A few weeks ago I read a very stimulating discussion &mdash; on the website of a favourite writer, Jim Emerson &mdash; about the &ldquo;technical&rdquo; knowledge required for in-depth movie criticism. Emerson mentions the reluctance of the legendary reviewer Pauline Kael to analyse technique, or to engage with the nuts and bolts of movie making. Elsewhere, he writes, &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t distinguish form and content for the purposes of analysis... You can&rsquo;t perceive the whole without taking notice of the specifics, any more than you can absorb a novel without reading the words.

Nuts and bolts

Business Standard

Anyone who studies cinema &mdash; or reads film literature at a level beyond magazine gossip &mdash; must sooner or later stub his toes on the Auteur Theory. The debates around it are too many to properly discuss in this space, but here&rsquo;s a condensation: in the 1950s, a group of French critics &mdash; who championed popular American cinema and drew attention to the artistry in many genre films &mdash; proposed that some directors imposed a unified artistic vision on the movies they helmed, even while working within the constraints of the studio system or under the watchful eye of a money-minded producer. Thus, though filmmaking is a messy, collaborative process, certain movies could be seen as bearing the stamp of a single distinct personality. Cinema, even commercial cinema, could be a deeply personal art form.

The star as author

Among the visual and aural pleasures of Saeed Mirza&rsquo;s 1978 film Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan (newly available in a restored print by the National Film Development Corporation) is an enigmatic establishing sequence. The first images are from a village or a very small town, and are set to a minimalist music score &mdash; little more than the gentle plucking of a string instrument, it becomes more hypnotic the more you hear it. We see measurements being taken, cloth being dyed, posts being driven into the ground, threads stretched across them, and soon we realise that we are watching an intricately embroidered carpet coming into existence.

Poor little rich boy

A pleasing thing about the so-called multiplex film &mdash; and its blurring of the line between &ldquo;mainstream&rdquo; and &ldquo;parallel&rdquo; cinema &mdash; is the number of opportunities it has provided to talented character actors.

Doctor Sperm

Faced with a book on the subject matter of which he has strong opinions, an honest reviewer should show his hand. So let me quickly touch on a passage in Christina Daniels&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll do it My Way where it is said of the 1990 film Dil that &ldquo;it excelled in the use of light-hearted comedy&rdquo;, that it was &ldquo;a complete entertainer&rdquo; and &ldquo;a path-breaking film&rdquo;.

Sun worship

The 2003 film Baghban has a scene where Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini &mdash; playing an aging couple mistreated by their children &mdash; find themselves outside a car showroom. An oily salesman coerces the duo into test-driving a fancy car, and then gets abusive and violent when it turns out they don&rsquo;t have the money to buy it. Of course, this pat, emotionally manipulative set-up provides a pretext for good adoptive son Salman Khan to show up and lay some of the old dhishum-dhishum across the sales guy&rsquo;s noggin; viewer catharsis is easily achieved, and all is &mdash; at least temporarily &mdash; right with the world.

75 and dancing

The lines work in the given context &mdash; this is a world of double-crossers and triple-crossers, and Vinod (probably not his real name) doesn&rsquo;t know if Ruby (definitely not her real name) can be trusted &mdash; but the seasoned viewer will catch another, more playful layer. The girl who was serenaded thus in the 1960s film &mdash; Kashmir ki Kali &mdash; was played by Saif&rsquo;s real-life mother Sharmila Tagore. Incidentally, the actor who sang those lines was Kareena&rsquo;s real-life grand-uncle Shammi Kapoor.

Of sons and grand-nieces

The Iranian film A Separation was one of the most widely acclaimed movies of the past year, but I went into it knowing very little other than that it was about a couple on the verge of divorce because the wife wants a better life (outside Iran) for their young daughter while the husband needs to look after his Alzheimer&rsquo;s-afflicted father. Based on this perfunctory plot synopsis, I expected to see a nuanced story about people trying to balance their responsibilities, feelings and circumstances. And indeed, Asghar Farhadi&rsquo;s film is all of this.

Many separations

To begin with a minor quibble, the &ldquo;Indian&rdquo; in this book&rsquo;s subtitle is slightly misleading: this is a collection of essays on iconic Hindi-movie performers. But there are larger problems with this anthology. Given that its subjects are screen legends who have had an immeasurably complex influence (for better and for worse) on the lives of countless fans, it would be reasonable to expect personal, passionate writing. Instead, one gets an odd mix of second-hand reporting with throwaway observations on films that deserve to be written about with much more enthusiasm.

Starry-eyed about Bollywood

Among the joys of being a movie buff in the Internet age (and I speak with the hoary wisdom of one who remembers an earlier time) is the opportunity to have limitless public discussions about a stimulating film. You can examine the nuts and bolts of a movie, supply diverse readings of a scene, get technical, argue about seemingly inconsequential details, stupefy people by making obscure references.

Plot holes & tale twisters

Any professional book reviewer knows there are days when one despairs of the grind of reading literary fiction, and days when concentration reserves fall so low that even Jeffrey Archer can seem highbrow and impenetrable. At such times, I turn for comfort to one of the mass-market novels that bear the insignia of low-investment publishing houses like Srishti. The sensory experience of reading these books begins with the titles, most of which are splendidly ungrammatical and contain at least one set of ellipses and a word in all-caps. Their very prefaces can make the heart sing; sentences such as &ldquo;The insect of writing a novel was born in my Department of Brain during my graduation days&rdquo; point to the treasures that await in the main narrative.

Jai Arjun Singh: Writers without reading

In-film advertising is a common thing these days. Much too common. (I sometimes fall asleep in a hall even before a movie begins, in the time it takes for the list of sponsors and media partners to display.) But what happens when a brand is so big and so representative of a way of life that its very appearance in a film &mdash; however fleeting &mdash; can add layers to the narrative? I speak of Coca-colonisation, a term that has been used to link the world&rsquo;s most famous soft drink with American cultural imperialism, and sometimes, with other supposedly American qualities such as enterprise, vitality and crassness.

Coca-colonisation of cinema

When we think of master-classes in film acting, we usually envision performers firing sharply written lines at each other in intense dramatic confrontations. Or scenes that have little dialogue but where the silences are soaked in meaning; where each pause, each glance, is somehow significant; where it&rsquo;s all about understatement. For a good sense of what is commonly thought of as a performance highlight, look at the short clips chosen when acting nominations are read out at the Oscars.

Jai Arjun Singh