REVIEW (short film): The Afternoon Song

Reema & artist Kiran Subbaiah

THE AFTERNOON SONG (’Madhyanadha Haadu’)
a film about Contemporary art & artists of Bangalore
23 minutes
bilingual (English-Kannada)
Script/Direction: M.S. Prakash Babu

Contemporary Indian artists are, perhaps, baffled with the usually well
known mainstream art media. A few of them still paint. These are the men
(most of them) who believe that no media is totally explored, year. Others,
by and large, engage always in a new medium — mostly unused, till now, for
a creative expression — as if ‘it’ is inevitable for artists to express.
There are still more rare species, amongst artists, who try to paint through
a film, and shoot through canvas. The Bangalore-based artist, carricaturist,
M.S.Prakash Babu paints through a film media, in his first film: “The
Afternoon Song”. And he has compelled the leading and young generation of
Bangalore artists to ‘act’ in it and not ‘paint’!

Interestingly, other than the few ‘painters’, K.T.Shiva Prasad, Reema Alwa
and B.Devraj, the other artist-actors hardly use painting as their medium.
Most of them are using unconventional media, in their real life, as does
Prakash Babu in/through this film.

The story line of this bilingual and verbal film, is simple while its
content is sophisticated and previously unheard of.

Kiran Subbaiah, the protagonist

An artist, Kiran Subbaiah (an Inlaks awardee) gets up from a nightmare. In
the dream, he attempts to teach the only student of his, Manjunath. The
disciple is, in reality, a boy from the slum. He had, before this film,
become popular overnight as ‘Kyaatha’, for acting as his ‘ownself’ (a slum
dweller), in a film called as “Deveeri” in Kannada. In the dream, Manjunath
‘communicates’ with his teacher, but fails to understand the latter’s
language. Usually it is the other way round.

Prakash, in his mobile-painting (film), metaphorically speaking, initiates a
discourse on the contemporary art of Karnataka, in a fictious form. The art
of this State in the recent decades, ‘communicates’ but fails as a
culturally accepted ‘media’ (i.e., the newer ones like installations and
assemblages) — so does the film — to the audience!

After the nightmare, Kiran goes out of his house, meets the only fellow
artist who has ‘acted’ in this film as someone else, say, as a girl student
(Reema, a modest painter, designer and a model) in a cafe and has a dialogue
with her. Both of them converse about Kannada culture in general and the
cultural revolution of the 70s in particular. All these issues are spoken
about in English! Both ‘communicate’ well about trivial matters but when it
comes to Basavanna, Cheguvara and others — pleads ignorance without feeling
even the slightest sense of guilt about her innocense. As a model and
painter she is mocked at by the camera (due to those prolonged close-ups)
and disgruntled by Kiran, the installator.1

Prakash brings about an interesting ‘binary-opposition’ between the initial
scene and the cafe scene. In the former, he strangely narrates the success
of ‘communication’ even when ‘language’ fails; in the cafe scene the
‘language’ succeeds but there is no ‘communication’ of ideas, whatsoever.

Further, there is a party scene wherein two generation of Bangalore based
artists, photographers and art writers reflex upon what ‘LOVE’ means to
them, in the form of impromptu answers. “Bullshit”, “I dont know”,
“L.O.V.E”, “the words written behind trucks”, “brinjal — that rots fast”,
are a few sincere definitions that emerge by the artists partying in an
artist’s studio, in reality. However, the two writers, Martha
Jakimowitcz-Karle among them, tactfully escape a personal interpretition, in
the pretence of theorisation.

Disillusioned with the phantasmagoric sequences (that the narrative is
about, as well as the film itself) Kiran returns back to his room, watches a
straightforward narrative song sequence of Gurudatt’s “Pyaasa” (’duniya ko
jala do’), about love. Then he flips through several books, in a reverse
sequence2, and is haunted by his own shadow, that lits his cigeratte.
Cigerattes and clocks, along with 20th century man-made disasters in the
form of printed visuals, supported by the poetry of well know Kannada poets
– recurr throughout the film.

Actor Master Manja & artist Kiran Subbaiah

Ultimately, Kiran subdues the yearning to define how ‘love’ is communicated
through language and continues to just live! This film almost captures a
whole generation of artists’ opinion about their sense of living. Often the
artist/film director seems to take sides. The choice of Kiran and Reema,
(whose mother tongue is essentially not Kannada) conversing about Kannada
culture, as the elite Kannadigas do in reality, that too in English — is
one such director’s priority. It is a kind of reinforced irony, for it not
only mocks at the fate of Kannada in the hands of the city dwelling
Kannadigas but also at the director’s choice for choosing them. It obviously
pinpoints at the metropolitan nature of Bangalore as the reason for a
culture’s death — rather simplistically. On the contrary, the almost
documentary-like impromptu speeches of artists in the party, emerge as a
powerful first hand narrative about the core essence of their art — love.
Even over here, it is the cynicism, hideousness and sarcacism of the
creative people that is captured, as though by chance, for the whole
dialogue sequence is impromptu.

The whole film, at first, seems to be a synopsis of what could have had been
a feature lenght film. A re-run of this film alone can make clear of the
true essence of it. And the narrative, natural casting, is a mockery at the
usual way in which the Indian audience is used to watch Indian movies, by
and large. It is as well a kind of pretention. There are, as Gabriel Garcia
Marquez says, “too many personal messages meant only for close friends,
unsaid,” in this film3. However, the film recall the oral traditions and
vernacular literature in its style, which always remains alien to the other.
It is destined to be of an incomplete, open-ended experience to the
‘cultural outsiders of Kannada’. Hence the film always becomes ‘the other’
– a typical post-colonial discourse of artists in always ‘the other’
medium.

——————-
Foot Notes:

(1) The history of the visual arts of Karnataka in the 80s and 90s precisely
does this. Artists working in the newer media are also held, rather
unjudiciously, above those who stick onto the well accepted (not
conventional) media. Kiran and Reema become personification of these two
known, accepted and unknown, strange media — respectively.

(2) This reversed sequence wherein the books climb upon his body and clad
him like a bedsheet is also the way one generally tries to look back for a
connection between the current craze for newer media and its past, the
tradition easel painting. Not only do the general audience try to do this,
even critics and artists (particularly the painters) attempt at this. Also,
this is one of the most memorable visuals of the film.

(3) Those who know the director/artist’s relation with the acting artists,
can read a lot between the lines. The absence of any names, either the
imagined ones (as it happens with popular Indian films) or their real ones
’suggests’ their friend-audience to read it more intimately as well as
variedly. I believe that the film’s experience is conveyed in all its
totality only when someone close to the Bangalore-based artists unveils it
orally, along or after the film screening. Hence, the width of the canvas
(film) is too tight, small but too concentrated. Hence the comparision of
this film with the oral traditions.///