Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan (2001)

On a Saturday night, it is not unusual to find my family sitting together on a couch watching a movie. No, they usually aren’t in English. They’re in Hindi. No, they’re usually not intense dramas, but they include song and dance. Welcome to the world of Bollywood. My family will start the movie around 8 or 9 o’clock, a decent time (if we were watching something from Hollywood). But remember, this is Bollywood, where it is not unusual to find a movie that is three hours long. Tonight’s movie, Lagaan, is even longer.

In India, going to see a movie is an experience by itself. You buy the tickets ahead of time, because the theater fills up fast for a number of reasons. They don’t just serve popcorn there, but delicious Indian street food. And for those people who don’t have much money, a movie ticket is expensive. So the longer the film the more it seems like one gets one’s money’s worth. In addition, it can get quite hot in some places in India; a longer movie means more time in an air conditioned theater. Consequently, people don’t just treat going to a film as three hours well spent, but they consider it to be a day well spent.

Generally, each movie features five or six songs with choreographed dance. Often times, it is between a boy and a girl. These musical numbers tend to add on 25 or 30 minutes to the length. It is not enough for the girl to act like she’s happy with a boy, but she has to sing and dance to express her feelings.

For American audiences, the biggest challenge from Bollywood is probably the length of the film. Why is it like that? Is it the American film industry that has limited our attention span? Is 90 or 120 minutes really enough for the movie to say something?

Lagaan is trying to say something, but at 225 minutes it has a lot more time to say it. It is a typical sports “underdog” movie, but with so many more elements. Set in the time when the British are governing in India, it has a romantic triangle between a British girl, Indian boy, and Indian girl. All of this is going on, while there is pressure on the villagers to pay three times the tax to the British, or lagaan, if they don’t win a cricket match, a game that they don’t understand. As Bollywood-ish as the movie is, it comments on underlying issues in Indian society. The Caste system is a social hierarchy in India. While not as enforced today, it plays a big role in whether or not they should let an untouchable play cricket with them.

Lagaan can be regarded as a key player for the crossover of Bollywood movies to other parts of the world. The main actor of the movie, Aamir Khan, who has achieved critical success since then in acting and producing, has the kind of appeal that transcends regional tastes. As recognition of its crossover qualities, Lagaan was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in the 2002 Academy Awards. It didn’t win (the Bosnian film No Man’s Land took the award), but it was still a big step for India. I hope you enjoy tonight’s special Indian treat.

Aditi Kulkarni
Film Club

Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (1979)

Everybody who sees Volker Schlondorff’s film Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) should have an opinion on whether it should be shown at school. You might be glad that Film Club has the freedom to show risqué movies, or you might be shocked that they would, or you may even be upset that the school supports to its showing. Even if the fact that SPA is showing The Tin Drum doesn’t shock you, the movie very well might. It’s groundbreaking, dark and somewhat comedic, and very surrealist. It is also graphically suggestive. (Unless that’s an oxymoron. Hey, it’s surrealism.)

The film’s sexuality earned it enormous controversy when it came out in 1979, and controversy over controversy, on into the 1990s. The state of Ontario banned it as child pornography. Later on, an activist group in Oklahoma County asked their library system to remove their copy of the movie. When they refused, the group showed a single scene from the movie to a judge. Through a snowball effect, he not only blocked the movie from the library, but deemed showing it illegal. Tapes of the movie were confiscated, and police demanded the names of people renting the movie from Blockbuster outlets so those films could be confiscated as well.

Thankfully, the American Civil Liberties Union heard about the case. They filed suit, saying that the seizure of videos violated first, fourth, and fourteenth amendment rights. In the end, the film was re-legalized.

Among film critics, the film is considered a classic. It received the top prize at the famed Cannes Film Festival – the Palme d’Or, a mark of distinction for films as unusual as The Tin Drum. It also won an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film), an award rarely given to a film as dark or strange as The Tin Drum.

In fact, there are rarely films as dark or strange as The Tin Drum. It’s cited as a landmark of the terrifying type of movie that takes you way out of your comfort zone in the name of art. Premiere Magazine calls this type of film a “Dangerous Movie” – a movie which “puts square in your face all of the things Hollywood usually presumes you go to the movies to get away from.” Their examples of “dangerous movies” include Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic Weekend. It’s great that we live in a nation with not just the artistic freedom to make bizarre and shocking movies, but one with people willing to see them.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
Film Club