Phantom India, Episode 1: “The Impossible Camera” - Louis Malle

At the outset of the first episode of Phantom India, Malle’s issue concerning what is true about India is explicitly addressed. He reminds us, visually, that much of our understanding of India comes from the 2% of the population that is English-speaking [1]. But these interpreters are employing Western-learned categories and constructions and consequently seeing India through a reductive Western cultural lens. Their testimony, Indian though it is, is suspect. Malle states that it is his intention to explore India, as much as possible, without preconceived prejudices. He has no planned itinerary and will go and photograph wherever the opportunities lead him.

The narrative structure of this first episode is organized around roughly six issues or themes that occupied Malle’s mind during the early stages of his journey.

1. The Intrusion of the Camera.
Malle knows from the beginning that the camera interferes with the natural life and rhythms of the people. It is an artificial intruder. And he knows, too, that his own Western perspective cannot be erased. He must necessarily view what he sees from his own cultural context – and that will inevitably diminish certain aspects of what is there. So all he can do is try to operate as best he can under these conditions.

He first encounters peasant women gleaning fodder in a dry and nearly barren field. The women fear Malle’s camera and turn their backs on the filmmakers, believing that the camera will cast an evil spell and somehow rob them of their spirits. Malle is acutely aware of his having barged into their world without permission. With such a cultural breach, there is no possibility of engagement. Later he films a band of travelling shepherds, a ritual-dominated village wedding, and other sights that catch his eye. In each case he concedes that he is filming them only because they are bizarre and uncomprehended sights from his own perspective.

2. The Caste System.
A fundamental feature of Indian society, its caste system, is, of course, a matter of considerable fascination to Malle. He photographs members of the Brahman caste, who, though often impoverished, are privileged and treated with utmost respect. He points out that there are more than 1,800 subdivisions within the general Brahman caste and that there are restrictions on these groups inter-marrying or even sharing a meal.

“Western logic fails here. It takes an intuitive understanding. We’d have to experience it from the inside, be a part of it.”

3. Life and Death
This sequence begins, in a brief homage to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), with buzzards flying in from the sky to land and gather in an open field. Malle and his companions have stopped to film a dead buffalo there that is being scavenged by the buzzards and by wild dogs. Despite often severe food shortages, it is forbidden to slay or slaughter cattle in India, so the cattle are left to be eaten by the scavengers. This scene provides a visual lesson in the distance separating us from the traditional Indians. We watch the disturbing scene of the dead animal being eaten up, its organs pulled out of its body, its eyes devoured by the hungry buzzards. At the same time the nearby Indian peasants in the neighbourhood are unmindful of the eerie slaughter. To them it is probably all a part of the great cycle of endless birth and death that is acknowledged as a basic and daily part of their universe.

4. Women and Men
Throughout the episode, and the series, too, the women of India attracted Malle’s attention and fascination, and indeed, I am personally aware that Malle had at least one romantic affair with an Indian woman during this period. Indian women are colorful, graceful, and very often beautiful and alluring, but they are conventionally kept as a separate pole in a bipolar society. Unlike women in Muslim countries, whose public presence is erased and whose human rights are usually severely restricted, Indian women are emphatically present in the public space and frequently bejewelled in relative splendour. But they are confined by social strictures. Although dancing is popular in India, Malle rarely saw women and men dancing together. So it is with other things; the women and men occupy separate spheres. When Malle observed and photographed weddings, he could see expressions of reverence, pride, and respect, but he never saw expressions of true love. And though the groom often looked happy, the bride never did. The one fleeting moment he captured of a boy and girl caught in a flirtatious moment was the exception that proved the rule.

5. Counterculture Visitors
Malle and his crew encounter two youthful French hippies who have been attracted to the alternative lifestyle that India seems to offer them when compared to that of Europe. The fiercely idealistic duo distinguish themselves from the self-absorbed youth who come to India merely seeking ephemeral gratification from hashish. They are romantically seeking a nonmaterialistic way of life, and they celebrate the way they perceive Indians live a seemingly egoless existence. They plan to live their lives there.

But when Malle encounters the two again a few months later, things have changed. One of them has been now exhausted by intestinal illnesses and is borrowing money from his parents to return home. The other also seems now to be less idealistic, as well, and has set a travel itinerary for himself. It is evident here, too, that these young French visitors had been looking at India through the prism of their own fantasies.

6. The Fishmonger
The final section of this episode presents a little drama that Malle and his crew happened onto by chance. A collection of untouchable peasants, both men and women who catch fish along the beaches with only handmade nets, are approached by a higher-caste and better-dressed young man who seeks to buy their fish and sell it at the market. This is the only way these powerless, casteless people can earn money, and there is a lengthy scene in which they engage in a heated, vituperative argument with the fishmonger over the selling price. The haggling over pennies is something that goes on constantly in India, a society where the inequality of wealth is enormous. While the hippies in the previous scene had insisted that Indians only need bother to work enough to support themselves and that they are not greedy and materialistic, this scene shows the reality: the desperate effort to obtain even a minimal amount of material welfare is a never-ending struggle for many people.
★★★★

Notes:

1. The English-speaking population portion is extremely difficult to specify precisely, because many people know a little English to get by “on the street”. There are varying estimates that identify the current English-speaking population today as 10-20 per cent or more.

"Phantom India" - Louis Malle (1969)

In 1968 Louis Malle’s career was at a turning point, and he took a timeout to travel to India and think about larger issues in his life. The still-young director had been something of a wunderkind in French cinema, having shared a Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or at the age of 23, worked as an assistant to Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped (Un Condamné À Mort S'est Échappé Ou Le Vent Souffle Où Il Veut, 1956), and scored several other hits and international prizes, But he was just coming off a marital breakup and a questionable outing with Le Voleur (The Thief of Paris, 1967), and he needed a break to think things over. The initially planned short trip to India turned into a two-month sojourn and led to a greater fascination with the country and culture. He returned with a cameraman and sound recordist for five months on his own personal budget to film his six-hour documentary series, Phantom India (L'Inde Fantôme, 1969). It took him a year to edit the 30 hours of original footage that was ultimately released as a television series in seven episodes. Though Malle is mostly known today for his feature films in France and later in the United States, I believe that Phantom India was his greatest work, and he, himself, asserted that the work was his own personal favourite of all his films.

Phantom India was very much in the cinéma vérité tradition that first flourished in the 1960s when the appearance of lightweight film cameras made possible the capturing of “real life” activities in the practical affairs of society. But cinéma vérité in its early European manifestation was distinguished from its counterpart in North America, known as “direct cinema”, which tried to capture “objective” reality by attempting to make the cinematographers invisible. Cinéma vérité filmmakers, in contrast to that, tended to acknowledge explicitly the presence of the filmmaker and his or her involvement in the processes under study. This, in my, view is the more realistic approach and is likely to lead to a more accurately captured “reality” on film. Whatever is captured on film is inevitably altered by the presence of the watcher, and in addition the choice of camera angle and the flow of edited images inevitably reflects the ontological context of the watcher. It is best to resign oneself to this state of affairs and work within that context. This is exactly what Malle did in Phantom India [1]. Indeed, Malle’s film is an extended examination of the issue of cinematic objectivity. He is less concerned with the camera’s putative “invisibility” (there are many occasions when his subjects look straight into the camera) than with the inescapable fact that the director, as well as each viewer, brings to the film his or her own intellectual categories by means of which the perceived reality is to be constructed. How can we avoid casting our own prejudices and desires onto the images perceived?

At the outset of the film, Malle’s voiceover commentary states that he set out to make the film without a shooting script, without even a plan of what he was going to film. But lest you think that this series is little more than a travelogue of Malle’s visit, you should be aware of two exceptional features of this film that make it stand out: (1) Etienne Becker’s skilful and fluid camera work and (2) Malle’s reflective and insightful commentary. The result is a journey in pursuit of the mystery (to us) of India. Certainly India holds within its fabulous culture and society many profound secrets about not only who we are, but the underpinnings of what we once were and the expanded possibilities of what we perhaps could be in the future. This is not a new revelation, as 19th century scholar Max Müller attests:

“If I were to ask myself from what literature we here in Europe, who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of the Greeks and Romans, and one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more universal – in fact, more human, I should point to India” [2]

As such the film is as relevant today as it was on its release.

The seven episodes of Phantom India can stand on their own as separate documentary films about India, but under discussion throughout the series are overlapping themes, such as the traditional Indian caste system. Taken together, the episodes form a meditative mosaic of the author-director’s reflections on India.
★★★★

For reviews of the individual episodes, click on the links below:

1. Episode 1: “The Impossible Camera”
2. Episode 2: “Things Seen in Madras”
3. Episode 3: “The Indians and the Sacred”
4. Episode 4: “Dream and Reality”
5. Episode 5: “A Look at Castes”
6. Episode 6: “On the Fringes of Indian Society”
7. Episode 7: “Bombay”

Notes:

1. This was not always the case with Malle. His later Human, Trop Humain (1974) was much more aligned with the direct cinema approach.
2. H. G. Rawlinson, India, a Short Cultural History (1968), Praeger, New York, p. v.

"Humain, Trop Humain" - Louis Malle (1974)

Louis Malle’s feature-length documentary, Humain, Trop Humain (1974), was produced in between the production of two of his more famous fiction films, Lacombe Lucien (1971) and Murmur of the Heart (Le Souffle au Coeur, 1974). All three films suggest a prevailing uneasy relationship between his pivotal characters and the larger sociocultural values of society. That relationship is not one of conflict and rebellion, but more of an “impedance mismatch” between his characters under focus and the societies in which they live. But this quasi-motif, such as it is, lies far below the surface of Humain, Trop Humain, which ostensibly depicts in considerable, almost obsessive, detail the manual operations of workers at a French auto assembly plant.

The shooting of the film was conducted at a Citroën automobile assembly plant in Rennes (where among the various models worked on was the notorious Deux Chevaux – “2CV”) and at a large Paris auto show, where showcase Citroëns are among the vehicles on display to the general public. The film’s structure comprises three principal sections, although there are no boundaries or clear-cut transitions between them.

• The 1st section presents a schematic sequence of the various fabrication processes and operations that are used to convert what starts out initially as rolled sheet metal into a finished automobile.
• The 2nd section shows completed automobiles on display at the Paris auto show.
• The 3rd section returns to the Rennes auto plant and focusses on some of the laborious manual operations of the assembly-line workers.

Throughout the film there is no narrative voiceover and very little recorded dialogue – no explanations concerning what is happening onscreen are provided. The emphasis is not on the product, but on the people performing the work.

1. The Auto Assembly Process (17 minutes). The opening shots show a woman hoist operator maneuvering rolled sheet metal being positioned so that it can be fed into a mechanical sheet cutter. Metal sheets are then stamped and fed to an assembly line, where other workers can perform more detailed operations on them. Later processes show skeletal auto frames being smoothed over by men with rotary grinders, completed auto frames being spray painted, women arranging the electrical wiring that will go in the vehicles, and men fitting various mechanical components, such as gear-shit levers, into the now almost-complete auto frames. Finally, we see fully completed cars being driven out of the factory and into a lot for shipping.

2. The Auto Show (17 minutes). Without warning the context abruptly switches to the Paris auto show, where large crowds swarm over the vehicles on display and hear pitches from salesmen describing the latest features on offer. (This is the only section of the film where human voices are discernable – in sections 1 and 3, the noises of the factory and the machines drown out whatever words might be spoken.) What is striking about this auto-show section is the contrast between the complexity of the construction work in the first section and the simpleminded naivete of the potential customers at the auto show. The consumers frown with self-satisfaction as they ask what they seem to think are challenging questions about the cars; but their questions are trivial and inconsequential. While we have just seen evidence that considerable engineering work must go into the design and construction of the automobiles, the customers at the show merely want to know why some knob for adjusting the front seat wasn’t moved a few centimetres to the left. And most of all, of course, the customers are concerned with the maximum speed of the automobiles – one young man complains dismissively that a car advertised as able to go 160 kph, can only do 155 kph. But other than general consumer cluelessness, the comments from the customers are not particularly revealing, and there doesn’t seem to be any progression or development in this section. It is merely a string of fragmentary snippets of encounters between customers and salesmen. So after more than a quarter hour of this kind of stuff, the viewer is likely to be thankful to move on.

3. Monotonous.Work (39 minutes). The scene now shifts back to the factory at Rennes, and from here on, as in the first section, there is no discernible dialogue to be heard in the film. In this part of the film, the focus is on the repetitive manual labor of the workers. There is something of a progression here: as we move to different handwork operations, the skill and dexterity required of the workers is reduced at each stage. Gradually we see a movement towards people being little more than simple adjuncts to machines. First we see repetitive operations performed mostly by male workers, and there is some skill involved. Then we move to some operations performed by female workers which require a certain minimal amount of dexterity. Finally we see women performing mind-numbingly boring and repetitive tasks, such as simply turning over a piece of metal as it moves by them on the assembly line.  The repetitive work includes

• Women doing manual work on auto seats.
• Men doing spray painting.
• Men working separately with hammers, blow torches, and power drills
• A single man who repetitively goes through a sequence of work with a metal file, then with a blow torch, and then using a power drill.
• Women using their hands to insert small pieces onto metal rigs moving by on the assembly line.
• A woman simply pushing items into a stamper.
• A woman simply turning individual items over as they move by on the line.

After watching this repetitive work at such length, one gets the feeling for the purely mechanical nature of this work. There is little intelligence required, only simple actions that are performed reliably. Although there is no suggestion that the workers are mistreated, there is the implicit suggestion that the workers are only useful as machine parts. Nevertheless the workers shown are remarkably assiduous and focussed on their work. I wondered while watching just how many of today’s youth would be even capable of this degree of diligence. It is no wonder that manufacturers look for the cheapest labor markets in the world, where industrious workers may be not only cheaper but more capable of doing this kind of factory work (and, indeed, Citroën was on a serious downward slope with respect to its competition at the time of this film).

Of course though the operations are presented from a seemingly objective point of view, one wonders just how natural the filming was. After all, the workers are all very presentable and well groomed by American standards. With the number of closeups of auto interiors in the film, one assumes that the cameramen were quite visible and was likely a psychological intrusion on the behavior of the workers. Was this somewhat staged, or is it just that the French, in general, have their act more together than Americans? This is not a minor issue, because it reflects on the overall meaning of the film. To me, the endlessly repetitive work shown in the film, even as presented in the best possible circumstances and with the best possible workers, is not human – it is inhuman, hence the irony of the film’s title. By contrast, New York Times critic Vincent Canby’s review argued that the film demonstrates the notion that small, repetitious tasks are beneficial – the familiar duties required by the simple tasks are comforting, because they create order in what otherwise would be a chaotic universe! Nope, I don’t think Malle would subscribe to this thesis, and I don’t think Friedrich Nietzsche, whose aphoristic philosophical work of 1879 provided the words for Malle’s title, would agree either. Nietzsche and Malle both see the potential for the human enterprise as far grander than is envisioned by modernism, metaphysics, and conventional religions: man’s heroic role is more than a search for simple jobs to do. But if you have a chance to see Humain, Trop Humain, you can judge for yourself.
★★★

Louis Malle

Films of Louis Malle:

• Vive le Tour - Louis Malle (1962)
• Phantom India (L'Inde Fantôme) - Louis Malle (1969)

1. Episode 1: “The Impossible Camera”
2. Episode 2: “Things Seen in Madras”
3. Episode 3: "The Indians and the Sacred"
4. Episode 4: "Dream and Reality"
5. Episode 5: “A Look at Castes”
6. Episode 6: “On the Fringes of Indian Society”
7. Episode 7: "Bombay"

• Calcutta - Louis Malle (1969)
• Humain, Trop Humain - Louis Malle (1974)
• God's Country - Louis Malle (1986)
• And the Pursuit of Happiness - Louis Malle (1986)

"Vive le Tour" - Louis Malle (1962)

The Tour de France is cycling’s more prestigious event and has by far the largest attendance of any sporting event in the world – 10-15 million – although it is impossible to obtain a precise count of all the roadside spectators. The event, which comprises 21 stages (racing days) over the month of June and typically covers a total length of more than 3500 kilometres that courses through ordinary roads and town streets all over France, has a history going back more than a century. Over this period it has emerged as a unifying cultural phenomenon for the French people to get a feeling for their own countryside and popular culture. Writer-director Louis Malle managed to capture something special about this race with his eighteen-minute documentary, Vive le Tour (1962). Though the film is now almost fifty years old, it still stands as one of the great sports documentaries and as a vivid tribute to this unique event.

Malle was still under thirty when he made the film, but he was already world famous for his vibrant and provocative feature films, Les Amants (The Lovers, 1958) and Zazie dans le Metro (1960). Though Malle is mostly known to world audiences through his lengthy and successful career as a director of fiction films, I think his greatest talent was as a documentary filmmaker.

Little is said in Vive le Tour about the nature of the race or the various strategies associated with the peleton and breakaways, etc. (although one can assume that the French viewing public was quite familiar with the basics of this event). In fact the basic scoring system is not explicated, and famous riders or winners are not identified at all in the film. Instead, Malle concentrates on the gruelling experiences of the cyclists and how it might feel to be one of them in the race. Although the film was made before the advent of lightweight digital video cameras and Steadicams, Malle achieved his subjective effects by managing to get amazingly steady closeup footage at high speed of the riders as they stream down the roads lined with people. This footage highlights one of the striking features of the Tour, which is the close proximity of the spectators to the bicyclists. Many of the people watching the race have the temerity, or cheek, to reach out and actually touch the riders or pat them on the back as they race by. Incredibly, in this age of violent attention-seekers, there are rarely any incidents of spectators causing serious interference or trouble with the race.

There are five interesting activities associated with the racers to which Malle calls our attention in the film, and the progression through this sequence of activities provides the film with its narrative structure. Each of the specific activities involves camera footage that is not normally seen even by viewers of today’s heavily covered event.

1. Food and Drink. Given the length of the race and the hot summer conditions, the riders need sustenance and fluid replacement all the time. The support crews hand their team members juice and water bottles as they race by various points along the way. But this refreshment is often not enough, and the riders often make momentary stops at restaurants and raid food and drink (some alcoholic) from the counters of the shopkeepers in order to boost their supplies.
2. The Call of Nature. Of course with all this drinking on the run, there are bodily functions to attend to, and the drivers don’t waste much time on this. Some of the cyclist relieve themselves quickly by the roadside, others do it on the run, only slowing down a bit.
3. Doping. The use of performance-enhancing drugs is a hot topic these days, but the history of this practice goes way back, well before 1962. The drugs used today may be more sophisticated, but the intentions is the same: take a drug that will enable the body to endure pain and fight off weariness in order to get that extra edge. Malle has some remarkable footage of a rider in this race who is so drugged with some sort of stimulus that he become nauseous and passes out while riding. Malle’s camera follows this unfortunate rider, keeping him in frame, until he finally slows down and crashes by the side of the road.
4. Crashes and Pileups. With the riders moving in a pack at high speed, there is always the danger of a massive pileup, and Malle’s camera documents one such episode and the effects of a few others. Serious injuries can and often do ensue, all the more so, because in 1962, the riders did not wear helmets.
5. The Mountains. Besides the time-trial sprints and the long-distance courses, there are also stages that involve incredibly strenuous hill climbing through mountainous terrain. The riders must not only be fast and lean, but also strong enough to pump their way up steep mountain roads. Malle’s cameras capture the exertion and pain of the riders as they struggle their way up the hills, sometimes in foggy and rainy conditions. The spectators often take pity on the stragglers in these circumstances and run out to give them extra pushes from behind to help them make it up. This extra support, which is actually illegal, doesn’t effect the race outcome, because the fans are only boosting the tail-end racers who have no chance of winning the event.

One of the things that struck me while watching the film is that the main features of the Tour de France have not changed much in the last fifty years. Sure, the riders wear helmets now, there is more media coverage, and the bikes are undoubtedly more technically advanced. But the main features are still the same. Compared to many other widely seen sports today, the changes to cycling, at least from general appearances, do not seem to have been very great.

Overall, Vive le Tour is a rousing success. Each of the five racing activities covered is interesting and has been carefully filmed. Malle must have had a high shooting ratio to acquire such well-frame footage of race events taking place at such speed. Even if you have watched the Tour de France many times on television and think you have seen it all, you will probably enjoy seeing this film.
★★★½