Cinematic City
Duration: 00:10:22; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 31.746; Saturation: 0.091; Lightness: 0.223; Volume: 0.394; Cuts per Minute: 8.671
Summary: The flashback is one of the most popular devices in Hindi cinema, serving he purpose of mediating between public memory and private memory. A space of memory that only the audience has privy to, and which is often excluded to the characters in the narrative of the film.
This clip is the opening sequence of Deewar made in 1975 by Yash Chopra. Shashi Kapoor who plays Inspector Ravi is being felicitated in a public function and calls his mother on stage to receive the award. We find out subsequently that he is being given the award for his bravery in killing a gangster Vijay who was also his brother. Deewar stages the conflict between the contractual law abiding citizen and its subterranean other, the illegal citizen, who can never fully occupy the space of the citizen.
And yet the narrative of the citizen is doomed to be haunted by the memory of the denizen, a narrative that may have no space in official archives and records, but is articulated as a wound in personal memory. This clip is very similar to the opening sequence of another iconic film, Mother India in which nargis is asked to inaugurate a dam, and she falls back into private memory including the traumatic memory of having killed her son, Birju to uphold the law. The metaphor of a mother having killed her son, or having sanctioned the killing of her son is a repetitive one in Hindi cinema. It is also interesting to contrast sequences such as the Dewwar and Mother India with the words of Nehru to the oustees of the Hirakud dam "If you must suffer, suffer for the sake of the nation".
Deewar:
The flashback is one of the most popular devices in Hindi cinema, serving he purpose of mediating between public memory and private memory. A space of memory that only the audience has privy to, and which is often excluded to the characters in the narrative of the film.
This clip is the opening sequence of Deewar made in 1975 by Yash Chopra. Shashi Kapoor who plays Inspector Ravi is being felicitated in a public function and calls his mother on stage to receive the award. We find out subsequently that he is being given the award for his bravery in killing a gangster Vijay who was also his brother. Deewar stages the conflict between the contractual law abiding citizen and its subterranean other, the illegal citizen, who can never fully occupy the space of the citizen.
And yet the narrative of the citizen is doomed to be haunted by the memory of the denizen, a narrative that may have no space in official archives and records, but is articulated as a wound in personal memory. This clip is very similar to the opening sequence of another iconic film, Mother India in which nargis is asked to inaugurate a dam, and she falls back into private memory including the traumatic memory of having killed her son, Birju to uphold the law. The metaphor of a mother having killed her son, or having sanctioned the killing of her son is a repetitive one in Hindi cinema. It is also interesting to contrast sequences such as the Dewwar and Mother India with the words of Nehru to the oustees of the Hirakud dam "If you must suffer, suffer for the sake of the nation".
Private Memory
Public Memory
Sacrifice
Bombay
Private Memory
Public Memory
Sacrifice
In Deewar, Amitabh Bachan's father if forced to betray the trade union that he is the leader of, because his wife and children have been kidnapped. As the father runs away in shame and humiliation, the older son, the young Vijay is caught by the workers and taken to a man who tattoos the boy's arm with the phrase Mera Baap Chor-Hai (My father is a thief). This tattoo marks out the different paths taken by the two brothers and
haunts Vijay's personality and character development throughout the film. Vijay is scarred, physically, symbolically and metaphorically. The scar becomes a signifier for marginality and social displacement.
Ranjani Mazumdar characterizes deewar as a narrative of urban sociology. The transition from. childhood to adulthood takes place in the early part of the film with the screenplay dwelling on different spaces of the city - construction sites, under bridges, hutments, high rise buildings, schools, and children working. She says "The city of Deewar offers us images of the street, the flyover, the railway tracks, high-rise buildings, all of which are implicated in a context that is shown as fragile. In this innovative and striking acknowledgement of urban space, the city loses its fundamentally threatening character (popularized in the 19509s), becoming a space where the hopes and yearnings unleashed by the promise of nationalism are either fulfilled or dashed".
The clip also marks the entry of Vijay and Ravi into two different spaces of citizenship. While Ravi enters the world of schooling, to be properly constituted as a citizen of India, Vijay joins the ranks of the urban working class and into the space of the denizen. The song that is being played at the background, while ravi looks longingly into the school is Saare Jahaan se Accha Hindustan Hamara ( India is better than the rest of the world) is the ultimate paen to the nation and to citizenship ( Hum Bul Bule hain uske).
Citizenship
Memory
Saare Jahaan se Accha
Urban space
Arguably one of the most famous and recognizable scenes in the history of Hindi cinema, this clip sees Vijay and Ravi returning to the bridge under which they spent their childhood. Vijay is now a well known smuggler, while Ravi has been given the task of arresting him and breaking his gang. Loosely based on the life of Haji Mastan, Deewar stretches the Mother as Nation and Nation as mother myth to its extreme.
Deewar also introduced a new kind of hero, the industrial hero into the cinematic landscape. Made during the emergency, Deewar inaugurated a new form of story telling which moved beyond the social dramas and romances of the fifties. If the social or feudal romances of the fifties contained social conflicts, the films of the seventies exploded the social contradictions that had been built up.
The metaphor of the bridge, which morally separates the identity of both the brothers in the city, is evoked by Vijay when he recalls their shared childhood experience in the squat under the bridge. Vijay requests Ravi to meet him under the same bridge. Vijay is worried that He is in danger because members of Vijay's gang want Ravi dead. At the
meeting, Vijay says when all the other bridges that connected the two have broken down, this physical bridge is the only place that cannot be broken for it carries, bears the memory of their shared childhood. The opening of this sequence is significant. We see Ravi waiting under the bridge at night. A popular nationalist song (Saare jahaan se Accha) plays on the soundtrack. The song is used to both recall a moment in Ravfs childhood as well as present the irony of the words- The song, which talks about the beauty of the greatest country in the world (India), plays over the bridge whose ugly underside (the footpath below the bridge) is where the two brothers grew up.
Madhava Prasad, writing about the iconic exchange between Ravi and Vijay says that "For Vijay this bridge of memory is the only remaining link between him and Ravi and he wants to reactivate it. Ravi does not yield to the unifying power of memory. Frustrated, Vijay boasts of his achievements, his worldly possessions, beside which
Ravi's sub-inspector salary is a pittance. 'I have all this, but what do you have?', he asks, to which Ravi replies 'I have mother'. This scene pre-figures Vijay's tragic destiny. It is here that we learn. the differences between the new figure, that is representative of
the law, and the old one. One is possessed by the past and seeks to be possessed and dominated by the mother, who is a figure from the past. The other, emancipated from the past, is able to 'have the mother', to possess her as a part of his familial affective realm"
The conflict between Ravi and Vijay can also be seen as that of the planned city and its other subterranean other, the unintended city across the wall. On the one hand you have the abstract space of the citizen and the city of planners, and on the other, the underbelly of the city serves as a site of aspiration and conflict for the not quite citizens of the country.
Citizenship
Memory
Saare Jahaan se Accha
Urban space
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