The Actor’s Dilemma
Last week I received an email announcing a commemorative
session for the late Razia Sajjad Zaheer at the Pak Tea House Lahore by the
Progressive Writers Association of Pakistan. Was I in a time warp? Is there
still an active Progressive Writers Movement?
I was already on a
search to understand why Pakistani films and TV dramas no longer had truly great
stories or great actors , a search that had led me to the role of the Progressive
Writers Movement, a group of engaged writers whom Bilal Zubedi and Dr. Riaz Ahmed Shaikh call the “creative
minority”, that gave us poetry, dramas and film scripts that defined the golden
age of literature, cinema, radio and television.
Zubedi and Shaikh in their study “Rise and Fall of Progressive
Thought in Pakistan: An Appraisal of PTV Drama Tradition”( 2013) suggest that this
creative minority established PTV , the
sole TV channel till 1989, from management to
creative programming, including Naheed Siddiqui’s classical dance payal,
Thursday Qawali, quiz show Kasauti, the
Zia Mohyedin show, and drama series
Mantorama – difficult to imagine in today’s loud wrangling TV shows that do
everything in their power to ensure we do not think for ourselves. Khuda ki
Basti, Jhok Siyal, Waaris, Deewarain, Qurbateinaur Faaslay, Taaleem e
Baalighan, with writers such as Amjad Islam Amjad Ashfaque Ahmed, Munnu Bhai,
Khwaja Moinuddin represent a society
that was questioning and reflecting, from a position of clarity rather than
confusion.
State influence or outright repression is something creative
industries all over the world face as has Pakistan, however what made Zia ul
Haq’s intrusions different were that they messed with our minds to an extent
that we have internalized suppression. A generation has grown up with a ban on
music and dance, and no discussions of the arts and culture, a policy perpetuated
long after Zia. We do not even realize
that we do not think anymore. The cultural silence is filled with social media,
cable television and religious lectures. The tentative return of music and
dance is in the context of entertainment not art or culture, with a few
exceptions of Sufi music and the heroic APMC classical music festivals.
The internalization has created another phenomenon - the
atomization of society into distinct social groupings based on religion, sects,
ethnicity, clan or class that do not
engage meaningfully with one another although they may work side by side. Assuming
moral or political judgement, the conversations that matter are kept entre nous.
According to Muhammad Qadeer in his book “Pakistan - Social
and Cultural Transformations in a Muslim Nation”, the seeds were sown long ago with
the 1956 Constitution that emphasized provincial and ethnic differentiations,
and, by what he calls the third , present period, ethnic and sectarian religion
and baradari has spread into rural Pakistan while urban structures have become fragmented.
Most people remain in their own social circle, except for
what Qadeer calls functional interdependence, especially in urban communities,
through use of common infrastructures
such as roads, banks, offices, , queuing for utility bills, hospital
visits , traffic jams. There is little recognition of others. While this self-
socialization works at a pragmatic level, its most problematic aspects are seen
in awkward cross-cultural interaction.
Early cinema and television dramas were produced, directed, written
and acted in, by and large, by people the stories were about. This gave the
films and television dramas an authenticity despite its technical shortcomings.
Today’s actors and film professionals come from a wide range of social
communities. Without rigorous training in acting schools, actors must depend
upon observation and intuition. In a self-conscious and closed society, where
true intimacy is not shared across social groups, or cautiously shared,
characters tend to be portrayed as stereotypes. The great opportunity that film
and drama provide to have insights into the human condition in all its nuances
and complexities, is lost. To complicate
matters, the stereotype itself has become more complex as social mobility
changes lifestyles and values. Actors are required to be more immersive to
represent the characters they portray, bringing their own insights to script
and direction. It is what made Uzma Gilani’s role as an Afghani in “Panah”, and
Salim Nasir’s portrayal of a transgender domestic in “Anghan Terha” so
memorable.
Realism in acting only emerged in the mid-20th century when
the acting guru Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavsky, taught
actors to strive for “believable truth.”
"I don't think you can really be an effective actor if
you're not curious about people and events. And if you're interested in things,
you want to go deeper and you want to know more.” Meryl Streep
Everything I’ve ever done in a film, it requires this
getting to some sort of emotional reality that is contrary to the actual
setting that you’re in." —Tom Hanks
Cinema is said to be a mirror by which we see ourselves and
our past, revealing a reality we would be blind to otherwise, and the actor is
the intermediary we must identify or empathize with. As the actor Philip
Seymour Hoffman says “Actors are responsible to the people we play.”
Durriya Kazi
June 24, 2018
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