Ten years ago I had a talk
with a Bengali film critic. When I praised Anup Singh´s Ritwik
Ghatak-homage Ekti Nadir Naam (The Name of a River), the
critic answered that he (Singh) was not one of us:” That irritated
me a lot, not only I consider his dreamlike poetic reflection on
Ghatak as one of the finest homages one filmmaker dedicated to
another, I felt uncomfortable with this arbitrary and easy use of
“us” and who belongs to what etc. This memory came back to my
mind when I saw last summer Anup Singh´s latest film The Song of
Scorpions during a Film festival in Berlin with the strange name
“Indo-German Film festival. In the discussion after the film, Singh
explained his decision to cast the female main character with the
Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani. He met her once during a
festival and they had intense discussions about Singh´s previous
film Qissa and as well about what it means being exiled from
one´s country and culture (Farahani is exiled from Iran since 2012).
Finally Farahani plays a woman from Rajastan. The often overused
terms like home or identity are often fixed values in different
civilizations. But they can be taken away from us very quickly. Singh described her
character Nooran as “exiled from her house, her family and finally
from her body”.
In the three films by Anup
Singh (who was born in Tanzania) exile appears always in the complex
meaning of this word. All his characters (as well in his poetic
essayistic Ghatak Homage) are uprooted exiled and homeless. Irrfan
Khans and Tilotama Shomes characters in Qissa or Irrfan Khans
and Golshifteh Farahani´s characters in The Song of the Scorpions
offer visible embodiments of what Kumar Shahani said once on Ritwik
Ghatak that partition does not only mean a geographical partition but
a partition which goes through body and soul of the people.
Singh called his new film
as inspired by folk tales. This invites me to compare it with another
great contemporary film which takes place in Rajastan and is also
inspired by a folktale, Lajwanti by Pushpendra Singh. While
Lajwanti presents an image of human civilization where the
people are deeply rooted in their landscape and culture and what we
call identity. The world in Lajwanti might be already an echo
of a world which is already lost - but that is another field. The
world in The Song of Scorpions is already introduced as a
world in the process of going apart. If I am as a spectator in
Lajwanti an invisible guest who can contemplate, in The Song
of Scorpions I feel an uncanny and painful closeness to the
cameleer Aadam (Irrfan Khan) and the young healer Nooran (Golshifteh
Farahani and their disrooting from a world they once belonged to.
These two great films
present two sides of cinema, the first reminds us that we are part of
the world, part of our culture, of all we call home, the other film
reminds us this certainty is not guaranteed. It is bit like we see
first a film by Ozu and later a film by Ghatak.
There is for example the
tradition of healing. Nooran is learning from her grandmother Zubaida
(Waheeda Rehman) the art of healing. A sting of a scorpion can kill a
person in 24 hours. These healer can safe lives when they literally
sing the poison out of the body of the victims. But this tradition
carried from one generation to the next is endangered. Nooran is not
yet ready to replace Zubaida and the old woman herself is close to
the end of her life. There is the threat that this circulation will
be interrupted. I remember an intense glance of Waheeda Rehman the
moment before she falls into sleep which is intense and at the same
time a reminder of cinema as the art of presenting glances. The fact
that is the last moment of her appearance in this film makes this
moment the more unforgettable. This notion of disappearance and death
stays with me.
Another narrative element
is the relationship between Nooran and Aadam. There is no chance that
a kind of love story can develop, just two lost souls who never
should have met appear. One gets an idea of this disaffected
relationship which will be confirmed much later through Aadam´s very
cruel intrigue. Nooran is attacked and hurt by a friend of Aadam. The
grandmother has already disappeared and might be dead. As the film
proceeds Nooran agrees to be Aadam´s second wife (after she rejected
him before) the tragedy unfolds.
When one of Aadam´ s
children asks her to sing the song that heals a sting from a scorpion
she answers, that she can not sing anymore because the poison is
inside her.
A central visual motive in
this film is the harsh contrast between darkness and light, night and
day. At night one sees only fireplaces, vague silhouettes of people
and sometimes reflections of traces of light in their eyes. It is a
darkness almost as a night sky with far distant stars. During the day
the sun burns merciless on people, animals and the desert landscape.
In both extremes people appear as exposed and vulnerable.
The contrast between
darkness and light presents also two extreme poles of cinema, the
inspiration, imagination caused by things we can rather guess than
notice. The other extreme is the burning sun during the day. It burns
merciless on the faces of these actors. No detail can escape our
attention. They are exposed and for a moment the thin layer of
fiction is suspended behind a strong feeling for the physical
presence of Golshifteh Farahani and Irrfan Khan. Cinema can not exist
without light, but here light appears as well as an destructive
power.
Near the end there are
some close ups of the faces of Irrfan Khan and Golshifteh Farahani.
It has an intensity which is only sensible on a big screen.These are
faces of two lost souls in a failed relationship and a civilization
which goes apart.
This fatal combination of
human failure and the indifference of nature in this desrt landscape
give the film an almost apocalyptical taste like the ending moments
in films like Erich von Stroheim´s Greed or Ritwik Ghatak´s
Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (The River Titash), moments which are
literally burnt in my memory.
Nooran disappears at the
end just like her Grandmother and more or less this film is as well a
film about disappearance.
In a sentimental and
blissful mood, I often consider Cinema as my true home but
nevertheless a film like The Song of the Scorpions can remind
us as well how fragile these terms home or identity are and that they can be taken from us without warning. There is a kind of cinema through
which we approach at least an idea how to dwell in the world as
strange or familiar it appears and there is a cinema in which we have
to redefine our place in the world.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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