Asian Film Journeys: Selections from Cinemaya

book.

BEFORE THE

beginning

ARUNA VASUDEV

1984, the Hawaii International Film Festival, then four years old, and a symposium on Asian Cinema at the East West Centre. Like everyone else in India and most of the world, I knew nothing of the cinema of this region apart from the three greats from Japan— Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi. Suddenly I found myself comparing notes with Hammy Sotto from the Philippines, with Boonrak Boonyaketmala from Thailand, with Stephen Teo from Hong Kong, with speakers from China and Korea and Indonesia . . . along with some Asian scholars from the West like Chris Berry. And seeing films from many of these countries at the film festival. I suddenly found so many new worlds to discover. So diverse yet connected, so different yet familiar. I was overwhelmed.

On my way to Hawaii I had stopped in Japan to see an old friend then posted in Tokyo. My Japanese friend from Paris, Hiroko Govaers, had suggested I meet Tadao Sato in Tokyo because of our shared interest in cinema. We met, he spoke very little English but he was a fount of knowledge, not only of Japanese but also of Asian cinema. My eyes and my ears began to open. And then came the Hawaii experience. Earlier, in I960,1 had gone to Bangkok to work with a German television team on a feature-length documentary on Thailand. From there I had taken a few days off and gone to see Angkor, which I had long wanted to do. This was before the Khmer Rouge unleashed its insanity on its own people. There were only a handful of tourists then; it was a place of utter peace and utter enchantment.

That had been my only contact with ‘Asia’ for the nearly fifteen years preceding Hawaii and the few days in Tokyo. In Hawaii it began to come alive for me: Asia, through its cinemas. I had a brief stopover in Hong Kong on my flight back. ‘Meet Leong Mo Ling of the Hong Kong Film Festival’, Hammy suggested. Bewildered by the three names I asked Hammy which was the first name, which the family name? ‘I have no idea’, he said. ‘Just say all the names’! I did manage to track down Leong Mo-Ling in the few hours I spent there. She—I discovered she was a woman—opened another area of Asian cinema for me. I absolutely wanted to go to the Hong Kong Film Festival which I had never even heard of until then. ‘We’ll pay half your fare and give you hospitality for a few days’, she offered. I jumped at the opportunity and went a few months later, to the 9th edition of the HKIFF in 1985. I met some of the directors of the Hong Kong New Wave which had begun in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s with Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Alan Fong, Yim Ho in the first phase. The second phase was to be followed shortly after with the work of directors such as Stanley Kwan, Lawrence Ah-mon, Wong Kar-wai, Mabel Cheung . . . In 1985 the Festival was a very small affair with only a few foreigners from West or East, but the young directors and would-be directors were present. And because it was small and intimate, genuine dialogue was possible. Roger Garcia, Shu Kei, Leong Po-chih, Ian Buruma were among its advisors, Leong Mo-Ling its Asia and Hong Kong coordinator. I learnt the correct way of writing East Asian names—the family name first followed by the double first names, hyphenated. The Japanese had been obliged to follow the western pattern through the post-war years of American domination but the Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, did not change. So many lessons learnt. I began to get a sense of the rich diversity of Asia. . .

I went back again to Hawaii. It was 1985 and to the Hawaii Film Festival came the diffident young Chen Kaige with his path-breaking first film Yellow Earth. Zhang Yimou, his cameraman and colleague from the Beijing Film Academy (BFA), accompanied him. Neither spoke a word of English. This was their first trip abroad, after the film had premiered at the Hong Kong festival a few months earlier and had, in fact, won the Silver Leopard in Locarno shortly after but Chen Kaige had not been present. I had met Wu Tianming in Hawaii the previous year with his stunning River Without Buoys. It was he who, as Head of the X’ian Film Studio, gave the graduates of the BFA the chance to make their first films which were to take the world by storm as the Fifth Generation.

While we were still in the planning stages of Cinemaya, a mere handful of films had made it internationally. In 1980 Lino Brocka’s Jaguar had been shown at Cannes.

In 1987 Im Kwon-taek’s Sibaji won the superb Kang Soo-yeon the Best Actress award at Venice. In February 1988 Zhang Yimou who had himself turned director, won the Golden Bear at Berlin. International critics began to take note of these individual directors and actors. But what was the background out of which these talents were emerging? Where did they spring from? What was their place in the context of the cinema of their countries? Nobody really knew. They were just there and were treated as exceptional individuals speaking a different language of cinema.

As I continued to see more films and meet the filmmakers and producers, the critics and writers, from a host of Asian countries I felt I was looking through the keyhole of a closed door, getting tantalizing glimpses of untold wealth. I felt I had to open that door and see and touch and feel those treasures. If I found the prospect so exciting, I thought, would not others feel the same? Why not a magazine which would devote itself exclusively to the cinemas of this region, with articles by writers from the countries they were writing about? An insider’s perspective, presenting its cinema to the world. Not the outsider interpreting these films from his, invariably western, point of view. We needed to understand not just the cinematic language but the cultural-historical-sociological background. We needed to know the history of the cinema of the country, who were its leading figures through its evolution, what was the infrastructure—the labs, the studios, the systems of production and distribution, even the form of censorship and its impact on the cinema, how, in fact did they define cinema? What, if any, were the outside influences? In Asia itself, we needed to know each other’s cinemas.

On every conceivable occasion I started talking to the film people I met about the possibility of launching such a journal. Tadao Sato and Donald Richie, Peggy Chiao Hsiung-Ping and Tony Rayns, Teddie Co and Wong Ain-Ling and Boonrak and Salim Said and Ken’ichi Okubo and Ahn Byung-Sup, Philip Cheah, Ashley Ratnavibhushana, Ngo Manh Lan, Houshang Golmakani, and so many others. Jeannette Paulson, the founder and director of the Hawaii festival was a firm supporter and has remained one. Without exception they thought it was a very good—and totally impractical—idea. In Delhi Chidananda Das Gupta (Chitu) with whom I was producing a television series on the environment for IN-TACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage), was my friend and staunch ally. He and I had already talked of the idea of a magazine on the cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America, to be published in English, French and Spanish. It was a wild idea and remained one! But the seed had been planted. Now I felt a purely Asian magazine was possible. I was so convinced the time was right that I knew it would happen. Anybody I talked to said ‘yes’, they would be on an Advisory Board and write for it and help promote it. ‘But how will you distribute it, how will you sustain it?’ they wanted to know. These were questions I was not bothered with. It will happen, I assured them—not having the faintest idea how.

Back home I continued to work on this totally ‘impractical’ idea. I dreamt up a name, Cinemaya, and went one morning to Chitu’s home to discuss the shape of the magazine. He was very enthusiastic about the name so at least that was settled. Now who would join me in making it happen? Latika Padgaonkar, a very old friend, was working half-days at UNESCO, like I was at INTACH. I met her early one winter morning to ask her if she would join me in this adventure. ‘What a pioneering idea’, she exclaimed. ‘Yes’. So now I had a companion. But we needed at least one more. Rashmi Doraiswamy had recently done her PhD in Russian, had interpreted for Tolomush Okeyev at the International Film Festival in Delhi and written for me for the Festival’s Bulletin which I edited that year. Rashmi came to meet me at INTACH. We sat in the garden with cups of coffee and I told her about my idea. Her immediate answer was ‘yes’. No money, I told both of them. It’s an adventure. Let’s start and see how we go from there. We’ll work out of my home, a couple of hours in the afternoon, and then see. With Latika and I both speaking French and Rashmi fluent in Russian, we felt equipped to take on Asia. What impudence! A publisher friend, Nar-endra Kumar, offered to ask the famous designer Satish Sud, to do the dummy. We loved what he did. Satish became enthused about Cinemaya and said he would do the first issue at cost price.

But where was this ‘cost’ coming from? Writers were not a problem but all the other expenses? One day in Mumbai (then Bombay) I broached the idea to the then head of the National Film Development Corporation. Just the first issue, I said. Then we’ll manage. ‘We’ll do it,’ was Malati Tambay-Vaidya’s immediate response. I didn’t really believe it. The NFDC had just launched its own magazine on Indian cinema. Why would they look at something else? ‘Because it is quite different,’ she said. On the off chance that it might work, we sent off the proposal to the NFDC. Nothing happened. We got the articles. Ken’ichi Okubo’s article on Japanese cinema was the cover story but though he sent it in English, we were at sea. We posted it to Tony Rayns in London, to edit it for us. He posted it back, edited into an eminently readable piece. In the course of my travels, I had met Nagisa Oshima. Will you write a Director’s Column for us, I asked him? He sent his ‘Letter from Tokyo’, in Japanese. We found a translator in Delhi and decided to carry the first page of the Japanese alongside the English translation. We could do anything we wanted. It was our magazine.

The money came through from the NFDC after a serendipitous meeting with the then Secretary of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting. G K Arora had recently taken over and set up individual meetings with a few of us to discuss the state of the cinema in general. ‘Why don’t you take your dummy along,’ my husband suggested. ‘He wants to talk about something else,’ I demurred. ‘Take it anyway,’ my husband urged, ‘you never know.’ At some point G K Arora asked me what I was currently engaged in. ‘Another book?’ ‘Well . . . since you ask,’ I said, and produced the dummy of Cinemaya. He was immediately convinced, picked up the phone, told the NFDC to go ahead with it, and it was done. The Gods were with us. We had the money for that crucial first issue.

We got it all together, spending every penny on the production. I was determined that the magazine be on par with the best. Under no circumstances would it have a ‘Third World’ look. And the writers would be paid. We could only manage a pittance, but being part of the fraternity ourselves, I was determined that we would not ask writers to write for free. We settled on colour for the cover, black and white inside. It took four months after the initial stages to get the issue ready with three of us working afternoons out of my tiny study at home.

On 13 October 1988, Cinemaya, The Asian Film Quarterly, was launched.

It was the beginning of a twenty year journey of ‘Madison Avenue ambitions on an Ox-fam budget’ as Latika’s husband Dileep Padgaonkar, was to say during the first years.

Cinemaya was not even two years old when UNESCO in Paris, asked me to organize a conference on Asian Cinema. ‘What about Asian cinema,’ I asked. ‘We don’t know,’ was their reply. ‘We had a conference on Latin American cinema and would like one on Asia, but you are the only pan-Asian organization through your magazine. You set the agenda, you decide who to invite.’ So in 1990 we held a five-day conference in New Delhi, with policy-makers and heads of cinema organizations from every Asian country—including Ka-zakhstan—and a handful of people who had been promoting Asian cinema like Jeannette Paulson from Hawaii and Tony Rayns from London. The idea of a network of Asian Film Centres was planted, and at the follow-up conference in Yamagata the next year, NETPAC was born; Cinemaya became its official journal.

Ten years down the line Cinemaya spawned Cinefan, the Cinemaya Festival of Asian Cinema. The Festival was driven by the same compulsions as the magazine. Make Asian cinema familiar to audiences in Delhi, so much so that eventually they would prefer to buy a ticket to see a film from Asia rather than from Hollywood. We had steadily built up a dedicated audience fuelled by the film weeks and film appreciation courses we had started organizing after Indu Shrikent joined us. We saw that an interest had been aroused as people flocked to the films we had shown at the ambitious, five-day celebration of the tenth anniversary of Cinemaya the previous year. Through the years of Cinemaya, and now through NETPAC members and activities we had a large network in Asia. And now we had our own Asian Film Festival to complement and give a fillip to the magazine. The adventure had taken wing and now we were flying rather than walking.

In 2004, two months before the 6th Cinefan Film Festival and after issue no. 61 of Cinemaya, both became a part of Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art, and took off in another direction. This book is a commemoration of those first momentous sixteen years—not only of a magazine and a festival but of an era when the cinemas of Asia went from unknown entities to a dominant position on the international cinema stage. The world has changed. Asian cinema does not need the sort of promotion that was our single-minded determination when we set out. The directors whose very first films we wrote about, whose subsequent triumphs we exulted in, are now world-renowned figures. The histories, cultures, societies of the countries and their cinemas are known and documented. Every Asian country has its own film festival, often more than one. It is time for a new beginning. . .

the STORY of cinemaya

RASHMI DORAISWAMY

It is in the nature of things that when something ends, you think of the beginning. Many of the writers writing on the closing down of Cinemaya, referred to their first meeting with Aruna. What was the significance of that first meeting? The fact that she spoke of an entity that you had not thought existed . . . The articulation of a hazy, out-of-focus notion and what’s more, an energetic invitation to get involved with that nebulous articulation—that is what has stayed in all our memories. We were used to thinking of our own cinemas, depending on where we came from—Iranian, Indian, Filipino, Japanese—and here we were being invited to think in continental terms about the cinemas of our own neighbourhood, cinemas that we hardly knew anything about.

To write the story of Cinemaya, I too, have to recall my first meeting with her.

It was in 1988 on the grounds of INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) that Aruna told me she was starting a magazine on Asian cinema and that Latika Padgaonkar would also be working with her. She asked me to join. I had written on Russian cinema for Aruna earlier when she had run the International Film Festival of India’s newsletter and that had been a happy experience. Have you thought of a name for the magazine? I asked. Yes, Cinemaya, she replied.

The name turned out to be apt: the illusion of reality that cinema gives us; and an Indian concept, that had travelled to other parts of Asia and the world. (Jhampa Devi, Aruna’s Woman Friday who looks after her house, has always pronounced Cinemaya as Sin-Maya!) Later, Aruna came up with ‘Cinefan’, once again an evocative title: the fans of cinema, the fan of the land of the Rising Sun, Japan, a symbol of the Asian continent that first sees the dawn everyday as the Earth revolves . . . Aruna has great faith in the power of titles, and she used to regularly pin up on the notice-board on her table phrases that had caught her fancy and titles that she thought up, for future use. So infectious was her enthusiasm for titles, that for several issues, in addition to the titles for articles, we used to give titles for the entire issue on the cover of Cinemaya, which gave an indication of the orientation of the articles inside: ‘Looking Back Looking Ahead’ (no. 3), ‘A Fluid Agenda for the ‘90s’ (issue no. 7), ‘Future Undefined’ (issue no. 8), ‘Scene From Afar: Émigré Asian Cinema’ (issue no. 9). . . .

Setting Out

We met for the first time in a little room in Aruna’s house. Aruna allotted little tables for all three of us. She took extra care to see that my table, which was under a bookshelf on the wall, was well-lit because of my weak eyesight. We began work on the first issue. Aruna had got together an impressive list of people from Asia and abroad as Advisory Board and as Correspondents. Once we got the issue ready, we spent a lot of time on the designing. One of Delhi’s eminent designers, Satish Sud, gave Cinemaya its distinctive look, and incorporated Asian, particularly, Japanese notions of empty space in the placing of text and picture. This feeling of space in the design continued for a long time even under his assistant (and later our designer), Ashma Singh, until Cinemaya had grown to such an extent that we began to get a lot of articles and were flooded with printed matter.

The first issue had been brought out with a grant given by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) and was sponsored by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). It was launched by the then Secretary, MIB, Mr Gopi Arora, at the India International Centre in New Delhi. I asked my friend , the well-known painter Manjit Bawa, to design a poster for the occasion and he had drawn a picture inspired by the first cover of Cinemaya which featured the Japanese film, The New Morning of Billy The Kid. We began Cinemaya with the colour silver, not knowing whether we’d make it to the actual silver twenty-fifth issue! The joy of seeing the cover and the magazine in print, of holding the printer-fresh issue when it came out, was something special that never left any of us through the years.

Our journey had begun and we were on to the second issue. The cover story in the first was ‘New Voices’ in Japanese cinema. The second was on Chinese cinema with an excellent article on the Fifth Generation by the Chinese critic Ma Ning. (For quite some time we thought that Ning was a woman critic, only to learn later that this was a man’s name in Chinese.) Cinemaya taught us a lot about cultural sensitivity. This issue also carried what was probably the first ever article anywhere in the world in English, written by a Vietnamese, on Vietnamese cinema. Cinemaya 2 was a collector’s item for another reason: the Spotlight on the Japanese master, Sadao Yamanaka, little known outside his own country. The third issue focussed on yet another unknown cinematic entity: Iranian cinema. Houshang Golmakani’s ‘No Trivia, No Masterpieces’ contextualized the Iranian films that had just started winning awards at major international film festivals. It featured the beautiful and resolute face of the Iranian actress in Maybe Some Other Time, known also for Bayzai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger, who later emigrated to Sweden: Susan Taslimi. Issue no. 4 was a special issue on Censorship in Asian countries, funded by the Ministry of Culture. This was another collector’s issue, for it put together for the first time censorship rules and regulations—some stringent, some perplexing, others downright hilarious and paradoxical—in Asian countries. We were through with the first year of publication. We had brought out four issues on time after having debated whether ‘quarterly’ meant three or four issues a year. We looked to the future with confidence. We received several encouraging write-ups in the press in India and abroad over the first year and later from La Revue du Cinema, Cahiers du Cinema, Sight and Sound and Continuum, to name just a few.

Laughter, the Best Medicine

Looking back, I often wonder: what has Cinemaya meant to me? Above all, it has meant laughter.

Aruna, Latika and I in the little room in Aruna’s house. Ringing up embassies for photographs of Asian films, claiming to be editors of a magazine whose first issue was yet to come out. Latika’s ever-ready 200-watt grin, transforming itself to laughter. It was not easy talking to embassy officials of a magazine we were to edit, which had no high-flying sponsors, no core funding . . . it tickled us that we spoke so seriously of it without having the faintest idea of how the second issue would come out, even if the first one did!

It was even funnier talking of Asian cinema to film buffs around us, when this many-splendorous entity was hardly known. That we could reel off unknown names of Asian directors with flourish and refer to films in their original names without batting an eyelid —Anayurt Oteli, Aje Aje Baara Aje, Ugetsu Monogatari, Khaneh-ye Dost Kojast?—put us in an exclusive club all our own. Rewriting and editing articles on films that we had not seen had us in splits. We often wondered if, after we had edited the articles squeaky clean, they had any semblance to the films that were being written about. I still remember the review of the Korean film The Man with Three Coffins: the hermeneutic possibilities of what the writer had written, the translator had translated, and what we had edited and rewritten were many, because we had not seen the film! Sunil Roy, Aruna’s ever amicable husband, working in the next room, often wondered aloud how we ever managed to get the editing done with all the bursts of laughter that he heard so often.

Arun Khopkar, it was, I think, who called us the teen deviyaan (literally, the three goddesses, but also the title of a popular Hindi film)! Or was it the three mayas? We worked in a small room and thought big. It was the zest and fun we had that saw us through not just the first, but so many issues.

Historical Conjuncture

Cinemaya was the product of a very specific conjuncture. Aruna, who did her doctoral thesis in Paris on censorship in Indian cinema, had a very French air about her. Tolomush Okeyev, the Kyrgyz filmmaker, who was on one of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) juries in the ‘80s, said to me, ‘Oh, she studied in France? That explains the way she moves her eyes and bats her eyelids! And yet, there is something Japanese and East Asian about her eyes as well, in the way they crinkle up when she laughs.’ She was a product of the Parisian milieu as much as she was of the Nehruvian ethos. The notion of being non-aligned (in a cultural sense that followed from the political stance), of having a Third World point of view was very important to her. Whatever my differences with her, I never doubted her genuine commitment to the Davids of Asia as against the Goliaths. It was no accident that Cinemaya covered cinema from Mongolia, Syria, Palestine, Vietnam, Singapore and Myanmar along with cinema from Japan, China, India, Iran, Philippines. . . She was always particular about Asians writing on their own cinemas, always preferring them over Western writers. These were important political decisions that moulded the identity and the contents of the magazine. Aruna was also very particular about the fact that we should remain genuinely pan-Asian and never give in to making Cinemaya India-centric. This meant a lot of work, particularly in the early years, to ensure we had articles from all over the continent, from countries big and small. At the same time, we were very careful to ensure that Cinemaya looked good, and not ‘developmental’. This meant that however hard-up Cinemaya was, no compromises were ever made on the quality of paper, of design and of content.

The quarterly began at a historically opportune moment. There were festivals in the world that focused on the three continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America at Nantes, at Tashkent. . . Yet in this focus, Asian cinemas were never covered in all their wealth and glory. Asia was known for decades by a few names that had won awards in European festivals: Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. Women filmmakers (were there any?), independent cinema, censorship rules, masters unknown outside their national territories, film movements big and small, new waves, the nations’ aesthetic traditions that cinema drew upon, industries with long histories beginning almost immediately after the birth of cinema in France, fledgling industries or industries getting back on their feet after political or economic turmoil, the views of Asian filmmakers on their own craft, documentaries and shorts, the State and creativity. very little was known about these issues, until Cinemaya threw light on them.

Cinemaya moved in to fill the vacuum of information, when Asia was beginning to capture the imagination of the world for a variety of political, economic and cultural reasons. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist bloc, the world order changed as did the balance of forces. In this new political scenario of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Asia was an important player, with many constituent countries, not all of them easily definable in strategic and power terms. If some countries of Asia were important demographically, others were important technologically; yet others were emerging as tiger economies, while others were undergoing regime changes, conflicts and resolutions, all of which were to have an impact culturally. Globalisation and the idea of one world market also made Asia important, however heterogeneous a continent it was. Globalisation also brought the world together in speeded-up networked connectivities. Cinema emerged as an important cultural window that opened out on alternative paradigms, distinct from those in Latin America and Africa: of emerging from colonialism, resisting authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, of representing the many nations within a nation . . . The Third Cinema debate which had engulfed Africa and Latin America, far more than it had Asia, had run its course. In the ‘80s, the countries behind the ‘other’ Iron Curtains, China and Iran (where the Islamic Revolution had taken place in 1979), came up with films that engaged the cinematic imagination of the West. Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth in 1985 and a whole series of Iranian films ushered in new possibilities of representing the relationships between the State and the Artist, national identity, postcoloniality, developmental issues, spirituality. This was the time of New Waves in the cinema of many of the Asian countries. In addition to this, Asian cinema, particularly from Hong Kong, was influencing the way the spectacle of action could be used in films. The martial arts in the Bruce Lee films, followed by action and its choreography by other Chinese masters was to influence Hollywood from the ‘80s onwards in much the same way that German directors fleeing from Hitler brought Expressionist aesthetics to mould film noir, or émigrés from the socialist countries such as Polanski, Forman and Konchalovsky were to create key films redefining the thematics of Hollywood cinema in the seventies.

This was the context of a ‘turn’ to Asia, in which Cinemaya emerged to spread an awareness about the many cinemas of the continent, of industries that were huge and tiny. The watershed year was 1989: all the three major awards were won by Asian films at the Locarno Film Festival, where Aruna was a member of the international jury—the Golden Leopard went to Bae Yong-Kyun’s Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left for the East (South Korea), the Silver to Shaji N Karun’s The Birth (India) and the Bronze to Kiarostami’s Where is my Friend’s Home? (Iran).

Inside Cinemaya

We thought of several sections that we persisted with through the years: Country Profile, Director’s Column, On Screen (for reviews of new Asian films), Festival Reports, Spotlight (on Asian masters who were no more), Dossier (on filmmakers who were still working), Profiles (on actors) and Newsreel (with brief write-ups on recent happenings in Asian cinemas). The Editorial in Cinemaya also had a title: Frame by Frame. Every section was carefully planned. In Spotlight, for instance, there was usually an article that gave an overview of the entire oeuvre of the filmmaker, with close analysis of one or two films. We included filmographies of directors and actors on whom we carried articles and interviews. Even Newsreel got more saturated with information as we went on: national awards, the passing on of film personalities, film events, forthcoming festivals, with addresses and last dates for entries, that a lot of filmmakers found very useful . . . We carried short book reviews and notices of books on Asian cinemas, and reports on seminars on Asian cinema, which was very useful for researchers in this lesser known cinematic realm. Our Country Profiles, which were usually our cover stories, gave a historical overview of the country’s cinema and contextualised present happenings. We thought up the title of ‘New Voice’ in issue no. 6. Aruna introduced ‘Musings’ from issue no. 34 onwards, as a carte blanche to an eminent film person to ruminate on any aspect of cinema or his association with it. ‘On Location’, too was introduced somewhere along the way to cover films from Asia that were in the process of production.

Cinemaya was a measured mix of information and analysis, delving into the past to discover Asian filmmakers and focussing on contemporary masters, uncovering new trends of filmmaking, providing space to directors to air their views, profiling actors of Asian cinema, publishing interviews with not just filmmakers but also with cinematographers. Even when we covered festivals from continents other than Asia, we focused on the Asian films shown at these festivals. It was this firm partiality and partisanship towards the cinemas of Asia that made us cover Japanese masters lesser-known than Kurosawa or Ozu, such as Sadao Yamanaka, or early Chinese masters such as Fei Mu and Sun Yu, or new trends in Hong Kong, Iranian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian or Vietnamese cinema. Lino Brocka, the well-known Filipino director, gave his last-ever interview to Aruna, shortly before he passed away. Cinemaya also asked film specialists to address the question of whether there was an ‘Asian cinema’, and if there was, to define what this ‘Asian-ness’ was. On the completion of five years, we brought out an index of articles published in Cinemaya, which was followed by two more after every ten issues.

Communication in those days was not as swift as it is are now with the Internet. We used to write, call and pursue our contributors for articles. We all knew the international dialling codes for most Asian countries by heart, as we did the time difference, for it would never do to irritate someone at the other end of the world with a demand for an article in the middle of the night! Some years later Cinemaya acquired a fax machine. Every addition to the office was hard-earned. One of Aruna’s prized personal possessions was her grey Apple laptop. She still uses an Apple, only now it is white in colour. Internet, of course, made things much easier, not just in connectivity, but in typing and proofing. Proofing was a major hassle until Sudhir Bose joined us. Thereafter the only hassle was ensuring that his pencils, eraser and sharpener were where he had left them the day before! We all learnt the proofing diacritical marks from him, although our pencils were never quite as sharp as the ones he used! Aruna wrote in May 2002 ‘We began less than modestly, working on simple manual typewriters, communicating through normal postal services, using the telephone only exceptionally. With the passage of time we acquired computers, a fax and then email. The growth of Cinemaya is as much the story of expanded editorial content as it is a reflection of the recent technological advances’.

New Networks

The second year of Cinemaya was equally exciting. Cinemaya decided on presenting new Indian films and the first Indian film presented was Kumar Shahani’s Khayal Gatha. This was followed up with many other new releases over the years: Adoor Gopalakrishna’s Mathilukal (1990), Shaji N Karun’s Swaham (1994), Nandan Kudhyadi’s Rasayatra (1995), Goutam Ghose’s Silk Route (1996), Santwana Bordoloi’s Adajya (1997), Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Lal Darja (1997), Rajat Kapur’s Private Detective (1998), Jahnu Barua’s Kuhkhal (1998) and Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Uttara (1999).

Satish Sud handed over the designing of the magazine to his assistant Ashma Singh and one of the first covers she designed was issue no. 6 with abstract shapes and the titles written on them. This was also the year that we first covered Central Asian cinema in the context of the changes in Soviet cinema, on my insistence that this region was an integral part of Asia. (I, in turn, had taken my cue from Tolomush Okeyev and Talgat Temenov, the Kazakh director). Cinemaya covered not only Central Asia but also the Transcaucasian region, particularly Armenia and Georgia (whose cinema is a heady mix of local, Mediterranean and Asian influences). In fact, we often joked about Cinemaya’s ‘colonising’ mentality, claiming many areas of West Asia and beyond as ‘Asian’ even when the countries themselves were not too insistent about their Asian identity!

The ninth issue was funded by the International Fund for the Promotion of Culture and was a special on Émigré Asian Cinema. This is another Collector’s volume for it put together for the first time ever filmmakers from Asia who were working abroad. Aruna’s talent for networking and cajoling and applying gentle but steady pressure not only got together an Advisory Board and contributors who actually wrote, but also helped in raising funds for special issues and special sections for international film festivals.

UNESCO asked Aruna to organise a seminar on Asian cinema in 1989. Cinemaya, with funds from UNESCO, and support from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations organised the First International Conference on Promoting Asian Cinema in 1990. This was the fourth in a series of seminars that turned the lens towards Asian cinema. In 1991 the Berlin Film Festival organised a symposium on ‘Current Economic and Cultural Situation of Cinematography in Southeast Asia and China’ to coincide with the panorama of Southeast Asian cinema at the festival. The German Foundation, which had funded the first symposium, in collaboration with the Goethe Institut and the Hong Kong Urban Council, organised another seminar in 1993. In 1997, a third seminar was organised by Aruna Vasudev, then with INTACH, for the Directorate of Film Festivals as a supplement to the forty film package of films from the Asia-Pacific region. This seminar included countries from Asia as well. While the first seminar had focussed on marketing strategies, the second tackled cultural issues. The third discussed questions of identity and self-perception and the specificity of Asian cinema.

Cinemaya had a dream: that there would be a network of Asian Film Centres in all Asian countries to promote our cinemas in each other’s countries—and all over the world. The five-day Conference we organised was inaugurated by the then Minister of Information and Broadcasting, P Upendra, and by Teresa Wagner from UNESCO. The opening was presided over by I K Gujral, then Minister of External Affairs. This conference brought together festival directors, Asian film experts, many of whom had been writing for Cinemaya, and policy makers, providing an impressive platform to share views, learn from and about each other and then take some hard policy decisions. Kim Dong-Ho, who had been President of the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation and who started the Pusan Film festival in 1996, with its award for New Currents in Asian Cinema, said that this Conference had oriented him towards Asian cinema: ‘My interest in films from other countries in Asia really started when I participated in the international seminar organized by Cinemaya in Delhi in 1990. It was a very good meeting because it was a great occasion to establish links. I met many film professionals and heads of institutions in Asia and have kept in touch with them’. The Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) was born at this conference. Cinemaya became the official journal of NETPAC. Today NETPAC has twenty-nine member countries and the NETPAC Award to the Best Asian Film is presented in more than twenty festivals around the world.

Film Festivals

The ‘80s was the time of the rise of Asian Film Festivals. This was another conjunctural factor that provided a beneficent context for Cinemaya—and one may add, for the festivals which got covered in the quarterly. India has the oldest international film festival in Asia, begun in 1952. The Hong Kong International Film Festival was set up in 1977 and soon became the finest festival to showcase international cinema, with the most interesting catalogue with insightful articles on Hong Kong and other cinemas. The Istanbul Film Festival began in 1982 as part of The Istanbul International Festival and later became a separate entity. FAJR was started in Tehran in 1982 by the Ministry of Culture and is held annually in February, the month in which the Islamic Revolution took place. The Isfahan Festival for Children and Young Adults was first organised in 1985 and the Singapore International Film Festival in 1987. The Fukuoka Focus on Asia was started in 1991 in a city that saw itself as a gateway to Asia and the West. The Shanghai International Film Festival was organised in 1993, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival in 1998, and the Bangkok International Film Festival in 2002. Cinemaya was a witness if not to the birth then at least to the flowering of these Asian festivals, being itself part of a similar ethos. Many of these festivals thought in ‘continental’ terms and focused on Asia in various ways, by having special sections or giving special awards to Asian films. Going to these festivals always meant carting several copies of Cinemaya to publicise and sell it at festivals and to rope in new writers. It also meant coming back with interviews, articles and information for publication, along with photographs and publicity material that was put to good visual use by our designers, Ashma Singh and Sunil Sud.

Moving Up

Early ‘90s we shifted upstairs, to the second floor in Aruna’s house. We had begun spreading out of the tiny room we had begun work in on the first floor, when Ram Prakash, Indu Shrikent and later Indrani Bose joined us. Aruna’s husband, Sunil Roy, had to do a daily obstacle race to his bathroom which lay beyond the room that we worked in, stepping over the files and Tipsy, Aruna’s dog, sleeping on the floor. Aruna liked to have people about and that was one of the reasons that Cinemaya worked. That Cinemaya could be brought out from her house for nearly sixteen years is testimony to the fact that the house in its own way was a foundation and support for the magazine. Her husband, daughter, sister and parents lived in different sections of the house. She lost her parents and her husband on the way. But nothing ever stopped Cinemaya from coming out on time. Cinemaya slowly took over the top floor. If no one else, Aruna always had plumbers, carpenters and gardeners walking about. It probably gave her a sense of reassurance that ‘things were getting done’ and that we were ‘moving on’, when the going was tough. On days when a little celebration was on the cards, there were the spicy samosas and sweet gulab jamuns. Little by little, the office began to look like the office of an international magazine. Posters of film festivals and films were put up, and cubicles for the editors and the office staff came up. All the photographs we had collected, were catalogued; Aruna’s large library, located on the same floor, came in handy for reference. The Editor sat right next to all the editors, showering her affection and irritation by turns on all of us. Aruna was also a great one for parties. To celebrate every event organised by Cinemaya, there would invariably be a party where we met filmmakers, film officials and critics from Asia and the world.

The ‘80s saw the publication of several film magazines in India. Siddharth Kak in early ‘80s brought out Cinema Vision India and the National Film Development Corporation came out with Cinema in India. The Film and Television Institute of India in Pune published Lensight and in Bangalore, George Kutty edited Deep Focus. These magazines, unfortunately, wound up sooner than later. It is a testimony to Cinemaya’s tenacity that it managed to come out regularly four times a year for over sixteen years of its nineteen-year existence. It was published in New Delhi and distributed internationally. Cinemaya was listed in the Film Literature Index, Media Review Digest, Magazine of the Movies and International Film Guide. Over the years it garnered the support of the International Forum for New Cinema in Berlin, the International Film Festivals of Amiens, Cannes, Fukuoka, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Pusan, Rotterdam, Vancouver and Yamagata.

To publicise Cinemaya, several folders were brought out. The most elegant in its black-and-white simplicity was the first one designed by Satish Sud. We remember the folders, however, for the way in which we agonized over the text: as if every word would find or lose a prospective sponsor or financier! We wanted to announce that we were a serious magazine, well yes, but we balanced analysis with information, and were exciting too. We were fiercely Asian, but were benignly international . . . We somehow could never get over this schizophrenia. We tied ourselves into knots over words such as ‘identity’ and ‘integrity’. Who wrote for us? Scholars and critics. We never mentioned one without the other for fear that we would lose out on different constituencies of readers! Were we a journal or a magazine? We opted for the word ‘quarterly’. Let people figure out what Cinemaya was! We could negotiate our split identities as long as we did not lose our access to different auditoria of readers!

Expanding Horizons

Cinemaya expanded its activities. In the first year itself we realised that the films that were being covered in Cinemaya must be seen. Cinemaya had to create an audience for Asian films that would transform itself into a readership for the magazine.

In addition to the presentation of new Indian films, Cinemaya began to organise film tributes and film weeks of films from Asian countries. In 1993, the first week-long festival of South Korean films was organised. This was followed in 1994 with a festival of Iranian films (in collaboration with ICCR) and a tribute to the Sri Lankan actress Anoja Weerasinghe. In 1995 there was a ten-day long festival of fifteen Asian films from six countries on Buddhist themes entitled ‘The Inner Path’ which travelled to Kolkata from Delhi and in 1996 a tribute to another Sri Lankan actress, Swarna Mallawarachchi. In 1997 there was another festival of South Korean films that travelled to five cities and in 1998 a tribute to the Turkish filmmaker, Omer Kavur. To celebrate the Khajuraho Millennium in 1999, a festival of films on artistes entitled ‘Celebrating the Artist’ was organised and to close the millennium celebrations in 2000, a festival entitled ‘Celebrating the Word and the Image’ with adaptations from literature into cinema was organised in Delhi.

Cinemaya also began to programme Asian films for Indian and foreign festivals. In 1992, we programmed films for the Mumbai Documentary and Short Film Festival. In 1993, Cinemaya programmed the first-ever Asian Panorama section for the 8th International Film Festival for Children and Young People (ICYP) at Udaipur. In 1995, we programmed a section on Asian Women Directors ‘Behind the Camera’, together with a seminar, for the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Mumbai (the following year IFFI made Women Directors the theme for its competition). After we programmed the Asian Panorama for the 9th ICYP in Hyderabad for the second time, this became a competitive section of the festival. The Asian films for children that I put together for ICYP on behalf of Cinemaya and the catalogues Ashma Singh designed for them, remain for me one of the high points of my association with Cinemaya. The brochures for both the 1993 and 1995 ICYP festivals were beautifully designed keeping children in mind and the 1995 one had Ashma Singh’s and Aruna’s drawings in it.

In 1996, a Special Tribute to Jahnu Barua was organised by Cinemaya for the International Festival of Independent Cinema (FIFI) at Brussels. 1997 saw the programming of the Asian Panorama at IFFI in Mumbai after which ‘Asia’ became the Festival’s competitive section for some time, and Asian Perspectives for the Trivandrum International Film Festival. We put together a section on Malayalam films for the Pesaro Film Festival and in 1998 Asian Visions was presented at the Thessaloniki Film Festival (both in collaboration with NETPAC). In 1999 Asian films were programmed for the international film festival at Cochin, as was a tribute to Adoor Gopalakrishnan we helped put together for the Cinematheque Française in Paris.

Five times between 1993 and 2001, Cinemaya and NETPAC organised a ten-day Film Appreciation course in collaboration with the Embassy of France and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). These were conducted by Suresh Chabria, Professor of Film Appreciation at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. The participants included film buffs, journalists, students and media professionals from India and the neighbouring countries. At the fifth and final workshop in 2001, in collaboration with the Embassy of France, we organised a Script Workshop by the eminent French scriptwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière who also gave a talk at a packed hall at India Habitat Centre called ‘Telling Tales’.

Cinemaya brought out special sections for the Fukuoka Film Festival in 1991 and 1992, for the Fribourg Festival in 1993, a special issue on Iran, special sections for Yamagata, a tribute to Zhang Yimou along with a special section for the Hawaii International Film Festival in 1995. We also brought out special issues on ‘How the West Looks at Asia’, ‘Asian Women Directors’, ‘Asian Shorts and Documentaries’.

Beyond the Tenth Year

The tenth anniversary celebrations of Cinemaya in 1998 were a turning point for the quarterly. The celebrations included a special issue with a list of Top Ten Asian films of all times by connoisseurs of Asian cinema. Cinemaya also organised a five-day event with a festival of twelve Asian films, a dance recital by the eminent classical danseuse, Sonal Mansingh and a music concert. In October 1998 Cinemaya organised a lecture on the ‘Portrayal of Japanese People in the Works of the Great Masters of Cinema’ by Tadao Sato. The response to all these events was overwhelming and at Cinemaya we realised that the time had come to set up an Asian Film Festival of our own. The Delhi Government was approached and with the funds sanctioned, the First Festival of Asian Cinema, Cinefan, was organised in 1999 jointly with NETPAC.

The 50th issue of Cinemaya was also very special. We published a list of Top Ten National Films in it. Since Cinefan was being organised annually, all the diverse activities that Cinemaya had been involved in, in order to create an audience for Asian cinema, were brought under the umbrella of the festival. New faces joined Cinemaya and Cinefan over the years and the quarterly and festival carved a special niche for themselves in the cultural life of the capital, in Asia and among the festivals of the world. In the midst of all this activity Aruna managed to edit a volume on Indian cinema entitled Frames of Mind: Reflections on Cinema in 1995. Aruna, Latika and I also coedited a book Being and Becoming: The Cinemas of Asia funded by the Japan Foundation in 2002. This was the first ever book to cover the film industries of different Asian countries.

The years of organising funds for the publication had begun to take their toll. It was Aruna who managed to somehow get money together year after year, through advertisements, through sponsorships of special issues and sections for festivals and film organizations, through the programming of packages for festivals . . . She bore the financial brunt of bringing Cinemaya out regularly four times a year, relying on the goodwill of her large circle of friends and well-wishers. We were hopeless at fund raising, at applying for grants which other organizations seemed to do so effortlessly. It was only for the first issue, the fourth one on Censorship and the eighth on Émigré Asian Cinema that Cinemaya received grants from outside agencies; core funding was impossible to come by and fatigue had begun to set in.

In 2004 Cinemaya merged with Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art Pvt. Ltd. The 10th Anniversary Editorial stated that ‘Cinemaya has been back-breaking, heart-rending, exhilarating, but through the good times and bad it has been an adventure full of fun’. At Fifty, we were Fighting Fit, Frolicking and Flying High. What do we say now that Cinemaya has reached the end of its road? ‘A Job Well Done!’ Aruna had a single-minded vision that found historical resonance. With the happy coincidence of finding a small group of people (mostly women!) who were as committed to her vision as she was, she managed to make Cinemaya and Cinefan the institutions they turned out to be.

This is the time of conglomerates and Osian’s with its interests in art, art auctions, publishing, archiving and documentation, sports and entertainment, is well-spread across cultural practices to sustain a festival that is growing every year. Multi-industry inputs into culture, and broad spectrum interests are what keep large enterprises going and Cinefan seems set to tread this path in its new avatar. Cinemaya, on the other hand, must bid adieu. It was the product of a historical circumstance of looking inwards at our own continent. The information revolution, internet, proliferating festivals, new technologies and digital media that have changed the rules of production and distribution, the aesthetics and reception of cinema, have also necessitated a different kind of writing and focus on cinema. Cinemaya fulfilled a task it had set itself to perform: of making the cinemas of Asia known in all their fine details. Its classical vision and its ‘enlightenment’ project’ are probably no longer relevant in an age when your neighbourhood is the globe itself, and information about every nook and cranny is available at the click of the mouse. Like Captain Von Trapp’s children, Cinemaya must now say, ‘So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!’

I left Cinemaya in 2001, a while before it shifted base literally and metaphorically. Thank you, Aruna, for so much fun and learning. The quarterly did open a whole new world of Asian cinema for me. I know you are just moving on, Aruna, and have more ideas up your sleeve. Filmmaker, writer, founder-editor of Cinemaya and founder-director of Cinefan, you have gone back to your old passion: Painting, Japanese style! If you are starting another cottage industry on cinema with multinational links, don’t forget to call me on board! I’ll be back!

SELECTIONS FROM CINEMAYA

The ‘Selections from Cinemaya’ consists of articles chosen from Cinemaya issues 1 to 61-62 (1988 - 2004) and the first five Cinefan Catalogues (1999 - 2003), after which both the Quarterly and the Festival were taken over by Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art. The annual Cinefan Film Festival continues to be held in Delhi in its reinvented form, while Cinemaya, after the six issues that were brought out by Osian’s, ceased publication.

The principle of selection of the articles in this volume was threefold: to reflect the range of countries that Cinemaya covered from 1988 to 2004; to carry the writings of our regular contributors; and to encompass the wide-ranging issues dealt with in the articles. We chose essays, interviews and reports that focused on masters of Asian cinema, on historical overviews of Asian industries, on contemporary movements that were just taking shape, and on the existing state of cinema in a given country. We did not include film reviews, festival reports and sections such as ‘New Voice’ on debut directors and ‘On Location’ about Asian films that were in the process of getting made. The texts of the articles in this volume have been reproduced from Cinemaya as they appeared in the magazine. We have mentioned the issue and year of publication at the end of every article. We hope to capture the sense of a remembrance of things past and the sense of the journeys that Asian cinema undertook as it made its presence felt on the map of world cinema.

A DEFIANT SURVIVOR

Zakir Hossain Raju

During the months that followed the victory over Pakistani colonialism on 16 December 1971, a state of uncertainty persisted in the Bangladesh film industry. Veteran producers were reluctant to launch new films as they were not quite sure of the attitude of the first post-Liberation government. They did not know how much concession in the film sector would be made for the benefit of the Indian film industry as a gesture of goodwill by the new Bangladesh Government to a country that had, admittedly, played a vital role in the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan.

However, with active encouragement from the administration, production in the film sector gathered momentum faster than in any other sector of the war-torn economy.

A spectacular number of productions were announced and work commenced at a hectic pace. The financiers’ morale was further boosted when they successfully exacted from the government a pledge for a totally protected market. Film import was completely banned. But the look of affluence the industry wore was superficial. Too much of easy money and reckless spending during production, aided by a runaway inflation that had gripped the country because of chaos in the industrial sector, contributed to the soaring cost of production. The earning ability of these new films was further curtailed by an increase in the amusement tax by over 125 per cent in two years. The golden goose was being killed.

Wage-labourers became the target of the new country’s film directors and producers. This caused a direct decline in the intellectual level of the films produced. Even so films continued to flop. The situation remained unchanged until the assassination of the president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in a coup led by a group of young officers on 15 August 1975. The end of the Mujib era seemed to bring about a significant change in the film industry also. The new producers who had appeared on the scene just after Liberation disappeared rather conspicuously.

There were two significant trends in the Bangladesh film industry in the years after the Liberation:

(a) Themes concerning the Liberation War became popular. Unfortunately, most of the films focused on the tragic incidents of brutal rape of Bengali women by the Pakistani occupation army. This attempt to cash in on a sensitive subject at the box-office failed.

(b) The relationship with India improved. As a result plagiarism in Bangladesh cinema reached new heights.

In this state of degeneration the only rays of hope were the off-beat films that received a mixed public response.

The theme of Liberation had caught the imagination of many and one of the first films on this theme, Ora Egaro Jan (Those Eleven Men, 1972) by Chashi Nazrul Islam, proved to be a resounding commercial success. Alamgir Kabir’s first feature, Dhirey Bohe Meghna (Quiet Flows the Meghna,1973), on the other hand, was not as successful, mainly because of its ambitious attempts at breaking down almost all established conventions of filmmaking with its essentially cinema verité style. Other noteworthy efforts that did not particularly abandon the conventional presentation format but found reasonable audience appreciation were Arunodoyer Ognishakshi (In the Flames of Sunrise, 1972) by veteran Subhash Dutta, Raktakta Bangla (Blood-Drenched Bengal, 1972) by Mumtaz Ali, and Alor Michhil (The Procession, 1974) by Narayan Ghosh. By 1975, the genre lost its popular appeal.

As the era of films on war came to an end veterans moved in with their pre-Independence formula for making films with tears, songs, infantile love affairs, occasional dances, frequent visits to religious shrines and large doses of popular comedians, all held together by a melodramatic treatment to make money. But it was not exactly old wine in post-Independence bottles. Many of these films dealt with an astounding variety of themes. Amjad Hossain’s Nayanmoni (1976), Golapi Ekhon Trene (The Endless Trail, 1978) and Koshai (Butchers, 1980), Abdus Samad’s Surjograhan (Solar Eclipse, 1976) and Surjosangram (The Sun Rises Everywhere, 1979), Abdullah Al Mamun’s Sareng Bou (Sailor’s Wife/The Survivors, 1978) and Ekhony Sbomoi (The Time, 1980), and Lathial (Goons,1975) by Narayan Ghosh bubble with social criticism and satire that were virtually nonexistent in most of pre-Independence conventional format cinema.

The New Wave

The decade of the ‘70s also witnessed the emergence of some of the most memorable attempts at social realist and humanist cinema. Ritwik Ghatak’s Titas Ekti Nadir Nam (A River Called Titas,1973), Baby Islam’s Charitraheen (Characterless,1975), Subhash Dutta’s Boshundhara (Mother Earth, 1977) and Doomoorer Phool (Unseen Flower, 1978), Kabir Anwar’s Suprovat (Good Morning, 1976), Moshiuddin Shaker and Shaikh Neamat Ali’s Surjo Dighal Bari (The Ominous House, 1979), Alamgir Kabir’s Surjokannya (Daughter of the Sun,1976), Shimana Periye (Across the Fringe, 1977) and Rupali Shoikotey (On a Silvery Beach/The Loner, 1979), or films by such newcomers as Badal Rahman (Emiler Goenda Bahini/Emil and the Detectives) and Syed Salahuddin Zaki (Ghuddi/The Kite) could be categorised as examples of Bangladesh’s Parallel or New Wave cinema and as films which are sure to survive in history as bold commentaries on contemporary reality. These films were able successors to such pre-Independence efforts as Nodi-o-Nari (The River and the Woman), Kancher Deyal (The Glass Wall), or Surjosnan (Sunbathing).

Titas was based on a celebrated autobiographical Bengali novel of the same title by Advaita Malla Barman. The intricately woven story revolves