By marrying voices to thus-far mute images,
Blackmail (1929) marked a pivot in the films of Alfred Hitchcock and of all Britain. Yet, later on in his career, the master of suspense would declare silent pictures to be “the purest form of cinema”. Nine decades after the talkie first released, artist Atul Dodiya has transported it back to a soundless medium. Through black and white oil paints on 36 canvases, he pays homage to the Psycho filmmaker.
“Seven Minutes of Blackmail”, the title of his new exhibition in Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road gallery, refers to a disquieting sequence leading up to a murder. In this time, an artist lures the naive protagonist, who has stormed out on her detective boyfriend after a fight, into his studio. They talk and draw a little, he plays the piano and talks her into trying on a tutu so that he can paint her. Very quickly, he launches a sexual attack until she reaches for and uses a bread knife to end it. The timidity, hesitation, furtiveness and strain contained in those scenes are conveyed in Dodiya’s frames.
There are two parts to the show: a faithful recreation of moments from the movie, and separately an expressionist enquiry. In the first, Dodiya’s precise brush achieves what he describes as a “contact sheet” (a print used in film editing to examine chosen frames before finalising them) for those who have not watched the film. As such, along with the aesthetic genius of the filmmaker, this section becomes a tribute also to the celluloid that carried these precious pictures.
Dodiya is a true-blue Hitchcockian, having seen most of the director’s films twice if not three times. “I enjoy the way he would cut shots, put a sequence together, and the way he would show details,” he says. He began pausing and photographing the film with his iPhone; these prints covered his desk for months while he reproduced them in paintings of 1.5 X 2 feet. This freezing of frames allows for an appreciation of how the filmmaker employed light, shadows and props in a limited space to produce shock and horror: the top of spiralling stairs, a chandelier casting menacing shadows on the face of the transgressor, the frightening picture of a clown in the background, a lifeless hand jutting out from behind a curtain.
With the use of sharp black and white, the lamp-dipped luminous quality of the scenes comes through, and in light hazy strokes, he renders the grainy effect of photographs taken from television. This speaks of both the original beauty and later deterioration of the images. Some of the paintings feature a tint of ochre, which Hitchcock was known to use at times. Walking through the three dozen pictures in the room, one sees the Czech actress Anny Ondra’s face going from coy and playful to terrified and eerily composed.
Of Hitchcock’s many visually arresting works, what struck Dodiya about Blackmail during a second viewing of the film two years ago was the central presence of “the artist” in the story. “The relationship between man and woman was interesting, of course. But also the work of art and creativity have always been my concerns,” he says. The second, more expressionist part of the exhibition dives into the artistic condition. “That pushing oneself and withdrawing … something similar happens in the process of painting and creating. You attack the canvas and the canvas tells you not to do it,” he observes.
A collage of large wooden palettes (quite like the palettes that appear in the sequence of struggle in the film) runs across two walls. Rather than dabs of paint, they bear dark abstract motifs that illustrate the inner world of the painter and the dilemmas of the artistic process. Discernible among these are a skull, a half-white-half-black pig and a silhouette of someone sitting on the edge of a wall. Dodiya is known for including objects in his work, most memorably shop shutters and more recently curio cabinets. Cabinets appear this time too, and are filled with photographs, trinkets, tiny images of his earlier paintings and leftover cuts of wood.
The show reiterates the painter’s long-standing love for cinema, a love that does not discriminate between the mainstream, independent and international. Growing up in Ghatkopar in suburban Mumbai, he watched films of Rajesh Khanna in Uday Talkies and Shreyas Talkies, both of which have made way for malls and multiplexes. He routinely sketched the actor in a bid to impress friends of his older sisters who were all fans.
He was barely out of school, “the youngest boy in the group”, when he experienced world cinema for the first time in the 1970s in film clubs including Screen Unit and Alliance Française. Robert Flaherty’s documentary Nanook of the North (1922), Satyajit Ray’s Nayak: The Hero (1966), and Tyeb Mehta’s short film Koodal (1970) left an impression on his 16-year-old mind that would soon be torn between taking up filmmaking and the fine arts.
If he picked painting eventually, it was because he could do it with a few materials all by himself, whereas cinema was an expensive medium that also required collaboration. He continues to indulge this passion with Netflix, YouTube or his DVD collection every alternate day. Films find reference in most of Dodiya’s works, notably kitschy stills of Sridevi, Madhabi Mukherjee, Aruna Irani, as well as international figures such as Brigitte Bardot. Breathlessly, he counts the attributes of cinema of doyens such as Hitchcock: lifelike, with great aesthetics, form, textures, tonalities. “I wanted to see how the narratives would transform on the flat, oil medium.” They transform rather well.
'Seven Minutes of Blackmail' can be viewed at the Chemould Prescott Road Gallery in Fort, Mumbai until February 21
 "Atul Dodiya's show is a homage equally to Hitchcock and artistic condition")
