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In its early years, cinema naturally took on the onus of depicting historical events -"History written in lightning" is what an awed Woodrow Wilson supposedly said of the 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, which was set during the American Civil War. But with the passage of more than a century - and the self-reflective hubris that comes so easily to this medium - the benchmarks for "history" have shifted; there have been many movies about movies. Legendary personalities from Georges Melies downward have been portrayed on screen multiple times, and the results can be disorienting for those of us who still watch old films: I remember being briefly spooked when, a few days after watching the real Orson Welles in the 1940s film The Lady from Shanghai, I saw an actor convincingly portray him in Ed Wood (made in 1994, but shot in moody black and white).
Last week I saw two recent films that are dramatised stories about real-life directors: one was the 2012 Hitchcock, about the strain on Alfred Hitchcock's marriage during the making of Psycho; the other was this year's acclaimed Bengali film Meghe Dhaka Tara, about the tortured Ritwik Ghatak's time in an asylum in 1969. It is hard to think of two major directors more dissimilar than Hitchcock and Ghatak. Hitch was solidly mainstream, worked in a very popular genre (suspense), and for much of his career was considered an entertainer rather than an artist, as if the two categories are mutually exclusive; he began to be taken seriously only when a new wave of critics held his work up to deeper scrutiny. Ghatak, on the other hand, rarely found commercial success but is often considered the exemplar of the serious, politically committed Artist - with a capital A - who never compromised on his integrity, and suffered for it.
Both labels are simplistic, but let's ignore that for now. Though these two films are outwardly very different, resonances run through them. Meghe Dhaka Tara replicates the title of a celebrated Ghatak film of 1960, while Hitchcock is about the making of another film released that same year. Though Hitch lived a much more comfortable life than Ghatak did, he struggled to sell his vision for Psycho - a major departure for him - to big-studio executives. Each director is shown here as having a long-suffering wife who puts up with her husband's moods and makes sacrifices at the altar of his art. (You are no bhadralok, Ghatak's wife tells him, while Hitchcock's weary spouse sarcastically notes that viewers only know about the "great and glorious genius" but not the flawed man.)
Most of all, both raise the question: can one resist making a film about a director in a style that imitates or pays homage to him? Meghe Dhaka Tara is beautifully shot in black-and-white, and unfolds in a deliberately (sometimes infuriatingly) abstract style that is not too far from the tone of some of Ghatak's own work. And this may be the place for a confession: while I admire many things about Ghatak, I don't feel a personal connect with his cinema, which is often laboured and meandering. I also feel his reputation as the ultimate honourable artist is somewhat overblown, especially when used as a pretext to pull down filmmakers who did make small, practical compromises. And perhaps for this reason, while Meghe Dhaka Tara is a fine visual experience and a very skilful, imaginative work, I had trouble engaging with it at an emotional level.
The more accessible Hitchcock has its own flaws - simplifications among them - but it is a droll, self-aware tribute that draws motifs and moods from Hitchcock's work. In the very first scene, we see the morbid and the comical in an unholy pact, as Sir Alfred enters the frame and tells us that if the mass murderer Ed Gein (whose macabre adventures inspired Psycho) had never existed "we wouldn't have our film". This can be viewed as an artist's admission to profiting from the ugly aspects of the real world, but the words "our film" are also a reminder that Hitchcock implicated his audience in everything he did, putting us through a gamut of disturbing, contradictory, morally ambiguous emotions. That scene catches so much of what the director was about: reflections on the relationship between life and art, between the watcher and the watched; the alternating of black humour with moments of human truth. Most of all, it is about cinema itself.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
