Kapurush (The Coward)

The UCLA film archive is in the midst of its Festival of Preservation, and last weekend, it exhibited two rare short features Satyajit Ray released in 1965 as a double bill: Kapurush and Mahapurush (The Holy Man). Sixteen of Ray’s films (deteriorated by India’s humid climate) have been restored since 1993, but you wouldn’t know it given the abysmal dearth of Ray’s cinema on DVD in the US, which amounts to four films (including the Apu Trilogy) that were unceremoniously dumped on barebones discs by Columbia. Living in Los Angeles, I’ve had the chance to see several of the restored prints the past few years, and it’s a mystery why they aren’t more widely available.

Kapurush (74 minutes) and Mahapurush (65 minutes) are narrative sketches that allowed Ray to subtly experiment with form and style; as such, they worked against expectations at the time (“Many of Ray’s critics think that Ray is making too many films in too short a span of time,” scoffed one Bengali journalist) and were largely dismissed upon their release. But according to Andrew Robinson’s book on Ray, the filmmaker said, “These are twin films I have considerable affection for; I have a pretty high opinion of Kapurush myself and I was disappointed by the response.” I’m leaning toward Ray’s assessment.

Mahapurush–the lightest of the two–was based on a story by satirist Rajsekhar Bose and has been accurately described as a farce about a charlatan posing as a holy man (evidenced by “miracles,” esoteric rituals, and outlandish claims of having taught Einstein and palled around with Plato, Jesus, and Buddha) and his impact on a group of characters, both doting and skeptical. “People call it crucifiction,” the man says imperiously. “I call it crucifact!” With a kind of ’60s British playfulness, the movie utilizes animation, freeze frames, and exaggerated performances to convey its story about the charlatan and his ultimate exposure. What makes the film especially acerbic is Ray’s skewering of the charlatan’s adda group (including a scientist and a lawyer) who blithely forgo their education simply for the emotional excitement and social notoriety of affinity with the “holy man.” In Ray’s eyes, the charlatan is merely a swindler but his followers deny their own intelligence.

Kapurush is a much more subtle–even somewhat Antonioniesque–film about a Calcutta screenwriter named Amitabha Roy who finds himself stranded in a remote region that he is researching for a story; a tea plantation owner offers him lodging, where Roy is shocked to discover that the man’s wife, Karuna, is his former lover. Their reunion–enmeshed with awkward social niceties and the man’s monologues on bourgeois living–sparks memories of a past when Roy was a student and emotionally unwilling to elope with Karuna when their situation demanded it. Karuna now appears stifled and unhappy in her marriage, and Roy must re-evaluate his decision.

Ray develops delicious irony through the fact that the screenwriter is researching the region in order to discover greater emotional verity (“You must write what you know,” he dully repeats) but in doing so, comes face to face with a moment in his life when his emotional integrity was utterly compromised (hence the title). Given the similarity in names and occupations between filmmaker and protagonist, one wonders if this might be an open self-critique, a laying bare of Ray’s own grapplings with conscience.

Confessional or not, it’s a deeply felt and observantly rendered mood piece that pivots on setting, camera placement, actor positions, and an editing structure that incorporates flashbacks via emotional associations: Roy’s sleepless night in bed reminds him of his last conversation with Karuna in his (ironically designed) three-cornered student apartment; a jeep tour of the countryside reminds him of his first meeting with Karuna on a public bus; Karuna’s hand reminds him of a time when he pretended to read her palm. The psychological sophistication of the film’s structure belies its simple story of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl,” a formula repeated by the jovial plantation owner to summarize the screenwriter’s craft. (Ray includes several similarly self-reflexive notes, such as having the husband ask to appear as a character in Roy’s developing screenplay, but not as a villain, a sentiment Ray upholds by emphasizing the plantation owner’s intelligence and self-awareness despite his shortcomings.)

The flashback to Roy’s student room is the film’s pivotal scene, thematically and plot-wise, in which he fails to act on his love for Karuna, and it’s a beautiful crescendo of silent intensity, beyond the couple’s initial dialogue, to a moment of painful, dawning awareness. In the sweaty, cramped confines of the three-cornered room with traffic sounds increasingly audible offscreen, Ray captures Karuna’s distressed face in the foreground with Roy receded (emotionally and physically) in the background, emphasizing the moment in a way that imprints it on the mind of the viewer; the scene hovers over the rest of the film.

Ray so often composed his own scores, which added immeasurably to the atmosphere of his films, and Kapurush is no exception; the film is graced with a beautiful, unexpectedly bluesy saxophone piece that perfectly embellishes the film’s low-key emotional tensions. A filmmaker much more diverse than is commonly assumed given the meager availability of his films in the West, Ray’s musical versatility should also come as no surprise.

I spent the past weekend experiencing Jacques Rivette’s magnificent, nearly 13-hour Out 1 (1971) at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, a film B. Kite recently described in Cinema Scope as having “joined that pantheon of broken and vanished objects ([The Magnificent] Ambersons, Greed, once and still to some extent Smile) in which, even against our better judgment, we place some unspecified hope of a definitive experience, maybe a bit too good for the world, as indicated by the fact that they live in a half-light, next door to oblivion.” It was the 1990 Rotterdam cut, a print of which has been making North American rounds (Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Berkeley) and is apparently now on its way to Seoul.

I use the word “experiencing” rather than watching or viewing, because more than most films, Out 1 is a movie that makes its overall impression on a cumulative, experiential level, amassing an ambiguous narrative comprised of documentary elements, intertextual quotes and references, and figures that are often more striking as actors than characters. As Robert Koehler (who introduced the screening) put it, the film can be seen as the “missing link” between the madness of Rivette’s L’Amour Fou and the playfulness of Celine and Julie Go Boating; Rivette expert Jonathan Rosenbaum has placed the film between the freedom of Jean Renoir and the fate of Fritz Lang.

Ultimately, Out 1 simply doesn’t follow the same creative impulses as most movies, preferring to conjure a story by collating, improvising, suggesting, and speculating until it eventually–twelve hours and forty minutes later–reaches a resting point as good as any other. One could attempt to describe the plot (which its Wikipedia page competently does) but doing so necessitates a great deal of simplification akin to describing a towering mansion by the kind of glue used in its assembly; the shape and beauty of the film lies elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the story involves two acting troupes rehearsing plays by Aeschylus, and a couple of characters on the fringes of Parisian society with their own private agendas.

The well-attended screening was offered in eight-hour chunks over two days, which included five-minute pauses between the film’s eight episodes and two dinner breaks. Contrary to the Archive’s disastrous Open City screening earlier this year, the soft-subtitling (digitally keyed live, Power Point-style) worked beautifully. Rivette once compared the experience of watching the film to one of Henri Langlois’ all-night CinÈmathËque marathon screenings of a complete Louis Feuillade serial, an apt comparison not only given Feuillade’s influence on Rivette, but also because Out 1 is similarly engrossing for those willing to engage it on its own terms; among its many pleasures are the spontaneously creative rehearsals of acting troupes, the machinations of con-artists, eccentric antics by conspiracy theorists, and even a humorous cameo by Eric Rohmer. The film’s length only fosters greater immersion into what one of its characters describes as its “magical, mysterious world” pitched between illusion and reality.

No doubt because of this, the real world seemed to fully take on Rivettean nuances. I was joined at the screening by two online friends, Jonathan Takagi, who arrived from San Diego, and Fred Patton, who arrived from San Jose, and our reunion resembled the kind of fortuitous linkage of characters seen in the film, further enhanced by our puzzling through a movie populated with characters assembling clues to their own enigmas. Most evocatively, I happened to overhear strangers–but members of an online listserve of which I’m also a member–sitting behind me, discussing their pleasures and frustrations with the forum in reference to unnamed members also seated within our auditorium. Suddenly I felt lost in a Rivettean vortex of double identities, secret societies, and an eavesdropping network of characters. Though critics have suggested metaphorical readings of Rivette’s shadow worlds, the age of the Internet seems especially relevant to the parallel realities suggested by his films.

Out 1 has been accurately described as a “film-fleuve,” and though its current may be slow, its volume is massive; one could easily follow any one of its many tributaries to vast thematic territory: a documentary portrait of its era (so much of the film is shot in the open streets of Paris), individualism versus group dynamics, play and performances in and of the film, its use of mirrors as a dominant visual motif, its cinÈma vÈritÈ and handheld camera techniques borrowed from Jean Rouch, improvisational structures versus traditionally scripted execution, etc.

On first viewing, the film struck me as a deep meditation on the mythology, rehearsal, and excitement of groupmaking (acting troupes or political alliances) that envision changing the world but in the end find themselves abstracted and disorganized to the point of disintegration. It came as no surprise when Koehler compared the movie to Eustache’s equally absorbing The Mother and the Whore (1973) and other post-1968 films in which the dreams of political revolution are seen to fizzle and sputter into inactivity, personal tragedy, and even blithe denial. Out 1 is about the excitement of discovery and subversion, which is why it’s so well served by its formal system and mode of production. But as preparation, performance and seduction gradually drift into betrayal, lucidity and abandonment, its protagonists find themselves on the downward trough of a receding wave. “We laid out the principles but we never got further,” one conspirator confesses to another. “We committed without knowing our goal.” That the film wholly succeeds in being about–and an entrancing example of–that ebb and flow of unpredictable communal energy makes it an indelible cinematic adventure.