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Film and Cinephilia in Pakistan: Beyond Life and Death

Ali Nobil Ahmad

Abstract

This introductory article identifies some of the conceptual issues and themes worth considering in the pursuit of a broader and deeper knowledge about the cinema in Pakistan than currently exists. It does so with reference to several of the papers in this special issue and a number of recently published scholarly works on culture and politics in the Pakistani context. The article probes existing discourses on Pakistani film in a bid to clear the way for more nuanced conversations, asking: What is meant in precise terms when cinema’s “death” is spoken of and what are the implicit assumptions about the nature of cinematic “life” that flow from it? What, more fundamentally, is meant by “Pakistani cinema,” and what sorts of elisions and conflations result from its vague and polemical usage as a generic epithet encompassing film output from so vast and historically unstable an entity as Pakistan? A final set of ques-tions centers around the term “industry.” Here again, defining and disentangling the terms of reference is a useful starting point for exploration of other units of analysis that may be appropriate for describing social realities and aesthetic forms than the clunky lexicon of life and death currently allows.

Keywords

Pakistan, film, nation, memory, cinephilia, industry, technology

Discussions about the state of the Pakistani film industry have tended to take familiar form in recent years. Out-of-the-box features by foreign correspondents; nostalgic laments for the days when “educated” folk made films; hopes for “resuscitation” by the latest Shoaib Mansoor blockbuster; or documentary-no-one-saw winning an Oscar1—all in their own way consign the cinema in Pakistan to a perpetual state of oscillation between “death” and “revival.” As a range of possibilities for the diverse cultural and artistic journeys that constitute the cinematic experiences, dreams, and desires of over 200 million people, the narrow scope of this dualism—which veers between self-loathing pessimism on the one hand, and on the other, a naïve optimism that pins all hope on the feats of indi-vidual directors—reveals less about the realities of Pakistan’s cinematic landscape than it does about the troubled circumstances of those doing the veering.2

This article identifies some of the conceptual issues and themes worth considering in the pursuit of a broader and deeper knowledge about the cinema in Pakistan than currently exists. It does so with refer-ence to several of the papers in this special issue and a number of recently published scholarly works on culture and politics in the Pakistani context. Its objective is to sketch an approach to the study of Pakistani cinema that draws upon the insights of Film and Cultural Studies as well as other disciplines. These are

Introduction to Special Issue

Ali Nobil Ahmad, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany and Lahore University of Management Studies, Lahore, Pakistan. E-mails: ali.nobilahmad@zmo.de; ali.nobil@lums.edu.pk

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© 2014 Screen South Asia TrustSAGE Publications

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82 Ali Nobil Ahmad

considerable given the impressive volume of published material now generated by scholarly journals and books on film, cinema, and media in Western academia, including work on non-Western film industries. Cinemas of the Arab world, North Africa, Iran, and increasingly, Turkey are particularly well studied. Bangladeshi film has, in its relatively short lifespan, inspired a number of serious scholarly inquiries into its present and past. India boasts a homegrown tradition of superb critical writing in addition to the considerable attention it has received internationally.

The complete absence of an equivalent body of work on the cinema in Pakistan needs some reflection. What follows is an attempt to address this issue by probing existing discourses on Pakistani film in a bid to clear the way for more nuanced conversations. Key here is the issue of what is meant when cinema’s “death” is spoken of, and what implicit assumptions about the nature of cinematic “life” flow from it? What is signified by “Pakistani cinema,” and what sorts of elisions and conflations result from its vague and polemical usage as a generic epithet encompassing film output from so vast and historically unstable an entity as Pakistan? A final set of questions centers around the term “industry.” Here again, disentangling terms of reference is a useful way to start exploring forms of analysis more appropriate for describing social realities and aesthetic forms than the clunky lexicon of life and death.

Cinema and the Nation

Pakistan today is thought of internationally as a dangerous place, its name synonymous with violence and misfortune. Reductive though it is to represent a country of 200 million as one gigantic cemetery because of terrorist attacks (which will not stop it from climbing up the list of most populated countries on earth to number five by 2050), there is something well-earned about the country’s associations with morbidity—human casualties aside.

The realm of ideology has only rarely been the subject of serious scholarly research. Here, contempo-rary Pakistan truly is a graveyard of dreams like Two Nation Theory that, despite having their shalwars pulled down by history, will not leave the stage, obscuring the past while preventing the birth of more meaningful ways of understanding the dangers that confront its present. That cinema and the arts might be an arena in which new outlooks and perceptions are fostered—new ways of being and seeing—is not lost on those wedded to the existing order. Filmmaker Sabiha Sumar’s extraordinary battle to make Khamosh Pani (2003), one of just a handful of truly excellent independent films made by a Pakistani director, saw Sumar and her international crew accused of working as spies for foreign governments when they sought a helicopter to use as a wind machine (Ahmad, 2014). In the tiny minds of those in positions of authority, the vaguest of bohemian associations was enough to trigger alarm bells about foreign plots. The absurdity of questions posed to Sumar underlines the absence of any bona fide security concerns; quite simply, a film that is incomprehensible to the philistine official must be a form of subversion.

Sumar’s experience has been all too familiar to successive generations of artists and performers treated with contempt and suspicion by the Pakistani state and its bureaucrats, whose primary “cultural policy” has been to harass, humiliate, and place obstacles in their path at every turn. Jamil Dehlavi’s Blood of Hussain, released in England in 1981, was banned under martial law and remains effectively proscribed; A.J. Kardar’s Door Hey Sukh Ka Gaon [This is a Village of Peace], funded during the rule of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1973–1977), never left the English laboratory it was sent to for post-production due to financing problems (as a state-funded project, this too can be regarded as evidence of institutional

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failure).3 Countless filmmakers will testify to the idiocies and corruption of the censor board. Its boorish impositions and knee-jerk bans arise from a generic mistrust of culture, regarded as a strategic threat unless proven otherwise. The sources of their obstructionism are easy enough to explain. To borrow an analogy from Hasan Askari’s 1947 essay on the usage of color in film (this issue), art, and film in particular, hold up a mirror for humans to view their own reflection and thereby possess a powerful potential to unsettle established ways of viewing the world. A leadership with no real answers to the awkward questions about Pakistan’s raison d’être has good reasons to fear truly creative and independent thinking. Behind the patriotic clichés and hollow rhetoric of ghairat [honor], as Sumar suggests, lurks a deep sense of intellectual confusion; a nation perpetually “warring with itself” over its “self-image,” unwilling to confront the image in the mirror.

Official mistrust of the arts also crucially turns on the inherent diversity they reflect. For an alienated elite, this variegated reality contrasts sharply with their bid to impose the abstract ideals of a purified Islamic identity on a population whose political sympathies they never bothered to earn. If Askari envis-aged filmmaking as a source of mutual understanding between Pakistan’s ethnically and religiously diverse populations, the unrelenting reality has been paranoiac repression of linguistic and cultural autonomy by an autocratic state, particularly within its peripheries. The contrast with neighboring countries is striking. India, Bangladesh, and Iran, despite imposing comparable censorship regimes and severe repression, have nurtured relatively healthy film industries, both in quality and, in India’s case, in terms of financial returns. Sumar’s explanation for the frailty of Pakistani cinema—“that we don’t have a nation”—is not therefore hyperbole. In many ways, Pakistan as a country never got off the ground. The tendency of the elite has been to treat “culture” as a funnel through which to shove its hol-low visions of “the nation” down the throats of the populations it seeks to govern.

It is absorbing to encounter the more complex visions that accompanied the emergence of Pakistan. Both Manto and Askari recognized early on in Pakistan’s existence, that we could never “compete” with India when it comes to big budget melodrama. In Europe and beyond, Askari observed, neo-realism was already breaking new paths on shoestring budgets using non-professional actors, a fact of profound significance for cash-strapped countries whose true cinematic potential lies in the untapped experiences of its ordinary citizens. For Manto, their everyday lives and preoccupations were sufficient raw material for an industry to stand “on its own two feet,” irrespective of state funding. Iranian filmmakers, who embraced this fact in ways our own were never allowed to, and despite complicated contests with the state, have regularly stunned the world with their creativity. In Pakistan, we can only wonder what our own new wave might have looked like had someone like Manto or Askari been allowed to devise cultural policy; the brilliance of individual efforts provides us with tantalizing clues, as does the Indian tradition, from which these drew sustenance, inspiration, and technical support (Biswas, 2007).

The temptation to mourn the loss of a Pakistan that never was, however, must be resisted. For although historical writings of the sort featured in this issue provide glimpses of the many roads not taken, many of the disasters that subsequently struck were, if not accidents waiting to happen, the result of dangers all too present at the inception of Pakistan. The view of cinema as sinful, for example, is not some Talibanic dogma instilled during the Zia years; it was the official position of early Pakistan itself, according to Gazdar. He cites the following response of the Ministry of Industries to local filmmaking companies’ request for protection against better-funded Indian film imports:

In principle Muslims should not get involved in filmmaking. Being the work of lust and lure, it should be left to infidels. (quoted in Gazdar, 1997, p. 24)

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The Ministry of Industries was at the time under Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar. His voice need not have become the dominant view, as a recently discovered letter penned by Jinnah indicates: he wished that “more Mussalmans would enter into this realm of film industry” (Yamin, 2013). That Pakistanis embraced cinema is indicated by the fact that as recently as 1997 the film industry was churning out 80 odd films a year, making it one of the top-ranking motion picture producing countries in the world (Gazdar, 1997, p. xii). But Nishtar’s was not a marginal perspective. He is still celebrated as a pioneering Muslim League politician who, as one of Jinnah’s closest associates, was tipped to replace Liaqat Ali Khan; today’s Pakistan is surely closer to Nishtar’s vision than Jinnah’s, a land in which ultra-right-wing religious mobs “protest” acts of “blasphemy” in faraway lands by burning and destroying the most beautiful film theatres in the country: no less than six of Karachi and two of Peshawar’s traditional cin-ema halls were ravaged by “protestors” following the uploading on YouTube of a film deemed offensive to the Prophet Mohammed in September 2012. The destruction took place on Youm-e-Ishq-e-Rasool—an official day of “Love for the Prophet.” It may not be a straight one. But there is a line connecting statements of the sort made by Nishtar in the early years of Pakistan to such gestures of “Love for the Prophet” in 2012. Today’s fundamentalist mullahs and their disciples may be a good deal more fero-cious than the old man threatening to chop off purdah-less women’s ponytails (see Manto, this issue); they are also better armed thanks to decades of state patronage. Evidently, however, they were always a vocal presence.

What is more: they were always in with a chance given the ruling elite’s lack of authority and legitimacy in a fledgling post-colonial state with considerable, if undefined reliance on religion for its integrity. To say this is not to suggest Pakistan and its cinema were doomed to their present condition from 1947. It is, rather, to understand that the structural roots of Pakistan’s contemporary cultural crisis are foundational, their historical lineages traceable to the desperate acts of statecraft that predate the installation of Zia’s particular brand of Islamic fascism. Indeed, as is clear from the most incisive of Manto’s recently reprinted Letters to Uncle Sam, the threat to Pakistan and its cultural vibrancy was never from religion per se—it was from the danger that a certain kind of philistine piety might be cynically fostered for reasons of political expediency by the post-colonial state and its Cold War sponsor, the United States (Jalal, 2013). A glance across the Western border where Iranian theocracy coexists with the most intellectually vibrant cinema makes the same point in reverse: Ayatollah Khomeini’s explicit embrace of film as a technology is perhaps the best evidence that the Pakistani state and society’s hostility toward the arts has no necessary correlation with “Islamic fundamentalism.”4

History, Memory, and the Politics of Language

None of this is to concur with the film industry’s obituary writers whose routine proclamations of its demise and revival are made without any serious attempt to define what Pakistani cinema was and is, let alone reflect on its purported causes of death. That any sort of discussion at all can be had today about these matters is in no small measure thanks to one particular cineaste: Mushtaq Gazdar’s encyclopedic documentation of the history of Pakistani cinema provides us with a singularly vast and meticulously compiled archive, together with chronologies, filmographies, and a working periodization that has held up remarkably well since initial publication in the 1990s.

Capitalizing on Gazdar’s treasure trove of factual description and insight requires us to approach his own assessments in a spirit of critical questioning. Magisterial though it is, the Pakistan Cinema 1947–1997 displays evidence of a tendency to romanticize the so-called golden years of Urdu film

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associated with “legends” such as Mohammad Ali, Waheed Murad, and “Madame” Noor Jehan, whose songs and performances dominated the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Whilst the aesthetic power of these works and the technical virtuosity of the actors, directors, writers, and musicians credited with them are beyond doubt, Gazdar’s hagiographic tone about the triumphs of this era and its stars lends itself to appropriation by those who today lament the “tragic” decline of bourgeois screen hegemony through simplistic narratives of the industry’s death. His occasional sentimentality, meanwhile, leads to uncritical celebration of works that, however impressive, often enjoyed relatively high budgets and were closely aligned with dominant discourse in a period when the cultural Cold War was at its height.

There is, accordingly, a pressing need for scholarship which attends to the status of the Urdu Social film as ideology. Kamran Asdar Ali’s acutely observed analysis of Behan Bhai [Brothers and Sisters] (1968), for instance, places a much-needed critical complexion on Pakistani cinema’s “Golden Years” by demonstrating one widely known film’s imbrication in the hegemonic discourse of 1960s Pakistan. This lies in modernizing conceptions of urban development and nationalistic visions of Islamic brotherhood, which accommodate diversity through symbolic inclusion of the various provinces. This tokenism conveniently ignored provincial and ethnic tensions then, and makes particularly ironic viewing now (Asdar, 2013). Quite apart from the mockery of such a vision by the blood-drenched ethno-sectarian killing fields of contemporary Karachi, an extreme and chauvinistic version of these naïve ideals was soon to drive and justify a genocidal massacre by the army in East Pakistan. Likewise, Iftikhar Dadi’s (2010) close analysis of frame, mise-en-scène, light and motion in Armaan (1966) relates sociological fabric and political ideology to aesthetics. As in Asdar Ali’s study of Behan Bhai, Dadi identifies ideological affinities with a homogenizing cultural elitism and, in the economic sphere, a celebration of Ayubian modernization with strong emphasis on consumerism. More generally, there are clear associations between the Social’s peak years and the dominance of an Urdu-speaking “salariat” which, in alliance with Punjab’s landowning castes and military establishment, enjoyed unchallenged ideologi-cal hegemony before 1971. It is no coincidence the Social film went into crisis thereafter, with Anari (1975) reflecting the altogether different cultural universe of the 1970s in which previously submerged sub-national ethnic identities and political ideas began to reconfigure cinematic norms.

A comparative analysis of the Social as genre might juxtapose Pakistani cinema’s homogenizing drive to unify the nation under Ayub’s and Yahya’s military dictatorships with its contrasting function in colonial India. Here, the genre became differentiated to accommodate the stories of the Muslim minor-ity through the emergence of the Muslim social in the early 1940s. However, according to Vasudevan, pre-Partition cinema had limited success in forging an egalitarian cultural pluralism. This was due to a secularist vision which ended up reifying cultural “differences” in relation not only to religious belief but also to narrative and linguistic cultures which had previously been experienced as shared across communities. Historical films relating to the Mughals came to be thought of as Muslim, and mytho- logical as Hindu, even when popular narratives and folk tales of this type had circulated widely through oral, performative, and textual cultures.5

Despite these variations in political content and function, the Social has retained a certain formal consistency in Pakistan, which, notwithstanding local evolutions and eventual migration to television, is evidence of the need for a regional framework that incorporates India. Dadi builds upon the insights of Geeta Kapur (1987) and others on “frontality,” the tableaux mode of framing space in South Asian visual culture, to demonstrate that, like its Indian counterpart, 1960s realist-melodrama in Pakistan was a con-tinuation of creative journeys that predated 1947.6 In a refreshing change from standard accounts of a period yet to be studied with the trans-regional perspective it demands, he traces the little known lineages of Urdu cinema across diverse sites of production and media.

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Attentiveness to the visual elements that characterized “the Golden Age” also makes clear that post-colonial trajectories in Bombay, Lahore, and Karachi (as well as Dhaka) have remained intertwined. It is also reflective of the acute difficulties that faced anyone trying to define Pakistani cinema in its early years: representing national “culture” as specific and thus different from that of India’s entailed an impossible disavowal of common heritage. The role of newly migrated artists and critics in this process—men and women whose (colonial) Indian social, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual formations predated Pakistan—is an intriguing, if at times troubling aspect of Pakistan’s previously unstudied cul-tural history. Indigenous film criticism, despite its modest volume and disparate nature, merits a good deal more interest than it has thus far attracted for the light it sheds on the contradictions involved.

Muhammad Hasan Askari’s precocious appreciation of film’s formal significance is partly explicable in terms of the well-developed body of modernist literary criticism—above all European formalism—that inspired him and others of his generation to take criticism seriously. The extraordinary range of visual and literary references that feature in both his acute commentaries (this issue) are all the more remarkable for the lack of fuss with which they reference Renaissance painting and Edwardian theatre criticism alongside classical Indian music, the Urdu novel, and Hindi cinema. Genuinely cosmo-politan, Askari’s humanism is striking amidst the endless identity talk of an academy still recycling the miniscule insights of post-colonial theory.7

And yet, it sits awkwardly alongside his determination that filmmaking should “build Pakistan,” an instrumentalism toward art suggestive of how Askari comes across as the pro-establishment reactionary in Sadia Toor’s (2011) compelling account of his Cold War clashes with the Progressive Writers Movement. Today, the dubious idea that films can or should be engineered to construct something as problematic as national identity seems almost quaint. So too his optimism in the idea of Pakistan as a cultural reference point which, together with Manto’s somewhat more pragmatic acceptance of the tasks at hand, contrasted sharply with the class solidarities invoked by writers and intellectuals with explicitly Leftist sympathies. Both men migrated to Pakistan in the hope that its cultural life would reinvigorate their careers; the health of the film industry was of particular concern to Manto, whose professional experience as a film writer in Bombay had left him with personal frustrations documented in Ayesha Jalal’s (2013) recently published biography.

The apparent willingness of both Askari and Manto to throw their chips in with a country so poten-tially unstable and susceptible to hijack by reactionary forces might today appear puzzling, especially to critics of contemporary Pakistan, who compare its militant institutionalization of religion and territory to homeland with Israel. And yet, the nightmare it has become perhaps makes it too easy to sneer with hindsight at those who identified with Pakistan. Perhaps for Manto and Askari, Two Nations were here and might as well stay. After all, even after the horrors of 1971 and today’s ongoing turmoil, what alter-native is there but to hope for the best through some kind of national harmony and reconciliation? (Baloch separatists might be right to demand otherwise but for now at least, there are few signs their sufferings will alter the map.)

Whatever the Lefts, Rights, and wrongs of the vitriolic polemics that ensued between Manto, Askari, and their ideologically pumped progressive adversaries, the notion of Pakistani and Indian cinemas as culturally different does not account for the way culture seeps across historically constructed geo-political borders. If in production, the infrastructure of film industries in South Asia can be located primarily within the discrete boundaries of given nation-states, the processes of distribution and recep-tion through which films are disseminated and experienced are seldom other than regional. It is here that terms like “Indian” and “Pakistani” begin to lose sense, for the deep indivisibility of Indo-Muslim worlds renders any attempt to identify ways of looking through national lenses as distortive.

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Manto himself hints at this in his essay on Pakistani film when he points out there is not much difference between Muslims and Hindus in quotidian life, adding that it is this mundane sphere of the everyday, not religious doctrine, which is the stuff of cinema. Whatever specificities Pakistani films might display, a religious–cultural identity distinct from India’s was never likely to make sense in depicting ordinary people. This was true of form as much as content, as Iftikhar Dadi’s earlier cited study of the Pakistani Urdu Social film makes clear.

And yet, for Pakistan’s puritanical middle class, whose aspirational Wahabism leads to ever stauncher disavowals of its Indo-Persian soul even as it devours the latest Hindi films, titillating pop videos, and Indian Big Brother on satellite television, the religiously plural origins of South Asian art and culture are anything but accepted fact. The schizophrenic contradictions that result from this disavowal are formi-dable: like Nishtar, we frown upon Hindi films for their lewd, “un-Islamic” commercialism but envy the wealth and global prestige they generate and so must have our own. A less anxious perspective would be one that proudly asserts Pakistani ownership of Indian culture and film thus reconciling ourselves and our imaginaries to who we are rather than who think we ought to be. For much as Indians and Pakistanis like to label films, stars, and songs as heritage belonging to one or the other nation-state, there is something about Amitabh’s image and Noor Jehan’s melodies that defies the grubby grasp of national classification—perhaps the most important part.

If drawing lines around art for the purpose of classifying and institutionalizing national heritage is a tasteless business at the best of times, in South Asia it is inscribed within a history of the Partition and its violent cultural erasure, population transfer, and madness, to draw on Manto’s Toba Tek Singh as allegory. Beyond the specific events of 1947, cinema’s close relationship with memory and psyche makes it a natu-ral medium for exploring the ongoing legacy of separation and conflict caused by partition with a lower case “p”—that is, as an historical process that continues to unfold in wars, communal pogroms, and the persecution of minorities in both India and Pakistan every day. Mehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008), like Subiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2003) before it, concerns itself with the minor differences Partition institutionalized—real and imagined borders whose perverse impingements on the lives of ordinary citizens are testament to the narcissism of contemporary South Asia’s national cultures.

Research into memory is perhaps most interesting when paired with retrieval and analysis of concrete historical realities and lost worlds. Hoek (2014) investigates a passage of history obscured by another partition, the bloody secession of East Pakistan in 1971. Combining dogged pursuit of new primary data from film historical archives and interviews with the protagonists of a period distorted by the contempo-rary metanarratives of Bangladesh and Pakistan, Hoek provides a fascinating glimpse into what lies beneath the palimpsests of contemporary reifications. The period 1947–1971, when Dhaka was the capi-tal of Pakistan’s most populous wing, is so very interesting precisely because it lies at the intersection of pasts disowned by nationalists in both countries. Tugging at the loose threads of film historiography in Bangladesh, Hoek interrogates the dominant literature’s unwillingness to acknowledge awami [popular] cinematic taste’s stubborn refusal to conform with nationalism’s culturally purist claims. In so doing, she reflects on how to evolve a methodology for film scholarship that explores repressed and forgotten connections between industries and communities now severed from their own pasts.

There is an element of the unexpected in the findings of Hoek’s quest, as the Bangladesh archive bears involuntary witness to an Urdu cinema past that traversed the 1960s into the early 1970s. This is ironic when one considers that ethnicity and language have been more appropriate categories of film analysis than country since at least the late 1970s, when Urdu abruptly lost its cinematic hegemony to a wig-wearing peasant wielding a farming implement (Sevea, 2014). Sultan Rahi’s Maula Jatt, an action man marked by his earthy rural aesthetic and anti-establishment ethos, is impossible to imagine outside

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his neo-feudal agrarian battleground of central and Northern Punjab. The impressive fact that he spent most of his on-screen career in a dhoti speaks volumes about the profound resentment of ordinary folk toward the coercive arm of Hamza Alawi’s bloated post-colonial state.

Subsequent waves of Punjabi action films reflect a deepening alienation from officialdom and the authorities no doubt caused by the growing frequency of “Encounters”—a euphemism for summary exe-cutions of criminal suspects staged as shootouts with the police. As in other Third World countries with tenuous rule of law, encounters are a standard police procedure in Pakistani Punjab. But here, uniquely, the “criminals” and their families have fought back at the state using cinema as a medium of resistance; it is as if the Gangs of Lahore have grabbed hold of the Ideological Cinematic Apparatus and started produc-ing films about their own lives. In Mumbai and Lahore, the uniformed officer, that most visible personi- fication of everyday state power has for long become something of a baddie, with Punjab’s heroes comprising a new generation of upwardly mobile castes and criminal gangs.8 The fact that the studios could effectively be captured by “uneducated goondas [thugs]” who “know nothing about art,” to use the words of bitter industry professionals and elite reviewers, tells us just how little legitimate industrial and finance capital have invested in filmmaking. When juxtaposed with the “gentrification” of Bombay film that began in this same period (Ganti, 2012), moreover, it underlines the extent to which the situation of Pakistani filmmaking becomes distinct from that of Bombay and other regional centers in the 1990s.

Hashim Bin Rashid and Sher Khan (2012) have argued that the significance of the “Gujjar” turn in action film is more complex than generally assumed. In a rare investigation into gangster budget bio- pics, they suggest that it constitutes a rare example of the downtrodden using cinema to intervene in the realm of culture by constructing counter-narratives about political events at the local level of community memory. The murky financing, limited profitability, and lack of regard for traditional star-construction in these films mean that despite their formulaic construction, they can arguably be seen as some of the most curious forms of guerilla film production anywhere since the 1990s. In linguistic terms, they belong to a tradition of sub-national nationalist filmmaking pitted against Urdu dominance in Pakistan’s failed and acrimonious federalism.

Of course, vernacular cinema is older than Pakistan, and has historically found its most natural expression through folk tales like Heer Ranja, first adapted for the screen in 1928, over four decades before Masood Pervez’s version was released in 1970. More recently, however, director Syed Noor’s modernizing blockbusters have displayed genuine innovation: Choorian (1998) and Majajan (2006) in particular fuse popular Punjabi cinema’s two seemingly unbridgeable strands—folk and gangster—in a witty syncretic combination of traditional musical elements with Pajero Punjabiyat, in which the legends of Bulleh Shah mingle with dialogue from the annals of Sultan Rahi. A memorable dance sequence in which Shaan straps bells to his ankles and performs a Mujra for a prostitute playfully inverts gendered clichés about the roles of courtesan and customer, even if much of the remaining action revolves around car chases, Kalashnikovs, and other standard elements of the action genre.

The nationalist aspirations of vernacular filmmaking in Sindh are equally interesting, even if their number and commercial success has been modest. Levesque and Bui’s close analysis of Umar Marvi (1956) (Levesque and Bui, 2014) suggests this film can be viewed within the same framework that Benedict Anderson places print-capitalism for its historic role in forging nationalism across Europe, Latin America, and beyond from the eighteenth century. The authors identify a curious dualism in the apparent self-consciousness of its particularism, which suggests an acute awareness that the rest of the country might also be watching. At the same time as addressing and urging an internal community of co-ethnics to imagine Sindh as a nation, Umar Marvi thus constitutes a bid for public (external) recognition of Sindhi identity as autonomous from the hegemonic centers of Pakistani cinema in Lahore and Karachi.

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The film’s technical poverty reflects the infrastructural underdevelopment in Pakistan’s economi- cally peripheral zones, a persistent feature of uneven media landscapes across South Asia. In stark contrast to the urban cosmopolitan feel of hegemonic Urdu cinema that dominated representations of Sindh (specifically Karachi) in the 1960s (Asdar, 2013; Dadi, 2010), Umar Marvi is couched in pro-vincial idioms of tradition and rusticity through visual signifiers and motifs reflected in its wardrobe and set design. Alongside similar developments in literature and politics, the film suggests a conscious effort to construct and engage an imagined ethnic community through appeals to nationalist sentiment. All this is achieved by using the technologies of cinematic circulation and a regional syncretism of pan-religious folk cultures that resonate across the subcontinent. This underlines the fact that sub-national provincial and ethnic identities are not necessarily more parochial in their modes of expression and range of influences than cinema that is national.

Cinephilia, Cinephobia

There is no denying the ghostly condition of film studios and movie theatres in Pakistan today (see Figure 1). At least some part of the extreme pessimism surrounding the film industry, however,

Figure 1. Box office of an awami [traditional] cinema hall, Peshawar 2013.

Source: Photograph by Ali Nobil Ahmad.

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appears to reflect the ethnic and social biases of an elite that does not get out much. It is simply not true, for instance, that: “Since the decline of Pakistani cinema in the 1970s, mainstream films in the country have lost originality, a good script and an audience” (Faruqi, 2010). What this discourse of bourgeois nostalgia actually laments is the “death” of the Urdu Social film and associated decline of middle-class custom in traditional cinema halls. The latter, where referred to at all by journalists (e.g., Boone and Malik, 2013), are simply dismissed as “seedy and run down” venues that “screen B-movies.”

The problem with such accounts is their near total ignorance of transformations in Pakistani cinema since the good old days when “good families”—to use the social Darwinian lexicon of South Asian elitism—went regularly to the pictures. As is clear from essays in this issue, there are important signs of life in the supposed corpse of popular Pakistani film. Whether or not these are visible from the Elysian fields of Defence Housing Authority, the film scholar is obliged to explore them seriously—particularly where there is evidence they point to subaltern agencies and subjectivities or where they illuminate societal power dynamics like class formation and gender (Sevea, 2014).

If action cinema’s politics is often dubious, it provides important insights into the complex relationship between masculine desire and cinematic gaze. In terms of formal innovation and treatment of sexuality, many action films and the totas (clips of hardcore porn) that splice their formulaic narratives reveal chinks in the armory of male dominance. Lotte Hoek’s work on Bangladeshi “cut pieces,” among the most innovative ethnographic studies of South Asian cinema to date, provides an excellent template for exploration in the Pakistani context where obvious parallels have been identified in Farida Batool’s recent research on pornography.9 Like Hoek, Batool identifies male anxieties, vulnerabilities, and ambiv-alences that underline the value of approaching these texts with a seriousness few among the Pakistani commentariat think they deserve.10

Extending this spirit of non-judgmental inquiry to all stages of a filmic text’s life requires atten- tiveness to the surreal features of a production process that remains poorly understood and largely undocumented. Here, the researcher is blessed with a fascinating and unusually transparent world in which directors, producers, and stars (if they can be called that) are all a phone call away; in which film studios can be accessed with an ease that is already revealing of specificities that distinguish the Pakistani context from most others. This very democratic openness has historically been held in contempt by “critics writing for major newspapers” who, Gazdar (1997, pp. 116–117) observes, early on “decided that filmdom was a place for the ignorant and illiterate” causing “respectable families to avoid this profession.” His assessment remains true today of most visitors to Evernew who see only ruins and lowlife engaged in “vulgarity”—fodder for their endlessly recycled columns on the industry’s decline, failure, and death.

The very term “industry,” in these assessments, appears to be invoked as a clearly identifiable infrastructure which exists to “succeed” in some unstated collective cause vaguely correlated with pros-perity measured in GDP. This is worth unpacking if only because its invocation seems to make narrow assumptions about what it means to create value and be industrious that have little use in the Pakistani context, where artists and performers have always been consigned to lowly social worlds associated with the kanjar and marasi castes. The dilapidation of Evernew Studios—paan juice spat on peeling walls, grotty carpets, “actors” trawling its bowels for paid work, boos, cigarettes, and hash—today reinforces elite bias. The fact is, however, films and advertisements continue to be made. Studio technicians may look like ageing chai-wallahas but the value of their toil to the films they make is no less than that of a London-based 25-year-old with a Masters degree in media practice working on special effects for the latest Harry Potter. If it so happens that film studios in Lahore are subterranean spaces in which

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inebriated dwarves rub shoulders with pantomime villains; where “producers” of action and gangster films are followed around by Kalashnikov-wielding entourages whose air of menace is more real than the characters in the films being made; where leading ladies are celebrated as much for their “stage show” performances as their acting in films—then surely we must explore the significance of these facts without losing sight of the labor processes which grind on in their midst. The infrastructural wounds, chaotic peculiarities, and carnal excesses in and around a Pakistani film set may be hideous to middle-class sensibilities, but they are not coincidental; they tell us what filmmaking looks like in one of the most cinephobic nations on earth (see Figure 2). The same is true of exhibition in beleaguered awami cinema halls, where films reach their final destinations. Every afternoon in the theatres of Lahore’s Laxmi Chowk, a diehard contingent of laborers, shop owners, and ball-scratching rickshaw drivers escape work to munch fiery kebabs and ogle dirty action flicks on dirtier seats. In Peshawar, where punt-ers include second-generation Afghan migrants, the surreptitious squalidity of movie-going is all the more potent (see Figure 3). Attacks on “unIslamic” venues means they literally risk life to watch porn. Matinées are better attended than evening shows, suggesting most are more afraid of parents who think they are at school than the Taliban. Here, in the noisy dank dark of the film theatre—half-full at best, filthy as a toilet on the GT road—the lumpen peri-urban proletariat of a terrifying war zone lose themselves in the collective visual pleasure of daily communions that keep cinema alive. The pathetic conditions they endure tells us just how fiendishly serious they are about the screen. This is not the death of cinema; it is the very opposite: a subversive avowal in circumstances utterly hostile to its existence.

Figure 2. Actor Pyar Ali, Evernew Studios, circa 2009/10.

Source: Photograph by Ali Nobil Ahmad.

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If the sense of doom that surrounds the future of twentieth century cinema halls in Pakistan has a specific context of religious obscurantism and conflict, debates about the state of film at large have gone through similar phases of concern over the erosion of cinema’s market value due to the rise of home entertainment. Television, the VCR, and now digital technologies have each in their own way triggered anxiety over the future of film and even talk of cinema’s death.

The tendency to conflate change with death is reflective of an ideological bias toward progressivist notions of modernization in which fast replaces slow, sound replaces silence, and color replaces black and white—a teleology shown to be false by film historians working on cinema in the Euro-American context.11 In South Asia, where yesterday’s technologies rarely disappear, teleological notions of cinema’s modernization make even less sense. Old and new cross-fertilize and proliferate new forms, sometimes nominally (in say, the term “CD cassette” used for Pashto films burned to compact discs) and often in ways that can be truly astonishing.12 Audio-cassettes are still sold alongside CDs and DVDs in bazaars; they are not second-hand. And beyond mere survival, technological transformation occasionally revives low-tech cinematic forms in unpredictable ways. Take, for instance, the live (often lewd) performances of film songs that intersperse comedy sketches in what used to be cinema halls, now converted into theatres staging new varieties of Punjabi and Pashto cabaret. Many of these live on after being recorded digitally and resold on compact discs alongside dramas and films featuring some of the same artists and performers.

Figure 3. An awami [traditional] cinema hall in Peshawar in 2013.

Source: Photograph by Ali Nobil Ahmad.

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However, old technologies returning in modified forms cannot reverse the transformations brought about by their initial displacement. We can never go back, so to speak, to the era of silent movies even if they enjoy a contemporary renaissance; if anything, black and white film today acquires novel signifi-cance based on its retrospective associations. Indeed, the quirky value of old technologies in the West is such that these are often re-commodified precisely for their nostalgic appeal. To use an example from beyond cinema, the revival of vinyl has been helped by the fact that it has gained new connotations of sophistication, exclusivity, and authenticity among DJs and connoisseurs under late capitalism. Its con-temporary appeal, which lies precisely in becoming “present” within the very mediascape that rendered it obsolete in the 1980s, underlines the impossibility of true return to the technological era before CDs and digital downloads.

There is, accordingly, something truly melancholic about the corrosion of old cinematic forms in the history of the screen, as Ali Khan’s affectionate retrospective of the hand-painted film poster, this issue demonstrates. As an indigenous art form that was once an integral part of the way cinema was experi-enced outside the film theatre, the poster is perhaps one clear example of an everyday form of cinephilia being expunged from the urban landscape. Gwen Kirk’s close analysis of inter-textual references in Omar Khan’s indie horror classic Zibakhana (2007) provides an interesting study of Pakistani cinema’s own comment on this process. Littered with cinematic motifs and references to past moments of glory in the history of Pakistani cinema, the film is haunted by the ghosts of its ancestors. By breathing life into suppressed memories like the iconic image of Maula Jatt, it generates an eerie sense of loss and even trauma for the Pakistani cinephile. The terror experienced at scarier moments in the plot is thus cleverly amplified by various forms of unease and affective tension generated by continual reference to the cinematic dead.

The irony of this retrospective nostalgia is that Zibakhana, one of the first digital feature films to be released in Pakistan, could not be screened in traditional awami cinema halls since most lacked the requisite technology. By 2011, Lahore Cinestar in Township acquired 3D screening facilities; there were no 3D Pakistani films to screen however, so the promoters resorted to exhibiting Indian and Hollywood production. These developments reflect a broader set of transformations through which film production and exhibition in Pakistan are being slowly, if unevenly, brought into line with international media trends initiated by liberalizing reforms under Musharraf’s dictatorship. The privatization of electronic media, resulting proliferation of satellite television channels and lifting of protection against Indian films in cinemas have significantly altered the morphology of national frameworks, together with notions of that which is public and private. American and Indian films enter Pakistani homes and multiplexes more freely and frequently than ever before. These shifts arise from the forms and path-ways of circulation that increasingly connect all forms of visual culture—news media, films, dramas, advertisements, and music videos—and which bear little trace of their historic manifestations before 2004 when a solitary state channel, Pakistan Television (PTV), enjoyed a monopoly on broadcasting.

(Not) The End

You cannot judge a book by its cover; there is a very real sense, however, in which films must be assessed by their trailers. The marketing campaign for Shaan’s much anticipated English language Pakistani film, Waar (2013), directed by Bilal Lashari, who cut his teeth making music videos, leaves little doubt cine-ma’s future in Pakistan is more tightly bound up than ever with broader currents of global neoliberalism

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(see Figure 4). Admissions to the press about support from the Pakistan army place the film squarely within the same aesthetic, political–economic, and (im)moral universe of militarized late capitalist imperialism that spawned Kathryn Bigelow’s career in public relations for the US war machine.

Any excitement about the development of an emergent multiplex film culture tied to global media flows and big investments of capital, it follows, must be tempered with an understanding that cinema cannot be bailed out of its morass by cash alone. Like an IMF loan package, neoliberal transformation comes with conditionalities attached—these might well leave little room for low and medium budget treatment of the everyday realities Manto and Askari said was the key to the fostering of an authentic Pakistani cinema. It may be too early to fret about this danger, particularly given the excellence of indi-vidual works that draw upon new technologies and marketing without compromising substance—Zinda Bhag (2013), for instance, which grounds high production values and smart usage of new cinematic forms in the honest basics of strong character, witty dialogue, and social awareness. The question, how-ever, will almost certainly begin to pose itself more frequently if films like Waar start growing sequels; if, that is, the “revival” starts to resemble the flowering of a “military-entertainment” complex that glori-fies the state: What is the point of bringing the film industry “back to life” if the movies it produces are, in Peter Greenaway’s terms, “brain dead?”

“I await the end of cinema with optimism.” Responding to a questionnaire in Cahiers du Cinéma about the future of French film in January 1965, Jean-Luc Godard’s famously bold proclamation pro-vides us with a useful way to summarize the argument thus far: to speak of the film industry’s “death” in Pakistan is to misunderstand the very nature of cinema which, as film theorists have argued in other contexts, is neither singular nor static. Film and cinema are cultural forms whose lives and deaths are multiple, overlapping, and unpredictable. Changes in technology and media infrastructure have consist-ently reshaped their meaning, often radically in ways that were alarming for audiences, practitioners, and

Figure 4. Still from Waar.

Source: Waar (Bilal Lashari, 2013).

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observers alike. Unsurprisingly, they triggered instability and false proclamations of The End. In the earliest years of Pakistan’s troubled existence, the writer and essayist Sadaat Hasan Manto compared imagining what true Pakistani film might look like to quenching one’s thirst before digging a well (this issue)—a strange analogy that gets mangled in translation. Given how much spadework remains to be done for film and film criticism in Pakistan to approach its full potential, however, it somehow remains pertinent for our times. Things began badly for the Pakistani film industry; decades of state and societal denigration later, a context of near unmatched cinephobia still limits and defines the pro- spects of making and watching films. And yet, thankfully, it has failed to quell the cinema instinct. Battered, bruised, starved, and stunted, the industry still stands: Fake moustaches still bristle. Fists still fly. (Dishum). Fat ladies still lip-synch. (It ain’t over). On sets and shoots in Lahore and beyond, the industriousness of practitioners continues to generate popular films that pleasure audiences in cinema halls (see Figure 5).

However numerically small, their stubbornly enduring desire to watch films is evidence of a cinephilia that—if not always equal to the phobia against which it is pitted and tussles dialectically—clings to life with a tenacity that is testament to the universality of cinema as a medium.

Instead of disowning their own reflection, the indigenous undertakers of Pakistani film would do well to study the dreams, fears, fantasies, and desires of their own society as projected in decades of celluloid productions beginning to pique the interest of scholars in this country and beyond. The need for meaningful debate of the diverse ways of being a citizen—or for that matter a human—has

Figure 5. Shaan Shahid and Khushboo with choreographer Pappu Samrat at Evernew Studios, circa 2009–10.

Source: Photograph by Ali Nobil Ahmad.

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never been greater in a rudderless and intellectually exhausted post-colonial state that threatens, in its worst moments, to devour itself in fratricidal, internecine, and sectarian hatreds. There will, no doubt, be disappointments: an honest gaze at one’s own image reveals imperfections, freckles, and flaws, of which Pakistani cinema, like Pakistani society, has no shortage. But there is no better mirror, to borrow Askari’s analogy about the function of art: no better way of understanding who we are, who we might yet be.

Acknowledgments

Ravi Vasudevan’s extensive comments on earlier draft of this article are gratefully acknowledged. Any errors of fact and opinion are my own.

Notes

1. Whatever its merits, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary about acid-attack victims Saving Face (2012) was praised for “excelling in film-making” (President Asif Ali Zardari’s words) after it won the Oscar almost certainly by pundits who had never previously heard of it.

2. See, for instance, Zaidi (2013), Kamal (2013) and for a foreign correspondent’s take, Boone and Malik (2013). 3. See Gazdar (1997, p. 130) for a detailed account. 4. Of course, there have been and remain profound tensions between filmmakers and officialdom in Iran,

as reflected in the 2010 jailing of acclaimed director Jafar Panahi, banned from making films for 20 years. For a discussion of the complex relationship between Islamism and cinema during the early years of the revolution, see Naficy (2012).

5. Ravi Vasudevan’s “Genre and the imagination of identity c. 1935–1945” (n.d.). 6. For a parallel perspective on Bombay’s Hindi Social, see Vasudevan (1996). 7. For a discussion of Askari’s cosmopolitanism, see Mehr Afshan Farooqi’s enlightening assessment of his

contribution to Urdu literary culture (Farooqi, 2012). 8. Madhava Prasad argues the police are often represented as arriving late at the scene of the crime, suggesting

an equivalent critique of the state (though not quite as harsh as Pakistan’s). See Prasad (1998). 9. In “Cut-Pieces as Stag Film: Bangladeshi Pornography in Action Cinema”, Lotte Hoek (2010, p. 147) argues:

“The aggressive display of middle-class girls as despoiled” can be read as symptomatic “of an anxious mascu-linity”, and notes that titillating rape scenes in which urbanized, affluent college girls are effectively punished for their transgressions come at moments in the narrative when social tensions are most acute. Together with its exclusive focus on the female body (in stark contrast with Western porn), this aggressive representation of middle-class women reflects the frustrations of an underemployed male workforce, anxious about the growing mobility of female labor. See Hoek (2010, p. 147) also her recently published monograph (2013).

10. Farida Batool’s fascinating post-graduate research was for a thesis completed at the School of African and Oriental Studies; she presented preliminary findings in a guest lecture to my students at the Lahore University of Management Studies in 2010, for which I am extremely grateful.

11. See Miesk (2010) for an illuminating history of color that convincingly complicates the assumption that chro-maticity simply displaced black and white or rendered it obsolete (through “tinting” and “toning”—painting film stock—black and white was always already colored, a fact seldom realized today due to the fact that the superimposed hues in question tend to fade over time).

12. Vasudevan has argued this “In the Centrifuge of History”, Vasudevan (2010); see also Mahadevan (2010), on the persistence into the contemporary of early film technologies; for a discussion of the urban socio-spatial aspects of this issue, see Ravi Sundaram’s seminal monograph, Pirate Modernity (Sundaram, 2009).

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