Day 263: Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players and Postcolonial Theory

When Ray made Jalsaghar in 1958 he did not imagine it would have success outside of India. In later years he told his biographer Andrew Robinson, “I didn’t think it would export at all.” The film’s screening in Paris in 1981 was part of the French reassessment of Ray’s films. American and British critics described Jalsaghar as Ray’s “most perfect film,” a film “of unique delicacy and refinement.” Ben Nyce attributes the film’s “universal” appeal to “the fairly common idea that often the greatest art is created in that space of time just before the processes of disintegration take over.” Nyce’s words encapsulate the general reaction to Jalsaghar and may well explain why this film enjoys a minor cult status in the West. If we take seriously Ray’s judgment that the film would not translate “at all” outside its specific Indian context, then we are forced to ask what makes Jalsaghar one of Ray’s most culturally intriguing films, and what accounts for the cult status of this film in the West. The answer to both questions can be sought in the burden of meaning Ray brings to bear on music in Jalsaghar, and the function of music in this film. Nyce’s statement suggests that by universalizing music as great art, it is possible for viewers to consume the musical soirees in Jalsaghar. Contrary to Nyce I suggest that Ray’s purpose in the film is to map resistance through the visual deployment of Bishwambhar as body without speech. Bishwambhar does not refute or explain any constructions about him. Ray essays an aural and visual critique of the colonialist/nationalist discourses about the idle landlord class. The aural critique is established through the way music is structured in the narrative and through the supervaluation of music. The visual critique is presented through the use of the large, framed mirror that dominates the music room.

Each jalsa is preceded and framed by the landlord/patron’s paucity of funds. In order to pay for the first jalsa Bishwambhar mortgages his wife’s jewellery. For the second concert he uses his last bag of money. For the final jalsa, Bishwambhar draws on the last of his wife’s jewellery. Each musical soiree is narratively and structurally framed through alienating devices. The viewer is never allowed to be in a secure place and position from which to gaze at the scene and pleasurably enjoy the music or dance. For example, the first jalsa is a flashback and therefore functions as a reminder of happier times when Bishwambhar’s life was not totally denuded. Ray frames the musical event with a series of alienating devices. There is a dissonance between the sublime grandeur of the first jalsa, performed on screen by the famous vocalist Begum Akhtar herself, and earlier scenes of a band playing a Western tune with minimal competence. The gap between the beauty and coherence of Akhtar’s singing and the unmusical band suggests that culture is fractured due to the legacy of colonialism. The jalsa itself is followed by a scene that alienates the viewer by underlining the toll taken by this cultural pursuit: Bishwambhar’s angry, tearful wife accuses him of excessive expenditure on his obsession with music and requests him to close the jalsaghar before all her jewellery is mortgaged.

The second jalsa fuses music, time, and the stormy weather in Salamat Khan’s rainy season raag. As viewers we know, unlike the members of the concert audience, that Bishwambhar has ordered his wife and son back in the stormy weather and their journey by boat puts their lives in jeopardy. Therefore the viewer cannot share the jalsa audience’s enjoyment, the music is framed by a sense of impending doom. A sense of premonition passes over Bishwambhar’s face. The sense of abrupt discontinuity culminates in Bishwambhar’s gesture, he disrupts the jalsa by leaving mid-way, unable to sit and enjoy the music. Disruption of viewer pleasure is also suggested by Ray through other visual cues, such as the carved boat on the mantelpiece turning over and the insect drowning in the glass. The sequence ends with Bishwambhar looking on as his dead son’s body is brought ashore.

Ray’s film steadily breaks the connection between culture and the viewer/spectator’s pleasure. The third and final jalsa is framed by Bishwambhar’s history of loss and his despairing recklessness in selling the last piece of jewellery. The jalsa ends with Ganguli’s attempt to humiliate Bishwambhar by pre-empting his reward to the performer with a larger sum of money, thereby emphasizing Bishwambhar’s decline in money and status. Ganguli is not an indigenous entrepreneur but a profiteer of British colonialism. As a moneylender Ganguli has prospered and branched out into other economic activities like quarrying sand. Ganguli is a subtle reminder that the services and professions available to upwardly mobile Indians were comprador economic activity which made them part of the colonial infrastructure and aided the colonial government in the exploitation of natural and human resources. However Ganguli is not content to be the nouveau riche, he wishes to accumulate cultural authority by boasting to Bishwambhar that he has lived in Lucknow and learnt to appreciate music and even play “some little” tabla. Ray interweaves displeasure into those very parts of the film that he characterizes as containing the “sweetness and greatness” of the northern Indian classical music composed for the film by Vilayat Khan. In The Music Room to enter into the pleasure of the music is also to be inserted into the film. Viewers are interpellated not through identification but through struggle, the struggle to understand Bishwambhar’s historical predicament, his lack of options, his lack of desire to master his predicament, and his reckless disregard for consequences in the pursuit of his passion for music. It is only in and through this struggle that Ray allows the viewer to question the value and function of music.

The Music Room rejects the notion that there is an organic and unmediated access to culture and cultural value. As viewers we do not have direct access to music the way Bishwambhar does. Ray makes this proposition explicit in a scene before the last jalsa. Bishwambhar has refused to accept Ganguli’s invitation to attend his rival jalsa. Ray’s camera captures a motionless Bishwambhar sitting, as the hours pass, in the same pose and on the same couch in which he received Ganguli. The camera moves into a slow medium close-up of Bishwambhar, on the soundtrack we hear the music of a jalsa. This music is not coming from Ganguli’s residence, it is used by Ray as internal diegetic sound. These musical sounds can only be heard by Bishwambhar and viewers. A fine, low shot of Bishwambhar shows him lifting a finger to mark, with impeccable accuracy, the rhythm of the music. This scene mirrors the first scene of the film where we first saw the motionless Bishwambhar impelled to speech and movement in response to the shehnai music. This intertextuality suggests that for Bishwambhar music functions as memory. Yet music as memory only recalls for Bishwambhar memories of other music, suggesting that for the protagonist and perhaps for the director, music is its own identity.

~~Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players and Postcolonial Theory (Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity) -by- Reena Dube

Day 163: Book Excerpt: Film Voices

RIC GENTRY : I understand that it was your father who originally inspired you to work as a cinematographer.

VITTORIO STORARO : My father was a projectionist with a major Italian company. He encouraged me into a school that taught photography. I was about fourteen years old, so I really didn’t have a very good idea of what this was about. It was something my father thought he might do but he never did, so he influenced one of his sons into photography as a continuation of his own ambitions. Much later, however, I discovered that photography allowed me to express myself. I can say today, very truly, that I don’t see myself doing anything but trying to express myself through light.

“Photography” originally meant “writing with light,” and it is the term I prefer for what I do. It’s writing with light in the sense that I am trying to express something within me: my sensibility, my cultural heritage, my formation of being. All along I’ve been trying to express what I really am through light. When I work on a film, I am trying to have a parallel story to the actual story so that through the light and color you can feel and understand, consciously or unconsciously, much more clearly what the story is about.

RG: This “parallel story” that you speak of complements the director’s vision?

VS: Of course. I believe that making a film can be compared to conducting an opera. Whether the director is the author [of the screenplay] or not, he is still similar to the conductor. The orientation, the language, the style that we are going to seek for the story originates with him. What is really very important for me is the relationship between the main author, the director, and the coauthors: the composer of music, the art direction, the costume design, the photography, and so on. As the photographer, I listen to what his feelings are, how he thinks about the material that is before us, what his concepts are. Then I read the script with all of that in mind, trying to visualize his concepts in terms of a style. Essentially I am trying to continue our dialogue. Then I suggest to him what can be done to augment his concepts in the photographic area, how the story can be represented in an emotional, symbolic, psychological, and physical way. If we reach an agreement, if we really know in which direction we are going, I go back to the script and, scene by scene, apply to it, in a specific way, the general concept that we have established, the principle that guides me in lighting any single shot. Of course, step by step, day by day, I can make changes, always trying to come closer to what the visual concept is. It will take you through the picture as it is made, as it evolves. Because you can see something along the way that is more attractive, more beautiful, but that is not right for the picture you’ve set out to make.

You should always be very strong in resisting these distractions. You must select only the right kind of light, the right kind of tonality, the right kind of feeling, the right kind of color for the story. This is my approach, and the work I do with the script has helped me a lot, usually. Also, from the moment I begin a picture, I also try to find stimulations, corroborations through external sources, such as images, museums, films, music, people, locations, costumes, that add to my feelings about the material. I am always trying to come closer to my original impressions of what is photographically needed. The first few days of any new picture are very difficult, very frightening, because you are taking a step forward. You are starting over, and until you know what you want to do, there is incredible pain and suffering. Yes, it is like being born. I remember every first screening of every picture I’ve ever done. There is an incredible emotion as you sit and wait for the screen to be lit by an image. Then it is magic, when you see an image moving. It almost doesn’t matter at this moment what kind of image it is. That you can see it and it is there is something very powerful, magical. Until then, it is all very painful. Until the light beaming through the positive stock breaks the obscurity of the room and you can see an image. After that, you can analyze what you think of it, whether it is good or bad, but that moment in the screening room is an incredible moment. Sometimes I think you live for that moment.

~~Film Voices: Interviews from Post Script -edited by- Gerald Duchovnay