She Shoots To CONQUER
A BOOK ABOUT INDIAN WOMEN FILMMAKERS HELPS SHIFT THE GENDERED LENS THROUGH WHICH WE WATCH OUR MOVIES
To say that women’s contributions to cinema have long been neglected—starting with early filmmakers like Dorothy Arzner and editors such as Elizaveta Svilova (whose genius is visible in every frame of the astonishing silent film Man with a Movie Camera)—would be to greatly understate things. Nandita Dutta’s F-Rated, comprising interviews with and profiles of important Indian filmmakers, from veterans Aparna Sen and Mira Nair to Alankrita Srivastava and Nandita Das, is an attempt to redress the imbalance. This book is about the preferred themes and working styles of these artists, the challenges they face as they balance profession with demands of parenthood or cope with extra scrutiny, condescension and even sexual harassment.
The result is a wide-ranging publication that tells individual stories while also probing cinematic tropes, trends and viewer demographics. For example, Dutta discusses the much-maligned “item number” and the difference between the sequence that focuses on the performer as a sentient person (as in ‘Kajra Re’) versus the one that treats the woman purely as object. Some anecdotes bring to mind the depiction of 1950s Hollywood in the recent TV series Feud. As Dutta points out, so much of film history, criticism and scholarship comes filtered through a male lens, a perspective that quickly became the accepted norm.
Dutta’s own biases towards “understated” (as opposed to popular or commercial) cinema leads to some simplistic analysis, as in a description of Tanuja Chandra’s clash with a New York producer who demanded she tone down a scene involving a bereaved mother. But it also makes the book more intriguing. Like the Farah Khan chapter—here is someone who makes flashy, big-budget films and doesn’t fit easy notions of the sensitive, personal filmmaking one might expect from a woman director. Dutta’s ambivalence about this comes across, though she acknowledges the hurdles that even someone of Khan’s popularity had to cross.
One does miss a few obvious names, like Zoya Akhtar (briefly mentioned in the Reema Kagti chapter), but then this wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive study. Also, some filmmakers refrained from participating because they didn’t care to be restricted by the label “woman director”—even though they have faced gender discrimination. Among other things, then, this book is a reminder of the limitations and the unavoidability of categorisation when it comes to assessing the work of women in a male-dominated space. ■