Actress Shwetha Menon’s decision to incorporate footage of her giving birth to her daughter in a film has led to an outcry. A TBIP report.

It is not uncommon for a woman to work when she is pregnant unless, perhaps, if she happens to be an actress. “I wanted to work during my pregnancy. I just never thought I would be working up to the delivery,” says 39 year old Malayalam film actress Shwetha Menon. She managed to work on three films during her pregnancy. Of these three, Kalimannu stands out. Kalimannu explores a woman’s journey to becoming a mother. Not only did Menon’s pregnancy fit in as part of the film’s narrative, her delivery was also shot on camera and the footage of her giving birth to her daughter was incorporated in the film. While this was quite unconventional, Menon did not anticipate the furore that it would cause, even way before its release on the 22^nd of August.

Menon, who has won the Kerala State Film Award for the Best Actress twice, met with Director Blessy at an awards function when she was pregnant. She had been keen to continue working at that point and had known that Blessy had the perfect story for her. “He got to know that I’m pregnant and everything. Then we spoke about it and then Kalimannu happened. It was just the process and timing. Nothing else.”

While the film seeks to explore the connection between a mother and her unborn child, the conflict at its centre is made up of the resistance the protagonist, played by Menon, faces when she uses the sperm of her husband, who is brain dead, to get pregnant via Intra Vitro Fertilization. In the film her decision causes enormous controversy— leading to objections from politicians, religious heads and society in general. As life follows art, these controversies have been closely mirrored in real life, when public figureheads began to speak out against the use of the live footage of the birth in the film. While the reel version takes on a more dramatic tone, the objections raised—both in the film and outside of it—have revolved around the ‘values’ that stem from ‘Indian tradition’ and the ‘sanctity of motherhood’.

In November 2012, while the film was still under production, word spread about Menon’s actual delivery being shot to be used as a part of the film’s narrative. G. Karthikeyan, Speaker of the Kerala Legislative Assembly, was one of the first to object. He asked why women’s rights groups who protest against the derogatory portrayal of women in advertisements were not concerned. Karthikeyan’s statement sparked off other voices of protest. Sobha Surendran, President of the BJP Mahila Morcha in Kerala, argued vehemently against artistic license in this case: “This is not art. In my opinion, using a woman’s delivery is not art. Art should be manifested through the acting. The emotions that a woman goes through in her delivery should not be (conveyed through) the expressions captured in the actual labour room. If it is (meant for) art, it should be recreated for art. There are so many films in which the actresses have acted out such scenes.”

Karthikeyan and Surendran are yet to the see the film, which is still running in theatres, but they stand firmly by their statements. Says Karthikeyan, “At the time, when the director himself had said that they were going to shoot this scene, I had asked whether it was the right thing to do. Didn’t it go against motherhood? If you ask me tomorrow, I will still stand by it.”

Surendran wonders if the scene was just a gimmick for the film to grab the audience’s attention.  “To make the film a success, they were asking politicians to watch the film,” she says. “Even to me, the producer said, ‘Watch the film and express your opinion to various TV Channels and reporters.’ This is the first time a producer has asked this of me. It has never happened before.”

Surendran also believes that the use of this footage in a film violates the sanctity of childbirth. “Delivering a baby is sacred. Mothers here have done it with great care, with regard for privacy. She (Menon) tried to use it as an experiment in her film. She has the right to do that. And just as she has the right to do that, to show live birth to the audience, mothers have a right to say that it is wrong.”

Whether the scene was a publicity stunt for the film seems immaterial because the actress had consented to it being shot and shown. However, Surendran did more than just “say that it is wrong”. She asked that the Government of Kerala to prevent the film from screening in theatres, even asking for the Chief Minister Oommen Chandy to intervene, and threatened to stall the film if it was released.

The exhibitors appear to be disgruntled by the scene as well. The Kerala Film Exhibitors Federation President, Liberty Basheer, was in agreement with Karthikeyan and Surendran. “My main objection was that a scene like that cannot be shown in theatres,” he says. “And this decision was taken by the whole federation.”

Even though the controversy raged on, nobody really knew what the objectionable scene looked like, what it included and what it didn’t. Through the uproar, Menon remained unfazed: “There is a saying ‘Kaanatha poorathe patti nammakku parayam pattilla. (One can’t talk about a carnival one didn’t go to).’ She explains, “I don’t think we tried to disrespect a single woman on this earth. We kept saying ‘Let Kalimannu come. Kalimannu is not about the delivery. Kalimannu has another point of view. It’s not only the delivery and it’s not that thing that we are planning to show, as you are thinking.’ There were so many things that we were trying to say but nobody was listening.”

One of the most vocal voices of support from the Malayalam film industry has been B. Unnikrishnan, the General Secretary of the Film Employees Federation of Kerala. He also has a cameo in the film, as himself. In the film, just as in life, Unnikrishnan argues against the protagonist’s detractors, supporting Meera’s decision to use the sperm of her husband to conceive her child. To the various hecklers of the movie, he has this to say: “Everyone knows that it’s injustice to do this to a work of art. Especially because the issue has to do with a woman, everyone is panicking. It reveals the patriarchy within us. For instance, Mohanlal was nude in a scene from Blessy’s film Thanmathra. Then it didn’t have this controversy. But when it comes to Shwetha Menon’s delivery there is one. It just shows our male bias.”

Once the film was complete, the Censor Board cleared it with a U/A certificate and the Kerala Film Chamber of Commerce extended their complete support. Speculations were rife over whether the final cut had the objectionable scenes— given that the protests had been raging on from before it was completed. “When newspaper reports came out, it said that the scenes had been censored. Blessy made a statement saying that that is incorrect and that the scene is still there,” Basheer says. Media reports quoted Blessy as saying that there were five scenes in the film that showed the delivery of the child.

“Even when discussing the film the day before its release, Blessy and Shwetha were not ready to reveal to the public, whether these scenes were a part of the film,” says Surendran. “And, if so, which of them were. The director and the actor were being secretive.”

Menon rejects the notion that they needed to give an explanation or clarify these doubts. “Everyone asked us why we weren’t defending the film. The only way we could defend it was by releasing the film, a film that has a U/A certificate. The same persons should have gone and seen the film and commented on it.”

Both Basheer and Surendran believe that their protests were successful and that the film was edited to suit their demands. Surendran says, “They have not been able to include the scenes to the extent that Blessy had thought, or Shwetha had wanted to, and that has been precisely because of the protests by the public.” Basheer insists further that there were cuts made to tone down the scene, even after the Censor Board had cleared the film, and only then did the Kerala Film Exhibitors Federation agree to screen the film. “Earlier, the film had scenes from the delivery itself. What you now see mostly is just doctors.”

Menon denies this. According to her, it was not the Kerala Film Exhibitors Federation but Basheer alone who had objected to the film and there were no changes made to the film after the censor certificate had been obtained.

Unnikrishnan agrees: “That’s incorrect. There have been no cuts (in the child-birth scene). No other agency has a right there. It was the director’s cut which was approved by the Censor Board, and it was the same film which was exhibited.”

***

Until its release the film remained embroiled in controversy. A member of the public, Mada Swamy, filed a petition in the Kerala High Court asking for the delivery scenes to be removed from the film. The High Court however rejected the petition on the ground that the scenes had been filmed with the consent of Menon.

“It is my body and I have full right to do whatever I want to do,” says Menon. “I decide where I should take it. I should be considered. I’m very grateful to God that I could work.” This attitude irks the BJP’s Mahila Morcha no end. Says Surendran, “I’m still against a woman taking the decision to use her delivery, in the name of artistic license, not through acting but as it is, and selling it for a film.”  Surendran cites the example of another actress. “On the Indian silver screen, I don’t think Shwetha Menon has risen to the heights that Aishwarya Rai has. When she was pregnant, and one of India’s biggest stars, Amitabh Bachchan said that, ‘I don’t want a crowd greeting the arrival of my grandchild.’ In a context where actresses and women are guarding their privacy, Shwetha herself said in an interview that when she knew that she was pregnant she thought about how it could be used for this film. That she used her delivery as an opportunity is my objection.”

Menon says of Surendran, “Somebody of that stature making that statement can affect a lot of people. When you say something about the film, I don’t mind. But when the same person points a finger at my personality or my character that is the only time I take it as an offence. I don’t give her a right. Nobody gives her the right to indulge in character assassination.”

Unnikrishnan deems the whole controversy unfortunate. He says, “I am not judging the quality of the film or the issues it raises. The problem is that these are very conservative and orthodox views on a woman, her body and her sexuality. If there is any such issue, it is the Censor Board that should take care of it, as a government appointed body. People outside of it shouldn’t be doing its job.”

And yet they are.

Last year, in October, TBIP took a petition to ‘save indie cinema’ to the I&B Ministry and published its initial reactions. Next month, we carried a response to these reactions by filmmaker Onir, who had drafted the petition. In June this year, some of the filmmakers’ demands seemed to have been met and this was seen as a relevant, if small, victory. TBIP examines what this really stands for. 

 

It has been almost a year since a group of filmmakers began an online petition to ‘save indie cinema’ on October 2, 2012. One of the things the petition demanded was that National Award winning films be screened on the national TV network Doordarshan (DD). In June, 2013, DD announced that it would now be accepting proposals from independent filmmakers who wish to screen their films on a new TV slot that has been named ‘Best of Indian Cinema’.

Whether this announcement will bring about any change remains to be seen. Some filmmakers have sent their applications, each of which requires an application fee to be paid, but there has been no reply. “It’s been two months since we’ve all applied. We’ve all paid 10,000 Rupees, but we still don’t know when our film will be shown,” says filmmaker Onir, who drafted the petition, and who is heading the ‘Save Indie Cinema’ campaign. “Once we’ve applied why aren’t we just paid the money? They can do programming later. This is how satellite channels function. They sign the agreement. They give you the money. In this case, first of all, we’re paying to apply. Then we have to wait eternally to get the money.” Onir, and other National Award winning filmmakers, have two contentions with the way things are going. One is that DD is taking too long to get back to them. The other is that National Award winning films should prima facie be accepted by DD, and the filmmakers paid for the films, rather than these films having to be vetted again by a selection committee. “The moment the film gets a National Award it should immediately qualify, and they should have someone in Doordarshan who takes the names and details from the (Information and Broadcasting or I&B) Ministry,” says Onir. “If a film is being honoured as something of national importance, then it should be the prerogative of Doordarshan to acquire it without us having to run after them.”

However in order to apply a film need not necessarily have won a National Award. To be eligible for this time slot on DD, a film should have been selected for at least one of a specified list of film festivals or have won a National Award and they should have been produced after the year 2000 and should be subtitled in English or Hindi. Apart from this the applicant must possess the terrestrial and satellite rights for the film for the necessary period.

But even after meeting the eligibility criteria films are not guaranteed a screening. The invitation for the proposal for films states clearly: “Only those films selected by the competent authority will be telecast.”

The DD guidelines state that the films will go through three committees before being selected for broadcast. A ‘Preview’ committee at each regional centre will be responsible for checking the language of the film, to see it is fit “for Doordarshan viewing” and “suggest the deletion” of words or lines that the committee decides are not. Also a ‘Technical Preview’ committee will check the “technical quality of the telecast tapes” and ensure “good quality of print for broadcast”. But it will be a ‘Selection’ Committee’ which will finally choose which films are be shown. Currently no details have been revealed about how this committee is to be formulated. The guidelines only mention that it will be under the “chairmanship of DG (Director General) Doordarshan (and) comprising of eminent film makers”.

“There are no clear guidelines under which Doordarshan is approving and rejecting films. I want them to show me who is on this committee,” says filmmaker Ashvin Kumar. “We (Indian independent filmmakers) are the people who are the invested parties, why aren’t we on committees?”

What is worse, the slot dedicated to the ‘Best of Indian Cinema’ is an inconvenient one for filmmakers as the films are shown only at 11 pm.

Chetan Vyas, a programming consultant with Doordarshan, says, “Award winning films are being telecast every Sunday at 11 pm. Most of the National Award films are very, very serious. And they are not commercially viable for ‘selling’ in their own language in their states. Most of the producers spend (Rs.) 30 to 40 lakhs and they don’t make money by releasing in their respective states. On the national network they will get a bonus.”

“When we were discussing the entire thing, they (DD) told us they would figure out at least a 10 pm slot,” says Onir. But even if an earlier time slot were to be given, currently films require a U/A or U certificate if they are to be broadcast before 11 pm. “Some of the best films of our country, right from Pyaasa to the older Devdas, are adult films,” says Onir. “If award winning films won’t be shown just because they have ‘adult content’, then it’s a joke.”

Kumar has faced several problems while trying to get his film certified. He says: “Why should the filmmaker run after the censor board and get the recertification done? That should be done by Doordarshan.”

In most countries, it is the broadcaster who goes through the process of getting a film certified for television. “When they’re screening foreign films on Doordarshan, they’re not asking the filmmaker to get it certified,” says Kumar. He has sold his films to distributors and channels abroad and in each case it has been them who have been responsible for getting his films certified for television.

The odd time slot and the recertification are not the only complaints filmmakers have with the guidelines. Documentary films are not eligible for this slot. “How many films at award festivals have a U certificate?” asks Kumar. “The film has to be a fiction feature (not a documentary), a U or U/A certified film, and it has to be a National Award winning or a festival film.” He feels that this excludes 80% of the films made in the country.

“At the moment we are a little bit tight with financial nitty-gritties and our guidelines (these are other DD guidelines, on showing documentary films) have not been finalized by Prasar Bharati (of which DD is a division) board. It is only after these guidelines are approved that we will start accepting these films (documentary films) for telecast,” says Vyas in response to this. “At the moment we are telecasting our own documentaries or, because we have some agreements with the Ministry of External Affairs and other ministries, it is their (documentary) films that are being telecast (on DD).”

However the 2012 petition is asking for the inclusion of documentary films into the same category of award-winning features. Alternatively, there could be a separate slot for National Award winning documentaries. According to Onir there are about 15 films which win in the ‘Best Film’ category every year. Among these are two or three documentaries. He doesn’t include films that have won awards in the technical categories, only those that have won a National Award for ‘Best Film’. “That the government can’t give us a slot for even 15 films in a year is a joke,” says Onir. He adds: “None of us feature filmmakers will complain about a documentary filmmaker sharing the same platform.”

Given that the economics of a documentary film and a feature film are different, the pricing can be different for features and documentaries. But it seems extremely unreasonable to exclude documentaries altogether.

The filmmakers want DD to get more proactive. By setting up a cell to source good films from festivals, it would be possible for DD to approach filmmakers instead of having them go through the arduous process of applying. Also, Kumar suggests that filmmakers should be allowed to fill the application forms online and attach them to the submission form for National Awards given that both these applications require the same information. This would make it easier for those who have already won National Awards to have their films shown.

“It should be them approaching us and taking the film,” says Onir. “The whole attitude that they’re doing us a favour is a big problem.”

The 2012 petition also asked for separate theatres to screen indie films. I&B Minister Manish Tewari had announced a day after this year’s National Awards concluded on June 16, 2013, that the Films Division Auditorium at Mahadev Road in Delhi would be converted into a theatre for independent cinema, but there has been no follow up. Despite several meetings with Ministry officials and a promise that 10 theatres would be ready this year, nothing has materialized. “I worked my ass off to make a list of 30 properties all over India which could be converted into theatres,” says Onir. “Everything they asked for, I followed up on. And there has been nothing from their side.”

 

Vijay Simha has been a journalist for two decades. Here, he tells you about seven journalism movies you must watch and why.

 

Anyone who’s been in a newsroom would tell you that you need to be crazy to want to be a journalist. It doesn’t get the big bucks in— especially not in India even though it is the world’s biggest media hub. Nor does journalism provide the sort of stability that might enable one to plan a regular urban middle-class life— with ample occasion for dinner, movies, shopping and quality time for family and friends.

 

Journalism is for the better part erratic and cruel. But when all goes well, it can also be euphoric, electrifying and elevating. It can strip a journalist of the ability to ever imagine life as anything else. For, the pen doesn’t just sit there. Life must happen on a journalist’s watch, for journalism to exist. No other profession has this defining requirement as its basis. So, even though a widely-read survey put a newspaper reporter’s job at the 200th spot in a list of 200 best and worst jobs of 2013, the world has to come to an end for reporters to cease to be.

 

If journalism is thus the most trusted form of mass communication known to man, cinema is perhaps the most loved. Together they must make for a crackling pair. No wonder then that Citizen Kane, the film widely regarded as the finest ever made, is on journalism.

 

My earliest memory of journalism and cinema is from when I was about four years old. I would sit on the floor, at my grandfather’s feet and pore over Deccan Chronicle, mesmerized by the headlines and pictures. The world moved each time my grandfather turned a page. When I learnt how to read, I began reading the newspaper with him. It was always the sports pages first, because he began with the front page. Deccan Chronicle was a low brow daily with a circulation you didn’t argue with. It would run movie advertisements over two or three full pages. If you wanted to go to the movies in film-crazy Hyderabad or Secunderabad, you would refer to the Chronicle for the cinema listings— Hindi, English and Telugu.

 

But it wasn’t until after I had become a reporter in New Delhi, that I saw my first journalism movie— New Delhi Times. It was a 1986 Hindi film with Shashi Kapoor in one of his more meaningful roles as Vikas Pande, a reporter who rises to the editor’s post, and finds the world vastly different. It was gripping because not many movies explored the interplay between politicians, businessmen and editors in an India still awed by Indira Gandhi. Almost everyone who worked in the media, and anyone who was a Hindi heartland politician, saw New Delhi Times.

Back in the 1980s, Indian journalism was still fairly convinced of its integrity. Newspapers were the principal form of mass communication and the corruption now associated with the media hadn’t seeped in. Yet, New Delhi Times showed Indian journalists in a not so flattering light. Key incidents in the movie were interpreted and re-interpreted over animated discussions. I don’t recall a major deconstruct of the movie in print, but there were parallels drawn to incidents and people that journalists knew in real life.

 

Some of what the movie showed was ironically mirrored in the life of its director, Ramesh Sharma.  It was a fairly regular pattern in the 1980s. Businessmen with money liked to make movies— atleast partly for the love of glamour and power. Sharma seemed to have political ambitions too and began to get close to members of the Congress party.

 

He was often seen in the company of Uma Gajapathi Raju, the wife of rich and feudal Andhra Pradesh politician Pusapati Ananda Gajapathi Raju. Ananda was a Member of Parliament and Uma too was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989 from Visakhapatnam in coastal Andhra Pradesh. Sharma’s friendship with Uma didn’t work for either because Congress circles in Delhi believed she had access to the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. It was, therefore, considered inappropriate for Sharma, a mere filmmaker, to be seen in public with Uma. It is hard to ascertain the truth of this story but it was deliciously full of intrigue and journalists lapped it up. (Reportedly Uma later divorced Ananda and married Sharma and they have made many public appearances together and have jointly run a production company as well as a non-profit organization.)

 

 

However, despite the critical success of New Delhi Times, few Hindi films have since explored the vast and rich material that the lives of journalists have to offer. There are several films that make a passing reference to the profession— Mohra (1994), with Raveena Tandon as a reporter for the newspaper Samadhan, C.I.D. (1956) with a plot that revolves around the murder of a newspaper editor, Mr. India (1987) where Sridevi is a crime reporter hunting for a scoop, for a daily aptly named ‘The Crimes of India‘, Nayak: The Real Hero (2001) with Anil Kapoor as a television journalist who becomes chief minister for a day, Bombay (1995) in which Arvind Swamy is a journalism student, Guru (2007) which features a character based on Ramnath Goenka, the founder of The Indian Express, played by Mithun Chakravorty, Wake Up Sid (2009) where Konkona Sen Sharma is a journalist with Mumbai Beat and most recently Satyagraha (2013), where Kareena Kapoor plays a TV journalist covering an agitation inspired by Anna Hazare’s real life hunger strike to enact the Lok Pal bill in 2011, to name a few. But there are barely any with journalism at their core. Other than New Delhi Times, the only ones I can think of are Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), Naya Sansar (1941), Page 3 (2005), Rann (2010), Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000), and Peepli [Live] (2010).

 

Hollywood, which has over the years invested more in realistic cinema, has far more journalism movies. Some of these are simply marvelous and can tell you in close to 90 minutes what it’s all about.

 

It is a popular belief that journalists are at risk from the subjects they are reporting on. This belief is based on the understanding that a journalist is always reporting on facts others want to hide because of their unseemly and illegal nature. This assessment is simplistic and barely ever true— especially in the metros.

 

Threat to journalists mostly comes from within the newsrooms they populate. Deep insecurities and unresolved issues get full play as media employees target each other. Often, editors add to the toxic mix with opaque, murky and constant shifting of goalposts. In my career, no one has ever remotely threatened me because of what I wrote about them. All the battles I either won, lost, or walked off from emanated in the newsroom. The problem, as always, is with your own.

 

The other critical equation is the one between a source and a reporter. This is the most sacred of all journalism relationships and unless one of them, the reporter or the source, goes rogue, not a force on earth can pry them apart.

 

The Insider (1999), one of the finest journalism movies of all time, gets both themes right. The film is about Jeffrey Wigand, a top executive who is about to show up big American tobacco firms for promoting addiction to nicotine and lying about it. It’s also about Lowell Bergman, the CBS journalist who helps Wigand go public in one of the biggest public health stories in recent American journalism. Russell Crowe as Wigand and Al Pacino as Bergman are magnificent.

 

They meet on several occasions at odd times in sundry locations, mostly in cars. In lashing rain and thunder, the source and the reporter pry every bit of information out of each other as they strive for the most treasured of journalistic traits: credibility. Family deserts the whistleblower under the incredible strain of telling the truth. And, inevitably, the source and the journalist end up targeting the other under pressure.

 

“I’m just a commodity. I could be anything worth putting between commercials,” Crowe snaps at Pacino. “You’ve been telling yourself that something happens when you get information out of people. You’ve been telling yourself that to justify having a good job. Having status. Maybe for the audience it’s just voyeurism that won’t change a fucking thing.”

 

 

Later in the film, in a conversation with Mike Wallace, the host of the show 60 Minutes, Pacino gets back. “I never left a source hang out to dry, ever. Not until right fucking now. When I came on this job I came with my word intact. I’m gonna leave with my word intact. Fuck the rules of the game.” Mike and Lowell argue over how far they should go for a story and to protect a source. And on what should be the moment where one lets go of loyalty to a news organization that has built up a legacy. This is a key question in our profession.

 

 

At one point in my career I had a source go into rage and panic at the last minute. It was, coincidentally, a public health story as well and was ready to go to print as the cover story of a magazine I then worked with. The source, a top doctor in a big hospital, froze over some agreed upon bits of the story that I had sent to him for fact-check before it went to print. He was a man of medicine, used to writing papers for medical journals. I had written the report in a manner that would allow an average reader to understand. Claiming I had trivialized everything, he pulled out of the story. It took hours of mediation by a common friend and several heated debates for the source to calm down. When this happens, it’s like your entire life is at stake. It’s about your word, your reputation, your integrity. Months of talking to a source don’t mean a thing. Each time there’s a big story, a journalist has to start all over again. Director Michael Mann gets this perfectly in The Insider.

 

The film also has wonderful side play between the corporate and legal wings of the CBS on one side and the editorial on the other. Mann does some of the finest direction over the past 20 years in Hollywood. He gets his casting right, and manages to recreate lifelike newsroom atmosphere with its many conflicts. As much as a single film can, The Insider opens up the world of journalism for its audience.

 

If The Insider is a tale of corruption and courage that plays out as a riveting thriller, His Girl Friday (1940) is a super screwball look at everyday journalism. Unlike The Insider it is not about a game-changing big story, which happens only now and then. It is about the basic instincts of a reporter and an editor and how their interaction shapes a newspaper. Cary Grant is in terrific form as Walter Burns, the cynical editor of The Morning Post, but Rosalind Russell is even better as the editor’s ex-wife and star reporter Hildegard ‘Hildy’ Johnson.

 

It is impossible not to relish the dialogues and delivery, which was always Grant’s specialty. Russell matches Grant’s sharp-talking word for word and their jousts are remarkable. In one memorable scene after Grant is just done getting a shave in his cabin, Russell has dropped by to announce she is marrying again the next day. In pops the City Editor of the newspaper.

 

“What do you want?” snaps Grant, “I’m busy. I’m busy.”

 

“I thought you’d want to know the Governor didn’t sign the reprieve. Tomorrow morning, Earl Williams dies and makes a sucker out of us,” the City Editor says.

 

“Oh, oh.”

 

“Well, what have we gotta do?” asks the employee.

 

“Get the Governor on the phone.”

 

“I can’t.”

 

“Why not?”

 

”Can’t locate him. He’s out fishing.”

 

“How many places to fish are there?”

 

”Well, at least two. The Atlantic and the Pacific.”

 

”All right, that simplifies it, doesn’t it. Get him on the phone.”

 

”And tell him what?”

 

“Tell him if he reprieves Earl Williams, we’ll support him for Senator.”

 

“What?”

 

“Tell him The Morning Post will be behind him hook, line and sinker.”

 

“But you can’t do that.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because we’ve been a Democratic paper for over 20 years.”

 

“All right, if we get the reprieve, we’ll be Democratic again. Now get out and get going. The Morning Post expects every City Editor to do his duty.”

 

And we are not even four minutes into the movie yet.

 

The movie splendidly lays out the gossip and cynicism of journalists in a characteristic Press Club as Russell goes digging for the facts about Earl Williams, who is about to be condemned to death. Absolutely rollicking.

 

 

Citizen Kane (1941) and All The President’s Men (1976) are the big daddies of journalism movies. Citizen Kane is almost uniformly celebrated as the greatest movie ever made in English. Orson Welles put in such a towering performance as the lead actor and the director that he didn’t need to make another movie. Like Harper Lee, it would’ve been just fine if he had chosen never to work again. Welles, however, did make more movies, but never again with the grand sweep of Citizen Kane.

 

The story of a newspaper magnate, Kane, the film busts the myth of American capitalism with an exquisite human story and genius filmmaking. As Kane’s newspaper circulation and clout rises, the owner-editor’s life falls apart. The mysterious magnate dies a lonely death. The meaning of his last word—Rosebud—remains elusive until the end. The word in the context of the film recalls a purity and innocence that the journalists in the film fail to understand because they have distanced themselves from the essence of life. There is no better metaphor for the dwindling relevance of the media.

 

Citizen Kane also brings to life the power a political journalist can wield. Policy can be dictated by stories he does and wars can be started. And with this power often comes megalomania.The editor-publisher’s megalomania in the film has since been amply displayed in several newsrooms across India. Citizen Kane, thus, is still a template for journalism movies.

 

An editor-publisher I once worked with in New Delhi began with the exemplary purpose of launching a world-class magazine that would help Indians make the right decisions— because they would be better informed by the sharp and superior journalism of the magazine. He soon began to distrust journalists and surrounded himself with people who said and did things to please him. The magazine became a platform to either attack the editor-publisher’s foes or to fawn on people he wanted to be friends with. The publication has still not recovered from the damage thus done. It was pure Citizen Kane every day in the newsroom there.

 

Equally powerful is the movie on the Watergate Scandal, the biggest investigative story of all time. In All The President’s Men (1976), director Alan J Pakula’s narrative follows Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), reporters of The Washington Post, as they crack open a bizarre attempt by President Richard Nixon’s men to spy on the Democrats by bugging the Democratic headquarters.

 

The most famous source in history, Deep Throat, played by Hal Holbrook, leads the reporters with his legendary advice ‘follow the money’. I’ve thought of this line several times in my career as a reporter and editor. I once gave a reporter a difficult assignment. His brief was to investigate a senior BJP politician on whom I knew there was a lot of dirt, but whose personal and professional life revealed nothing. The reporter began with enthusiasm but gave up too soon. I had told him to forget everything else and trail a dubious Rs 3 crore deal to get to this man. Had he done that he would not have lost the story. I have given this advice to a lot of reporters I have worked with since and it has almost always come in handy. The Watergate report remains the benchmark of great journalism. Even today, every reporter dreams of matching the reportage on the Watergate Scandal, or of getting a bigger story.

 

 

Ace in the Hole (1951), directed by Billy Wilder, is another superb journalism drama. Kirk Douglas lives the role of a reporter, Chuck Tatum, who tries to make an ambitious comeback. Sacked from his job in a big city for drinking, slander and womanizing, Douglas arrives in dead-end Albuquerque. He walks into the office of a local newspaper’s editor and makes a pitch for a job. His biggest weapon is that he can hold an audience spellbound and he charms the staff of the small town newspaper that is practically in coma.

 

One day, a worker is trapped in a nearby mine and Douglas senses his chance. He strings the worker along, delaying his rescue, to turn it into a human interest story that captivates all of America. The media circus that builds and the denouement have been redone many times since, in several languages, but this is where it was done first and best.

 

The story takes charge of the reporter as he goes from cunning to slimy. When it all unravels, the reporter is back where he began, bereft of his soul and desperate to understand why it happens with him over and over again. Ace in the Hole is a lacerating masterpiece.

 

 

I’ve seen Ace In The Hole happen to many journalists. You get so obsessed with a story that you manipulate it to suit your ends. Then, when you’re found out, you become the story yourself. There was a senior political journalist whom I had held in high esteem at the beginning of my career. Then, suddenly, it came to light that he was fabricating interviews with senior politicians. A Congress Chief Minister bumped into the journalist at a party and said: “I’m so glad to have finally met the person who interviewed me.” The journalist eventually quit the profession. He does what is described as ‘liaison work’ these days.

 

In the world of Indian journalism, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani and Peepli [Live] are successors of Ace In The Hole. They are possibly the best Hindi film satires on the country’s media. Both are wonderfully crafted. Director Aziz Mirza and producer-actor Shah Rukh Khan were ahead of their times when they tore apart the mad TRP race among news channels with Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani. In a sharp moment in the film, sponsors line up for the execution of a prisoner that is to be broadcast live on television.

 

Unfortunately the film meanders into a number of futile sub-plots that trivialize the film’s message and dilute its central idea, but the movie manages to pack in a punch. Today, India is awash with news channels doing exactly what Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani predicted they would— in ways so extreme that were the movie to be released now it might seem tamer than reality.

 

 

Peepli [Live], directed by Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui is a tighter and more nuanced depiction of media hypocrisy in India. The tale of a media circus around a farmer’s attempted suicide in many ways mirrors Ace In The Hole and to an extent this diminishes the movie. But its attention to detail and deep roots in our cultural contexts makes it the hardest look at modern Indian television media. The absolute lack of integrity and skill in newsrooms comes through sharply.

 

The tendency of following the leader and not doing one’s own homework hurts Indian journalism badly. A few months before Peepli [Live] was released, I was in Vidarbha to report on 10 suicides of farmers that had taken place in 48 hours. I traveled around the region extensively and managed to track down the homes and families of the farmers. The story that resulted from this was the first to say that the farmers were not killing themselves only because of bad crop. They were dying also because they had taken loans to meet the grandiose demands of the communities they lived in, especially for lavish marriages. The local journalists had never written about this because it would bring in social reasons into what was until then believed to be simply agricultural strife.

 

But when they learned that I had reported from all over Vidarbha for the story, they started to call me. They were content to merely reproduce quotes from me instead of getting to the roots of the story as only they could have. Peepli [Live] rests almost entirely on the mainstream media cannibalizing the work of an honest, unsung local reporter.

 

That then is the list of my top seven journalism movies— starting from The Insider. When I am down and wonder if it’s worth putting up with the provocation and humiliation that journalism brings, these are the movies I turn to. And they never fail to pick me up because they remind me about why I got into the profession in the first place. They humble me and leave me raring to go, one more time.

 

My memories of both journalism and movies begin at my grandfather’s feet. I learnt early enough that everything can be beautiful from the bottom of the world too. Journalism and movies, both work well when the instinct is sharp and the ego blunt.

 

Deepanjana Pal on the relevance of art direction in Hindi movies and trends in the profession, from the fifties to now.

 

On November 5, 2011, at the art gallery Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, set designer and filmmaker Aradhana Seth made her debut as an artist with a show titled Everyone Carries a Room About Inside. The gallery was turned into an imaginary house, but not one that would belong in the pages of a magazine. This was a house made up of rooms that were sketches. They filled the space with objects that had been flattened to fit into bold, wavering lines that had the unsteady quality of drawings done by hand. Every element— even the clutter—seemed artfully arranged. Despite the fact that Seth’s paintings were filled with everyday details, they felt entirely unreal. Perhaps Seth wanted her audience to be surrounded by artifice as they saw her show, but the paintings looked like clumsy representations of reality and the effect was to make the gallery seem like an awkward experiment. What Seth had created wasn’t a home; it felt like a set.

 

Ironically, when Seth designs films, the effort is to communicate precisely the opposite effect. No matter how removed from reality the story may be, it falls upon the art department and production designers to create a world that makes the film credible to the viewer. Would a train compartment ever look as plush as the interiors Seth created for Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited? It is highly unlikely, but for a film set in the off-kilter universe of Anderson’s stories, the rich colours and elaborate patterns (even the bunks looked like they were covered in hand-painted fabric) were perfect. This was an India crafted largely out of Anderson’s imagination: precious, beautiful, slightly retro, and about as similar to Rajdhani compartments as frozen yoghurt is to shrikhand. There’s nothing realistic about it, but the sets establish the reality in which the film is set.

 

Sacrilegious as it may seem to put Anderson and commercial Indian cinema in one sentence, the fact is that both of them sell you an alternate reality in the way their worlds are presented to the audience and how their stories play out. The first, most crucial step in that process is the production design. In the intensely collaborative world of filmmaking, the art department is like the group of nocturnal elves in the fairytale about the shoemaker who would wake up in the morning to find perfectly-made shoes that seemed to have appeared in his workshop magically. Few of us watch a film and applaud the people who created the sets in which the actors perform. Yet, before an actor has even entered the frame, the storytelling has begun as the camera shows you a space. A good art director lures us into the world of a film, persuading us to suspend our disbelief for the next couple of hours, as the most improbable events unfold on the screen before us.

 

For instance, few of us have questioned just what kind of architecture would allow Mogambo of Mr. India to have a bubbling pool of lava right below his floor. But art director Bijon Dasgupta made it seem perfectly logical that a sliding panel would be protection enough. Then there’s the staircase, which is a prominent architectural feature of almost every wealthy home in Bollywood. Disapproving fathers in shiny dressing gowns, and villains, need staircases to direct their glowering gaze at the hero or heroine at a suitably-sharp, downward angle. Many a character has stumbled to its death because of it. The staircase is also the site of whispered sweet nothings as the lead romantic pair make their way down to a party or a wedding. It is a silent but key player in so many stories, yet it doesn’t occur to us that few people choose to have staircases in the middle of their living rooms.

 

The production design team is key to rendering a director’s visual style distinctive. The elaborate grandeur that is Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s trademark can also be attributed to art directors Nitin Chandrakant Desai (Khamoshi, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Devdas), Omung Kumar (Black, Saawariya) and the team of Sumit Basu and Rajnish Hedao (Guzaarish). The gritty glamour of Anurag Kashyap’s best work has been made possible thanks to Wasiq Khan in Black Friday, Gulaal, That Girl In Yellow Boots and Gangs of Wasseypur, Tariq Umar Khan in No Smoking and Helen Jones and Sukant Panigrahy in Dev.D.  And the glossy gleam of a Karan Johar film has become synonymous with art director Sharmishtha Roy who has worked on every film of his. The aesthetics of these filmmakers are instantly recognizable because of their production design. The art department translates the director’s vision into the style of the film. It also determines its genre. Film noir, for instance, is a theme that ensues as much from the production design of a movie as from its camerawork or script. Small wonder then that director Biren Nag, who made two of the better known films in this genre in India—Bees Saal Baad and Kohraa—was art director for 1950s Indian noir movies like C.I.D., Kala Pani and Detective before he became a filmmaker.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, for Johar’s dramatic love story Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, released in 2001, Roy re-created Delhi’s Chandni Chowk in Mumbai’s Film City as a hygienic, sanitized and kitschy mohalla with old world charms to woo a nostalgic diasporic audience. For Delhi-6, Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra’s production designer Samir Chanda created another type of old Delhi in Sambhar, a Rajasthani town that had similar architecture. It was just the right amount of clutter and chaos to make the sets seem authentic, but it didn’t overwhelm the frame. It provided a mix of realism and spectacle for a blockbuster attempting to deliver a message and a hit. “I created a background plate and punched Jama Masjid into the frame,” Chanda said in an interview. “In the old days, I would have called in a background painter and made a cut-out. Now there is this technology, which allows it to be punched in during editing.”

 

Back in the era before fancy special effects, to show the story has shifted to a hill station a painted backdrop with mountain peaks would appear on camera and sweater-clad actors would stand in front of it. A friend of mine remembers his parents’ house in Kolkata frequently being used to show the rich father’s den where the poor but idealistic hero would be invited, offered some alcohol, and then humiliated.

 

But, mostly, movies were shot in the studios. In 1958, for instance, when the tricks of the trade were far less sophisticated, director Shakti Samanta imagined Calcutta as a city of shadows and crime in Howrah Bridge. The film’s soundtrack had a number of memorable songs, including Geeta Dutt’s Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu. The song was one of Helen’s first hits and Art Director Sant Singh set it in a bar that has shiny, mosaic walls and fluttering white curtains. There are paintings on the walls to add richness to the ambience. The song actually begins with a shot of a light fixture—a revolving affair that dangles from the ceiling—and as Helen twinkle-toes her way across the room, singing the song, you can see European art-inspired sculptures of nubile women in the background. All the little details of the decor convey to us that this is a stylish place. The bar was probably an easier task for the art department than recreating the metallic pillars of the real Howrah Bridge and it’s unlikely that anyone even in 1958 believed that Samanta had shot on location or that a bar like the one in which Helen sang that famous ditty actually existed. For the duration of the film though, this fictitious Calcutta replaced the real one and this noir city felt as accurate as anything in a newspaper report.

 

Fourteen years later Samanta directed Amar Prem, a love story that called for a romanticized representation of Calcutta. The song Chingari Koi Bhadke appears to be sung by Rajesh Khanna to Sharmila Tagore on a quaint nouka, or boat, on the Hooghly, but was actually shot in Mumbai’s Nataraj Studios. A soulful and richly sentimental Kolkata was depicted by recreating the river, on which shimmered the reflection of the city’s night lights. As the nouka sways to the rhythm of the melody, Khanna reaches out, melancholically, to touch the water. Many years later, Tagore recalled in an interview that the water in the studio was stagnant and dirty and stank through the shoot. “It was horrible,” she said. “But on screen it looks like poetry.” But more than making the Hooghly prettier than it actually is, what Samanta’s Art Director Shanti Dass had captured was the ambience of the city and the setting in which the film was set.

 

Over the years, the budgets for films have become bigger, and more attention is paid to production design because cutting costs in this area makes the entire film look amateur. The work of the art department now also determines how sophisticated the film will be deemed. Whereas in the past the frame would usually be tight, focusing on just a small patch of wall or a corner, now an entire area is created to allow for wider shots. Film sets no longer look like temporary constructions. Take the family home as seen in Rajshri Productions’ films. The two-tiered structure that housed the happy family in Hum Aapke Hain Koun, or the roof where Bhagyashree appeared before Salman Khan (but not the audience) in a nightie in Maine Pyar Kiya were almost theatrical. In the more recent Vivah, on the other hand, the homes don’t look like they’re made of plywood panels that were taken apart at the end of the shoot.

 

Today, much like the saying about Mohammed and the mountain, frequently the art department and production designers have the responsibility of creating miniature versions of entire cities in studio complexes like Film City which is spread out over 500 acres in Goregaon, Mumbai. For Lamhaa, a hard-boiled political thriller, Wasiq Khan brought in two truckloads of chinar leaves (among other things) to recreate Kashmir in Film City. Bhansali is known for creating beautiful but overwrought sets that are frightfully elaborate. His production designer Omung Kumar built parts of pre-independence Simla in Film City, Kamalistan and Mehboob Studios for Black. Then, for Saawariya, he created a faux-city, complete with lakes, streets, shops, signage and a clock tower, that was unmistakably but beautifully fake. Whether it be Devdas or Saawariya or Guzaarish, Bhansali’s vision is the stuff of spectacular fantasies, which must be realized by his art directors. When you see the gorgeous stills for Bhansali’s films and find yourself charmed enough to buy a ticket, it is the art director whose spell you’re under. It is he, or she, who creates a critical aspect of the spectacle that is film.

 

Mumbai’s Film City had setups built so that one could film everything from a temple scene to sequences set in a village or mansion within the radius of a few kilometres. These structures appear as recurring motifs in opuses of the past, but are dismissed today by modern Hindi filmmakers for being too tacky. A scene from Deewar, Yash Chopra’s 1975 release that had Amitabh Bachchan exhorting a statue of Shiva, may have immortalized the Film City temple, but it would be impossible to imagine Yash Raj Films shooting a scene there today. Nowadays Film City’s permanent sets are mostly booked either by Bhojpuri filmmakers or TV show production houses.

 

It’s not that the temple is no longer important, but that it’s been given a makeover now that Bollywood has become more ambitious in terms of its preferred locations. For Aditya Chopra’s Mohabbatein, Bachchan’s comeback vehicle in 2000, Sharmishtha Roy had to create a Shiva temple on the grounds of Longleat House, a palatial and stately home in the English county of Somerset. This is characteristic of another trend that followed the age of the studio set: that of shooting on location. Who can forget how much director K Asif invested into filming the song Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya from Mughal-e-Azam at Lahore Fort’s spectacular Sheesh Mahal or filmmakers like Raj Kapoor and Yash Chopra’s fondness for shooting in exotic foreign locales?

 

Shooting on location didn’t mean the art department’s work lessened. For Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, made by Karan Johar, one of Yash Chopra’s aesthetic successors, Amitabh Bachchan’s character’s family home was to be set in Waddesdon Manor. As in Mohabbatein, Roy had to install a mandir to recast the Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild’s chateau as the house of a mysteriously über-rich Indian industrialist. With shooting abroad becoming de rigeur, the art department’s task has become increasingly more elaborate. New York in Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006) has been described by The New York Times Critic Neil Genzlinger as the place where “rainstorms are a little rainier than real life; the wind machines are cranked up an extra notch.”  It was also where Rani Mukerji, in an effort to be the average NRI housewife as imagined by Johar, vacuumed her house—which looked like a pristine service apartment—wearing a figure-hugging dress that would be perfect for a cocktail at a posh bar. Both Kabhi Alvida… and Rensil D’Silva’s Kurbaan, released in 2009, had scenes that were set in New York but actually shot in Philadelphia. It fell upon the production design team of these films to make sure the city known for cheesecake looked like the Big Apple to Indian viewers. Fortunately for most Indian audiences, one American city looks much like another. Those familiar with Philadelphia may have wondered how its 30th Street subway station popped up in New York City, but for most viewers, a picturesque cityscape with shiny high-rises and Caucasian pedestrians are enough. The art department’s role here comprised more of avoiding elements—such as signage—that were typical of one city rather, than inserting those typical of another.

 

Desai, art director for Bhansali’s earlier films, also created the village of Champaner for Lagaan, which was shot in Gujarat but was no less fabricated for being an outdoor shoot. He and his team enlisted the locals to build one temple and 56 huts for the film. Some of these huts were modelled upon ancient Kutchi huts, which were circular in shape. It’s another matter entirely that the film’s dialogues were all in Avadhi, which has no trace of Gujarati.

 

The latest trend in Bollywood seems to be rustic small town India. Vishal Bharadwaj set his Othello-inspired Omkara in India’s heartland in 2006 but the places we’ve seen in films like both the Dabanggsor Ishaqzaade or Rowdy Rathore or Barfi or even, in parts, in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani are very different from Bharadwaj’s chosen canvas. Dabangg is part of a trend that celebrates camp in all its comic book glamour. A stylized small town by Wasiq Khan (a production designer who was till this movie known for gritty realistic cinema like Aamir and Black Friday, and who has since created sets for Rowdy Rathore and Ranjhanaa) adds to this effect. In contrast, Yash Raj Films’ Ishaqzaade production designer Mukund Gupta merely aggregates kitsch from the reality of small town India to stitch a technicolour dreamcoat for Habib Faisal’s love epic to flaunt. But in all these films small town India is a photogenic, doll’s-house-esque version of itself that can obligingly crumble and explode to make the hero look larger than life. Unlike Bharadwaj’s non-urban India, which seems to be densely-packed with problems, the new India shown on celluloid is depicted as a simpler world. It doesn’t have the chaos or the distractions of cities and is an idealized version of the B-town. The colours are warm, the setting is a mix of rustic and modern. Here, in its prettily-decayed buildings and modest homes, the problems of urban India are dealt with summarily. Fights that make walls cave in provide solutions. Systems can be put in place here and some properly old-fashioned ideas of love and romance can be enacted.

 

Till recently, to woo audiences, Indian films showcased, for the main part, an urban world that viewers could aspire to. This world was set in India and abroad, in cities like Mumbai, New York and London, across slumlands, Tudor houses and street cafes. The exotic was sought out in countries like Latvia, Morocco, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Jordan, Russia, Peru, Brazil and Seychelles. Even Kenya, Namibia and Afghanistan. Tashan, set across small town India, had a song filmed in Milos. Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani, a campy love story at a hill station, had songs shot in various parts of Turkey.

 

Today our gaze seems to have turned towards the great Indian hinterland. This means that now the art director must fashion this other India as a slick, photogenic product that can be served up as ‘cult’ for an urbane audience that would like to believe it has more in common with Quentin Tarantino than Karan Johar. Consequently, there’s a quality of wink-wink-nudge-nudge cleverness in the design of these films. For example, the poster for Gangs Of Wasseypur showed another film poster— that of a 1984 Mithun Chakraborthy film (with the name misspelt), Ksam Paida Krne Waleki. These quirks are ‘in’ jokes for those who get the genre. For those that don’t, these films are masala potboilers, straight out of the 1980s, and can be enjoyed all the same. Some of these films are made by and intended for those who regard the audiences that create box-office hits with a degree of contempt, while trying to appease them all the same. Perhaps the divide between the haves and have-nots has become so wide that it cannot even be bridged in the escapist fantasies of cinema.