The
Chess Players
Film
Comment Vol.42 No.4, New York, 2006
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
Satyajit
Ray is a director/composer to whom much cine-critical respect has been accorded,
yet whose cine-musical status remains under-considered. A key post-war internationalist
auteur, his work simultaneously probematises the presumed literary criteria
for authorship, and complicates the assumed musicological criteria for composer.
The Chess Players is one of his many films which gives rise to these notions
of the director as 'aural auteur'.
It's
not implausible to read Ray as an 'anti-masala' filmmaker
who eschews Bollywood celebratory spectacle for Indian
societal critique. But aside from obvious high/low dichotomies,
a complex net of audiovisual and musicological discordances
vibrates the aural skin of The Chess Players. In as much
as Bollywood cinema generates highly transcendent narratives
from lip-synched musicals, the voice in The Chess Players
is a socially rooted one of the spoken rather then the
sung. The dialogue is largely live in its recording,
creating palpable theatre-stage acoustics enlivened by
room tone. The Bollywood musical by contrast is an ornate
space of compression, equalization and reverberation.
The former accentuates the written script while the latter
emblemises the recorded tape.
