Deb Kamal Ganguly

There is a consistent anxiety among the best of the sound engineers and sound designers in India that the auditory simulation model, the ‘grammar’ of sound ‘aesthetics’ of surround sound has been and is being constantly torn apart by the mainstream demands of the cine industry. In a way this anxiety can be placed in the historiography of a longer chain of technological appropriation in Indian landscape for more than hundred years, starting from the tactile realism of oil painting, or the use of Renaissance Perspective in painting and cinema in Indian condition. While this linking can be relatively easy, thanks to the works of cultural theorists and cine-scholars to some extent, what we need to look at is that – whether there is a significant change in the mode of technological appropriation, which can explain the often demand for +100 dB level of sound, various other ‘non-realistic’ movements of sound elements (digital SFX or pre-recorded sound passed through various digital sonic filters, almost on the verge of non-recognition of the sound source) in the surround channels and often a kind of over-deterministic applications of musical bits and pieces throughout the soundtrack. Somehow the job is more complex than it looks, for that we need to map somewhere the cultural history of sound production and listening, the politics of ‘noise’, the frequency spectrum of the indigenous sound producing instruments, specially in the lower strata of the society and even the subaltern/dalit aesthetics -- which hardly can be done within the span of the present paper, nevertheless some speculation can be done. And a take off point can be reached, where we may propose, whether there can be a kind of extension of Deleuzean Movement-image, Time-image, Affection-image etc to the sonic images as well!

The challenge of surround sound has different signification for the ‘avant-garde’ section of Indian cinematic forms. While there are some scanty moorings on the possibility if Indian theory of cinematic sound, specially in the writings of Ritwik Ghatak, Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Ashis Rajadhyaksha etc, the surround sound phenomenon has not been addressed there for obvious historic reasons. We can take cues from the works of these masters (e.g. reverse perspective in Khayalgatha, musical or non-diegetic use of diegetic sounds in the films of Ghatak and Kaul) and place these works vis a vis the important sonic sequences from world cinema (e.g. trolley sequence from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the film Milky Way by Benedek Fliegauf etc). That comparison might lead us to understand one of the latent tendencies of cinema – the cinema becoming ‘ambient’ in nature, ‘ambient cinema’, and the possible sphere of negotiation of Indian cinematic forms with this upcoming, yet futuristic form of cinema; because in ambient cinema, more than the realism of sound, the ecology of sound is important, more than the relationship of sound to the visuals of cinema, the sound has the potential to be treated as independent soundscape, even as a kind of sound installation. It is important to look for the possibilities of Indian responses to this form of perceptual extension of cinema.

While the film practitioners' interest in Deleuze has been largely focused on 'Cinema 1' and 'Cinema 2', understandably enough though, it can be said with relative certainty that one hardly gets the full spectrum of Deleuzean theory-scape and its possible implication for cinema, if these readings are not backed up by understanding of more fundamental works of Deleuze, where he has proposed the primacy of 'difference' over that of 'identity', the importance of 'becoming' over 'being' and a foundational criticism towards the idea of 'representation'. As Rodowick mentions about Deleuze's interest of cinema for its important quality of being anti-platonic, it is possible that a large part of the moving image appropriation is still being done in the model of platonic assumptions of identification of identity, marginalization of the simulacra and the fake in the name of truth, and movement towards idea/l. In the discussion of time-image by Deleuze, we don't specifically see a taxonomic elaboration of the idea of long take, where the camera is allowed to dig a substantial amount of time in a single take and thereby allowing significant clock time operation in the shot. While a long take not necessarily becomes time-image only because of its longer duration, it is possible that in the long take, the idea of 'difference' of various series of cinematographic elements may get the chance to grow significantly over the allowed clock time. Also the concept of 'Deleuzean event' as cumulative of possible resonances and the constant shift of the sense of the being of the semantic event can be perceptually felt and mapped on the temporal topography of the long take.

In this paper, taking various examples of long take from works different directors, a possible typology of the long take will be attempted while keeping the above Deleuzean notions foregrounded. It would be proposed that the changing ideas about long take could move beyond the classical conceptual opposition of Eisenstein and Bazin, specifically due to its intrinsic relationship towards the notions of Deleuzean 'immanence' and 'sense'. In addition to that it will be contemplated, in terms of historiography, what can be the significance of 'World War II as an event' (if we try to explore it according to the Deleuzean notion of 'event') as it became a signpost for the formation of Deleuzean time-image from movement-image.

Key Words: Deleuze's hypotheses on time, Long Take in cinema, Sense, Difference

This conversation is about the film 'LIGHTNING: A Legend in Four Seasons' (230 min, 2013) written and directed by Manuela Morgaine. She is a filmmaker and visual artist of Egyptian and Mediterranean descent. Born in 1962, she lives and works in Paris. The conversation took place at FTII between Manuela Morgaine and Deb Kamal Ganguly, faculty of film direction and screenplay writing, during Morgaine's visit to FTII as an extension of her stay in Pune as an invited filmmaker in Pune International Film Festival, 2014.