An Arthouse Interpretation...

Well, I wanted to pen this down before the worldly opinions & factors malign my pure thought yet again. So trying something different now – writing what I felt after watching the movie Khoya Khoya Chand about half an hour back. Three scenes stick to my mind indelibly-

1. The male lead, Zafar, is directing his debut movie. He chooses the story to be that of his own life – a childhood and a youth ridden with angst against his casanova father. In the climactic scene that he shoots, the actor in this movie – which is actually a screen avatar of Zafar himself, asks his father something that he wanted to ask all his life, but could never do so until now. The sincerity and the painfully curious, screaming-for-an-answer-look is shown to be shared by both the actor and the director Zafar, before and behind the camera respectively. Zafar is so emotionally involved in filming this scene that, for him, the difference between reel & real ceases to exist. He looks earnestly, searchingly towards the father, and, in the process, forgets to ‘cut’ the scene.

This scene shows what art means to an artist. Art is not only self expression. It is also a medium to attain salvation for him. It gives him a chance to rollback his life, change things he wished he could – even if those changes are on something as mercurial as a celluloid. A piece of art can be understood cent percent only by its creator for this very reason; it is a self constructed code language, a sort of personal diary, an expression which is, to a certain extent, directed towards himself. A commercially viable piece of art would be directed more towards the audience and would have practically no personal connection with the artist, while a non-commercial one would be directed almost totally towards the artist himself – being as unintelligible to others as scribblings in a personal journal are. The difference between these two lies totally in the target audience that they have.

2. Zafar’s movie’s premiere is greeted with yawns and other general displays of disinterest. Watching, a critic asks Zafar, who is sitting besides him, his opinion on the whole debacle. Zafar watches him broodingly for a moment, seeming ready to burst out in exasperation any second. He does burst out, albeit into a big, ear-to-ear grin.

This scene is a continuation of what I said above. After making a personal-journal piece of art, and understandably not being understood by anyone, there is nothing left for an artist to do but to smile. There may be two reasons for this smile – One, he smiles at others’ ignorance. In a mocking way, he may consider himself to be ahead of his time. He may consider others dumb because they couldn’t understand his metaphors. Two, and this one is difficult to explain. The artist is so deliriously submerged in his art that he doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s opinion on his work. Visually, the situation looks like a sculptor who, after creating his sculpture, has settled down to worship it, as we worship our idols.

And, well, there also are a few, who, with their ingenuity, understand this beautiful but abstruse piece of art, and end up smiling too, albeit for reasons entirely different than those of the artist!

3. Zafar, who had left the industry and his actor girlfriend after the failure of his film, has returned after many years – in order to make a comeback, only to find that his ex-girlfriend has become disillusioned & alcoholic since. While talking to his friend who has since taken care of the girl, about her condition & his reasons for coming back, he says, while looking straight at the girl, who is immersed in an intoxicated slumber –

‘Kya karein bhaisaab, ab in se duur bhi to nahi raha jaata’.

I found this to be swashbucklingly brilliant. The identity of ‘in’ here, in my opinion, is two pronged. He is referring to the two things which were irresistible, and probably irreplaceable in his life –

i)the film industry: An artist can never run away from his art. No matter how much he may try, whatever else he may dabble in, or however disillusioned he may become, he just can not throw his art out of his existence. Perhaps this is the difference between an artist and a non-artist. The commoner has taught himself since childhood that an unproductive part of your being should be cut out from your existence. There is no reason whatsoever for retaining anything so unworthy, so unusable – and so, he adapts himself to any vocation that will satisfy his material wants. An artist can’t do that. He is a person who will retain that pencil with which he has practiced all year long for the final test, even though it may have reduced to such a small size that it is practically unusable.

ii)the girl: This excessive sentimentalism is evident is his human relationships as well. Even well after they end, he can perhaps never get over any of them. Just as he can’t cut away his creative organ however unrewarding it be, he similarly can’t do away with the people he loves. But because his self-expression would be as abstruse as his art, he would be constantly uninterpreted (or worse – misinterpreted), giving way to his failures in these relationships.

So these were some riveting moments from the movie. But watching this movie added more fuel to a greater debate raging inside me for quite sometime now. This debate concerns itself with the relevance of art today. Do we really need it? Does it represent a useless outcome of human creativity? Does it not, by the virtue of its existence, and by its propensity to hypnotize minds, waste human time and effort? These questions can be better understood if we take a peek into what we aim to head towards. Human upbringing is all about mechanizing. Since childhood, we are taught discipline, laws, doctrines, manners, etc. and are constantly conditioned to become ‘civilized’. The rules stated above are imbibed in every inch of our existence, and are generally viewed as prerequisites for living in an organized society. Any deviation from these is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable. Our ideal existence looks, thereby, to be chillingly similar to a machine part. We are intended to be the well oiled, formulaic & unwavering pieces of a larger machine (visual imagery*: a clock mechanism; also a military parade for the broader sense) known as the human society so that it may run ad infinitum. In such a pursuit, art is necessarily an unneeded enterprise.

And art becomes necessary just because of a need to demechanize. Both its construction & understanding involve the uninhibited side of human nature. A side which is perhaps the sole factor distinguishing us as human beings (to quote a character in The Matrix Reloaded – ‘To deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human’). The keywords here are ‘uninhibited’, ‘free’, ‘creative’, ‘romantic’, ‘impulsive’, ‘un-dogmatic’, and, to a certain extent, ‘illogical’ – with the definition of logic which one chooses making the difference here. And it is these words which represent the basic tenets of the concept of art. Art involves a skill which is almost totally impulse based. Its outcome is an expression which is not externally controlled or dogma-resultant, but is free. A shackled expression can therefore never be called art. Art is inherently iconoclast, because human spirit is inherently unrestricted.

And therefore art is needed - to give an expression to the demechanization. By giving an output to this unrestricted side through the medium of art, we keep some semblance of that human element alive in ourselves in this fast changing world.

‘Of all lies, art is the least untrue.’ ~ Gustave Flaubert.

Pretty apt, eh?

* Refer to the previous post for more elucidation on visual imagery