the flags of incompatibility

Via Veena and Alok, this article about relationship compatibility based on literary tastes. Somewhere down the page, this: 'Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony.'

It reminds me of the time I was at the Institute and we were being ragged. Yes. I was the only girl in my batch and I was being ragged less than anyone else. The entire ragging thing at the Institute was actually like an elaborate mating ritual, because at least a large part of it - for the editors - was an issue of compatibility.

What happened in them days was this: the editing course was for two years, while all other courses were for three. This meant that the batch ahead of you had their unit of director-cameraperson-sound recordist in place but no editor. Every editor in the new batch was not only being assessed, they were being wooed by every director so that their unit would be complete.

Wherefore, editors were rather closely questioned about several other things, among them literary and cinematic tastes. What films you liked said everything about you that your potential director needed to know. What answer you gave was very, very important (assuming you'd already made up your mind about who you wanted to work with for two years).

So a few nights into the ragging, my (future) director, along with the cameraman, sat down with me to do The Talk.

"So. What's your favourite film?"

This was crucial. I had already decided I wanted to be this guy's editor. He was well enough read, for a start. I looked at both of them and made a quick decision.

"When Harry Met Sally," I said.

Silence for a second and they burst out laughing.

"At least that's honest," director man said. Actually it wasn't. At that point, my absolute favourite film was either Hiroshima Mon Amour or one of several Bergman films. But I knew I couldn't say that because that would be pretentious. On the other hand, to say Harry Met Sally could be construed as meaning that I (1) was unpredictable in my tastes; (2) was being ironic; (3) didn't care what conclusion anyone drew from my tastes in film.

Whatever. It worked. But there's a catch. If someone falls for your cynical manipulation of a situation without making it clear that they know what you've just done, can you respect them?

I reserved judgment until he told me who his "director" was.

Every final year direction student had to analyse, in the final year, the work of a director. If someone chose Tarkovsky (there was always one of them every year) you knew what to think and you tried your best to avoid them. Mine, as it happened, had chosen Buñuel.

I never regretted my choice of director and I hope the feeling was reciprocated.

RIP Istvan Gaal

This is two months too late and as sometimes happens, I've been thinking of Istvan Gaal often these last two months.

I found out only because I was at the IFFK site to check if they've put up the list of retrospectives and homages (they have) and in the homages to all the directors who died this year, was Gaal's name. My heart sank. I googled for news of him and sure enough, he passed away on the 25th of September this year.

Gaal, like Zanussi, was one of those directors who visited the Institute often. He was incredibly generous with his time, staying for a month each year, at least, doing intensive workshops with the direction students. He was not a very tall man, but he looked tough. His spiky white hair and the inevitable white shirt were signals of a more exciting time on campus.

In my first year, the directions students had to write a script and take turns directing small parts of a half hour film, under his supervision. The students wrote a script that drew heavily from the plot of Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers. This was sheer laziness on their part, of course, because it meant two main characters and not much in the way of challenges they set themselves (sorry, Kuntal). I was the woman in the film, so I got to spend a lot of time with Gaal and the direction students.

Needless to say, everything about the film was a disaster: the acting (mea culpa), a story that was transplanted without contextualising it in any way; and, as happens with any workshop film, the sheer lack of cohesion because of ten students directing one film.

The following year, Gaal came back to do another workshop with another set of students. This time, I was supposed to edit the workshop film (in the end my diploma schedule coincided with the workshop film and I didn't, after all, edit it). If anything, this film was worse.

And despite these failures, Gaal returned to the institute for a third year. By this time I was finished with the place, married and that winter, Gaal was on the jury at IFFI in Delhi. We had been in touch, off and on, and I went to meet him at his hotel. He was reading Ouspensky and we talked about theosophy a little. He chatted with us about our diploma films (which were all at the festival that year). He told me, about mine, that it was a bad idea to adapt Kundera's story without deep thought about why one would choose such a story. This was a familiar argument coming from him. He believed very strongly that filmmakers should be deeply rooted in their own ethos and found it a little strange that our generation was so willing to attempt adaptations of single stories from Eastern Europe without being exposed to the realities that those writers had lived. Our experiences were second hand, stale and deeply false, he said. That year he mentioned Rajashri's diploma film as the only one worth talking about.

(This sounded rather extreme to me. Rajashri's film was about a rebel boy whose differences with his parents involved supposedly radical hair changes, and was a very ordinary film, full of very heavy handed humour and clunky camera work.)

Sitting over a pot of coffee that winter, though, we strayed away from cinema talk. I'd been married less than a year, and I was there with my (then) husband, a classmate and (how to avoid making this sound filmy?) the male lead in that terrible workshop film. Gaal had gifts for us from Hungary. He had got us chocolates and wine, and me a wonderful white-on-white embroidered blouse. I was overwhelmed (and tried hard not to be jealous when, later that year, Surabhi showed me the small bottles of perfume in gorgeous Hungarian crystal that he had given the direction students as a gift). We gave him a sandal paper knife. He said no, he couldn't accept it because to give anyone a knife as a gift meant blood had to be drawn. Finally, after much persuasion, he accepted it provided we accepted blood money in exchange. It all felt a little weird. Watching him tape up the four 50p coins that were our token money, I wondered if all of this was because of a language problem or because he couldn't hear us properly. He was always hard of hearing and wore a hearing aid; conversations with him were apt to be tangential and more than a little odd. I still have the taped-up money somewhere.

That was the last time I saw Gaal, though I did write to him a couple of times. Earlier this year, I wanted to write to him and I realised that I didn't have an address anymore. I vowed to write to the Hungarian Cultural Center and ask them to put me in touch again, but like all good intentions it never made the transition into action and now it's too late.

So at IFFK this year, I will make it a point to see Falcons and remember Istvan Gaal.

Another obit here. Mukul, do you have any photographs?

Spaniard Says Steal

Many things that happen in books are unbelievable, but like everyone else I suspend my disbelief and get on with it. However, some things I cannot bring myself to believe and these items of disbelief have usually to do with the mundane. Such as, how come we never see Jason Bourne wanting desperately to use the loo after being on the run for days on end?

Or, how on earth can Hermione, who loves books and practically lives in the library, tear out pages from books instead of referring to them and making notes in another book (taking care as she is doing so, to write down the name of the publisher, date of publication, pages numbers and so on)?

This last is especially inconceivable for me, having been brought up to worship - if I worship anything at all - books. I always flip through entire books before I borrow them from the library, to see if they have pages missing and I’m indignant when they show signs of damage.

So I can forgive you your gasps of horror when I tell you the evil things I’ve done with books that don’t belong to me. Ok, let me rephrase that: I’ve never damaged books but I have caused or induced other people to do terrible things with magazines.

(Yes, that does make me less culpable, doesn’t it?)

In college, for some reason that I can’t immediately recall, I was avoiding S. We’d set up several dates and I’d cancelled each one on the flimsiest grounds. A normal guy, more or less as callow and clueless as I was, would have given up. But S, being older, wiser and infinitely more interesting for it, didn’t. Two days after I said, for the nth time, that I couldn’t meet him, I got a letter by post.

It was not the usual small yellow envelope; it was intriguingly large and I opened it carefully. Inside were several pages that had been torn out of a magazine. It was good, thick paper; not from one of the cheap glossies. I opened the pages that had been folded once, turned them over and gasped. It was an extract from Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All. The dance of Salome bit. I started to read, ignoring until much later the little post-it note stuck on the first page. In it, I later found, S declared that he didn’t usually vandalise magazines, even for girls who stood him up. But he was the eternally forgiving sort, he said. That explained why he went against his instincts or upbringing, whichever was stronger. I can find it in me to regret some things from that time, but not those pages, which I still have somewhere.

Some years later, at the Institute, it was diploma time. It was also birthday time for me, and A asked me what I wanted. We were always broke, you understand, so it never even occurred to me to ask for something anyone might need to buy. Just days before, I’d been in the library, reading some film magazine (by which I do not mean Stardust). I can’t remember what this magazine was, but it had two pages, back-to-back, of the psychedelic Beatles posters in it.

I coveted them. I wanted those two pages more than anything else and I was even willing to consider hiding in some dark corner and ripping those pages out. But better sense prevailed. Besides, I did not want to ruin the posters by tearing them out badly. This was an operation of great delicacy and planning.

We weren’t allowed to borrow magazines from the FTII library. How to sneak this magazine out so I could use a good paper cutter to cut the pages evenly?

So when A asked what I wanted for my birthday, I told him.

The library people almost laid out the red carpet because this was probably the first time A was entering the library. All eyes were on us as I took him to the magazine stand, took out this one (I had half expected it to have disappeared. Malign forces frequently conspire to take away that which is most desired) and sat at a table.

A had to take the magazine out but how? No bags allowed. Eagle-eyed librarians all around. We walked through every aisle pretending great interest in every unlikely book – books about microphones, stuff like that.

“Put it in your t-shirt,” I hissed.

“No! I can’t lift my clothes in here. They’re all looking at us.”

“Please! There’s no other way you can take it out.”

“I’ll bring a cutter in here tomorrow and cut them out somewhere.”

“Tomorrow the magazine will be gone. Someone will take it away and say read the new ones that have just come. Please! You promised!”

Hard to do all this in the regulation library undertone. But I managed.

“Ok, fine. Just remember, I’m doing this only because it’s your birthday.”

A hid behind a shelf while I guarded one side of the aisle and he quickly tucked the magazine into his jeans.

“Done? Let’s go.”

Suddenly A was more calm and nonchalant than I was. He insisted that we browse for a while longer. I looked at his t-shirt and it was clear to me that we were going to get caught. I nearly said, put it back. Never mind about the posters.

Guilt vied with greed and greed won. Naturally. We left without getting arrested or grilled. Nobody even noticed.

Back in my room, we examined the two pages with a surgeon’s eye. A fished out a paper cutter from his bag. I turned away, unable to look.

Two minutes later, I was the proud owner of four posters - John and George on one page and Paul and Ringo on the other.

“Happy Birthday,” A said.

I beamed.

I wouldn’t do it myself, ever. I hate vandalising books.

But I can’t promise I’d never again ask someone to tear stuff out for me.

My conscience? Clean as a whistle. Did you doubt it?