Koodal Director: Tyeb Mehta Year: 1970 (15:40) "There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid." — Rene Girard “There's trouble outside: / crowds, stammering guns, the sea / screaming from side to side.” — Adil Jussawala Visionary post-war modernist Tyeb Mehta channels the nightmares of the nation in Koodal, at once the artist’s self-described “autobiography” and a profound meditation on collage, crowd control, cinematic subjectivity and the violence buried within every glorious act of foundation. One of several provocative artists’ films commissioned under the leadership of that most sacred, revered and polytropic among sarkari Lares et Penates Jehangir “Jean” Bhownagary, Koodal evokes, envisions and enters the dangerous city — where every public square is also an abbatoir, every mela a mob — not as a hero, but as a victim of the frenzy; not the victor, but as the body at the bottom of the pile. “KOODAL” IS A TAMIL WORD WHICH MEANS A MEETING POINT, THE UNION, AN ASSEMBLY OF IMAGES, says the typewritten card. Its title appears, first in Tamil script then in English letters, spelled out in tall, stylized white blocks jammed close and crowded. Looming just behind is the deep black eye of a bull, its pupil reflecting a hot bulb on the wet stones of a charnel-house floor. Then flayed heads of cattle corpses — abstract, skinless — fill the screen, nearly illegible but for their dead eyes, glistening and ebony, set in exposed tissue, burning through the sequence of images like holes. Or like graves. And how inescapable that a word for “heap” should contain within itself such a heap of meanings, such an assembly, a pile, a gathering, a coming together. Montage. A pile of meanings. A congress of whatever kind you like. A crowd. Tyeb Mehta was trained as a cinematographer -- indeed it was his family business -- and worked as a film editor at Famous Cine Laboratories & Studios on Tardeo Road in Bombay before abandoning that job to pursue painting at the Sir JJ School of Art in 1947. One day while commuting to work from his home on Mohamed Ali Road he witnessed Partition-related street violence that culminated in a mob beating a man to death. The experience haunted his work forever after and how could it not have? And how could that potent combination of the spectator’s power and powerlessness, that drug-like frisson of the crowd’s excitement, that revulsion not someday become cinema? The abbatoir, where the violence of the angry mob is transformed into the sanctioned violence of the butcher, is the central nightmare of Mehta’s oeuvre, and central to this film as well. In a sequence that begins at 5:40 a bull mounts a cow to high-keyed tambura drone and mridangam in the meatyard. Multiple angles and fast cuts of this animal congress, this koodal, this violent bovine montage of muscle, bulging eyes, huge ribs, scenes of calves suckling and cattle usher us through a dark gateway into the charnel house, hanging with double-pronged hooks, where the mighty animals are laid bare and made helpless, opened up for display. The “bull is man’s mute and uncomprehending victim,” Gieve Patel wrote of Mehta’s recurrent use of the bull motif in his work from this time. “But he is also an image of the aggressor’s own helplessness before forces he has released and cannot control.” There’s an inevitability to the syntax of a filmic phrase that starts with sex and ends on a meat hook — cf. Mani Kaul’s Arrival (1979). The empty, waiting hall of double-pronged meat-hooks carries uncomfortable hints of the movie house, of the cinema’s interior, of the cineaste’s interiority. Mehta takes pains to emphasize the formal echo between the doubleness of the hooks and the doubleness of the cattle’s horns, as a harsh, ticking clock that gets louder and louder against the drone — sometimes seeming to move the (handheld) camera with it. We are always aware of the susceptibility of the camera’s gaze in this film, its interruptibility, its readiness to pitch headlong into violent feverdream — see the cattle corpses tumbling blurred, rhyming psychedelia at 9:49, as close to the actual moment of killing as he can bear to bring us — so close we can barely see it, as though the violence of that moment has rippled outward and corrupted the lens, burnt the film, inflicted our vision as the ticking fades to grotesque landscapes of flesh curtains, cows hung to air — like pictures, like paintings, like movie screens, like sacrifices made to the nation and each other.
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