Urbain BIZOT
Thirst and Mourning
about a masterpiece
— In memory of
Guru Dutt —
Now that in its whole, cinema has so obviously ceased to be an art, and has taken its place, with a sort of silly pride, among various kinds of industry, time has come to evoke a masterpiece of rare beauty, and to pay a well deserved homage to one of its most important names, to somebody who remained unknown or almost unknown by the mass audience, if not, quite often, by the “ specialised ” clubs of those who call themselves cinema-lovers.
Indian filmmaker Guru Dutt Shiv Shankar Padukone (born
on July 9th 1925 at Bangalore, committed suicide on October 9th
at Bombay), was not in the usual sense a filmmaker, but an immense poet, expressing
himself through the camera. One may assume that this is truly the only way to
be a “ film-maker ”, but then, there have been very few of them.
Through the few films he was free to produce according to his own taste, Guru
Dutt deserves without hesitation to be compared to such great filmmakers as
Charles Chaplin or Orson Welles; his masterpiece would have put André Breton in
rapture as much as did Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson. In India, i. e.
in the midst of what was and still is the worst film production in the world
(from which the western audience just homoeopathically extracted Satyajit Ray
as a moviemaker acting at his best for the western audience), Guru Dutt was an
exception, trying to speak to the Indian audience with respect to its taste, while
also trying to load the traditional stylistic forms with a radical content,
profound and unexpected, without compromising with mere Entertainment.
˙
His works’ list is quite short: he shot some negligible
films, much too adapted to his time’s taste, on behalf of the Navket
Productions company of Dev Anand, Baazi
(The Gamble) in 1951, Jaal (The Net) in 1952, Baaz (The Falcon)
in 1953, then, on behalf of his own production company, Guru Dutt Productions,
later on becoming the Guru Dutt Films Private Limited, he already used a more
personal tone in 1954 with Aar Paar (This side or the other), then with Mr
and Mrs 55 in 1955. Thanks to the financial success of this comedy and to
thus earned independence, he achieved in 1958 his masterpiece, totally alien to
what came before : Pyaasa (Thirsting), the script having been
written as early as in 1948, and being constantly improved by Dutt since then.
The next film, in 1959, was Kaagaz ke phool (Fake flowers), a sincere
and much appropriate critic of cinema’s deceiving and deadbringing world, and,
therefore, a commercial flop. Due to this, Guru Dutt ceased any activity in his
own name ; in 1962 he had Sahib bibi aur ghulam (The master, the
mistress and the slave) directed by his talented dialogue-writer Abrar Alvi,
but was nevertheless participating himself to the shooting, and not only as an
actor. This was a second flop, and also his last: Dutt became even more alcohol-addicted
than before, played some second roles in various films, and committed suicide
in the middle of a shooting.
˙
Pyaasa appears as the story of a pariah. The main theme is linked to modern
time’s constantly strengthening paradox that refined and sincere culture (for
example the culture of Vijay, the poet played by Guru Dutt with utmost tact and
distinction) is of no help for gaining a place in society, but rather forms a
major handicap for achieving it. Like in all Third World countries, India was
torn apart between an old traditional culture, dominated by religious morality
(and, among others, by the cult of the dead), and modern obsession for
business, greedy and cynical. A civilised and sensitive individual has no place
in a world that is no longer anything else than a boxing ring for such
adversaries, whose party he can by no means consider as his own. Too modern and
too clear-sighted to adopt the religious consolation’s servile rites, Dutt was at
the same time too conscious of a classical humanism to get unreluctantly corrupted
by commerce’s needs : he saw on the contrary that commerce does not spare
anything in life, and spreads itself like this very prostitution that Dutt
shows as the main force dominating the world (scenes he devotes to this
question are the realistic portrait of what now the Third World’s daily life
has become ; besides, if it is true that the most miserable most deserve
that the world should be changed for their sake, Guru Dutt is right giving the
most respectable and clear-sighted role to Gulabo the prostitute, played by the
very beautiful and moving actress Waheeda Rehman). Crushed between the teeth of
this impossible alternative (religious tradition versus mercantile corruption),
Vijay will have another danger to escape from, more attractive than all others:
the individual way out – literary glory, spectacular passion for the
exceptional drop-out, the “ accursed poet ”. Thus, he will reach the
end of the film with totally empty hands, and dive into a shapeless emptiness.
The scenario evolves in more precise terms as follows
(I am using the description of P. Parrain, only occasionally modified by
footnote):
A young poet without money has his works rejected by a
slightly foolish publisher, and is also thrown out of his home by his greedy
brothers. He strays along the streets, homeless, and, in the night, suddenly
listens to a song he wrote himself before loosing its text : a few steps
away from him, a woman sings to catch his attention, a prostitute, leading him
softly to her door. While he tries to speak about his lost song, she refuses to
listen and pushes him away when hearing he’s short of money. A paper fallen
from the young man’s pocket shows her that he is indeed the author of the song
she was singing just before, and now she tries desperately to find him again. Meanwhile,
Vijay (the young poet) happens to meet a former classmate who suggests going to
the reunion of past classmates. There, Vijay meets Meena, the girl he had
fallen in love with as a teen [i].
As he sings one of his poems the audience has been asking for, melody and text
overwhelm the girl’s heart, bringing old memories into life, and recreating a
bond that had vanished. In the meantime, she had married a publisher, who now
proposes Vijay to come to his office; but as the poems do not please him, and
moved by pity, he offers Vijay a position as a servant in his household [ii].
This lasts until a qawali [iii]
occurs, and until it is the servant who starts singing a song of his own in
front of a charmed audience.
But admiration is not what he is looking for. The tear on
Meena’s cheek did not escape his view, and when his song ends, Meena’s chair is
empty, rocking all alone. Vijay looks for her and asks her for an explanation.
He reproaches treachery, but she answers necessity: she had to survive, and,
unlike him, she was not able to sacrifice her material desires, waiting for
Vijay to become well known and rich. Her husband listens to the conversation.
Vijay has to leave. Unable to reach his ideal, the young poet drinks heavily,
and is rescued by a girl who happens to be the prostitute’s friend. The
prostitute is still searching for him, having fallen in love with him [iv].
When dawn breaks, Vijay escapes from the prostitute’s home and, trying to
commit suicide, causes the death of a poor bloke [v]
to whom he gave his last property: his coat. By mistake, the media announces
Vijay’s death. The book publisher agrees to publish the manuscript, called
Shadows, as long as the prostitute pays for it, while Vijay is locked up in an
asylum. There, everybody refuses to recognise him as the new literary celebrity
he became overnight, including his brothers and the publisher. One day, he
manages to escape from the asylum, and comes to a giant meeting in his own
honour. He starts singing one of his poems and is acclaimed by the audience,
but he pretends not to be the Vijay all are looking for, causing the crowd’s
anger [vi].
Once again, he has to escape, leaving mass admiration and commerce vultures
behind him, running away for a country where he probably will again be
misunderstood, or maybe loved for himself. Meena refuses to join him for this
quest: to her, this is meaningless. Only the prostitute listens to his call,
and both disappear in the void landscape, as a stormy wind takes away in the
same swirl mankind and papers.
˙
First of all, it is important to refuse the
traditional praise of this film, saying that it is a great “romantic”
masterpiece. People speak of “romanticism” only to speak of reactions that are
foreign to their own behaviour. It is sufficient that someone refuses
compromise or corruption to be considered as a “romantic”. This common place
says more about the people using it than it does about whom they are speaking
of, and it reduces any authentic expression of life to an artistic fashion
among others, occurred at the beginning of the XIXth Century. Saying
that a work is “romantic” is merely reducing it to something irrational, which
we tolerate only because we secretly despise it, refusing that it might have
any real content, or any effective impact. Although Pyaasa possesses a
dreamlike beauty, the story can by no means be reduced to a simple dream.
˙
The film’s first content appears in my opinion to be
this: Vijay, a young poet educated in a bourgeois manner, is hardly thoughtful of
people’s reactions around him. Nothing surprising, therefore, that he doesn’t
understand others, and is fooled by a stuck-up go-getter like Meena.
Hermetically concentrated on his “śuvre”, he behaves like the traditional
egotist called “artist”, fully absorbed in narcissistic contemplation of his
own production. Only thanks to his social breakdown and to his becoming a
down-and-out, Vijay will learn the essential: poetry is not so much an “śuvre”
than a mean of communication. Also that his poems do not have to be recognised
by a literary audience, something that does not really matter, but that they
have to be active in people’s life. Examples, though, are abundant: Gulabo, is
charming her clients with Vijay’s poems; Abdul Sattar, the masseur, is entertaining
likewise his customers, and, later on, distracts the attention of the asylum’s
guards to free Vijay; Gosh uses the poems to pretend, publicly and falsely, to
have some humanity; Vijay’s singing his poem in front of his audience allows
him to turn the situation around and make people angry with his supposed
official “friends”; etc. All this (real use of art, effective social impact of
art) occurs more or less without Vijay’s being conscious of it – until he
understands that Gulabo loves him because initially she had loved and
understood his poems. Then, his mental yoke bursts, and the work’s fetishism is
broken: separate art has to be refused, because of the necessity of overcoming
an art that would stay in the margin of a missing life, and would comply with
this state of things. Life itself has to become art. At the same time arises
the question of the power of speech, and of the reality of thoughts. Instead of
being satisfied with the standard opinions that, for some, speech is real, and,
for others, speech is unreal, Guru Dutt develops a subtle dialectic showing
that words take their impact only in certain, quite determined conditions. Some
day, Vijay’s poems are a big commercial success, but only at the cost of being misunderstood,
and merely consumed by “literary
amateurs”. The sole person able to understand them has nothing to do with a
literary status: Gulabo had known the poems’ despair in her own flesh, and the
poems came to her as the conscience comes to reality. Literature has to be
destroyed in order to free what’s inside. The separate status of art is nothing
but a malediction, words mean something only amidst struggle for life. Gulabo
didn’t love any man because love was her commerce. She just loved these words
she found by chance, she, the illiterate, but also the only
“ cultivated ”. In these words she had found the feeling for life
that life did not offer her, so how could she abstain from loving Vijay
instantly, the man who took these words out of his own heart ? As long as
imprisoned by official means of distribution, words are sentenced to radical
powerlessness, but they transform into an extraordinary power when they play in
direct communication between two living beings.
˙
The second theme revealing itself in the film is
systematic contest against a society based on money. As wrote Henri Micciollo,
“ his hatred for the rich and his passionate love for the humble ”
are constant and essential features of Guru Dutt. There is hardly any element
of Guru Dutt’s style and taste that do not express his plebeian sensitiveness
(or, even more than plebeian, on the fringe, outcast). His disgust for money
could belong to a character of Prévert, and Dutt never ceases to express his
refusal of this kind of jail (poor, or golden, no matter). No sphere escapes
the picture of corruption : neither family feelings, nor sexual
attraction, nor intellectual respect. Vijay staggers from his greedy brothers,
his greedy publisher, his corrupted beloved to a city disrupted by
prostitution, from one misery to another, and the film looks like a never
ending series of plunges made by somebody more and more drunk, this of course
being in line with the movie’s title and also with Guru Dutt’s real life.
Refusal of money and of society’s breakdown because of money, we hardly can
emphasize it enough, is never compensated, with Guru Dutt, by some kind of
nostalgia for an ancient order, or, even less, by any sympathy for religion. No
doubt that this man was especially moving because of his simultaneous and
indissociable accusations against the ancient social order and the new
one : a radicalism for which he paid a tremendous price.
˙
The part played by an artist in contemporary society
is characterised - and this will be the third theme - as oscillating between a
domesticated monkey performing in literary salons, and a simple servant, like
Vijay hired by Gosh. In the artist’s status, nothing is acceptable, and glory
most surely least of all. One has tried hard to forget the considerable
reluctance with which this new status was received in the 19th and
at the beginning of the 20th Century : nowadays, no debate on
this matter is tolerated any longer, because the artist modelled his behaviour
on the part of a public entertainer rewarded by a lucrative industry, and
wishes by no means that any light might be thrown on the slavish reality thanks
to which he earns his amazing privileges. This debate, that some people
consider as obsolete as far as they do not wish to take it out of the dustbin
where they concealed it, obviously runs right through Guru Dutt’s film :
therefore, some feel this is supposedly a fairly outdated film-maker. But, at
the same time he shows this altogether privileged and slavish status of the
artist, Guru Dutt creates an increasing distance of Vijay to this role of his,
despite the fact that formerly he was claiming it. The evolution of this
complex is quite right and consistent. As long as he was an artist, Vijay was
altogether victim and onlooker of this misery : his passive role as a
spectator made a victim out of him. On two occasions he realizes what’s up with
it : at the time of the public meeting in his honour, while he is believed
to be dead, he reappears and tries to take the crowd along with him towards
revolt and violent destruction of all that opposes to the will for life
(tradition, money, greed, urban poverty) ; and, at the end of the film,
when Vijay leaves this country sentenced to founder, and could not find any
other ally than lovely Gulabo. Then, he has ceased to be an artist, because he has
become a man.
˙
Fourth theme, and not the least important : quite
often, Vijay denounces the kind feelings people are supposed to have for the
dead, but not for the living. Vijay, no doubt, is in a proper position to be
fed up with this absurd attitude, for as long as he was alive, nobody took any
interest in him, whereas, since he is supposed to be dead, his friends and fans
are countless. At first sight, this looks like a critic of some religious
tradition in India, and of course, this is true. But it would be shortsighted
to stick to this sole explanation. Guru Dutt does not express himself in the
India of the Kushâna-Gupta era, but in a country already largely dominated by
modern capitalist economy, and where the spectacle made massively his
appearance - Bombay’s movie industry is quite a good example for it. So we have
to understand the cult of the dead exactly as it exists in the Western
world : not as religious fact (at least in the traditional sense of
religion), but as the logical result of a preference for fiction. What is the
basic form of a unreal person ? A
dead. In their lifetime, celebrities are already quite unreal, but when they
die, their unreality leaps forward. How many groupies prostrate with grief on
Jim Morrison’s tumb, burst out crying in Elvis Presley’s bedroom, or, climbing
up the molehill of Solutré, holding some bottle of beer in their hand, to
honour the memory of a dead President whom his majordomo announced as
“ socialist ” ? The carrion cult, though now supposedly profane,
takes considerable proportions. Processions are endless. TV programs could not
survive without commemorations. For sure, Guru Dutt was particularly right in
giving this question a central position. Light is shed on tumbs only, while the
living sink into oblivion.
˙
Fifth theme, perhaps the most concealed, but not the
least important : the subject’s identity. The poet Vijay’s advance is an
evolution like in the German Bildungsroman, the story of a man in search
of himself. Vijay walks out of this story deeply changed, but not as American
scenarios would see it (that is by discovering himself as he always was, as if
he had had a “ nature ” just ready to be discovered, an idiosyncratic
private nature like preferring Pepsi to Coca or Pall Mall to Peter Stuyvesant).
No, Vijay does not “ discover ” himself, he makes himself. The best
evidence for this is that he tries to avoid such a necessity until the end,
being stuck with regrettable stubbornness to some artistic recognition. His
choice is precisely to stay faithful to his initial shape as a poet, thus
renouncing to the living feeling that he is dwelling in, or to renounce to this
status, in order to save his feelings. Finally, that’s what he does, but only
when pushed to the breaking point, when missing any other alternative. But it’s
also greatly to his credit, let’s not forget it, that he stuck to his line
without any compromise, until, for such reasons, his position became
irreconcilable. Guru Dutt offers permanent variations on the identity’s
quest : Vijay’s brothers deny his identity ; he renounces to
recognition by his mother so that she would not take charge of him ;
awakening from coma at the lunatics’ asylum, he does not remember his
identity ; in front of the audience acclaiming him, he pretends not to be
himself ; the beggar dies with Vijay’s identity in his pocket ; and,
last but not least, the whole story started because Vijay wanted to be
recognized for himself. All kinds of identity vanish, such as social, family,
professional identity, there only remains the kind of identity to which the
path of life leads on. But this ultimate kind of identity is closely linked
with a sixth theme : Death.
˙
Stirb, und werde ! This idea, as old as ancient initiatory practice,
perfectly summarizes the film’s scansion, and is the sixth theme. But such an
injunction, of religious origin, has been profoundly transformed. The tyranny
of interest and the expropriation of meaning and sense caused everywhere by
this tyranny, force us “ to die, in order to live ”, insofar as a
direct, immediate access to life is denied. But if it is true that life is
blocked, barred by a previous death of subjectivity, which Freud rather unduely
called “ principle of reality ”, by an initiation to oneself’s
corpse, disalienation has no other way to take than the one alienation took
itself, and the subject, if wanting to arise, has to die as self-image, as it
is reflected by the ruling system of illusion. Conversely, if one dies,
insofar, once or twice per life just to be born again and to really become
oneself, it is clear that there is no life whatsoever after physical death.
Guru Dutt achieved an astonishing combination of these two dimensions of life,
to some extent a synthesis of ancient mystical sensitivity and atheistic, radical
lucidity. Of course, things being as they are, such lucidity leads to a despair
of irremediable darkness. Vijay has to pass through the death corridor, and
this leads to nothing, if not to the intuition of a life that does not yet
exist. In front of this disarmed intuition without return, there is nothing but
global mediocrity, a death taking itself for life, numskulls’ limbo. Some could
be tempted to put this darkness on the account of “ Indian
fatalism ”, but who could be satisfied with such an “ explanation ”,
while situations of the same kind multiply and spread everywhere, most of
today’s humanity coming to life without a tiny hope to live, some day,
somewhere ? Who, amidst contemporary globalizing misery, would dare to
speak of choice ? The simple fact to be born in one or other of the
numerous regions despised and rejected by the corporate market and division of
labour secures to each newcomer (and there are plenty of newcomers in such
areas !) the existence of a worm ; or of a mayfly ; or of a torch burning
with AIDS ; or of a sperm-bin, exhausted at the age of 14 ; or of an
ambulant corpse, whose photo is taken just before dying by representatives of a
“ humanitarian ” organisation. Vijay’s initial preoccupation (like
all artists : to “ express ” oneself, to be heard) has faded
away, leaving its place to the fact that it is completely pathetic in a world
where all men or nearly are deprived of it. Concerning the will to express
himself, Vijay had to gain knowledge of its real status : for most, what seeks
for expression is hunger, thirst, and the weariness of having to sell oneself.
After all, only this thirst remains. Vijay’s story is one of a thirsting man,
learning about the tremendous size of all preconditions to his own
thirst : the thirst for life includes the need to survive, and the dissatisfaction of the second
forbids to speak of the first, because life as it is produces and reproduces
the lack of any reasonable solution for survival. Material poverty reduces man
to the level of animals, deprives him not only of the humanity he is thirsting
for, but of the thirst itself.
˙
Now, how could we avoid speaking of Vijay’s psychical
state, which Guru Dutt achieved to transform with technical perfection into the
film’s atmosphere ? A pure question of cinematographic style ? Why
not, but in the sense that this style is included in the film’s very meaning.
Vijay is a poet, by two kinds of sensitiveness : he is often led to
introspection, and the film reveals all that moves him. But all that moves
other people is also moving Vijay as if it were himself. As far as this
sensitivity is concerned, the strongest scene is probably Vijay’s distress when
facing street prostitution. At no moment Vijay rejects prostitution from the
viewpoint of morality, rather Vijay looks at the prostitutes as if he were
belonging to them - something made easier by the fact that being heavily drunk
erases the borders of his ego. And we watch a strange face-to-face between the
reality of prostitution and its separate conscience (Vijay). Cinema has few
examples of this kind [vii].
Guru Dutt is able to create something like poetry of critical conscience,
presence of critical conscience as poetry. This state of mind (something like
uninterrupted, and therefore painful open-mindedness) gives the film its global
tonality (at the beginning, the poet watches how a bee is smashed by a
foot ; and in the end, he understands how humanity in its entirety is
smashed). Therefore, too, the film will keep wavering between reality and
dream, dream being of course a refuge to escape real misery, but dream also
imposing itself to reality as the truest way of living (“ in this film,
everything happens as in an enchanted castle ; encounters, episodes,
everything floats in semi-unconscience. At any moment, reality might slip into
the dream ” writes P. Parrain). Vijay looks at reality without turning off
the inner machine. Insofar, Pyaasa is strictly speaking a great surrealistic
film. And what Parrain calls a semi-unconscience is rather a higher degree of
conscience. Pyaasa is a fully integrated stylistic composition, far more even
than what Henri Micciollo said about it [viii].
There is a complete fusion, made consistent through style, between Vijay’s
point of view, reality he is watching, and the film-audience’s perspective.
Quite symptomatic are the pictures where the camera watches Vijay from behind
while Vijay himself watches something (very similar to the technique often used
by the great painter Caspar David Friedrich, for whom mourning was also a
predominant feeling). Vijay’s sadness characterizes a powerless
spectator : but this is not a kind of more or less pathological personal
feature of Dutt, it is rather the sine qua non condition for having the
film-audience itself confronted with the misery watched by Vijay, without
softening, soothing or transforming its own feelings through an active reaction
of the hero, which of course would be fictitious. Vijay is not a anti-hero in
the stupid sense of a ridiculous hero, but in the sense of someone who does not
master the catastrophe’s progress, not more than we do in the theatre or at
home.
The unity of style does not consist only in the visual
part. The least one could say is that Guru Dutt did not neglect dialogues, all
of them being brilliant (dialogues written by Abrar Alvi, and lyrics by Sahir
Ludhviani), nor the music, of an bewitching sweetness (S. D. Burman). Songs,
traditionally imposed to the Hindi scenarios to “ entertain ” and
“ relax ” the audience, are totally integrated into the story, and,
as Henri Micciollo remarked, generally represent the expressive summit, the
acme, the superior stage made necessary by the previous pictures, rather like
the sound of human voice, singers and choirs, in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or
in Mahler’s Second. The extreme fluidity between spoken and sung parts is of
great mastery, and can be compared to some extent with the same ease we find in
Mozart’s operas, when arias and recitatives follow on from each other. Thus,
Pyaasa’s songs engrave themselves indestructibly in our memory, like the
entrancing reminders of the film’s unique, peerless atmosphere, but, even so,
they achieve to merge with the deepest real-life of each of us.
˙
Guru Dutt’s view on the world is like an endless
mourning, mourning of the living, not of the dead. A desperate sadness that
reminds us of Omar Kháyyám, or of Li taď pe, or, even much more, of Schubert’s Winterreise.
The conscience that is guiding Vijay tells him that nothing seems possible, but
that the conscience of what could be possible remains strong and alive, and is
our only respectable guide. Guru Dutt’s film is therefore tinged with a twofold
light : the thirst for living and the knowledge of failure are tightly
mingled, but not as strangers for one another : rather as indissociable
parts. The film reaches a unique quality of tone : for Guru Dutt, the most
important in a world where nothing succeeds is to remain witness of what could
be. This is the least one could do, but also what costs the highest price :
the poor’s luxury, the humble’s pride. Guru Dutt’s poetry confronts itself with
the lowest depths of life in a way that places his poetry on the highest level
of critical intelligence.
Paris, 1987
(Translation
by Samuel Fever)