Cut-Pieces

Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh

Lotte Hoek

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780231535151
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Asian Art

Imagine watching an action film in a small-town cinema hall in Bangladesh, and in between the gun battles and fistfights a short pornographic clip appears. This is known as a cut-piece, a strip of locally made celluloid pornography surreptitiously spliced into the reels of action films in Bangladesh. Exploring the shadowy world of these clips and their place in South Asian film culture, Lotte Hoek builds a rare, detailed portrait of the production, consumption, and cinematic pleasures of stray celluloid.

Hoek's innovative ethnography plots the making and reception of Mintu the Murderer (2005, pseud.), a popular, Bangladeshi B-quality action movie and fascinating embodiment of the cut-piece phenomenon. She begins with the early scriptwriting phase and concludes with multiple screenings in remote Bangladeshi cinema halls, following the cut-pieces as they appear and disappear from the film, destabilizing its form, generating controversy, and titillating audiences. Hoek's work shines an unusual light on Bangladesh's state-owned film industry and popular practices of the obscene. She also reframes conceptual approaches to South Asian cinema and film culture, drawing on media anthropology to decode the cultural contradictions of Bangladesh since the 1990s.

{1} WRITING GAPS

THE SCRIPT OF MINTU THE MURDERER

ONE MORNING in February 2005, I anxiously waited for a man whom I had never met. I had been asked to find the Abul Hotel, a run-down little place in Malibagh, next to a vacant lot where timber had formerly been sold. As I arrived, I gave the ubiquitous “missed call,” letting the receiving mobile phone ring only once before hanging up. He now knew that I had arrived. Although I wouldn’t recognize him, he would most definitely spot the single white woman lingering on the footpath. I looked around to decipher which man among the crowd walked toward me most purposefully. I tried to push aside the nagging misgiving that whispered I should not be in a neighborhood I didn’t know, all on my own, awaiting a man I had never met, who would take me to meet a film director and scriptwriter known for their licentious productions. I wondered how wise I had been to laugh away the concerns of my self-appointed guardians, who had warned that my “state of mind” would suffer from being around such men. Before I could contemplate whether this had been a cautious euphemism, I heard my name. A short man of about thirty-five with a peculiar lisp introduced himself to me as Nazmul Islam, assistant director. Unmindful of the traffic, he traversed the busy intersection. He took me along a narrow alley. Squashed between a wholesaler in rice and a dying company, the alley led to the entrances of three apartment buildings dating from the 1980s. The last one belonged to scriptwriter Shahed Rony.

FIGURE 1.1

PHOTO BY PAUL JAMES GOMES.

Climbing three flights of stairs, each decorated with an intricate pattern of intersecting stars, we arrived on a landing from which we could hear the sound of men’s voices. Beyond the threshold with all the abandoned sandals, an animated discussion was taking place. As we entered, the small room fell silent. At the far end of the room sat film director Shahadat Ali Shiplu, cross-legged on the plush red sofa. He motioned me to sit down next to him. After introducing me to the men gathered in the small room, he explained to them that I would stay with them for the coming months, to see how films are made in Bangladesh. He introduced me to Shahed Rony, the scriptwriter; Mohamadul Hasan Litu, the producer of the film; and Mohammad Nazmul Islam, the assistant director I had already met. The others in the room were there only for the social occasion. Rony, Litu, Nazmul, and Shiplu had come to work. Today they would think about the first lineup for Shiplu’s new film. The lineup would consist of seventy to eighty scenes, each minimally described, and this would provide the backbone of the script that would be written over the next ten days.

This chapter explores scriptwriting practices for action cinema in the Bangladesh film industry. Here I describe how Mintu the Murderer came into existence as a script and introduce its key crew members: Shiplu, Rony, Nazmul, and Litu. Providing an account of the script’s “entextualization,” or “the process of rendering a given instance of discourse as a text, detachable from its local context” (Silverstein and Urban 1996:21), I will argue that the negotiations over the development of the script were less concerned with providing a cohesive and singular narrative than with creating a textual medium from which other things might emerge, including illegal and unwritten sequences, as well as affective dispositions within an imagined audience. This script was developed through quoting other texts, as “text is created when instance[s] of discourse … are made available for repetition or recreation in other contexts (Barber 2007:22). I will show that scriptwriters “read” already existing texts or fragments of discourse (from other films and newspaper accounts to urban myths and collective fantasies) according to their potential for fulfilling three sets of conventions (genre, structure, and affective narrative strategies) that structure action scripts in predictable ways. But this script was not a finite object, as it was continually subjected to rewriting and functioned primarily because of its gaps and opacities rather than its concrete formation. This lack of stability expressed itself in the conflict between the scriptwriter and the film’s producer. While the scriptwriter concerned himself with the story, the denotational text, the producer was mainly concerned with what was not on the page, the opacities and gaps that the script produced, that which would subsequently allow the insertion of other, unscripted scenes, images, and stories: hidden cut-pieces or accounts of the “true” nature of the city that could not be directly stated.

BRAINSTORM: JUICE AND GENRE

“The opening shot will be of a guy in half-pant!” announced Rony, the scriptwriter. In quick strokes he set out a story of a villain in shorts who rose from contract killer to district commissioner. The story involved rape, corruption, slaughter, pregnancy, and suicide. Rony talked fast, the story lines coming one after the other. The action would protect college girls against the killer and his henchmen. There would be conspiracy. In a climactic fight sequence the two parties would meet head-on. “The political party idea is good,” interrupted Shiplu, “but the rest needs to be changed.” Undeterred, Rony started again. He narrated a new story of two heroes fighting parallel battles. “I don’t like it,” said Litu, the producer of the film. “We’ve had that sort of story before.” Rony sighed and went out for a break. It was hot inside; there had been no electricity all morning, and the small dark room with the heavy sofas was clammy.

When Rony returned, the brainstorming resumed. All of the men threw around film titles to find story lines or characters that could be used anew. They mentioned Bangladeshi films; Indian films in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu; Hollywood films; and a few martial arts films from Hong Kong. Rony’s most recent releases were praised and compared to other Bangladeshi films. Bombay (Mani Ratnam, 1995, India), Kansas City (Robert Altman, 1996, United States), Bap Betar Lorai (“Father Son Struggle,” F. I. Manik, 2004, Bangladesh), and Sleeping with the Enemy (Joseph Ruben, 1991, United States) were mentioned in a continuous flow of possible plots and locations. Rony asked whether they had seen a film called Blackmail (Anil Devgan, 2005, India), with Indian film star Ajay Devgan in the lead. In it Devgan’s children are kidnapped, and toward the end someone questions his love for his own children. “And then he gave this impassioned speech, with tears in his eyes,” Rony exclaimed, “Sentiment!” Spurred on, Nazmul asked whether they had seen that film with Manna and Moushumi, two of the most famous Bangladesh film stars. “They killed the hero’s wife,” Nazmul exclaimed, “and she was nine months pregnant!” He shook his head in amazement.

When the electricity went off again, most of the hangers-on took leave of Rony and left me with the core team of Shiplu, Litu, Rony, and Nazmul. In the quiet generated by the load-shedding, I asked Shiplu to explain the process of scriptwriting to me. Although the brainstorming process was rapid and seemed largely associative to me, it was structured according to a clear logic. This logic combined three sets of conventions: generic requirement, well-established structural frameworks, and a clear sense of what would appeal to the audience. Shiplu outlined these three sets of conventions for me. He first explained that there are four basic types of film in Bangladesh: social films, romantic films, action films, and folk films. These genre categories describe conventions of filmmaking, as well as audience expectations and their understanding of certain films, the “patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film maker, and the reading by an audience” (Neale 2000:12). According to Shiplu, any film made in the country could be classified into these four categories. “I make romantic action movies,” said Shiplu, “movies that focus on a love affair with an action plot.” Romantic action and its sibling “social action” (which focuses on the violent resolution of a social conflict) were the two most prominent genres in 2005. Every genre came with a certain type of script, and Rony and Shiplu’s sorting through story lines was founded on an understanding of these genres and the requirements of a romantic action film. They incorporated or rejected story lines or possible characters for the new film according to the genre conventions of the type of film they were making.

The basic requirements for a romantic action film were elaborated along a structured framework of scenes and sequences that formed the second convention for mainstream films made in Bangladesh. “A story will be divided into six song sequences, ten to twelve fight sequences, a few comedy scenes, and the rest drama,” said Shiplu. This structure is conventional for all Bangladeshi popular cinema, transcending the genre divisions. The prevalence of these elements in popular cinema across South Asia has occasioned the term masala film, likening the blend of conventional ingredients to the blend of spices in a dish (Gopalan 2003:367). While such blending may suggest a dissolution of genres, Shiplu’s framework for classifying films makes clear that despite these overlapping structural principles, the films were still clearly identified by filmmakers as separate genres.

Transcending the generic and structural requirements, there was an additional magic Shiplu hoped to add to the film. “A hit movie will combine three things,” said Shiplu, “juice, sentiment, and the question of rich and poor.” A successful romantic action movie would have to incorporate these three elements, and it is these that give mainstream Bangladeshi cinema, especially the exploitation genres, its identity and recognizability. First, juice, or rosh, was the term applied to a range of scenes that were sexually suggestive and exposed the female body in varying degrees to the public gaze. This was the most distinctive element of romantic action movies and considered their most important commercial asset. Films and scenes were called “commercial” when they featured sexually explicit or suggestive imagery, mostly contained in cut-pieces. Romantic and social action movies sold on the basis of the rumor of the presence of such scenes, filled with “juice.” The second element, sentiment, referred to melodrama, such as the murder of the pregnant woman in Nazmul’s example. Sentiment was generally produced through an expulsion from an idealized village into the harsh environment of the city. This was given additional force by the third necessary ingredient of the hit film: the juxtaposition of rich and poor. This form of social antagonism structured the narratives of romantic action cinema. “Although Allah has made us all and we all have the same blood,” explained Shiplu, “in this country there are two classes that do not mix: the rich and the poor.” The plots of action films were thus also a class exposé, outlining the immoral and corrupted lives of the wealthy and powerful and the injustices they inflicted on the poor. The elements of sex, sentiment, and social antagonism would emerge from the structural framework of scenes and sequence.

The quotidian use of the Bengali word rosh to indicate commercially viable and sexually suggestive and explicit scenes makes it easy to miss the etymological roots of this word in the Sanskrit word rāsā (I drop the diacritics from this point on), meaning, among other things, juice. Rasa, of course, is the central principle of the aesthetic theory set out in the ancient Sanskrit Natyasastra, the treatise on performance arts in ancient India (Schwartz 2004). The link becomes evident when we look at the actual use of the term rosh by these filmmakers. They applied the term rosh to particular scenes that generated a desirable response in the audience and explicitly linked this to the body as a site of dramatic expression and perception. This coincides roughly with a commonsensical understanding of rasa as the principal aesthetic goal in the performing arts.

To link the contemporary usage of the idea of rosh by Bangladeshi filmmakers to theories of rasa potentially creates more trouble than it’s worth. Does linking the contemporary production of rosh-filled films to these aesthetic treatises place contemporary Bangladesh scriptwriters of dubious artistic training into a timeless space of ancient Hindu scripture or problematically posit them at the heart of a set of debates waged by the finest of Indian aesthetes? This would only be the case if aesthetic practices and national borders are reified beyond the recognition of the inevitable blurring between low and high art, new and old borders, devotional and secular practices, the past and the spaces of modernity. The recurrence of the term rosh among these filmmakers is also less surprising if it is considered that “the sensibility of the text [Natyasastra] … has been spread throughout the subcontinent by oral transmission and by example in intense and personal context” (Schwartz 2004:4). The roots of South Asian cinema in other performance genres (Hansen 2001), the continuities in personnel in theater and the Bengali film industries (Kabir 1979; Mukherjee 2007), and the reliance on guru-shishyo styles of learning the artistic trades in the Bangladesh film industry through apprenticeships (see chapters 2 and 4) could all be used to explain the ease with which a notion of rosh finds its way into the scriptwriting discussions for a Bangladeshi action flick.

As these filmmakers refer to these scenes and their effects as rosh with such ease and frequency, I take this at face value and suggest that the evaluation of scenes on the basis of their potential for rosh can be understood as an aesthetic evaluation that draws, in whatever idiosyncratic ways, on a wider tradition of understanding performance genres in South Asia and foregrounds a concern with audience response. While such an application of the concept of rasa to cheaply produced action films and pornography might seem slightly odd, perhaps even anathema, for an anthropologist it is empirical practice, including linguistic practice, which should be paramount in the analysis of particular social practices or cultural forms. If they call it rosh, I take this seriously.

The desire for rosh and sentiment in Shiplu’s new script draws attention to the evocative mode of filmmaking in which he was engaged. Shiplu’s recipe for a hit film combined a three-pronged attack on the experiencing body: tearful sentimentality, sexual titillation, and throbbing indignation. Interested mostly in an emotive and visceral response from his audience, Shiplu’s films belonged to what Linda Williams has called “body genres,” film genres that appeal to the body of film viewers, such as melodrama, horror, and pornography (Williams 1991). Genres such as pornography are self-evidently addressed to the body, and their success is dependent on a capacity to move the body. More recent explorations of the nature of the aesthetic have similarly probed the combined visceral and mental appeal of particular aesthetic forms (Dudrah and Rai 2005; Marks 2000; Pinney 2001; Sobchack 2004). In these accounts a visceral link between the sensorium of the spectator and the aesthetic object is posited in a way that any reflection on pornography makes immediately self-evident. Except in studies by specialists such as Williams (2004), however, porn has not been a part of the recent enthusiasm for the discussion of the bodily involvement in aesthetics. Where it has been discussed, it has been seen as working so remorselessly on the body that its address is postulated as to the senses only, bypassing the intellect, mind, or consciousness. What the notion of rosh as rasa brings into focus is that it is not the body that overtakes the mind; rather, in rasa the boundaries between body and mind or spirit disintegrate (Schwartz 2004:9), and performance is “an experience at once physical, emotional and cognitive” (Schwartz 2004:50). Pornography in its various forms, distinctive across time and place, variously efficacious, becomes more meaningful when considered as a complex performance genre that aims for an arousal that cannot but be a combination of the physical and mental, firmly placed within a particular aesthetic tradition, rather than an unstructured display of genitals and the simply carnal response of the viewing body.

To write the script for the new action film, Rony combined the mercurial qualities of sex, sentiment, and social antagonism into narrative strands appropriate to the genre film he was making and stretched these across the established structure of six songs, ten fights, and some comedy. To find the story lines and characters that would conform to their generic and aesthetic needs, the team delved into an archive of other narratives available to them, evaluating them by imaginatively looking through the eyes of their imagined audience.

THROUGH THE EYES OF THE SPECTATOR: READING PRACTICES IN SCRIPTWRITING

Shahed Rony was confident about his work as a scriptwriter. He told me on a number of occasions that he would never want for work. “I know what other people want, and I can give it to them,” he said during a conversation we had near the FDC, his face a satisfied smile, “because I am educated.” Rony studied physics at Dhaka University, leaving with a master’s title, but he never worked as a physicist. His father had been a film director of some success, and Rony grew up in Dhaka around cinema. “When my father suddenly died in 1997, I took up scriptwriting full time.” In the Malibagh flat where Rony lived with his young family and widowed mother, the cabinets were decorated with his father’s national awards and trophies. Speaking to me in a mix of English and Bengali, Rony was an exception in the team. Unlike the others, Rony had grown up in Dhaka, spoke English, and was educated in reputed schools and the country’s most prestigious university. He set himself off from his audience, his colleagues, and the producers and directors who called daily at his Malibagh residence. “I own a laptop, you see,” he explained. “Others have to take weeks, writing out the dialogues by hand.”¹ He continuously reminded me that he was a member of the middle class. “I could write ‘class’ films or films for the channels,” Rony sugges...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Pseudonyms
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Before Mintu the Murderer
• 1. Writing Gaps: The Script of Mintu the Murderer
• 2. A Handheld Camera Twisted Rapidly: The Technology of Mintu the Murderer
• 3. Actress/Character: The Heroines of Mintu the Murderer
• 4. Cutting and Splicing: The Editor and Censor of Mintu the Murderer
• 5. Noise: The Public Sphere of Mintu the Murderer
• 6. Unstable Celluloid: The Exhibition of Mintu the Murderer
• Conclusion: After Mintu the Murderer
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List