Showing on the screening service MUBI, In Search of Famine is a 1980 film by the celebrated Marxist and Bengali director, Mrinal Sen. The movie is undoubtedly excellent and, certainly, seemed to me to be remarkably interesting and intelligent -- but MUBI streams the film in a format that proved to be unwatchable. Indeed, the movie was so traduced by the way it was presented that I am considering canceling my MUBI service. There's no point in showing movies of this sort if they are going to be systematically disfigured and, therefore, disrespected, in the way they are presented.
So far as I can tell, In Search of Famine involves a contemporary (late 70's) film crew shooting a movie about the great Bengal famine of 1943, a politically induced calamity that murdered five million people. The movie crew are urban westernized artists from Calcutta, as it was then called. They roar into a remote Bengali village in a rented bus, wander around a huge, deserted temple (it looks a little Angkor Wat) and, then, take up residence in a decaying local palace This where the town's ruling family once lived -- the grandee is now paralyzed and dying alone in the abandoned palace. The townsfolk, many of whom are very scrawny, cynically observe that they will look fine on the screen as famine victims. Everyone in town gathers to watch the movie makers at work -- there's a big peanut gallery of women and children and peasants who sit just off-screen while the gas generators rumble and the director (he looks like an Indian version of Stanley Kubrick) films the action. When he shouts "cut!", the local kids imitate him and scamper about maniacally crying "cut! cut! cut!." In the middle of the night, there is the ghostly sound of a woman wailing. It turns out that the local prince, the old paralyzed landowner, has died. The leading lady walks off the set, possible because she is upset by the death of the old man. A local girl is recruited to play the part of a young woman forced into prostitution to save her husband and family -- this seems to represent a deviation from the original shooting script. (The production of the film within the film seems to be a jaundiced commentary on Satjiyat Ray's Distant Thunder, a harrowing movie about the 1943 famine that was an international art house hit and that involves the plot element of a young woman prostituting herself to save her family.) The Bengali film makers are casually cynical. They play a game of "Guess the Famine" -- showing horrific pictures of skeletal people and dying children and challenging each other to identify which famine these pictures show. Apparently, India has had a number of famines, even as recently as 1959. The last image is particularly horrific -- a skeletal man whose ribs and sternum are perfectly visible under his grey stretched skin. But this turns out to be an carved stone image of Lord Buddha as a starving man. The point seems to be that the starvation of the poor has always been a part of Indian culture.
After about an hour, I abandoned the movie. This was notwithstanding my interest in Mrinal Sen and the film itself, probably a magnificent achievement. The picture is accompanied by very pale, blurry subtitles. The subtitles bleed into the whites and other light colors in the movie and can't be read without heroic effort -- it's eyes-fatiguing labor to read those titles and, after forty minutes, I gave up on that enterprise. Therefore, I had little or no idea what was going on from shot to shot. The picture has lots and lots of dialogue and without the Brechtian interplay between the director, the peasants, and the actors, the film is impossible to comprehend. Furthermore, MUBI streaming films have a disconcerting characteristic of suddenly freezing, only for a second or two, but at increasingly frequent intervals -- this must be some kind of perverse artifact of the digital streaming process, but it makes watching these films, even if you can read the subtitles, a real pain in the ass. In Sen's movie, this freeze-up or freeze fame effect occurred with alarming frequency until the movie began to simply black out and finally ceased streaming entirely. By touching any key on the remote, I could resuscitate the movie, but only to have the film begin to stutter and pause again and again once the picture was revived. This is intolerable and, if the problem continues, I will cancel the service. There's no point in watching movies that are poorly curated, presented with innumerable pauses and black-outs, and, then, provided with wholly illegible subtitles. (The subtitle problem seems to me to be subtly racist --would a film by Bergman or Fellini or Kurosawa be presented with blurred, unintelligible subtitles? I think not.)
Movies by Sen, reputed to be a great master of Indian film making, are almost impossible to see. Years ago, I tried to screen for a movie club, Sen's Calcutta 1971. The movie's first sequence, involving a family in a hovel penetrated by the rain and tormented by ceiling leaks, was immensely memorable, frightening, and compelling -- the family has to leave their shack and go to some kind of public shelter that also leaks like a sieve full of hundreds of other people all crammed miserably together. This was the film's initial vignette -- I think it had five parts. But the movie was so poorly preserved as to be impossible to watch and the subtitles were also just a vaporous blur, impossible to read. In general, Bollywood (and Indian independent films) seem regarded as of negligible significance and, even, the Indians seem wholly uninterested in conserving these films. A movie made in Bengali in 1980 looks worse on screen than something directed by D.W. Griffith in 1915 -- it's shocking and deplorable.
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