The semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce was improved upon by Ferdinand De Sauserre. The status quo of semiotics is the Christian God who maintains the denotational and connotational relationship between signifier and signified. Meaning exists because of faith in God, first as the cult of Jesus and later as the Roman Catholic Church that produces the Pope who replaces God, so that the Church of Christ becomes a medium of oppression, the same agency that Jesus rebelled against. Much like the relationship between revolution and counter-revolution, the revolutionary teachings of Jesus produce the oppression by the Church through the figure of the mythical Christ as resurrected instead of the factual life of Jesus as everyday-profound.Jesus is represented as blood and body, signified through the objects, wine and bread respectively, constituting the primary signifiers of the denotation and connotation of signifying chain that materialises the non-entity God. This transformation of the sublime immaterial through the manifestation as language and utterance, which Saussere categorises as langue and parole respectively. Parole or speech is the power of freeing the oppression of the signifier (Church) so that the word and the thing are not the same thing. So if I say “cat” it does not say “meow”, which is the basis of a jumping signifying chain so that language cannot be denoted and connotation is immaterial. Wittgenstein in a late paper stated that the statement “the cat is soft” has only the connotation soft without a subject:cat. When the significative and denotational aspect of language no longer hold then speech becomes sounds, rhythms that alternatively suggest and negate meaning, or create degrees of meaning that are differential.
Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar B Dar uses the primordial sound Om as de-territorialized in language (dar b dar) so that the sounds of words and their meanings create the so called postmodern condition in which the juxta positioning of multiplicities of meaning create a collage of meaning. For Swaroop, this meaning is nonsense going back to the nonsensical Dadaists or the statement of Gilles Deleuze: the logic of sense is nonsense.In an interview Swaroop stated his favourite film was Coppola’s The Conversation. He meant to say that the reality of the conversation of the interview was the reality as onomatopoeia of the signifier “The Conversation.” This aesthetic of onomatopoeia is something Kumar Shahani has attributed as the pioneering efforts of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette who constituted the Nouvelle Vague of 1959. The reality of utterances lead to the Outside as the utterable which is where the speech replaces the acoustic image: so soap is s-o-a-p, but post modernity may attribute it to a signifier L-U-X, which is a soap but does not resemble the signifier: soap. David Fincher works with a similar approach in Fight Club, where he juxtaposes the un-namable signifier “you do not talk about Fight Club” with a white supremacist approach to destroying matter in America under the jargon, Project MayhemThe primordial statement of Indian capitalism is the 500 rupee note which has the following statement: I promise to pay the bearer of this note the sum of five hundred rupees. Swaroop correctly assumes that the signifier and the signified are a promise and not a reality. Swaroop’s categorisation of cinema as tadpoles as a multiplicity that become refracted light as frogs equivalent to television. The subversion of causality is such that language becomes matter. In philosophical terms cinematography confuses the totality of matter (hyle) with the the Ultimate Reality or thing in itself (noumenon). In other words, the phenomenological apparatus of the totality of the cinematographic image is a material whereas the suggestive connotation of the shot is immaterial which coincides with materiality: you need money to make a film.
In Om Dar B Dar the statements like “Plaster of Paris” to “He came from Paris to Pushkar to sell plaster” ; or for that matter “should I get the T(ea) , it is T(ime) for T(he) T(rain)” create a repetitiousness in language that confuses the relationship between utterance and meaning through materiality which is precisely the referent. Jean-Francois Lyotard pronounces this condition where signifier and signifier are suspended so that only the referent, or the thing referred to remains as the post-modern condition. The postmodern condition is an ontology of capitalism where when everything is appropriated by time, thinking is waste of time and there is only a condition of potentiality for one signifier to have many conflicting and contradictory, even inflecting connotations that create a confusion between the status quo of class and caste, high art and pop culture, and high philosophy with pop philosophy, mediated by kitsch culture.Kitsch is the violence of the everyday that produces empirical meaning in reality that is pan-class but usually appropriated by the lumpen proletariat. Swaroop challenges the nature of high art so that the work of art is uncategorisable subtraction so that what remains “when everything is taken away” is a purification coinciding with the Shuddhi of Brahmanism.
Om Dar B Dar’s engagement with the nature of matter and materialism as opposed to the Ultimate Reality via the Self of Brahmanism creates a dualism of the Self with matter or Prakriti. G. Aravindan’s Kanchanseeta uses a suggestive aesthetic of Dhvani to engage materiality as the absence of Sita through which the forces of nature and the suggestive nature of the raga Bageshree create an awaiting of love-mood or sringara-rasa. Swaroop uses the space of Prethkund as televisual screen with total internal reflection where the coins as tax of the donation of the Bhakta or devotee, during the sacrifice is collected through Om’s underwater dives since he can hold his breath. The panda or priest, symbolic of Brahmanism, accuses Om of finding only fake coins creating a fraudulent ontology of capitalism, which Om finds as a dullness or lack of intelligence in the panda, perhaps signifying the intellectual dullness of dualism, which results in the vulgar representationalism of Puranology, that Swaroop has embraced in his recent documentaries. In this way, Om does not suspect that the ritual of going underwater in Prethkund is a preparation for his own sacrifice by the Brahminical clergy, represented by the panda, and supported by the worshippers so that the backward class character is murdered by the upper class status quo.The utterance Om is used by Brahmins to create breath control that form rhythms and departures to combine and return to the Sama or first beat. The rebellion of pranayama to hold breath is given a mythical symbolism of Brahma representing breath and Brahma’s refusal to raise the location-space of Pushkar to the heavens, creates a withdrawal of breath so that “birth control is breath control.” In this way Swaroop analysis the schemes of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi to eventually have the witch Phoolkumari utter “Rama Rajya”, the mythical governance that was propagated by the Rajiv Gandhi government, which although Congress, was instrumental in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s demolition of the Babri Majid and the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. Om is deterritorialised and decentered resulting in a challenging of the status quo of the Brahminical superiority.
The criticism Swaroop has received is that it is still exploitation of the crew by the all-powerful director which negates the liberal fascist ideology of the film The axiomatic “Tit for Tat” or causality become “Tit for Toothpaste” which moves to the primordial “promise” of Indian capitalism on the Reserve Bank of India’s paper note: “I promise to pay the bearer of this note the sum of 500 rupees.” Promise is a toothpaste that Om is a celebrity model for. Swaroop cuts to a sequence of devotees asking the realised master what the relationship between the toothpaste-as-divine and the immanent consumerism of the times would result in. In this way the objects emerging out of Prethkund are similar to the mythical tale of the churning of the ocean by the Devtas (Gods) and Asuras (Deminos) The master strikes Om with a peacock feather, as he is brought the outcome of the samurai Mathan at Prethkund, following which Swaroop cuts to a peacock, the national bird of India. In this way, there is a confusion between the sublime and the nationalistic ideological which is especially characteristic of the confusion of State and Church, that constitutes the politics of the Bharatiya Janta Party.
Om is finally assassinated precisely through the breath control so that the frog regresses into a reptile, the chameleon in front of a television screen, and how new media creates a further regression in the Neo-cortex and cerebellum to the primordial amygdala that is instinctive and non-volitional at the same time. This method of improvisatory intuition is what returns to the feminine energy in the final sequences where Gayatri forces Jagdish to commit suicide, perhaps as Grace or Krishna Kripa, as in the films of Robert Bresson, until she escapes with Swaroop denoting the dominance of nature-as-feminine as opposed to masculine consciousness.Swaroop was extremely influenced by Bimal Urf Jaaye to Jaaye Kahan by Krishna Baldev Vaid. The title translates as Bimal Also Knows as Where can he go?, and is a formalist take on the crisis of masculinity that emerges after 3 decades of Congress rule in India. Using the semiotic approach of French Nouveau Roman writers who used the detective novel to explore the unconscious vis a vis language, Vaid also tips his hat to the semiotic approach of using the gender semiotics of I/You/She/He (Je/Tu/Il/Elle) used by radical leftist French novelist Philippe Sollers. Bimal was banned during the Emergency because of its representation of masturbation as the termination of male phantasy consciousness in the wake of First Wave Feminism, something that Swaroop indicates generally through Gayatri’s agency in the film as Shakti, feminine energy, but also through the radical act of her cutting her hair that signified a feminist outlook in Indian towns.Much like Vaid, Swaroop does not have a political statement since a political statement is an axiom mediating a subject and predicate that connotes an ideology. Swaroop emphasises the non-sensical nature of the right and the left as well as religiosity as Om dresses as a Kazi and recites the Hanuman Chalisa. The inter-religiosity of the sequences where Swaroop documents Ajmer through a 360 degree pan with the Islamic Azaan and the Hindu Hari Om Namashivaya playing simultaneously , as well as the call of the non-figurative Arya Samajis on a loudspeaker.
The nonsensical nature of Hindu chants is represented by a statement of a variant of a Sanskrit shloka: Bhute samundara teh sarveti bhuteshu and she flew, flew, flew.. creating a literal line of flight from the ossified rigid shloka.Similarly there is an abrupt entry of the narrator when Om leaves Ajmer: this is a door and that is a shoe, and Om never returned. During the “this” and “that” section Swaroop matches the denotation with the utterance but Om never returning is precisely the post-structuralist line of flight that introduces realism into the son-image-texte. The replacement of the word with the actual thing so that it becomes an outside utterable which is a purely temporal object, outside the domain of representation, takes the film into “image without idea of image.” Similarly Martin Heidegger breaks the dualism of res cognitas ( things of the mind) and res extensa (things of extension or space) with the statement make the res into a res, or make the thing into a thing.Quantum physics makes thought into a thing, in a similar fashion as a particle becoming a wave, is similar to matter becoming thought. However, J. Krishnamurti clarifies that res means reality, so the interpretation would then be: make the reality real, without a symbolic mediation, like the Lacanians would insist. In this sense, Kamal Swaroop affirmed my statement that Om Dar-B-Dar is a documentary, the image meeting the shadow is the total internal reflection of reality as itself at its immanent core.
Swaroop draws one dimension of reality exactly like Vittorio De Sica in The Bicycle Thief but through the multiplicity of single screen cinema, multi-screen television and the death of Om as toota tara neend mein TV toota which means the dark matter as time of a star is a shooting star, in the sleeping state that is the breaking of the multiplicity of the screen, so that the image is subtracted and what remains is reality.According to Deleuze and Guattari, this reality is the link between capitalism and schizophrenia so that Om Dar-B-Dar is the tool box of the ontology of capitalism and its original function is to serve as a paid promotion for the non-existent brand Promise toothpaste with the fictitious character Om. Swaroop distinguishes between coconut marketing and Coca-Cola marketing where unlike nature where the seed in the fruit leads to more space and more trees and more health, Coca Cola creates a dent in the market with expanding space that cannot be occupied by anyone else. Swaroop’s argument is that market forces create a stereotype like actress Anita Kanwar whose performance as Phoolkumari is a (de) coded version of her part in Lajoji in the Doordarshan serial Hum Log. In this way, Om Dar B Dar is similar to the Hollywood genre cinema of Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino where the genre coding as Hollywood is decoded through the point of departure to de-climax the film, which some people find boring (an accusation against the cult film Pulp Fiction). In the case of Om, the boring nature is replaced by an incomprehensibility which refers back to the Dadaist formula of carefully constructed nonsense.
Devdutt Trivedi is a Mumbai based film scholar.
in this ever growing hyper-contextual & fragmented times i will remain in the dark.
when in rome, wrote like romans