn't be taken seriously.
The prediction in question is that the Raja will die if he sets eyes on the newborn prince. The baby is cast away but found and adopted by a member of the local "untouchable" community and named Jeeva; years later, his path crosses with his biological father's when the Raja is told that the only way to get water flowing in his stepwell is to make a human sacrifice. By this point the allegorical nature of the story is clear, what with the many archetypes and the deliberate comic exaggeration. In a society where the "dirty work" can only be performed by lower-caste, what happens when they take a day's leave? The palace starts stinking to the high heavens, of course, because there is no one to clean the human excrement. But then, something has long been rotten in a kingdom where a whole group of people have to wear spittoons around their necks and drag a little "tail" behind to wipe away their footprints.
"Our homes are burnt, we are treated like animals, and you don't feel anything?" a lower-caste man says in one scene, looking at the camera. "I am talking to all those who are watching from the safety of their darkness," he tells his wife. The words could refer to the moral blindness of people who practise or tolerate discrimination… or to a darkened movie hall in which some of those people sit in comfortable anonymity, behind the Fourth Wall.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer