#10
Hey friend, we're back with issue 10. Just like Rick Astley, we're never gonna give you up!
We've successfully fought the lethargy of winter and are here with the first issue of the new year. In memory of the legendary David Lynch, Abhinav Nath Jha pens a personal piece pondering the dreams, dread, and sincerity of the Lynchian legacy. You may leave cinema, but cinema rarely does— Vanij Choksi lays out his relationship with cinema in the absence of it. Varun Oak-Bhakay filmography with the vantage of Se7en (1995). Prakhar Patidar, our budding film programmer, drawing from her experience with ALTEFF, writes about what makes a good environmental fiction short. And, Mahika Kandalgaonkar offer’s something exciting — she’s made an experimental short film!
1. Dreams, Dread, and Serenity: The Legacy of David Lynch
ABHINAV NATH JHA
The image of an artist suffering, honing their craft to the point of torture, has now almost become an undebatable axiom in modern culture. Not in the least, all forms of art have played their part in perpetuating this. In Whiplash [Damien Chazelle, 2014], Miles Teller’s character decides to play the drums even when moments ago he was in an accident and was bleeding profusely. In that same film, he even decides to break up with his girlfriend in order to become a better drummer.
Taylor Swift literally titled her latest studio album The Tortured Poet’s Department [2024]. Yet, amidst all of this, there was a man from Missoula, Montana, often seen in a black suit with a cigarette between his lips, who could easily pass off as your grandfather who said stuff like, ‘You don’t have to suffer to show suffering’, ‘Negativity is the enemy of creativity’, ‘If you're truly depressed, they say, you can't even get out of bed, let alone create.’ Clearly, David Lynch did not buy into the idea of sacrificing one’s well-being for their art.
When he passed away last month, I was in utter disbelief. Lynch was one of the many figures, along with Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Copolla, who marked the beginning of my journey as a cinephile when I was a teenager. I still remember being terrified of the infamous jumpscare scene in Mulholland Drive [2001] as a fourteen-year-old when the Hobo makes her appearance right outside Winkie’s Diner. Even as I failed to grasp the major motifs and symbolism of the film, the experience left me with a strange feeling. It almost felt like the film was interacting with me and revealing itself long after I had watched it.
Through the use of surrealism and dream-like sequences, Lynch was able to make his audience a co-author. He never liked explaining his films or breaking them down, looking at films akin to a painting. Exploiting the full potential of the visual medium, he would linger, never in a rush to tell his story. As a viewer, there does come a point where you feel you’re completely immersed in his world, like a semi-hypnosis is drawing you in. Recently, while watching Eraserhead, in the context of climate change and declining living standards, I felt the lines between the television screen and the reality of my living room blur.
Despite dealing with themes of existential dread, loneliness, yearning, and hedonistic desires, Lynch would always appear peaceful, never without a smile on his face. He even started a foundation called the David Lynch Foundation to propagate Transcendental Meditation, which he had learnt from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi back in the 70s. Lynch got diagnosed with emphysema in 2020. He had become reliant on supplemental oxygen since a few years. Although, he passed away while meditating without any sign of struggle . The ordeal that he often put his characters through, it was nothing short of legendary that Lynch was able to have a zen-like attitude towards life, inspiring artists all over to nourish rich, inner lives.
2. Cinema in the Absence of Movies
VANIJ CHOKSI
I haven't watched a movie in over three months. I think about film, about movies I admire, often repeatedly. I might have a “movie of the month” marked at the end of this newsletter, although it’s probably something I watched long ago. But I don't feel the lack. I’ve spent years bathing myself in film, firmly believing in the practice of regular movie-watching as a connection to the world and an interpretation of it. Now in my prolonged hiatus from the practice, a new meaning has managed to make manifest before me: cinema as a conduit. There is no interpretation now, only the creation of a firm belief system from it. A new way of seeing, not just reality via the lens of the cinematic medium, but also through the lens of everyday living. Yet this is, as I see it, the natural progression of my relationship with cinema, a nudge to implement its experience outside of its passive viewing. Was that not exactly what the movies I watched aimed to achieve?
Another form of the natural progression of my relationship with cinema is the creation of a certain taste and the formulation of its defence – the axiom of the veritable relationship. As such, my interests and prejudices strike far beyond collective opinions about contemporary cinema. The genesis of this attitude I would attribute to the cinema that I find interesting itself. Insofar as the films I engaged with and related to, nudged me to make of it something that which it inconspicuously commented upon, I found meaning that may not have had any correlation with the specifics of the film itself, but were equally valuable findings. That is at once a statement of my interests and taste. Films that are quasi-literal of what they’re about, yet elevated to an experiential nth degree where understanding and empathy may foster. It's as if it invites you to co-author its meaning. This must not be confused with films that are considered “open-ended”, in fact, these films may be readily readable at their beginning, but they manage to express specificity in terms of calculated obscurity that leaves one with the potential for insight. As it turns out contemporary cinema is littered with exactly the opposite, films dead-ended by the lack of the creative ambiguity that both parties – filmmaker and audience – long for. Images are created with such literalness that the potential for insight is finite, capped by the filmmaker's observation that feels supposedly objective - the narration of a world as is. This is at once a statement of my prejudices and defence.
Per this rationale of my interests and tastes, contemporary cinema left unprotected by my reckonings finds a rough fit within a personal understanding of “cinema”. Closer to mass culture – creative, entertaining and valid creations in their own right – they enforce a state of information siege, ignorance and complacency, yet the custodians of mass culture have made it such that nothing else is deemed necessary. “That’s what the people want.” Well, “the people” didn't have much to choose from anyway. The self-proclaimed protectors of the so-called “public interest” and a single method of doing have led to the reverse-engineering of a taste, the fixation on the perceived potentialities of a form and the perpetuance of a collective consciousness. We aren’t pressed to look too far back in human history to learn of the effects of ready acceptance of collective consciousness. While this isn’t that, a common flux of ignorance occurs plaguing actual societal development and emanating a predisposition of alienation.
I do not intend to posit that films akin to mass culture should not exist. In fact, I’d rally against its total eradication. They’re essentially entertaining, only I’m distressed when it's made such that this is only what's available under the pretext of what the audience is looking for. Where then will ever there exist a situation where one may create a sense of taste? More importantly, personal awareness? It’s almost as if the matter at hand is more insidious than it appears – perhaps the audience is made to want what they think they want.
But the audience isn’t entirely exempt from any responsibility. In the event that audiences influence and enable artists, almost proclaiming them heroes, or celebrities, the artist buys into the image regurgitating much of what the audience has influenced him to. In a sense, the relationship of comfort between audience and artist has taken precedence over art itself – so one awaits the work of the “visionary director of XYZ film” as the selling point to its watchability. This is true in the case of popular music as well. An almost inbred symbiotic relationship of delusion is the breeding ground for the “celebrity” and the death of social art. Influencing an artist means in turn accepting a subservient influencing of oneself. Ignorance giving rise to ignorance. It is the sin of the artist to accept the notion of the celebrity, offering a safe product rather than challenging and liberating the blind influence being thrust upon him by the masses he believes he’s serving.
The objective of cinema then I find is two-fold: prompting thought and prompting thought about the specific nature of the world the film has chosen to divert its gaze to. A macro and a micro. The objective of the audience then I find is two-fold as well. Learning and retaining things intellectually through the practice of art consumption is half the battle won. One has first liberated oneself from the perpetuance of a collective consciousness and rejected the comfort of the concocted balm of self-importance, now comes its practice viz the field of human activity of one’s choice. As it seems, my chosen field is cinema itself – perhaps the practice of doing has taken precedence over the practice of viewing. But all the same, it stems from a call to action propagated by cinema itself – to better my skill so that I may be able to create efficiently from a social standpoint.
But I know I’ve learnt more – the time I’d spend experiencing the longing for love and the creation of human relationships that I’ve received from some of my favourite films I now assign to the creation of new and the maintenance of existing relationships of my own. Accepting love and meaningful connection, empathy, good, the ideal – and there’s still more, by-products of the creation of a taste and the liberation of personal awareness, in what seems like a time dominated by earning profits by its repression, is the fulcrum of spiritual and ethical human action. I haven’t watched a movie in over three months, but I don't feel the lack. I feel free.
3. Re-Unboxing Se7en
VARUN OAK-BHAKAY
[Spoilers for most of David Fincher’s filmography follow]
I first caught the film David Fincher insists on labelling his maiden effort (over Alien 3, on which he was a hired hand) in my undergraduate days, when blood, guts and gore were still new on-screen concepts, when Brad Pitt’s David Mills cursed more than me, when Modiji hadn’t yet completed a term as Prime Minister. Good times, basically. The film is now thirty (I am less than five years short myself); to mark the anniversary, an upscaled remaster of the original negative was released theatrically.
I enjoy rewatching films, and as I step further away from writing about them and lessen my consumption of them, I tend to consider revisiting more and more stuff I’ve enjoyed. Quite often, young Varun’s opinion, summarised by a relatively innocent mind, will be ruthlessly updated by a bespectacled man with greying hair. I no longer stand by Anubhav Sinha’s Dus [2005], appreciate Haider [Vishal Bhardwaj, 2014] more, and, just to prove that some things don’t change, continue to not care for The Shining [Stanley Kubrick, 1980]. Rewatching a film has painfully little to do with nostalgia; it is a process that looks inwards such that even a person such as yours truly, who’d rather not get to know himself any better, is willing to revisit his thoughts, reconcile his ideas with the world he lives in, and look at the same thing slightly differently.
Years ago, Se7en played out as a heady crime thriller about two detectives on the hunt for a rather creative killer. It lived up to the shock value it promised at every turn of the game, from the grotesque crime scene to the famous “What’s in the box?!” moment. It feels much more like a drama with the spectre of police procedure hanging over it now. In Morgan Freeman’s worn-out, weary Somerset, the film locates a disillusionment about life itself while Mills and his wife Tracy [Gwyneth Paltrow] are young, much-in-love newlyweds who find the dispiriting atmosphere of the unnamed city unnerving. Before the film is over, both viewpoints will have changed. Tracy’s, in fact, starts to take a turn soon after we meet her: Mills has a job that acquaints him with the seedier side of life deftly, she gets no such exposure.
Fincher’s depiction of the city as damp and filled with despair, early mere intricately-done atmospherics, points now to the ideas John Doe [Kevin Spacey] espouses about a rotten society that is willfully blind to its numerous shortcomings.
That Fincher approaches drama through crime is now an established pattern, as evidenced by Zodiac [2007, my favourite of his works], The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [2011], Gone Girl [2014], and Mindhunter [2017-19], but even outside the crime film, Fincher’s exploration of personhood is fascinating, be it young Harvard nerds who have yet to realise the power they wield [The Social Network, 2010] or alcoholic screenwriters a step short of the definitive points in their careers [Mank, 2020]. In Se7en, one finds the early strains of this meticulously-moulded style: Somerset and Mills appear to make the perfect odd couple, and this is immediately contrasted by how well the latter’s equation with Tracy works out amidst the humdrum of moving to a new city and taking up new jobs. Doe’s motivations have more to do with being acknowledged by society than anything else: he doesn’t care whether they like him or not, it’s the inability to see him that is the problem. The unknown killer in Zodiac may or may not derive pleasure from murder but the fear he generates among the populace of 70s San Francisco is what brings him prominence. Amy Dunne’s manipulative machinations are not merely a means to satisfy bloodlust but to preserve an ideal she has cooked up in her head.
More than any other filmmaker, it is Fincher’s work which appears different upon being subjected to a rewatch. It’s almost like watching a newer tread of the material. I caught Zodiac on the big screen recently and the doggedness of Paul Avery [Robert Downey Jr.], the consummate professionalism of Dave Toschi [Mark Ruffalo], and the sheer boneheadedness of Robert Graysmith [Jake Gyllenhaal] was infinitely more interesting than the “killer never caught” aspect of it. Fincher’s cinema, then, is a before-the-fact examination of the fandom around violent crime, as though he knew, three decades ago, how people would someday come to derive a vicarious pleasure from the actions of the likes of Ted Bundy and Ed Kemper, and chose to flip the camera around to monitor their responses rather than the crimes.
The response matters in Se7en, perhaps more so for the volte face of both detectives. Once Doe’s final victims are revealed, Mills loses the openness with which he has approached his job thus far, and Somerset appears to reconsider his decision to quit. The world has nothing new to show for itself, and the characters’ existence is forever altered. That state of disquiet is where most of Fincher’s cinema comes to rest.
4. A Programmer in Training on a Good Environmental Fiction Short Film
PRAKHAR PATIDAR
Still from VIRUNDHU // THE FEAST (dir. Rishi Chandna)
Why are good environmental fiction shorts so hard to come by?
I have been with ALT EFF – All Living Things Environmental Film Festival – for two years now; 2025 will be the third. The festival receives as well as sources films from all around the world. In its five-year lifespan, it has built a solid repository of environment-themed cinema, from feature documentaries to journalism. Shorts are an important category in niche festivals that aim to attract a diverse crowd. The narrower the audience’s scope of interest, the harder it becomes to sell a lengthier, issue-heavy film or unconventional experimental films. Programming more and more short films is a lot like bread crumbing in this scenario, but with the intention of delivering consistently while pushing the very definition of a “festival flick”. Hence, in crude transactional terms, there is a demand. Where is the supply?
Before I put on the programmer’s hat in preparation for the 2025 edition of the festival, I would like to put on that of a critic and dive into some of my favorite fictional shorts from the ALT EFF 2024 programme to contemplate what even makes a good fictional environmental short?
ABBA (dir. Fabiana Lupo)
Two space explorers land on a planet with water— a discovery never made before in the film’s universe. A woman speaks in the background, as if telling a bedtime story or recalling a distant memory. Architectural ruins of what once was perplex the protagonists. There’s a discovery to be made, revealed halfway through the film for the viewer and in the final minutes for the protagonists. This is no undiscovered, life-supporting twin but a healed Earth herself, three thousand years after humans fled the mess they made.
ABBA is the most directly linked to environmental themes – it explores an end that is inevitable should anthropogenic environmental destruction continue. Direct engagement with the theme often hollows fiction out. Lupo seems to be aware of the predictability of the plot she has chosen to weave into a short film and thus focuses more on its treatment rather than the inventiveness of its narrative. Filled with larger-than-life imagery of a healed planet, ABBA is evocative. It utilises the power of orality, lost humanity coming home, and visual prowess to remind us: the only second chance we get is in mending our ways now.
Conclusion 1: Building the environment is IMPORTANT in an environmental short fictional film.
SPIRIT OF PLACE (dir. Jack Cooper Stimpson)
A young couple watches birds in a wetland sonorous with nature – wind, swaying grass, ripples in water, coos, and hoots. Ethel tries to make Edward see something shiny in the distance, a kingfisher perhaps, but he misses it. Stimpson cleverly embeds the essence of the film – laid out in its title – into its very first scene. They both want the wetlands to be different things: Edward is drawn to the birds, Ethel to the landscape. This is precisely where the setting emerges, and a third character weaves into the narrative to represent the conflict between the couple.
This thought-provoking short succeeds in its ability to evoke the spirit of each version of the wetland presented to us – Ethel’s, Edward’s, and that of the old birdwatcher (Mark Rylance) – compelling the viewer to ponder the spirit of the places they hold close to heart.
Conclusion 2: It helps if the environment is more than a setting.
ULLARIVU // THE AWAKENING (dir. Sumi Mathai)
A young girl's attempts to be outdoors in nature are constantly met with her mother’s disapproval, her older sister’s lack of interest, and the tendency of groups of boys to own a place like it’s nobody’s business. As our protagonist learns that accessibility and freedom aren’t distributed equally, she awakens to a gendered world that she must inevitably grow into. Girls don’t go out hugging trees, roaming in forests, or fishing by the lake. Invisible barricades block the way, as exclusive dangers await them in the wild.
Through her protagonist, Mathai revisits one of many instances of girlhood where the world shrinks a little—here, it is the severance of solitude and peace that nature holds in abundance. The Awakening’s simple form is elevated by its awareness of the content it chooses. The environment isn’t just nature. Because it is home to humans, it too is an unwilling part of their constructed mess. The environment is socio-political.
Conclusion 3: An environmental short fiction film is aware.
VIRUNDHU // THE FEAST (dir. Rishi Chandna)
Inspired by a unique act of protest using food as a tool, in 2021, the fisherwomen of Pulicat Lake organised a feast for politicians and bureaucrats in an attempt to remind them what they stood to lose if they let industrial development destroy the lake – the very source of their treasured cuisine. The Feast speaks for coastal communities on the verge of losing it all.
Mary invites a local politician to dinner in a bid to convince him to stop expanding factories by the lake – a threat to her livelihood. The table is set in the neighbourhood church. Candles are lit. Prayers are offered. In the most remarkable scene of this capable short, Mary gives the politician an earful under the guise of prayer before the meal. She reminds God of the price of net and diesel, the vanishing shrimp, the culprits responsible, and thanks Him for the meal despite knowing their follies.
Instantly humorous, the scene adds warmth to a rather grim setting – the kind of warmth all tales of food inherently possess. Her words and her laboriously sourced, heartily cooked meal echo the pleas that had been falling on deaf ears until now.
Conclusion 4: A good environmental short fiction film has something to say.
This of course is on top of all that generally applies to short fiction – an engaging story, a plot that feels complete as a short rather than an excerpt from a future feature, layered narrative, fitting treatment, good performances, efficient sound design and so on. For starters, environmental fiction shorts have to stop burdening themselves with a “message”. The film is the message.
There’s a lesson here for my programmer self as well. Those who’ve been longer in the field often don’t have an answer to what exactly makes a film a good fit – for a programme or the larger responsibility of qualifying as cinema. Almost everyone I have posed this question to echoes Gerwig’s stream of consciousness flow of an answer when asked “what is cinema?” at the Hollywood Reporter’s Director’s Roundtable of 2020 – “you know it when you see it”. What do you need to “know” to “know” that you have seen it? Anyone can watch a film and express their opinions. Everyone does. Perhaps programmers ought to write their way to “knowing”.
5. The Night Before (dir. Mahika Kandalgaonkar)
MAHIKA KANDALGAONKAR
Places form people to tell poetry of their relationship.
When people are gone, those places hold their memories.
If you listen intently, the poetry reveals itself.
I remember my mother saying, ‘Do you hear the ghosts trapped in the void?’ I have often wondered what the people of the past have in common with the people of the future. I believe they are haunted by the same thoughts: life, death, and everything in between. The space in between is where they create art. Their performance travels through time. The proof of their existence is witnessed by the people of the present. Hence, the ghosts are not merely a fragment of our imagination; they are the traces left behind by our ancestors and our descendants.
The Night Before transcends time and space to bring together the stories of two women who, despite having lived worlds apart, are consumed by familiar feelings. Their experiences, expressed through the lyrics of a moment in time of their lives, are reflected in the visuals and the sounds of the spaces they once occupied.
Picks of the Month
A short list of the writers each choosing the best film/show they’ve watched in the preceding month.
Abhinav: A Real Pain (dir. Jesse Eisenberg, 2024)
Vanij: The Meetings of Anna (dir. Chantal Akerman, 1978)
Varun: Nosferatu the Vampyre (dir. Werner Herzog, 1978)
Prakhar: Flow (dir. Gibts Zilbalodis, 2024)
Mahika: The Hypnosis (dir. Ernst De Geer, 2024)
Call for Guest Contributors
Cut, And Print! emerged from the shared enthusiasm of a bunch of young film critics interested extending their habit of “living and breathing” cinema to “writing and publishing” about it. While our core team contributes to the Newsletter regularly, we are always on the lookout for people to join our tribe.
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