Tartuffe, a silent film by F W Munrau from the 1920s, was way ahead of its time.
Sting operations conducted with hidden cameras are, needless to say, a recent phenomenon — it’s difficult to ascertain their exact provenance, but one can safely agree that they didn’t exist in the 1920s. However, the pioneering film directors were decades ahead of their time, as I realised while watching F W Murnau’s silent film Tartuffe. Besides, certain themes — such as voyeurism and self-righteousness — have a timeless appeal.
“Are we not sinning?” a married woman asks a Godman in the climactic scene of Tartuffe. “He who sins in secret does not sin!” he replies, smacking his lips. Then he opens the curtains to his bedchamber, gives her a meaningful look and invites her in. Earlier in the day the expression on his face was that of a man rapt in communion with a higher power, but now he’s a satyr anticipating worldly pleasures.
Something about the scene was very familiar, though I couldn’t think what. Then, suddenly, the circuits of my reptile brain lit up. “The Swami Nithyanand sex videos!” I cried to myself in triumph. I had watched the TV news channels with uncharacteristic interest a few days earlier.
The Tartuffe sequence is a sting of sorts, too: Madame Elmira has set up a nighttime tryst to convince her gullible husband Orgon (hiding outside the door, watching through the keyhole) that his friend Tartuffe is a hypocrite masquerading as an ascetic. The husband intervenes just in time to save her honour and cast the scoundrel out. All ends well.
Story-wise, this film — a condensed version of the Moliere play — is a simple-minded morality tale, and most modern-day viewers would find it difficult to work up much sympathy for Orgon and his wife, members of the noble class who are in danger of losing their expensive jewellery to the fraudster Tartuffe. It’s hard to really see these people as victims — just as it’s difficult for me to see Nithyanand’s willing acolytes as victims. But plot aside, there’s something else that’s notable about Murnau’s film, something that gives it an uncanny modern resonance — its unusual use of the movie-within-a-movie technique.
The film’s “framing” device is a story about a housekeeper persuading her nearly senile employer to disinherit his grandson and leave everything to her instead. (She’s slowly poisoning the old man too!) The grandson is banished, but soon afterwards he arrives at the house disguised as the proprietor of a “touring cinema”. Ringing a bell vigorously, he proclaims that the film he wishes to screen is “a story about saints and sinners”. The housekeeper initially resists but then gives in and the boy sets up a screen, complete with little curtains, on the living-room wall.
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Then he blows the candles out, darkening the room, and starts the projector with a flourish.
The camera that has so far been showing us this framing story now moves into the screen on the wall, and the cautionary tale of Tartuffe begins. The “lesson” that the boy wants to convey to his old granddad is that the world is full of hypocrites, pretending to be noble and high-minded, but secretly preying on you.
Cinema was relatively young in 1925, with lots of questions being asked about whether it was capable of raising people’s consciousness (as opposed to “simply” telling amusing stories). In Tartuffe, we see a pedantic demonstration of the medium’s power to warn people about the evils around them. It’s self-conscious but it’s inventive, and a lot of fun. When the boy starts playing the Tartuffe film, I can’t help thinking of the anchors on today’s news channels, hysterically ringing bells (in the form of “breaking news” flashes), claiming to hold up a mirror to our sordid times.
(Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer)