 "The sounds of Sholay")
I have written in this column before about the pleasures of the good opening sequence in a movie. These are scenes that viewers often neglect or overlook (because they came into the hall late, or because they are concerned mainly with the "plot" and start paying attention to the film only after the title credits have gone), but when such scenes are well-executed, they can set a movie's tone, establish the mise-en-scene and even introduce visual and thematic motifs that will fully be explored later in the narrative.
All this is splendidly and economically, achieved in the first four minutes of Sholay, which uses a series of shots of two men riding on horseback to take us through the entire topography of the film - from anonymous sunbaked landscapes that might easily have come from an American Western (a genre Sholay was heavily influenced by) to the hustle-bustle of daily life in a very Indian village, with its water tank, its mandir, masjid and little kirana shops. Showing this sequence to a group of students recently in a class about film criticism, I was reminded again of how tightly constructed and multi-layered it is - but also how compelling it can be, even for a "casual viewer" who doesn't care to analyse or intellectualise cinema. These weren't film students to begin with - this was a creative writing class - but within moments some of them were speaking like professionals, asking to see the scene a second time, pointing out little things that hadn't occurred to me. There was even a brief "technical" discussion on the use of lengthy takes - in the shots of the two riders moving across the screen from left to right - and the compression of time and space.
But most of all, there was appreciation of RD Burman's superb music score, which moves from a guitar-dominated motif to a more recognisably Indian one when the village of Ramgarh appears on screen. Murmurs of appreciation accompanied the beginnings of the tune, which had its own distinct personality even while being an ode to Ennio Morricone's scores for "spaghetti westerns" of the 1960s. During the class, when I talked about the artful use of Western and Indian motifs, one of the students corrected me: "That's the mridang, not the tabla," he said.
In their very comprehensive book R D Burman: The Man, the Music, Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal elaborate further: they describe the sequence being scored with a combination of "vibrant guitar chords, French horn and percussion, including a tabla tarang", along with a taar shehnai coming into play when the riders go through the village. They also observe how the music uses "a certain twang in the acoustic notes that is reminiscent of the Wild West," while at the same time evoking the sound of the horn that is central to Indian mythology. (Think of the war-heralding conch-shells in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.) The writers are scrupulous about the less savoury aspects of the score, such as the fact that the gypsy song Mehbooba Mehbooba was copied from Demis Roussos's Say You Love Me. But they also chronicle the high degree of inventiveness that went into almost everything Burman did for this film: sitting with his assistants, blowing air into partly filled beer bottles, for example, to create an ululating effect for the soundtrack; or using a dholak and ghungroo sound in the scene where Basanti is being chased by the dacoits.
No wonder the sound design, both in the opening sequence and elsewhere in the film, is so resonant. One thing you immediately notice when you are listening to the opening scene on a good sound system is the way the clip-clopping of the horses' hooves is incorporated into the musical theme. This is not done with "realism" - the hoof-sound is too vivid and percussive to be authentic, and it has a clear echo - but it is very effective. In his recent memoir Sounding Off, sound designer Resul Pookutty discusses the concept of "manufactured reality". Well, those clopping hooves are an example of sound and music design that makes a scene much more poetic and emotionally resonant, without being "realistic" in the narrowly defined sense of the word. But then, that is true of so much of great cinema anyway.
All this is splendidly and economically, achieved in the first four minutes of Sholay, which uses a series of shots of two men riding on horseback to take us through the entire topography of the film - from anonymous sunbaked landscapes that might easily have come from an American Western (a genre Sholay was heavily influenced by) to the hustle-bustle of daily life in a very Indian village, with its water tank, its mandir, masjid and little kirana shops. Showing this sequence to a group of students recently in a class about film criticism, I was reminded again of how tightly constructed and multi-layered it is - but also how compelling it can be, even for a "casual viewer" who doesn't care to analyse or intellectualise cinema. These weren't film students to begin with - this was a creative writing class - but within moments some of them were speaking like professionals, asking to see the scene a second time, pointing out little things that hadn't occurred to me. There was even a brief "technical" discussion on the use of lengthy takes - in the shots of the two riders moving across the screen from left to right - and the compression of time and space.
But most of all, there was appreciation of RD Burman's superb music score, which moves from a guitar-dominated motif to a more recognisably Indian one when the village of Ramgarh appears on screen. Murmurs of appreciation accompanied the beginnings of the tune, which had its own distinct personality even while being an ode to Ennio Morricone's scores for "spaghetti westerns" of the 1960s. During the class, when I talked about the artful use of Western and Indian motifs, one of the students corrected me: "That's the mridang, not the tabla," he said.
In their very comprehensive book R D Burman: The Man, the Music, Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal elaborate further: they describe the sequence being scored with a combination of "vibrant guitar chords, French horn and percussion, including a tabla tarang", along with a taar shehnai coming into play when the riders go through the village. They also observe how the music uses "a certain twang in the acoustic notes that is reminiscent of the Wild West," while at the same time evoking the sound of the horn that is central to Indian mythology. (Think of the war-heralding conch-shells in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.) The writers are scrupulous about the less savoury aspects of the score, such as the fact that the gypsy song Mehbooba Mehbooba was copied from Demis Roussos's Say You Love Me. But they also chronicle the high degree of inventiveness that went into almost everything Burman did for this film: sitting with his assistants, blowing air into partly filled beer bottles, for example, to create an ululating effect for the soundtrack; or using a dholak and ghungroo sound in the scene where Basanti is being chased by the dacoits.
No wonder the sound design, both in the opening sequence and elsewhere in the film, is so resonant. One thing you immediately notice when you are listening to the opening scene on a good sound system is the way the clip-clopping of the horses' hooves is incorporated into the musical theme. This is not done with "realism" - the hoof-sound is too vivid and percussive to be authentic, and it has a clear echo - but it is very effective. In his recent memoir Sounding Off, sound designer Resul Pookutty discusses the concept of "manufactured reality". Well, those clopping hooves are an example of sound and music design that makes a scene much more poetic and emotionally resonant, without being "realistic" in the narrowly defined sense of the word. But then, that is true of so much of great cinema anyway.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer