Possible Affirmations. An Interview with Donald Richie Author(s): William Coco, A. J.

Gunawardana and Donald Richie Reviewed work(s): Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 15, No. 2, Theatre in Asia (Spring, 1971), pp. 294-302 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1144654 . Accessed: 06/11/2012 04:45
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Affirmations

An Interviewwith DONALDRICHIE

by WilliamCoco and A. J. Gunawardana

RICHIE: The cinema of Asia is mostly primitive, except in Japan and, to some extent, in India and South Korea. A primitive cinema is one that has not found itself. Cinemarequires a lot of money and technical knowledge, as well as an aesthetic. So a cinema may be primitive because it is either too poor technically to make films, as Burma is, or too poor in imagination,as is the Philippine cinema, where films are mostly "love"romancesor adventurestories. In many small countries,and sometimes in larger ones, even if one has the technical equipment needed to make a film, the importantquestion of what the film is to be is left up in the air and one imitates the kind of pictures-usually American-that one has seen. Of course, such imitation occurs whenever there is no strong creative guidance, but the temptation is even greaterif one has lots of money and equipmentbut no ideas. TDR: Why do American pictures have such a great influence in these countries? RICHIE: American distributorsin Asia have always been extremely aggressiveeven now in Japanthe bulk of the foreign films shown is American. Setting up their own distributionoffices in foreign countries,American producerssold, and still sell, their product extremely well, which means that American cinematic influence has always been strong and will continue to be so. This is true in most of the world, including Europe, but it is less noticeable in Europe becauseEuropeanshave their own cinematictraditions. Movies travel very well: people all over the world know who Chaplin is, they've seen Easy Rider, and so forth. As a result, the themes and patterns of the American films which saturateAsia have a strong influence.Take one patternwe see in American cinemafrom the very beginning: man (American man) thinks mountains,rivers, wasteland are there to be made into cultivated lands-the West is to be won. This "Renaissance" ideal is plausiblein America, less so in Europe, but not at all in Asia, because the whole system of Asian beliefs holds that man belongs to something larger than himself and that he should acknowledge this, that man should live with nature and that this living together should be amicable, not for the destruction of either. The ideals are completely different;yet American films appeal to Asians.

Madras,1948 Chandralekha, Movies generally tend to appropriate patterns and themes wholesale. This has hapof the native cinema. When pened in Asia-and in every instance to the detriment the American and European cinemas were formed, there were no archetypes, no out how they should be made. So places one could go and look at films to find were able to do so with a many Western countries invented their own cinemas; they kind of freedom which an industry in, say, Latin America, Africa, or Asia would not have now. Art can't be treated as if it were technology. If a young nation in Africa, for example, wants a technology, it doesn't really have to contend with nineteenthto a highly socentury mechanization. It can go directly from a primitive stage be imported; can't But an art tradition phisticated one with computers and so on. then have and films many Asian peoples try to import a cinema by copying foreign enormous problems. TDR: How has Japan escaped from imitating Western cinema? RICHIE: Japan is different because the Japanese believe themselves to be so peculiar that they will not accept a new idea or even a word without changing it in some new from abroad, but way, to make it more Japanese. They may accept something first they will assimilate it. This is part of their national character; this helps to exAsia has evolved a truly national plain why Japan alone among the countries of

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cinema; it also underlies much of the success of Japanese industry. A country must pay for this, perhaps by being torn against itself, as Japan is, a combination of East and West. The Burmese, for example, would never assimilate a new idea in this way; they would simply use it in the form it came in, never change it. This, of course, would work against Burma's ever becoming industrialized: after all, one of the ways an independent nation grows industrialized is by taking what has been learned by others, copying it, building on it, certainly, to make it better along the way, and creating in the end one's own version. The British were in Burma for a long time, putting up factories, bringing in their civilization, all of which the Burmese merely tolerated, without making any attempt to turn them into something Burmese. It's the same in India: foreign and native elements exist side by side, never touching. In Japan it is different: the Japanese distinguish between what is foreign and what is truly Japanese, but since the Japanese are essentially an empirical, pragmatic people, always intent on using things, this distinction breaks down after about five years and foreignness is forgotten. Another reason for Japan's success in creating its own cinema is that the Japanese started making films at about the same time as the Americans, and consequently they had the same initial freedom from foreign influences. The first Japanese film was made around 1900. The Indian cinema started around that time too, but it didn't develop. It's a plateau cinema-the Indian cinema today is the same as it was in the twenties. Most Indian films are a kind of love and adventure story liberally spiced with comedy, music, and dance. It's only fairly recently that people like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen in Bengal and Lester James Peries in Ceylon have been able to detach themselves from this pattern and make films in their own way. That's very hard to do: it requires the agreement of one's backers, who are generally conservative by nature. TDR: But the best American and European films, not built on Hollywood models, are also shown in Asia. RICHIE: There are greatly divided audiences in all of Asia. In India certainly, the mass audience is and will be content with Bombay talkies for the next twenty-five years. Only a small part of the Japanese audience will go to see films by Antonioni, Godard, Welles, Bergman.... This creates problems for the filmmaker who wants to make films which grow out of his own culture. Potential producers have little patience with anything except that which will please a mass audience. To make personal films today you must have an evolution behind you, some kind of cinema history. TDR: The truly popular Indian films-those made in the movie capitals, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras-are almost unknown in the West, yet they are so popular among Asians that the Indian film industry is often called the Hollywood of the East. What are these films like? RICHIE: The ordinary Indian films are popular there for the same reasons that the ordinary American films are popular here: precisely because they do not reflect the life of the Indian-or the American-as it is. One of the reasons for film's continuing

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popularity everywhere is that film can so easily lie. The Indian films have the same sort of wishful plotting and gaiety as their American counterparts: benevolent gods and goddesses sing and dance for our delectation; or, to take a scene common in many Indian films, the son goes out into a kind of Westernized world and makes good, then returns to his home to affirm traditional values with the girl who's waited behind. In countries like India where traditions are still strong, the individual feels within himself a war between the traditional and the modern. Both make demands on him and perhaps the isolation of the modern from the traditional helps to keep society vital. But in the Indian films the either/or's dissolve and the audience is told, falsely, that one can have both at once. The films are rigidly and formalistically structured. Once while I was in Egypt, as a director was taking me to a film studio in Cairo, we were stopped by another director who said to my friend, "I hear you're working on a new film." "Yes, I am." "Have you done your nightclub scene yet?" "No, we'll do it tomorrow." "But you've done your the dansant scene?" "Yes, we did it yesterday." I said, "It's nice that you directors know a great deal about each other; you know all about his picture and he just started it." He said, "No, no, not at all. I have no idea what kind of picture he's making, but all Egyptian pictures must have at least one obligatory nightclub scene, and of course they must have a the dansant scene. Where else would the hero meet the heroine, and where else would they part?" Such formulas, ever popular in the Middle East and still to some extent in Japan, are typical of Indian films. The entire structure of the entertainment is put down like a cookie-cutter over whatever life patterns the scriptwriters want to show. There are two main kinds of films in India. One is a sort of mythological or historical musical comedy (now fast losing popularity) with stories illustrated by songs and dances which are usually anachronistic. The other genre is the heavily, predictably plotted Indian melodrama film, which compares with the Hollywood films of the Shakuntala,Bombay, 1943

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thirties and forties. Take a June Allyson/Dick Powell housewife comedy. The audience knows there are only so many things Allyson can do in such a film. Usually, since it is a woman's picture, she's out to prove herself: she alone is able to get her husbandthe contract, or she becomes a very, very good secretary and surprisesher husbandwith her business acumen. But in the end she's happy to get back to the kitchen. Indian films still use such formulas.The reason we don't recognize them is that we don't often think to find the Indian equivalents.But the approach is the same: they both are about what most troubles most people in a given society at a certain time. In America in the forties, what troubled people was the place of woman: how could she reconcile her native femininity with the demands which maleoriented society made upon her, with her own need to be a person, and with her own competitive urges? This complex problem was smoothed out, tidied up, and answered in the woman's films of this period. In India, as in Japan, one contemporary question which must be solved is, How can one live balancedbetween a traditional and a contemporarysociety, each with its own different demands?All the Indian films I've seen dwell on this theme, even many fine films-for example, those of Satyajit Ray. He treats the problem very honestly, but of course most Indian have to simplify it mendaciously. films, being massentertainment, TDR: In what ways does theatre influence the film in different countries in Asiasay, in Japanand India-not just in content but in style and structure?Do these films tend naively to copy the theatre the way the early American cinema did? RICHIE: In all cinemas-American,European,Indian,Japanese-the influence of the theatre is strong, almost baleful; the history of all cinema is the history away from the stage, for no two forms of art are further apart. In Japan the influence of the theatre on the film is perhapsnot what you'd expect if you didn't know the country. There is no influence from Noh, Kyogen, or Kabuki;the influence-and to a certain extent in India also-is exerted by nineteenth-centurymelodrama.This is no different from the American film, which came not from genuine English-Americanroots, but directly from nineteenth-centurymelodrama.In Japan the stage influence most evident even now is a style called Shingeki. (To define Shingeki-if Kabukiis Dryden, and if Shimpais Pinero, then Shingeki is Eugene O'Neill....) In the early films of most cultures, the influence theatre has upon cinema is usually clearest in the staginessof the acting style. (This is still prominent in Indian films.) Film exposes staginessin instanceswhen on the stage it would perhapsgo unnoticed. Most actors and directors (usually unknowingly) bring a stage consciousnessto films. This is true especially in countrieswith theatricaltraditionsas lively as India's.Every Indian has certainly seen, if not taken part in, much more theatre than has his Americanor Europeancounterpart. Early American films were usually structured according to a three-part division correspondingto the three-act melodramastructure.At intervals of about one-third of the way through the ordinary American film of the twenties or thirties you will find a ringing line, or, if the film is silent, a ringing title, followed by a long fade-out -a "curtain"to end the act. This occurs even in "original"scripts not adaptedfrom

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the stage. Indianfilms use the same technique,but an American wouldn't easily notice the analogous divisions because Indian dramasgo on for so long and have so many acts. Still, parts of the films' action are grouped under such rubrics, divided by dissolves as they would be in the West. The nineteenth-century stage psychology used in Indian and some Japanese films results in overacting, on a double level: in the rhetoric of the lines themselves,and in the melodramaticfacial contortions and actions which illustrate the lines. Melodrama lends itself very well to didacticism, which is another element the Indian cinema borrows from the stage (though the Japanese don't). Indian theatre-particularly the historical dramas-is meant to teach. The Indian temperamentis didactic, and, except in the dance, the idea of dramaticart for its own sake is not too highly developedin India,at least not to the extent that it is in Chinaor Japan. The shooting methods used in Indian films are much like those used in America through the twenties, and to some extent in the thirties. While a filmmakermay not be trained in theatre, he will insist on a number of "theatrical" conventions. A story is first written and then divided into scenes; these scenes are not divided internally to take into account the camera'sabilities to delete or abridge scenes or to show several actions at once-the script is written as though it were meant to be performed on a stage. Once the story is divided into scenes, it is given to a dialogue writer (a very important figure in the Indian cinema), who writes the lines which are to make the points in each scene-points which, as I said before, are also made visually. Then all the dialogue is mouthed, spoken, and photographed;and, finally, the scenes are put together end to end. The result is a photographed play, not a film. In this process, traditionalstories are modernized.The original, usually a sacred or historical text, is rewritten like, say, Lamb's versions of Shakespeare; the characters and events are given an absolutely believable and expected psychology. Thus, before filming, the story which is to serve as the basisfor the film is already one crucial step away from the original. The writers then do free variations on the rewritten story, contemporizing and debasing it so that there remains hardly a trace of the original. Ironically, the original often has an open-ended structure in which actions go and on and the only conjunction used is not "because"but simply "and"-very filmlike. The open-ended, free-flowing original is reduced to melodrama,the antithesis of cinema. TDR: What techniques or approachesto filmmakingdo directors like Ozu, Peries, and Ray use to replace the melodramaticschema of the popular film? RICHIE: As an art, film presentsthe audience with a person in such a way that the psychology of plot-making is unnecessary.Everything you need to know about the person is shown in his face and in his activities. All a filmmaker need do is watch the person very intently and perhapsgive him some guidance. There's no need for him to perform as an actor does onstage. The films of Ozu, Peries, and Ray are the opposite of the theatricalized cinema I have described. These directors share a knowledge of the uses to which cinema is best put. Their films are realistic rather

Ozu's Banshu Banshu Late Spring 1949 Ozu's (Late Spring), 1949

Akibiyori (Late Autumn), 1960

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than naturalistic; their cameras look on the action with an extremely watchful eye but rigorously refuse to make any kind of comment on the scene being filmed. Very early in his career, Ozu said that he disliked and distrusted plot because it "uses" people. He felt that to use people is to misuse them. He thought people so precious, he could not maim them by binding them to plots contrary to their natures. A typical scene in an Ozu film might be done this way: there is a placing shot (he's very careful to orient the audience geographically), perhaps first outside and then inside a house; someone comes into a room, or else is already there; and amid the general talk that goes on is whatever in the story needs to be said at this particular point. The information is given quite casually-sometimes you might not realize its import until two or three scenes later-then there is more talk, perhaps about the weather, and then a silence; the talk stops naturally, but the camera goes on. Ozu has said that he refuses to do what any ordinary director would do at such a point, that is, immediately start a new scene to hurry along the story. Instead, he wants the story to disclose itself. This reticence shows a reverence for people and is the opposite of the cookie-cutter techniques used in most films. Ozu uses only the straight cut to punctuate his films, because it is the most invisible of technical devices. He gave up using the devices other directors depend on heavily for psychological effects-the fade-in, the fadeout, the dissolve. Such technical devices aren't interesting, he felt; they're attributes of the camera and have nothing at all to do with the nature of film. Later, he also decided never to pan or to dolly. His scenes are composed of series of shots, connected by straight cuts, from an invariable angle. Often he opens a scene with a shot from a level three feet above the floor, the viewing angle of a person sitting on a tatami mat. The camera becomes a kind of ideal viewer; it may in the next cut move closer to the speaker or move back again, but it never moves within the shot itself. Ozu says that to move the camera is to intrude upon, or to editorialize, a feeling. He realizes that one of film's great virtues is its ability to capture the essence of things, and he meticulously selects from a mass of possible scenes exactly those which will show the essence of whatever he wishes to show. This requires a great amount of tact-to show only so much, and to take for granted that the audience can follow and appreciate it. Peries's films are more directly poignant because, unlike Ozu, he wants to show the spiritual states and progress of his people. Ransalu (The Yellow Robe) concerns a girl who becomes a nun. She has lived the usual life of a well-to-do girl in Colombo, but slowly she becomes aware of a spiritual dimension her self. In one scene beyond she watches herself taking off her jewelry in front of a faceted mirror. This is done with no comment by the camera: the mirror shows three different views of the girl, and we realize that she is going through a spiritual crisis. The film ends as the girl, alone, proceeds to the nunnery; a long, elegiac sequence shows where her steps are taking her-to God.... Ray's films have a similar concern with people; his films show the person to be more important than his problems; if a solution is to be reached, it will come from within the person himself and not from a dramatic event outside.

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All three of these directors are intensely personal filmmakers. They follow what I call the true Asian tradition of acceptance. This is not simply a Buddhist attitude but something more amorphous; it's a general attitude found among the people. TDR: In many Asian countries intellectuals are calling on the cinema to serve important social functions, promoting education, for example, or helping to bring about socialism in those countries with socialist aspirations. Film is already being used for instructional purposes in China and probably in North Korea. RICHIE: Naturally the cinema is used in such ways; it is an extraordinary social catalyst. It can teach and indoctrinate as no other medium can-it's persuasive by its very nature. It's always in the present tense, instantly believable. Also, cinema can enable one nation to speak for itself, quite apart from any political considerations, regardless of what party is in power. This is much more important, much less tangible than propaganda-that's why I dislike to see propaganda used in the Chinese films, for example. Ironically, I think we'll not find anything peculiarly "Asian" about such films; they will answer only current questions, and we will eventually find them as oblique as those "Russian" qualities in Eisenstein's Strike. Socially aware people know that there is a revolution going on-and that we are taking part in it. But I've always admired Asia's brave admission that life is tragic by its very nature, a series of negations ending in the final negation. This is the great lesson of Ozu, Ray, and Peries, and it's the great lesson of Asian art: the acceptance, the even joyful acceptance of evanescence. This is Asia's heritage (whether Asia wants to admit this now or not) arguing for a wisdom which vaunting Western man, collapsing in his own ruins, is only now beginning to see as wise. As we are going down, our ideas of ourselves are going down, and it's only natural that Asians-the Indians, or the Japanese, for example-would find in their wisdom a kind of faith, a possible escape from life, possible answers to problems which we in the West all agree are impossible to solve. TDR: But as Asia becomes more and more industrialized, shouldn't we expect to see the same degree of fragmentation in Asian art and cinema witnessed in the Western art of the last three hundred years? RICHIE: Soon whatever is best in Asian art or in the Asian mind will simply not be able to maintain itself. In Japan now everything is as much out of hand as it is here in America. Technology has begun to rule, and it's no longer possible to stop the various kinds of machines-including the human sort. Yet the only hope is in art. In other mannerist ages-ours is certainly one-art has led the way and people have recovered. Right in the middle of the last mannerist age, in the fifteenth century, there was Tintoretto, pointing the way to the New Baroque. Today there are people like Ozu or Bresson leading us directly through this veil of Maya into something else. If you draw a line from the Lumiere brothers through Dreyer, Flaherty (romantic though he be), right on through Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Ray, Peries-and of course many others-you will find a line of cinema which does lead to a kind of affirmation. If this line can continue in the face of fragmentation-which is what the world is offered now-then again art will have performed its standard function; and if it doesn't, it won't make any difference anyway. 0 1971 by William Coco and A. J. Gunawardana. All rights reserved