Long Life of a Short Film
by Riyad Vinci Wadia
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Filmmaker Riyad Vinci Wadia
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This is part three of a four-part series. Please
read part one,
part two,
and part four.
Watch BOMgAY in the
PlanetOut Online Cinema.
Because of Raj's deadline things moved at such a speed that even today I am
amazed that we were able to create what we did in such quick span. Perhaps it was
this very speed that allowed the film to come from the subconscious and not from
some calculated or thought out plan. After putting the phone down on Raj I called
up my friend Jangu Sethna. Jangu was one of the few gay men in Bombay who had
been out since his childhood in the early '70s. He had worked in film production
in various capacities over the years and had a keen sense of the urban gay
culture of Bombay. He had switched careers in the early nineties and had become a
respected landscape artist. I was keen to collaborate with Jangu and asked him to
come on board this project as my associate director. A few hours later we were
sipping coffee and he and I started to furiously discuss ideas on our interpretation of
Raj's poems.
The next morning we had our storyboards down on paper. We felt good. We had let
our stream of consciousness flow wild and true and we had come up with images and
story lines that came from our collective experiences. I was clear about one
thing when we started the ideating process: we were not going to fall shy or act
coy just to please some societal norms. We were going to make a short film as we
saw it. The only restriction would be the budget. I had earmarked a total budget
of two hundred thousand rupees (then equivalent to approximately $5000). We were
determined to shoot on Beta, as film would have been prohibitive and a far
lengthier process, difficult to achieve in our timeframe. There is an inherent
difficulty in translating the objectivity of poetry to the subjectivity of film.
A poem offers unlimited variations to interpretation to a single reader each time
that reader goes through it. In visualizing the film Jangu and I were freezing
once and for all a visualization of the poems as we saw them on the day we drew
the storyboards.
Now came the tough part. Putting together a team of professionals to work on a
film that's bound to gain some notoriety is not easy. In India making a film that
will shake mountains or threaten the peace is not considered avant-garde; it's
seen as being childish. "Five thousand years of cultural evolution" is a phrase
often thrown at any attempt to contest the status quo. I was keen to involve as
many people from the gay community in Bombay as I could but found after a few
initial phone calls that most fought shy of coming on camera or working behind
the scenes for fear of being clearly identified. It was the old syndrome: if you
work on a gay film then you must be gay. Just as, "If you had a friend who
identified himself as gay, ergo you were gay." This prompted me to call in some
of my friends who were clearly not gay. I brought in Neha Parikh, a senior
production manager, and got her to make the initial phone calls. This worked
wonders. She got Tejal Patni, a heterosexual, who was the "hot" new videographer
in Bombay. He was then producing a popular fashion show on Channel V. We
contracted Ashutosh Phaatak, also a heterosexual, to do the music score.
Ashutosh, now a major music director in India, was then starting out and had just
the musical sensibilities I felt this film needed. Plus he had really cute hands.
Casting was proving to be tricky; I decided to tackle this myself. When I was
very young my grandfather had shared with me a trade secret. He told me that he
always went for the most difficult aspects of a job first and then finished up
with the easier tasks. In our case, getting an actor to perform in the nude, with
some frontal nudity; we knew was going to be the make-or-break aspect of our
film. If we could convince two actors to do this for the sequence we had set in
the public library then we were assured that our worries were over. I called my
friend Rahul Bose. He was an actor of some repute in India, having performed on
the legitimate theatre and done one feature film. That film was Dev Benegal's
independent masterpiece English August, where Rahul had played the central
role. There were some sequences in the film that were clearly homoerotic and
Rahul had done some nudity in that film, too. I decided to play reverse
psychology on Rahul and told him I was casting for an experimental art film and
wondered if he had met any actors that he could recommend to me for the principal
roles. I told him about the library sequence and said I need a really talented
and fearless actor for that sequence. Rahul immediately suggested himself but I
told him to consider it as he had a high profile and it may not be wise of him to
take on a role that could have adverse effect on his career. It is to his merit
as an actor that he saw through my bluff and told me to fuck off feeding him that
crap line. That same afternoon he was at my office and we went over the script.
He loved it and was all ideas as to how he would do it. I offered him both
choices: to play the "sodomiser" or the "sodomisee" (sic). Sensing that the
latter was the more challenging, he opted for that.
Once we had an actor of Rahul's standing in the film, the rest of the roles
filled in easily. My pitch to others went, "Well, we have Rahul in.É Now do you
want to do it?" And they did. There were some that accepted to do the film in the
name of "the cause" as well. Within 48 hours of starting the venture we had
shaped the film as an "important" work of "socio-politics" that "needed" to be
made. My own coming out in Bombay society and the fact that I was making the film
under the venerated banner of my family's company, Wadia Movietone, also added
legitimacy. For the narration of Raj's poetry we requested the Nation Award
winning actor Rajit Kapur to lend his voice. Rajit is one of the leading actors
in India's art and independent film scene and that year had made a splash in
Shyam Benegal's The Making of the Mahatma, playing the role of a dashing
Mahatma Gandhi. When Rajit agreed to participate in our venture I was overjoyed.
It showed that the film we were making was being taken for all the seriousness
that we had intended.
Getting permissions to locations was especially benefitted by the fact that we
were a recognized film unit and not some new kids on the block out to have fun or
disturb the peace. Within six days of starting we were on a roll. There were a
few glitches -- some actors that dropped out at the nth hour and some locations
(especially the underground bathrooms and shooting on the train) that had to be
used "guerrilla" style. The most stressful shoot was the library sequence where
the librarian supervising the location had to be distracted and led away while
our actors got nude and simulated sex. The librarian kept trying to hang around
the set and the actors (Rahul Bose and Kushal Punjabi) became adept at slipping
in and out of clothes every time he would reappear without notice. At one point
the librarian caught on to what was going on and started to scream, saying, "You
are making a perverted porno." Jangu Sethna expertly handled the situation by
reasoning with the librarian, "How can Wadia Movietone, the maker of great Indian
cinema films for over 60 years, be involved in something so base!" The librarian
then accepted our lie that we were making a social service film about ragging on
college campuses! I had to sign a letter stating the same and only then did the
librarian agree to let us proceed.
While such incidences in retrospect seem funny, the real threat of being caught
by the law making this film was felt by all of us at the time. It was a fear
based on the fact that we were breaking the law. To start with, we were making a
film about homosexuality and quite openly depicting acts of homosexuality --
crimes punishable with life imprisonment in India under the Indian Penal Code. We
could also have been booked under several other laws for making what could easily
be termed "lewd," "lascivious," "perverted" films. Our actors could have been
hauled to jail, as could the crew and our suppliers. This threat was not taken
lightly by us and we went through the entire shoot constantly keeping an eye out
for any potential trouble. Section 337, which states that carnal intercourse
against the course of nature is punishable by life incarceration, is a law that
has seldom come to the courts but is used repeatedly by the police and the state
to threaten, coerce bribes from, and subjugate the public. A relic inherited from
the English colonial period, this law has seldom been discussed because to
discuss it would invite a description of sexual behavior, something that most
Indians shy away from.
When the shoot was completed we rushed right into post-production and because of
the sensitive nature of our material I decided to edit the film on an Avid system
myself. What initially emerged were six short films ranging in length from 30
seconds to two minutes. All together they made for nine minutes of running time.
Jangu and I were very excited with our work; we knew we had done justice to our
vision. Our next concern was how we planned to present it. We showed the six
vignettes to friends, both straight and gay, and listened to what they had to
say. Most felt that we would need to put these films into some sort of context.
I, too, felt that if I was to screen these films for a more general public then I
would have to find a way to deflect the films' strong images (and Raj's very
strong poetry) by some sort of covert gimmick. I decided to set the six films in
a sequence and inter-title these with a quasi socio-political construct. While
the language of the inter-titles was academic, the thoughts expressed in them by
me were heartfelt. They helped give our film a veneer of respectability that
otherwise would have been seen as simply provocative. Our final film was now
twelve minutes long.
Now came the all-important decision: to get the film sent for censorship or not.
We debated this for a long while and came to the conclusion that it would be an
exercise in futility. The film not only contained images that would be seen as
profane but also had language that was unacceptable to current censor laws. We
knew that all we would achieve would be to create controversy and that was not
our intention. Instead, I devised a plan that I felt would be much more
effective. The plan rose out of my understanding of advertising and marketing,
trades I had experience with as an ad filmmaker.
There is a hierarchy in the media and arts. Film is at the top of the hierarchy,
followed by literature, followed by journalism, followed by visual arts like
painting and sculpture. Film is at this exalted pedestal because it has the
potential to reach the widest audience and cut across social and educational
barriers. It is also seen as the medium that is the most expensive and
collaborative to work with, hence any idea that can be made into a film must have
passed through much discussion and consideration before making it to its final
form. While this is not entirely true, especially in the Mickey Mouse world of
video production, it is a reputation that the film medium generates. And it is
this reputation that allows film to be used for propaganda in the most effective
way. And it was with a propagandist stance that I went about marketing and
screening BOMgAY.
Watch BOMgAY in the
PlanetOut Online Cinema.
You can purchase a VHS copy ofBOMgAYfrom Wadia Movietone, NYC. E-mail the distributor at
cinema@mindspring.com or visit the Web site
www.wadiamovietone.com.
This is part three of a four-part series. Please
read part one,
part two,
and part four.
This essay is part of the landmark book, Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade
edited by Andrew Grossman for the Haworth Press.
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