‘Civil War’ is just reporting, says Alex Garland
Much of the film’s disquiet comes from seeing war on contemporary American soil
chose subjects marginalized by society. Fakir (1939) shows a man begging on the streets in Park Circus area of Kolkata. He drew this portrait in charcoal after observing his subject for days, and it demonstrates his ability to capture the pathos of the downtrodden in his socially responsive works. Other works in the same genre include Street Beggar (1937), Fisherman (1939) and Santhal People (1950).
The first half also devotes a section to his selfportraits. Mostly done in pen and ink, with a pronounced use of cross-hatching, these chronologically arranged sketches reinforce his image of a quiet and reclusive artist. Unfortunately, while he was known to make self-portraits till his final days, there are none exhibited from his sunset years, thus limiting the exhibition’s scope to showcase the evolution of this vital aspect of his artistic practice.
A glaring miss, again, is the absence of Ash’s series of watercolours on the catastrophic famine of Bengal in 1943, which he has been long recognised for, along with other contemporaries like Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Zainul Abedin. In past retrospectives on him, or of modern art from Bengal, seminal works of his like One by One—which represented the haunting scene of a family converged around a lifeless child aware there was more death to come— have been prominently featured.
A divergence within the exhibition is a set of non-anatomical figures created between 1948 and 1951. Branded as the Avatar series by the auction house, ostensibly to give them a catchy moniker, these gouaches stand in stark contrast to Ash’s early academic studies, his other modernist works, or ones from his later years exhibited in the show.
While the curatorial attempt to draw a likeness between Ash’s figures and recent digital avatars like Cryptopunk NFTs may seem opportunistic, his ability to arrive at such a distinctly expressive style makes him appear foresighted compared to his more established Indian contemporaries, and creates a dialogue with other global post-war expressionists.
A lesser known fact, which the retrospective highlights, is that in 1950, as an invited member of the Calcutta Group, Ash exhibited with the Bombay Progressives. At this point in the show, one is faced with the question: What happened to this nonconformist, who rebelled against the luminaries of the Bengal school, painted heartrending images of the famine while questioning British mismanagement during the war, and was considered avant-garde enough at his peak to exhibit alongside modernists like F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza and M.F. Husain?
The second half of the exhibition implies a decline in his prospects, both creatively and financially. From 1952 to 1955, he headed the painting department at the Indian College of Art and Draughtsmanship in Kolkata but then withdrew to his home town in Begumpur, where he opened the Fine Art Mission Free Art School in 1956.The Children series, painted in oil between 1957 and 1967, comes across as a regression to a more traditional approach, especially after he had developed such an individualistic style in his earlier works. The resulting piece, titled Commander-in-Chief, shows three children with the one in the centre holding a whip, while the other two look on subserviently.
The exhibition tries to uphold Ash as an influential modernist, who needs to be recognised for his critical contribution to Indian art during a period of turmoil ravaged by famine and Partition in Bengal. The show also underscores the lack of historical scholarship and critical recognition for many Indian modern artists who have withered away from the spotlight.
The exhibition can be viewed at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, Kolkata till 21 April, Monday – Saturday, 11 AM – 7PM.
Alex Garland’s films have vividly conjured a virus-caused pandemic (2002’s 28 Days Later), an uncontrollable artificial intelligence (2014’s Ex Machina) and, in his latest, Civil War, a near-future America in the throes of all-out warfare.
Most filmmakers with such a record might claim some knack for tapping into the zeitgeist. But Garland doesn’t see it that way. He’s dealing, he says, with omnipresent realities that demand no great leaps of vision. He wrote Civil War in 2020, when societies around the world were unraveling over COVID-19 and the prospect of societal breakdown was on everyone’s minds.
Civil War is an ominous attempt to turn widely held American anxieties into a violent, unsettling big-screen reality. Garland’s film opens Friday — the anniversary, to the day, of when the Civil War began in 1861. And it’s landing in movie theatres just months ahead of a momentous presidential election, making it potentially Hollywood’s most explosive movie of the year.
Civil War is something far more oblique than its matter-of-fact title. The film, which Garland wrote and directed, isn’t mapped directly against today’s polarization. In a war that’s already ravaged the country, California and Texas have joined forces against a fascist president (Nick Offerman) who’s seized a third term and disbanded the FBI.
A band of journalists (Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura) makes its way toward Washington, D.C. Much of the film’s disquiet comes from seeing visceral encounters of war — bombings, fire fights and executions — on contemporary American soil. “When things collapse, the speed at which they collapse tends to surprise people — including people like intelligence officers whose job is to watch and predict when these things will happen,” Garland said in a recent interview. “Things are always in a slightly more dangerous state than they might appear.”
The rapidity with which society can disintegrate has long fascinated Garland, the 53-year-old British born filmmaker. Western democracies, he says, can lean too much on their sense of exceptionalism. To him, Civil War isn’t an act of cynicism. It’s a warning shot. “The consequences of it are so serious that to not take the threat seriously would, itself, be another kind of insanity,” says Garland. “It would just be complacent.”
“Civil War,” set in a near-future, instead plays out with more subtle connections to today’s fractured politics and cultural splits. Jesse Plemons plays a heinous militant who interrogates the main characters, asking them: “What kind of American are you?” Though it’s never seen, Charlottesville, Virginia — site of the 2017 white supremacist rally — is referred to as a battle front.
Asked about that choice, Garland replies: “The film is just reporting.” As much as anything, Garland’s film is about the central role reporters play in capturing critical events in lethal conditions. Unbiased reporting, Garland says, has been eroded. In Civil War, it’s literally under attack.