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Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial CityRelaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in TransitJaponisme and the Birth of Cinema

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00104124-10334555

1945-8517

Jane M. Gaines,

Cinema and Media Studies

The academic study of motion pictures is grounded in industrial production, distribution, and exhibition, an approach established decades before literary studies seriously took up publishing in the history of the book. More recently, "media industries" marks a shift away from "the" industry as major Euro-American companies in competition for world markets. Considered as part of the turn to "industries" plural, these three books radically alter our vantage, relocating world cinema to Bombay, Tokyo, and Tehran. They transport the reader to cinemas elsewhere, confirming a definitive break with the center/periphery model and revisiting the tensions between artistry and industry where questions of originality and the origins of cultural forms took root.Kaveh Askari in Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran traces the distribution "relay" route from New York to Rome to Cairo to Tehran, following the traffic in secondhand 35mm celluloid film prints to tell the secret history of Iranian cinema. We learn from Daisuke Miyao in Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema what we should have known long ago—that the French vogue in the Japonisme aesthetic can be detected in some of the earliest examples of motion picture photography—the French Lumière Company actualitiés (1895–1905). In Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, Debashree Mukherjee finds cinema and industrialization in all corners of Bombay city life, replacing the question What is cinema? with When, where, and how? and innovating a new model of analysis (Mukherjee 21).We are returned to Japan in the half century after it was opened to trade in 1854, corresponding with the arrival of cinema around 1897, to Bombay in the late colonial period—1929–42—at the institution of the Talkies, and to Tehran mid-century, two decades before the 1979 revolution. These national moments are shown to eerily correspond with key advents of cinema. Yet we must always ask of every scholar, Why undertake historical studies? Then if, following Foucault, the rationale for doing historical research is to upend established assumptions, to disrupt and destabilize them, what conceptual trouble can we expect from these new accounts? (Foucault, Reader 88). These studies compel us to ask again how modernization as industrialization is seemingly synonymous with cinema. In the process, they test some of the most widely used umbrella terms in current discourse—media archaeology, intermedial, and infrastructural, as well as that ever more elusive term modernity. While postcolonial theory has taught us to see "modernity" as unevenly achieved and to ask how it is measured against whose deadline projecting what future to the advantage of whom, we are still mapping the changes to ways of life in the last century.Thus, of all the issues with which these important new case studies engage, the relation between the advent(s) of cinema and so-called modernity may be the most difficult, if nothing else, because indicators of change could be identified in multiple incidents (car accidents, drownings, electrical outages) or a range of attitudes (from ambivalence to animosity) as well as strange new objects (like the bowler hat on a Tokyo street as seen in 1897 actualitiés). Or they could be distilled by Debashree Mukherjee to capitalist modernity as "speed" and "energy" and dramatized in the encounters between "modern and traditional" that Miyao teaches us to look for in the meeting between cultures—the interactions between Lumière cinematographers Constant Girel and Gabriel Veyre and Japanese subjects-before-the-camera in their 1897 visit to East Asia. One such telling encounter is found in Miyao's account of Inabata Katsutrao, former classmate of the Lumière brothers whom they met when he was studying the French silk industry at La Martinière Institute in Lyon. Inabata's family posed for Girel in what Miyao reveals as a completely fabricated or "invented tradition" of family meals in which custom is abandoned for the sake of Orientalist expectation. Here is the enactment of what Miyao calls nativized Orientalism in which "the other constructs itself as the other" (92). He finds evidence of a two-way exchange in Inabata's look back at cameraman Girel in Family Meal/Repas en famille (Lumière Co., 1897). As we can still see in this extant film, Inabata turns to the European as though to ask, Is this what you wanted? Countering the old one-way West to East trajectory of signs and meanings, Miyao relies on Stuart Hall's concept of "negotiation," turning the question of the modern into one of a more dialogical compromise or adaptation, a "give and take" (Hall 128–38).Worlds away from London, Paris, and Los Angeles, the influence of these First World cities is diminished. Iranians made eclectic new artwork out of the 35mm "junk prints" left at the end of the Middle East distribution run, prints not worth the studio expense to recover. Valueless to the studio, these prints were invaluable to Iranians who built a popular film-going culture based on motion picture film prints Hollywood thought had been destroyed. Japanese cinematographers kept filming after the Lumière cameramen left, capturing the changing society that the European cameramen missed. The challenge of describing societies in transition goes hand in hand with that of how to differentiate the new institution and its spread from both precursors and adjacent formations and to do so in technological as well as aesthetic terms. Debashree Mukherjee's Bombay Hustle ambitiously asks us to consider where cinema start and stops, developing her "cine-ecology" approach to encompass interrelations missed by traditional categories and the constraints of chronological social history.Here, in reference to "interrelations," I admit some skepticism about the term intermedial, which in André Gaudreault's early use was meant to explain the kinematograph's "subordination to" as well as "confusion with" other media in adjacent spaces. In the beginning there were media that, as he put it, belonged to different "cultural series"—the magic lantern show, the magic show, and vaudeville, all in the first decade before 1915 when cinema began to cohere as an apparently "autonomous institution" (Gaudreault 63). Thus, the question was originally one of whether to consider motion pictures as a new invention or as an amalgamation of preexisting forms. But what function does the term intermedial serve once cinema is established as autonomous? If there is productivity in continuing to consider cinema from an "intermedial" perspective, it might be exemplified by Askari's work, in which the "composite score" depends on the record industry or is later exemplified by the connection between magazines that published translations of American hard-boiled fiction with crime films understood as Tehran noir. The question is whether intermedial helps us to see such relations differently, as like or unlike the commodity "tie up" historically designed to expand profit centers around new movie releases.Yet Gaudreault's intermedial is also interdisciplinary, and it is the latter term that I find more productive, especially as it pinpoints what is remarkable in these studies. We're reminded not to gloss over a long-standing issue—what disciplinary fields contribute to understanding the aesthetic complexity of moving pictures. Miyao, for instance, relies on art history to explain the legacy of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print composition style as it relates to the impressionist painters Monet and Cezanne in France 1895–98. I note the ingenuity of Miyao's use of the term à travers, the mobilization of the eye carried over from ukiyo-e prints as relates to the contrast between frontal layer and back just as in Japanese landscape art that significantly eliminates the middle ground. Today, the new discipline of sound studies combines musicology with engineering. Basic principles of sound engineering are requisite to explaining how in Iran magnetic stripes were laminated onto 35mm optical film prints and Persian dialogue dubbed onto secondhand Hollywood films to innovate the Iranian industry's "collage score." Think here of the Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin's score for Duel in the Sun (1946) and Miklós Rósa's score for Spellbound (1945), the two most frequently reused as nondiegetic underscoring to enhance melodrama structure. Such cross-cultural mixing was established convention until around 1969 when Iranians began to compose musical scores.To put the disciplinary situation differently: the student of the evolution of motion picture film in the first half of the twentieth century masters the iconographic codes and conventions of art history (perspective), literary studies (narrative and seriality), theater (performance style and staging), and musicology (scoring and sound recording), as well as history and science of technology with emphasis on telegraphy, telephony, electricity, and electrification. The other question is of what theoretical concepts are now shared across disciplines—with anthropology and communications studies, for instance, as in the approach to cinema as a distributional and discursive infrastructure. In Mukerjee's project the infrastructural approach sees cinema as "a powerful assemblage that activates people and things" such that dreams as well as finances circulate (185). In referring to "things" she includes all of the "materials of infrastructure"—paper in addition to celluloid film stock and cameras. Strangely, while Askari's use of the term infrastructure to modify production is relatively more narrow, the effect of reading these two studies together is such that the Bombay "cine-ecology" as a model carries over as a way of grasping the components of cinema in mid-century Tehran. For instance, we might start with economic scarcity at the time, then the unpredictability of electrical wattage on which interior scene lighting depended, then artificial lighting available for exposure that then dictated the use of black and white as opposed to color film stock.To grasp a key methodological distinction between the three studies, however, consider that while Askari and Miyao align their work with Thomas Elsaesser's "film history as media archaeology," Mukherjhee does not. One difference for her is that ecology allows, as she puts it, "temporalities and technological itineraries in tense, simultaneous play" (330). In one example of the "play" of temporalities she enters into her own study in the contemporary moment, recalling girls clapping in unison in her childhood school, searching for the ruins of the Bombay Talkies studio, and coming face to face with megastar Shah Rukh Khan. One of the difficulties with Elsaesser's concept of media archaeology stems from the fact that Foucault, the source of the concept, left no exact methodological instructions. If there is a Foucauldian legacy it is at least in the rejection of traditional historiography and its linear timeline and its illusion of historical continuity (see Foucault, "Introduction" 3–14). It's also useful to recall that Foucault's inflection of the term archaeology has nothing to do with the subfield of anthropology; equally as important, "ecology" in Mukherjee's study is not related to environmental sustainability although it borrows what science tells us about the operation of ecosystems seen as a "web of energy relations" (Mukherjee 39). Our problem is that "media archaeology" is so capacious that it would seem to accommodate all historiographic possibilities, and if it's that loose how does one make clear methodological distinctions? How does a scholar object that what he or she is doing is not "media archaeology"? After all, all three of these studies can be situated after the "historical turn" in film and media studies with which Elsaesser has been associated (see Elsaesser chap. 1). They all work back and forth between empirical research findings and theorization that puts new concepts into circulation. Askari develops the "relay system" not "powered by its source" to explain how prints circulate and are recycled in mid-century Iran (16). For him, the use of "found sound" as an "ironic citationality" of Hollywood is also a form of "code switching" (22). Miyao theorizes a challenge to the one-way West to East relation that would miss the complexity of the Japanese attitude toward premodern iconography such as the geisha. Miyao posits a "nativized Orientalism" as used by Japanese makers especially for export as well as "internalized Orientalism" as imagery for domestic circulation. Japanese producers of images for export, he argues, "put on" the position of a "modernizing/Westernizing self," and in so doing proved themselves to be consciously aware of Orientalist fantasies (114–15).Bombay Hustle, however, innovates an even higher theory to history ratio, that ratio easier exemplified than defined. The "cine-ecology" methodology of Bombay Hustle depends on interlocking components underwritten, as noted, by "speed" and "energy" as aspects of capitalist modernity, a variation of which is the wild ride of "speculative modernity" with which Mukherjee begins. The "hustle" of the title is borne out in the scramble of the speculative financing that bankrolls the new film business, tied to gambling and cotton futures, later manifest at multiple levels in the study. Structurally, two of six chapters are provocatively titled: "Vitality" and "Exhaustion." Then, Mukherjee's usage abstracts energy following the model of electricity, making productive use of the term transduction which in a microphone or loudspeaker refers to the conversion of sound into electricity transmitted over wires. Ingeniously, energy is also measured on a human continuum on which vitality is opposed to exhaustion and depletion. But energy is most dramatically translated from theoretical into anecdotal and back again by means of a case of heroic resistance. Actress Shanta Apte's 1939 hunger strike against Prabhat Studios Energy emblematizes exhaustion in her wasting away in protest against working conditions, a "perplexing" performance of her own "self-depletion" as Mukherjee theorizes it (234).In a way, Bombay Hustle updates the venerable Marxist theory problematic in which the economic is relatively constitutive of all aspects of life. Like the best of Marxist cultural theory, however, this multifaceted analysis of the energetic, speculative capitalism of the Bombay film industry avoids both deterministic causality and cultural mirroring as in "reflection" theories. Yet one hears an echo of Marxism's labor theory of value in the body of the replaceable cine-worker, subject to exhaustion, depletion, and death, given the expendability of film extras and stunt workers. The distressed body is further the site of oppression as manifest in the inequalities that sustained the Bombay film industry, signaling where the function of caste in Bombay cinema needs more analysis. But finally, the critical effect produced by studying Bombay as a "cine-ecology" in which everything can be related to everything else in one way or another, is that the screen image, only one component among others, now shrinks proportionately. In contrast, the tradition of close analysis can be critiqued as having enlarged the text to a size out of proportion relative to the dense ecology of the practices surrounding it.In another way, however, labor is unavoidably caught up in the screen aesthetic, that is, when we turn to another difficult issue, that of valuation as it brings together both labor value and cultural value as critically assessed. Strangely, the resistance to seeing motion picture film work as labor coincided with a moment of a militant labor activity in late colonial India. In response, the Bombay colonial government censored Mill (1934), based on a mill workers strike, as well as Metropolis (1925), the German science fiction featuring a machine labor revolt. Eerily, in this same moment a contemporary source wondered, "Was a film studio a factory? Were film practitioners workers?" (Mukherjee 253). As though in answer to this question Mukherjee applies the term cine-worker to all, from extras to star actresses. Yet the problem of classification remains—what kind of labor was it that they did?Thus, these Bombay, Tehran, and Tokyo studies return us to the vacillation between moving pictures as art or industry at critical moments. Confirming what we know about the inception of cinema, all three offer alternatives to seeing the director as "artist," a figure that today still justifies the academic study of moving pictures as well as international festival awards. Unchanged is also the relatively lower status of technicians, whether editors, cinematographers, or audio engineers. But camera operators historically predated directors. Miyao brings to our attention the figure of Shibata Tsunekichi, one of two Japanese experts who learned to operate the Cinématographe Lumière and who shot local scenes as well as the oldest extant Japanese film title Momijigari (1899). In the Iranian case, Askari proposes "craft labor" to describe work requiring special engineering ingenuity, especially in the realm of sound production. He even goes so far as to argue that "sound work" in mid-century Iran "challenges assumed hierarchies of authorship" (88). Further, responding to the charge that Iranian cinema was "authorless" at that time, he describes the work of engineer Rubik Mansuri who developed an archive of his record collection that served as the basis of the "collage score." Yet the division between artistic and technical labor stubbornly remained even while musical scores were associated with authorship as a brand and compilation score work was credited. Askari must concede that after the heated debates over art and industry that followed, the auteur cinema of prestige won out in the long run in Iran.Again we must ask about the limited vocabulary available to indicate the complexity of labor in motion picture production, although the term practices does help to avoid the hierarchy inherited from arts criticism. What is at stake? Here is the major cultural form of our times and an educated audience remains oblivious of exactly how motion pictures and television were technologically invented and continue to be manufactured as industrial products. The larger public yet subscribes to the notion that moving pictures are "created" by artists and that such "creation" can be judged and nominated for awards on the basis of "creative" achievement. Askari and Mukherjee both use the modifier creative, although the former to counter the charge that Iranian mid-century cinema was "imitative," the latter in an attempt to expand the range of practices. Finally, however, the art vs. industry debates are updated and brought to a head in the conclusion to Bombay Hustle where we are reminded that "creativity" continues to have its ideological function in the contemporary "creative industries." For under consumer capitalism, as Mukherjee continues, citing Angela McRobbie, "creativity" functions to idealize work, hide economic relations, and downplay working conditions (see McRobbie).It would help to reconfigure historical discussions of the "remake" to include Askari's Iranian "collage sound" as cultural composite work (Askari 83). Here the arts and humanities' dedication to unique newness is reversed in Askari's rescue of recombinant film objects whose appeal "lies in the ways they are not new" (23). The neutralization of terms such as borrowing and even appropriation would allow the more nuanced conceptualization we need in the study of cinema as globally circulating mass culture, exemplified by Iranian film print transformations—English dialogue "swapped out" for Persian—made possible by dubbing studios operating under the radar of Hollywood. These studies encourage us to think about the vocabulary we have developed to describe the aggregate that is world cinema, especially since the motion picture film is a product of art and media as well as cultural connections, forms so tightly intertwined as to be inextricable. The point of origins of mass cultural forms should no longer matter so much given the scrambling of codes. Then again, cultural origin has mattered historically as in Askari's case of mid-century Iranian critics' animosity toward the very foreign films that stimulated such irreverent innovation in the decades before the auteurist art cinema associated with Abbas Kiarostami. Askari at one point asks an almost heretical question as he wonders whether earlier engagement with "foreign films" explained something of the strange familiarity of the later generation of Iranian auteur cinema, suggesting that the very recognizability of these films contributed to their international film festival acclaim.It remains to be seen whether intermedial will go the way of extratextual, especially since the term still holds theater, literature, visual arts, and music at "arm's length" from motion pictures and television. The point is that intermedial is inadequate to deal with what all three of these studies demonstrate—something more difficult that could be called formal and cultural inextricability, the inextricability produced by citation and homage but also conventions and practices of intertwining, sometimes "jerry-rigging," or in Askari's term, "grafting" an Iranian sound mix onto American film prints (194). While intermedial may acknowledge interconnection, it doesn't necessarily deal with cultural confluence in the moving pictures screened in world cities in the decades after 1895, including Bombay, Tehran, and Tokyo. Nor can it deal with the final inextricability of aesthetic forms with which art history has so inadequately dealt using the terminology of "influence." What Miyao dramatically illustrates with example after example is how Japonisme as a visual style, first inextricable from the style of Impressionist painters Monet or Cézanne, is furthermore inseparable from much of the first Lumière cinematography. Thus it is that we can never again view Lumière actualitiés without also seeing Katsushika Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" from the Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji series.