Chapter 3. makers. The films Train to Pakistan, 1947: Earth, and Black Friday are the cinematic

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1 Chapter 3 Comparison of the Two Media Cinema and Literature The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of cinema, a new art form which also came to be known as film, moving pictures, or movies (Gibson 5). In the recent decades cinema has been dynamically interfacing with literature and life in a rapidly changing cultural context. Cinema is also the medium with immense mass appeal. The sole raison d être of cinema resides in the extent of its mass appeal (Mitry 4).The most general notion of popular Indian cinema being merely an entertainment industry has observed radical changes over the last few decades. Cinema has accepted the challenge to portray the frightening phenomenon of communal violence and terrorism at a transnational level. Filmmakers have made important contributions towards inaugurating serious discourse on the issues such as nationalism, and the protection of human rights of the minorities in India. Literary texts have been extensively adapted for the screen by film makers. The films Train to Pakistan, 1947: Earth, and Black Friday are the cinematic adaptations of the literary works Train to Pakistan, Ice Candy Man, and Black Friday: The True Story of Bombay Bomb Blasts respectively. The novel Amu is the script of the film Amu extended into a novel. The film Parzania and the novel Fireproof are inspired by the communal carnage in Gujarat during February These films spanning over a period of two decades ( ) have explored the important socio-political junctures in the metamorphosis of India. The comparative study of the different texts within the scope of this research can be appreciated by understanding of cinema as an art,

2 comparison of the two media and understanding the different aspects of cinematic adaptation. 3.1 Cinema as an Art Cinema is the youngest and still evolving, dynamic art form. No doubt, cinema is an industry of mass entertainment in India, yet there have been versatile filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy, Deepa Mehta, Anurag Kashyap, Shonali Bose, Rahul Dholakia and Mani Ratnam who have used this medium to address important socio-political issues in a dynamically changing cultural context time and again and making constructive contribution towards modifying the set notions and prejudices of the society. Their films are masterpieces of cinematic art, each one of them carrying the stamp of its auteur. Elaborating on the artistic nature of cinema Anwar Huda states that it connects our subconscious, reflects our values, customs, styles and life (1). Film theorists and filmmakers have asserted cinema s links to others arts (Singh 2). Film is a medium of expression just like the other art forms such as painting, music, literature and dances in and may be used to produce artistic results which depend on the aesthetic sensibility of the auteur. Avant-garde film maker Maya Deren has most effectively expressed the link of cinema to other art forms: The motion-picture medium has an extraordinary range of expression. It has in common with the plastic arts the fact that it is a visual composition projected on a two-dimensional surface; with dance, that it can deal in the arrangement of movement; with theatre, that it can create a dramatic intensity of events; with music, that it can compose in the rhythms and phrases of time and can be attended by song and instrument;

3 with poetry, that it can juxtapose images; with literature generally, that it can encompass in its soundtrack the abstractions available only to language. (Gibson 5) Since ages man s eternal pursuit to capture and recreate life is reflected in the earliest expressions of art and has found their realisation in the development of the cinema. Anwar Huda has further stressed that films were the result of a long quest, in which a number of great thinkers, scientists and artists took part (9). It is generally believed that making a film is a mechanical process. Understanding the operations of certain basic elements of film art reveal that the reality gets recreated during the process of film making and the visual reality [the term used by Arnheim (9)] is not absolute. According to Jean Mitry, Arnheim was the first to try to establish general guidelines by relating the film effect to the psychology of perception (2). Arnhiem has refuted the charge that the camera mechanically records life by proving that even in the simplest photographic reproduction of a perfectly simple object, a feeling for its nature is required which is quiet beyond any mechanical operation (11). The camera is an optical instrument like our eyes. The human eye forms the image of an object on the retina which remains on the retina for a fraction of a second. The blending of these images at a very rapid speed produces the dynamic images of the world around us. Cinema works on this scientific concept that is called the persistence of vision. The images formed at the retina are transmitted as electrical impulses to the brain that reproduces the image along with a perception of the image. Images are continuously

4 expressing those truths, imaginations and ideas what languages labour to tell or write (Huda 7). The human eye, and equally the photographic lens, acts from a particular position and from there can take in only such portions of the field of vision as are not hidden by things in front (Arnheim 9).The filmic reality is selected, recorded and projected by the camera through the vision of the auteur. The auteur of the film employs his aesthetic sensibility to highlight the hidden dimensions of objects, situation and characters in relation to life. The ordinary looking aspects of life, characters and objects may be enhanced by effectively handling the camera. Since our field of vision is full of solid objects, but our eye (like the camera) sees this field from only one station point at any given moment, and since the eye can perceive the rays of light that are reflected from the object only by projecting them onto a plane surface- the retina-the reproduction of even a perfectly simple object is not a mechanical process but can be set about well or badly (Arnheim 10). The handling of the camera is more or less detrimental to the impact of the idea that is projected. The use of a low angle shot makes the characters and objects look larger than life. One of the scenes from the film Black Friday reveals how camera techniques intensify an idea much more powerfully than words. The filming of the Bombay Stock Exchange in the beginning of the film is an example of a low angle shot that projects the BSE as a potential structure representing Bombay. Whether a particular person is more himself in profile than full face, whether the palm or the outside of the hand is more expressive, whether a particular mountain is better taken from the north or the west cannot be ascertained mathematically-they are matters of delicate sensibility (Arnheim

5 10-11). For instance while filming a scene showing anguish, pain or suffering the use of close up intensifies the scene. The close ups of Cyrus Dastur in the film Parzania speak volumes about his loss. The close ups expose the feelings of anguish and communicate the pain of a suffering father. Another close up shot, towards the climax from the film Amu, intensely portrays the immense love of Keya for little Amu. It was the power of the filmic close-up ( the defining device of the film, unavailable to the stage) that it could enlarge this emotional action of the face to the sharpest relief or show us a play of the hands in which anger and rage or tender love or jealousy speak in unmistakeable language (Marcus 7). According to Arnhiem, those aspects that best show the characteristics of a particular object are not by any means always chosen; others are often selected deliberately for the sake of achieving special effects (11). The use of colour and lighting plays an important role in setting the mood of the scene. The use of natural daylight in the film Train to Pakistan when the Sutlej is overflowing with bloated up carcasses intensifies the viscerality of the violence. Another scene in which Jugga tugs at the rope across the bridge is also in monochrome which adds intensity to the idea of the scene. The reduction of all colours to black and white very significantly modifies the picture of the actual world. Yet, everyone who goes to see a film accepts the screen world as being true to nature. This is due to the phenomenon of partial illusion. Colours and lighting techniques enhance the idea and the message of the film. The song Rut Aa Gayee Re in the film 1947: Earth displays the use of colours and natural lighting to capture and portray the joyous mood of the times. On the other hand the song Dheeme Dheeme Si Khushboo is again a technically skilled scene that panaromically portrays the vibrance of spring.

6 Camera movements also play an important role in creating the filmic reality that the auteur wants his audience to feel and perceive. For example, the bombing of the Bombay Stock Exchange in the film Black Friday illustrates how camera movement accentuates an idea or a scene. The camera steadily moves close to the basement of the BSE accompanied with the sound pulse that goes on becoming rapid and loud. As the camera focuses on the basement it is accompanied by the blast of the bomb that was implanted in the basement. Thus the camera, like a man who can move freely, is able to look at an object from close to or from a distance- a self-evident truth that must be mentioned in as much as from it is derived an important artistic device (Arnheim 18). Space and time form a continuum in real life. However, in a film the space-time continuum is broken, and modified and integrated in accordance with the subject of the film. According to Arnheim, the subject of the film is an account of some action, and a certain logical unity of time and space must be observed into which the various scenes are fitted (21). The space time continuum of a scene may be interrupted by a flashback, say for example which is integral to the subject of the film. For example one of the scenes in the film Amu employs flashback to achieve artistic and logical unity of the film. Keya relates to her daughter Kaju, the gruesome fate that her father, brother and mother had met during the anti-sikh riots of The intercepting of the space- time continuum evolves as a powerful cinematic device that develops artistic integrity in the film. According to Arnheim, in a good film each scene must be so well planned in the scenario that everything necessary, and only what is necessary, takes place within the shortest space of time (23).

7 The cinema is an intriguing cultural phenomenon. It has definite psychological dimensions. It has been studied from different perspectives. The blending of the different film theories and approaches gives a comprehensive picture of this new, innovative and revolutionary medium as art. Since its very beginnings the possibility of cinema as art were explored. In 1911, poet Riccio Canudo christened cinema as the seventh art (Mitry 1). The initial insights into the works of filmmakers like D.W. Griffiths were not systematically structured. Jean Epstein was one of the foremost film theorists. The insights of the critics like Emile Vuillermoz, Rene Jeanne, Pierre Henry to name a few, played an important role in shaping the film theory. The artistic principles of cinema were established by the woks of Sergei Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim and Bela Balzas. Bela Balazs and Rudolf Arnheim did revolutionary contributions by refuting the concept that film making was merely a technical process. Their in depth study and insight formulated the essence of film theory and study of film as an art. Both of them tried, using the work of their predecessors as a springboard, to define and codify, in a systematic and coherent manner, the generative elements of visual expression ( Mitry 2). Film theory developed as an evolving body of concepts designed to account for cinema in all its dimensions, namely the aesthetic, social and psychological (Singh 2). The insights and reflections of Jean Epstein, Munsterbeg, Sergei Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim, were the prime movers who charted out cinema s stride in establishing itself as an art form. Though the purists were cynical of the artistic capabilities of this new medium, there were the ones like who could foresee the immense potential of this new medium as an artistic expression.

8 After the First World War there were debates- mainly among French critics and filmmakers on the issue of high and popular art, realist versus naturalist film, the spectator screen relationship, editing styles (a debate much influenced by the Soviet cinema of the 1920s), unconscious and psychoanalytical potential of film (Singh 2). The concept of cinema as a language was brought forth in 1948 by Astruc, who talked of the cinema as the camera-stylo. Further development of the film theories led the emergence of the auteur theory in the 1950s and structuralism in the 1960s. The chief proponent of structuralism was Christian Metz who believed that a film could be scientifically analyzed. This could help determine and define the film maker s style. The structuralist theory gave way to the concept of Auteur Theory. Cinema was being identified as an art. It was the aesthetic and creative sensibility of the auteur that gave a film its unique features. According to Singh, if the film maker was to be seen as the author he would have to exhibit auteur characteristics e.g. visual style with reference to mise en cine and cinematography, narrative structures and features and handling of situation and themes (3). The 1990s saw the emergence of post- structuralism. Cinema was seen as a creative pursuit that produced films and a film could be seen as a text that could be read and comprehended through visual images and integrated in a particular context. Dr Indubala Singh highlights this aspect in the final analysis of film as an expression of the cultural construct, by quoting Hayward, post structuralism opened up textual analysis to a pluralism of approaches, which did not reduce the text to the status of object of investigation but as much subject as those reading, writing or producing it (4).

9 3.2 The Language of Literature and Cinema Since its birth, cinema has attracted the attention of the poets, writers and critics of art. The poet Blaise Cendars produced his alphabet of cinema, while Ricciotto Canudo, in his Reflections on the Seventh Art, claimed that cinema was renewing writing, harking back to the language in images (Marcus 8-9). Filmmaker Louis Feuillade also attempted to describe associations of cinema with other arts in his advance publicity sheet for his series le film esthetique (1910). According to Brain Lewis, Mitry was one of the earliest university teachers of film history and theory and one of the first to legitimise film aesthetics as an object of serious study ( King v). Jean Mitry did pioneering work in understanding the nature of cinema as a language of artistic expression. Unfortunately his work went unnoticed till 1990s, when it was translated by Christopher King as The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. Mitry s cinema comprises those movies which elevate us from the everyday, presenting a vivid, concrete world of experience, pregnant with symbolic meaning and deep feeling, a world which is same but other ( Lewis v). Literature and cinema have a dynamic correlation as languages in different aesthetic genera. From the earliest filmmakers till date the films have relentlessly explored literature in the number of ways. Until the advent of cinema, literature, especially novels, were the most popular means of creative expression. Cinema is a great life-like medium that preserves our past, stories, imaginations, legends and the great acting (Huda 9-10). Since its emergence, cinema has used techniques inherent to literature like symbolism, figurative language, vivid and graphic representation. Cinema or the seventh

10 art bears many common elements with literature. The film and the novel have strong syntactical resemblance (Bluestone 1). Both literature and cinema make us perceive reality through different ways. The two art forms make us see the previously unnoticed reality, thereby projecting the human conditions in different societies and different contexts. The writers like Khushwant Singh, Bapsi Sidhwa, S. Hussain Zaidi, Shonali Bose and film makers like Anurag Kashyap, Deepa Mehta, Rajiv Dholakia and others have brought to life the incessant soreness caused to the victims of communal violence that is barely registered by historical documentation. The novelist meditates on the situation and through different literary devices, recreates the different episodes of life, making the reader see the hidden dimensions of truth. Similarly the cinematographer uses different cinematic devices to reveal the hidden dimensions of life through his/ her films. On the one hand that phrase to make you see assumes an affective relationship between the creative artist and the receptive audience. Novelist and director meet here in common intention. One may, on the other hand, see visually through the eye or imaginatively through the mind. And between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image lies the root difference between the two media. (Bluestone 1) Generally a surface level observation makes one feel that the two art forms are totally different media employing different devices. It would seem that film and literature are very different: film, with its flickering dream-like images, and print literature with its

11 black lines on white pages (Gibson 7). However, Bluestone in his groundbreaking work Literature into Films (1957) analysed the similarities between the two media. These two arts based on language have analogous formative elements; Robert Richardson says in his study Literature and Film that film s lexicon is the photographed image (the frame ) and its grammar and syntax the editing process which arranges these images (Gibson8). Cinematic language, however, according to Jean Mitry, appears not as an abstract form to be supplemented by certain aesthetic qualities but as an aesthetic quality itself supplemented by the properties of language; in short, an organic whole in which art and language are fused, the one being indissolubly linked with the other (2). Cinema is the new medium of expression that may be imbued with artistic sensibility to make it a work of art. The cinema is being seen as the concrete language of emotions, thoughts, and visual expression. The immense mass appeal of cinema lies in its expression of emotions without the need of spoken words. Braudy and Cohen has identified the common denominators between cinema and literature and cinema: Cinema was very quickly perceived to be an art and the theorists and filmmakers proudly asserted cinema s links to other arts because films embody, communicate, enforce and suggest meanings. Film theorists often suggest that film constitutes a language or a visual esperanto. (Singh1) The language of literature is the abstract words whereas the language of the film is constituted by the image and the aural bytes. A means of expression capable of organising, of constructing and communicating thoughts, able to develop ideas which can change, form, and transform themselves, then becomes a language- indeed is what is

12 termed a language (Mitry 13). Just like the words the meaning of the images depends on the context in which they are placed by the creator. The abstract words in literature depending on their context produce dynamic images in the mind and are perceived. In addition to this, cinema deals in concrete images which demand a different type of reading and comprehension. According to Pfleiderer and Lutze, most of what the film has to say is to be read as percepts, preverbal and concrete observations and simple identifications rather than words (Singh3). The cinematic language requires one to create meaning through identifying the context and coherent assimilation of the images. The language of film is not the language used in conversation but that used in a poem or a novel; and images- though organized according to a predetermined meaning-inevitably leave an area of vagueness around the thing expressed which makes us rather think that it does not encompass or designate a rationally defined thought (Mitry16). The cinematic language considerably pictures a situation, character and object from the perspective of the auteur. The mise en scene and the editing techniques selectively rearrange the images to create the story from his/her perspective. According to Robert and Wallis the study of a film s narrative is both the study of its story and also the study of how the story is told by mise en scene (i.e. what is to be filmed traditionally) cinematography, editing, sound and its structure (Singh3). According to Gibson, however, the frame s denotative and connotative meanings, in isolation, are incomplete; just as the full meaning of a word arises from its context, so the frame s meaning is incomplete without a context (8). The Susan Santog highlights the importance of understanding the context when he mentions that just as verbal language is made up of words arranged in a specific context in time to

13 attain full meaning, film language is made of images and sounds, likewise arranged in a context in time to attain its full meaning (Gibson 9). Charles Eidsvik has further drawn up the syntactical resemblance between the two media: The pattern of arranging shots in their standard sequence resembles the syntax patterns of speech. A long shot establishes the subject; a medium shot conveys the important action, and a close-up shot shows what happened to the object in the film sentence. A periodic sentence pattern is achieved by placing the establishing shot last in the pattern. The fade-out and fade-in signifies a paragraph or chapter division. The break between shots in a sequence means roughly the same thing as comma. Film syntax involves the distribution of images in a sequence; the sequences frequently resemble the distributional system of the verbal language of the film-maker. (Gibson 9) According to Singh, films are essentially the work of a writer director yet film like literature is essentially a story telling art, dealt with as a literary genre (3). In being an art of storytelling or narration it is closely related to novels that are also narrative in nature, each novel deals with a particular literary genre. Genre characteristics are based on the use of plot, visual imagery, character setting, narrative development, music, metaphor, space and symbol. The elements defining a literary type or genre more or less define the genre of a novel also. According to Gibson the filmmakers Georges Melies to Edwin S. Porter to D. W. Griffith to Sergei Eisenstein did an enormous amount of

14 borrowing of techniques, approaches, genres, and stories from print literature and especially from popular literature (Gibson 19). Space and time are the important formative elements of both the novel and the film. The filmic reality as well as the literary reality is produced by the coherent blending of the verbal and the visual images by the writer or the filmmaker respectively. The power of the film to represent organic processes could, however, also be identified with its unique mechanical intelligence, its mechanical thought, in Jean Epstein s formulations. For Epstein, the cinema produced thought or thinking (independently of a human observer), precisely because it was able to generate new and unprecedented forms and relations of time and space. (Marcus 4) These arrangements and blending have to be done in space and time in order to achieve artistic unity. Just like the novel the film involves movement and change. In its structure, film is movement and change: change of shot, sequence, angle of view; movement suggested intellectually (for instance, between several actions going on in different places) (Mitry16). For example in the films dealt with in this study flashback is used as an important device to connect the past and the present. One of the scenes in the film Parzania that deals with grief of Cyrus Dastur tends to bring forth the rare moments of happiness in their life. The film Black Friday also effectively employs flashback as an important tool to associate the past with the present. This involves the meticulous use of camera techniques and artistic sensibility. The space time continuum is re-established here to lend organic unity to the narrative. In the film Amu, Keya Roy relates to Kaju in

15 the end about her past life in a close up shot. Shonali Bose has blended the flashback scene within the film to fill up the gap of twenty years in her life as well as Kaju s life. Cinema and literature are the two art forms where the perception of the audience and the reader is defined by the artist through selection and discrimination. Just like a novelist establishes the world of the story, the filmmaker also establishes his world of story. The establishing of the setting of the novel is similar to the establishing shot that sets the context of the film in purpose. The establishing shot of the film Train to Pakistan gives a panoramic vision of the village Mano Majra. The beauty of the scene is that it blends and portrays the lifestyle of the Mano Majarans through a rare composition Sanu Aa Mil Yaar Piyaria. The trains are integrated in the life of the Mano Majarans. The shot begins with the rising sun in the east and gradually moving to the west making the audience integrated with the rural ambience of Mano Majra. Similarly the description of Mano Majra through use of figurative language creates a dynamic mental space in which the reader lives and moves. Like the novel, the cinema presents us with a view of the action which is absolutely under the control of the director (writer) at every moment. Our attention cannot wander about the screen, as it does about the stage. When the camera moves we move, when it remains still we are still. In a similar way the novel presents a selection of the thoughts and descriptions which are relevant to the writer s conception, and we must follow these serially, as the author leads us; they are not spread out, as a

16 background, for us to contemplate in the order we choose, as in painting or the theatre. (Susan Santog as cited in Gibson 7) The comprehensive definition of language as means of translating the tiny impulses of thought, all language is necessarily associated with the mental structures which organize them i.e., with the operations of the mind, which consists in conceiving, judging, reasoning, ordering, according to associations of analogy, consequence, or causation by Jean Mitry (16) revolutionised the way the language of cinema was being understood. According to him, the abstract symbols generate mental images; written expression captures and expresses the thought processes. Elaborating on the literary devices like symbolism, alliteration, imagery, Jean Mitry stresses that they are merely the impressions left by thought structures and are literary because, up to now-for many thousand years- the verbal language has been the only possible way of translating or applying them (17). The formative editing techniques like the montage that rearranges images simply translating the thought processes into audio-visual impressions. If the purpose of cinematic technique is to translate this thought process in terms of film, then it is done using mental shapes and not literary shapes, which are merely its verbal application (Mitry17).The cinematic devices like the close-ups, dissolves, pans, tracking shots has analogous generation in literature using figurative language and graphic imagery. The great thing would be to discover certain features of this movement (such as those captured today by the cinema) in the master pieces of literature! For in literature we see tracking shots, pans, close-

17 ups, and dissolves when we observe quite simply the expression of these same forms of thought, the same rhythmic associations and the same descriptive sequences- except that the means are different, means which try to give, in a roundabout fashion, what the cinema achieves directly. (Mitry18) These insights go far beyond just finding the analogous formative elements or contrasts between the two media. At the present juncture, literature seems to have transcended the limitations of being just verbal impression and cinema its limitation of just being a mechanical medium of recreating reality. Novelist and critic Evelyn Riesman feels that some of the most exciting moments in any art come when, rather than exploiting its natural strengths, it instead stretches the boundaries of its natural limitations: These leapings over boundaries are always exciting when poetry becomes painting in words, or when painting becomes a kind of calligraphy, when photography moves more and more towards something internal, something literary, turning it upon itself, so to speak, on the mind working behind it (Gibson 14-5). Thus idea is strengthened when the study of the literary and cinematic texts reveals that intense writing can create mental images that we can feel and experience and certain films through the use of close-ups, cliff- hangers speak a language that overcomes the limitations of the verbal or written expression. Both the art forms employ figurative language. According to Gianetti, both art forms use figurative language in similar ways; but the person trained in literature should be aware that film is not an artistic poor relation of print literature in regard to its richness of expression, since the film s juxtapositions

18 within the shot can include people, objects, sets, sounds, costumes, lights, color, movement, angles, music, verbal expressions-and include them simultaneously, which verbal literature cannot. (Gibson 16-17). The relationship between cinema and print literature has been intriguing since birth of the film making moving on to the adaptation of literary classics for cinema and to the recent trend of the camerastylo. According to Alexandre Astruc s famous pronouncement of 1948, camera as a new form of writing has established itself. I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera - stylo (camera pen). This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the image and the concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. (Gibson 22) 3.3 Cinematic Adaptations of Literary texts The technological advancements in the world of cinema have blended with the cultural needs of the society it pertains to. Cinematic adaptations have played the important role of providing timeless expression to literature and life in the modern, more dynamic cultural context. According to Aragay, adaptation negotiates the past/present divide by recreating the source text- as well its author, historical context and a series of inter texts-an insight which studies of film adaptation have gradually come to terms with since the early 1990s (Aragay 23).The language of cinema aesthetically embodies the different cultural aspects of a society. Religion is an important cultural construct in the

19 Indian context and communal violence an integral phenomenon of the Indian society since partition. Through recreating the different literary texts the film makers have provided a serious discursive platform to the issues raised by the writers on socially relevant issues. Cinematographers have lent a dynamic dimension to the persistence of great literary works. Stressing the role played by cinema by adapting literary texts Jauss mentions: A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence [... a literary event can continue to have an effect only if those who come after it still or once again respond to it- if there are readers who again appropriate the past work or authors who want to imitate, outdo, or refute it]. (Aragay 22) The cinematographers have been charged with untruthful to the literary text. The critics have time and again felt that the richness and originality of the literary text can t be captured truthfully by the cinematic adaptations. The films 1947: Earth, Black Friday and Train to Pakistan within the scope of this research are cinematic adaptations of the novels Ice Candy Man, Black Friday: The True Story of Bomb Blasts and Train to Pakistan respectively. According to Linda Costanzo the first step in exploring the merits of literature-based films is to see them as translations of the source material and to understand the difference between adaptation and translation (Cahir 14).The prior reading of the literary text no doubt forms a vivid impression of the subject on the mind

20 of the reader. These impressions get further deeply imbedded in his mind when he reflects on the work intentionally or unintentionally. Readers translate words into images and form strong, private often vivid impressions of what the book s fictional world looks like and what it all means; words have translated into emotional experiences. When a film does not square with the reader s ideas, images, interpretations- even simple recall- of the book, the movie is deemed de facto deficient and disappointing, spawning the general impression that the movie just never is as good. (Cahir 13) These cinematic texts are the translation of the respective literary texts into a totally different medium using the cinematic language through selective interpretation and association. The cinematographer tries to integrate the idea and the story of the novel to be retold through the language of images that are more concrete than the suggestive, figurative and verbal language of the novelist. The first step towards understanding a cinematic adaptation is that the literal translation of a novel is not possible in a visual medium. The cinematographer has to assimilate the artistic aspects of the literary work and recreate the same concept in a different art form. During this process the literary text gets transformed into a new text. The literary and the film texts are then in a symbiotic relationship with each other. In the process of adaptation, the same substantative entity which entered the process exits, even as it undergoes modification sometimes radical mutation- in its efforts to accommodate itself to its new environment (Cahir 14). The

21 question of faithfulness gets modified in this context when we treat the adaptation as recreation of the story and its theme in an audio visual medium. More important than such faithfulness, however, as Andre Bazin wrote, is knowing whether the cinema can integrate the powers of the novel (let s be cautious: at least a novel of a classical kind), and whether it can beyond the spectacle, interest us less through the representation of events than through our comprehension of them. (Cahir 4) According to Cahir we can stay more mindful of inherent predispositions and more aware of how our overall translation expectations influence our reception of literature based movies if we look at these works as translations (15). The film Black Friday differs considerably in its approach of presenting from that of the novel. Where the reading of the novel seems more like reading the documentation of the conspiracy and execution of serial bomb blasts, the film goes on to selectively recreate the important parts of the texts integrating the human dimensions of the ghastly episode in a much more emphatic manner. This is in consonance with Cahir s observation that there is a hierarchy of purpose and intent within the dynamics of translating, each individual translator must determine what is most crucial, what is of secondary importance: The literal letter of the parent text? Its structure? Its unique music- its rhythms and sounds? Its meaning? Its accessibility to a popular audience? Its beauty (15)? Making a film on a literary text is a complex pursuit and involves the employment of the logical, creative and aesthetic skills of the cinematographer. There are three modes of translation of literature into films: the

22 literal, radical and the traditional. An understanding of the different modes of translation enables us to appreciate and understand the effort of the cinematographer. The cinematic adaptations of the literary texts tend to meet the rapidly changing aesthetic and cultural needs of the present society that is confronted with technological inventions. According to Aragay, judging an adaptation on the basis of an impressionistic fidelity criterion reveals a lack of awareness of the radical difference between the two media- the linguistic and the visual media and that the novels and films are different aesthetic genera or autonomous media (12-3).Novels being more suggestive and instilling more of self reflection were treated to be a higher and more subtle form of creative expression as compared to films. The technological aspect of film was thought to be inadequate to meet the level of creative expression of the writer. Novels and films though autonomous aesthetic genera have common denominators and interexchange with each other in that words are present in films and images through vivid imagery permeate novels. The emergence of the concept of the auteur towards the 1950s established the film as a text endowed with artistic ability. The journals such as La Revue du Cinema (1946) and, particularly, Cahiers du Cinema (1951) emphasized the concept that the aesthetic sensibility of an auteur is independent of the technological and generic factors just like the literary author. Keith Cohen s Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (1979) explores the dynamics of exchange of energies between the film and the novels. He also explores the common denominator between the primarily visual language of the film and the verbal language of the novel. The dynamics of exchange, in other words, work both ways between film and fiction- an argument which instantly undermines claims for the

23 superiority of literature vis-a-vis cinema (Aragay 18).The films Black Friday and 1947: Earth have witnessed the creations of masterpieces of cinema thereby refuting the claims that cinematic adaptations are subordinate to literature. There exists examples of correlative characteristics between film and novel as Cardwell claims which make it harder to argue that textual characteristics within the end products of different media arise from the unique properties of the media themselves and this in turn potentially liberates adaptation studies from the formalist, binary source /adaptation straitjacket (Aragay 18). Films encompass the realm of life and culture and owing to multiple reasons, form an interesting exposition of the cultural dynamics of a society. The films chosen for this study relate with literature as: cinematic adaptations, independent works documenting a particular juncture of socio-cultural relevance or a film script transformed into a novel. Timothy Corrigan has mentioned the importance of such interfacing of literature and film under the demands of the current era in his book Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Whether because of its massive social impact, because of the aesthetic development of film art, or because of shifts in cultural literacy, the cinema now demands equal time and attention when we argue the relative value and meaning of movies and literature. (Snyder 12) The study of these works reveals that cinema and literature of a particular era are simultaneously working independent of each other in the modern construct as much as through mutual exchange of creative energies. According to Aragay, the literary source

24 need no longer be conceived as a work/ original holding within itself a timeless essence which the adaptation/copy must faithfully reproduce, but as a text to be endlessly (re) read and appropriated in different contexts (22). A cinematic adaptation is a creative pursuit which enables a film maker to explore the potential of a different medium to meet the cultural demands of the global world. The study of the films as well as the novels chosen for this study establishes a varying correlation between cinema and literature. Present day Indian society is marked with the rising interest of the masses and the global audience in films based on communal violence ranging from partition to the communal carnage in Gujarat during Feb There has been a rise in the creation films and novels dealing with the different aspects of communal violence from perspectives. The comparative study of the literary and the corresponding cinematic texts demands an in depth understanding of the subtle aspects of cinema as an art form, the analogous formative elements of literature and cinema and the nuances of cinematic translations of literary texts. The handling of the camera that is a technical and mechanical process may be imbued with artistic sensibility. The selective photographing of the objects, situations and individuals reveals those aspects that the auteur wants to highlight. The camera movements, angles and lighting may accentuate a particular idea or theme. According to Andre Bazin the film-makers strength lies in explicitness and control, while the writer s is found in power of suggestion (as quoted in Gibson 14). The understanding of the different camera operations enables the reader to appreciate the aesthetic of the film. The development of the film theory from its initial insights to the auteur theory to the present

25 day post structural theory enables to comprehend the artistic dimensions of film and understanding of the common denominators between film and other art forms. To sum up, the reading of the film text is based on perceptual understanding of the preverbal and the concrete images that are arranged in a particular context to achieve the connotative and the denotative meanings. Films have borrowed extensively from literature. The understanding of cinematic adaptations as translations of literary texts into a different medium is governed by a number of factors. The symbiotic exchange of energy between the two has been of interest to film as literary critics. Cinematic translations have enabled to add to the essence of literature and pervade and propagate through time and space.

26 Works Cited Aragay, Mireia. Relection to Refraction: Adaptation Studies Then and Now. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Ed. Mereia Aragay. New York. Rodopi B.V. Editions: Print. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkley and Los Angeles: U of California P, Print. Cahir, Linda Costanzo. Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Google Book Search. Web. 4 Mar Gibson, Christine Mary. Cinematic Techniques in the Prose Fiction of Beatriz Guido. Diss USA: Dissertation.com: Google Book Search. Web. 10 Jan Huda, Anwar. The Art and Science of Cinema. New Delhi. Atlantic Publishers and Distributers, Print. Jaidka, Manju. A Critical Study of Deepa Mehta s Trilogy: Fire, Earth and Water. New Delhi: Readworthy Publications, Print. Lewis, Brains. Foreword. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. By Jean Mitry. Trans. Christopher King. Bloomington: Indiana U P, vii-xi. Print. Marcus, Laura. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. New York: Oxford U P, Google Book Search. Web. 10 Jan

27 Mitry, Jean. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. Trans. Christopher King. Bloomington: Indiana U P, Print. Richardson, Robert. Literature and Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, Print. Verma, Suparn. Breaking New Ground. Rev. 10 Sept Rediff.com. Web. 19 Feb 2012.