All Generalisations Are False

Rod Stoneman compares the content and performance of two very different films and asks what lessons, on a global scale, can be learned. [Extract]

Speaking in tongues
To start at the end of Monsoon Wedding: hidden amongst the end credits, as a roller caption goes by, cutting to fast flashbacks of shots from the exhilarating musical finale, there is concealed amongst the lists of production personnel a three line note:

"We are like that.
40 locations 30 days.
exactly and approximately."

There are always the perverse pleasures of discovering a hidden code ­ there at the edge of the text. (I remember the most radical aspect of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Saló, aside from the explicit sexual cruelty, was the bibliography he supplied in the end credits: Barthes, De Sade, Sollers). It is only cinephiles who stay in the emptying cinema for the credits and then amongst them only a tiny minority who would understand an obscure reference to the shoot schedule.

"We are like that"­ a necessarily defiant assertion of cultural specificity in relation to the pervasive centripetal pull of Western Culture. The film was entirely shot in Delhi and, for anyone familiar with the modalities of film production, the implications of "40 locations in 30 days" is an indication of a six week schedule (or five weeks if you film for an exhausting six days a week). Suffice it to say this was a very intense production process, achieving an average of over three minutes of final material on each day of filming. It also constitutes an extremely fast turn around between locations, even if they are all in the same city. The "exactly and approximately" is a marvellous oxymoronic quotation from P.K. Dube, a Mr Fix-it character who opens the film and also provides one of the narrative denouements.

There have also been word of mouth rumours of a significant insurance claim, when one reel was apparently wiped out by an airport x-ray. There is always the specificity of the adventure of every film¹s shoot with its group dynamics, its authentic anxieties and excitements, in its decisive encounter with the contingent.

Monsoon Wedding is a musical, light and colourful film; with its five intersecting stories it also has with a meaningful social engagement with issues of class, caste in relation to gender political questions ­ abuse, sisterhood, arranged marriage. Perhaps it is too bald to list these topics in this way as though the film is just a vessel containing this 'content' (to use the mercantile term of the digital era); it is a cinematic experience and not some sort of sociological agenda. If Monsoon Wedding is a powerful film it is the way that these progressive 'engagements' are integrated into its form. Indeed it would also be facile to approach a film like Behind Enemy Lines purely in terms of a simple critique of its reactionary 'content'. Both films are their modes of production and the way their cultural and political perspectives are inscribed in and through their texts.

The full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland 89