The films of that year have left a deep impact on not just Hollywood, but contemporary cinema. There is also a clear demarcation between popular Hindi films before and after 1994, says Gautam Chintamani
Someone once mused that films were like wine. Some films age better with the passage of time, some show a variance in character over the years, but peer beyond the obvious connotations and you’d notice how like wines, a particular year ends up being special for films as well. In a little over a century since its advent, cinema has seen the best as well as the worst of times, and there have been some very specials years that have given certain films a very distinctive sheen. With Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Goodbye Mr Chips, Stagecoach and Ninotchka amongst others, 1939 is one of the first years that comes to mind when one thinks of cinema’s exceptional ones. There is something more to 1939 that bestows it a hallowed place in the pantheon. This single year also saw the births of future New Hollywood wunderkinds Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather I&II, The Conversation), Peter Bogdanovich (The last Picture Show, Paper Moon), Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) besides Wes Craven and actors like Harvey Kietel, F Murray Abraham, Ian McKellan and John Cleese.
Comparably, 1976 is also up there when it comes to talking about the special ones with Rocky, Network, Taxi Driver, All The President’s Men, Carrie, Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock’s last release), and Marathon Man. What makes 1976 further special was that it was good beyond Hollywood with Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face and The Scar, which was Krzysztof Kieslowski’s first theatrical feature film.
But if there were truly a stellar one when it came to a year in cinema, then 1994 could arguably be the one. Surrounding the hoopla around the 20th anniversary of modern classics such as The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, a film that singularly catapults 1994 into a league of it own, the films of this particular year have perhaps left a deeper impact on not just Hollywood but also contemporary cinema than any other in recent memory. Unlike 1939 or 1976, there is a clear demarcation of a sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in films that followed across genres or themes. Besides the three standout features, 1994 in a single calendar year witnessed the release of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Reality Bites, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Crow, little Buddha, Speed, Wolf, The lion King, Baby’s Day Out, True lies, The Mask, Air Heads, Clear and Present Danger, Natural Born Killers, Quiz Show, Blue Sky, Ed Wood, The River Wild and Bullets Over Broadway.
Across a natty mix of old school and the new, many of these films not just did great business but also went on to rewrite the rules. The one word that could ideally describe the general mood of the year’s cinema is ‘breakthrough’ and it applies in more senses than one. Irrespective of the fact that 1994 was a great year for traditional Hollywood or even global cinema, more on that later, it was nothing less than a watershed year for the indie films. Since Sex, lies and Videotape (1989) enthralled audiences and put Sundance Film Festival on the global map, no indie film had managed to better it. In spite of successes such as Quentin Tarantino’s debut Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Roberto Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992), later remade as Desperado, the indie movement was finding it difficult to deliver on its promises of being the new playground till Pulp Fiction happened. An encyclopedic cocktail of zany dialogues, trivia, references, irreverence, homage and veneration of all things cinema, Tarantino’s highly-stylised black comedy lapped up a bevy of Oscars, walked off with the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and ended up raking in over $200 million at the box-office, besides revitalising John Travolta’s wilting career and unleashing Samuel l Jackson. The film impressed just about everyone from critics to audiences to the award juries and essentially hailed the arrival of new cinema. Pulp Fiction opened up new vistas for not just indie filmmakers who were suddenly being seen with new interest or the trade, which realised that less could be more, but also ushered in an era where people rediscovered how pleasurable a movie could be.
Richard Corliss of TIME recognized how Tarantino dared Hollywood films to be ‘this smart about going this far’ and looked forward to good directors accepting Tarantino’s implicit challenge to make the movie theatre a great place to live in. If Tarantino found himself at the centre of it all, while at the same time being at one end of the indie spectrum where he was the final word on the genre, there were others like Kevin Smith, who broke through with Clerks, along with David O Russell, who debuted with Spanking the Monkey. With Pulp Fiction, indies became a near sub-genre in the mainstream and also empowered Miramax, the production house behind the film, beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. The Weinsteins Brothers — Harvey and Bob — would go on to dominate the trade by making marketing the most creative tool and changing destinies by merely green lighting projects.
Usually in cinema, the year’s biggest success story overshadows everything else. In 1939, Gone with the Wind loomed larger than anything else, and correspondingly Rocky dominated the proceedings in 1976, but Pulp Fiction’s runaway success or the global affirmation of Forrest Gump never truly eclipsed the year’s other releases. Meshed between these two, an old-pro such as Woody Allen (Bullets Over Broadway), or new stars like Tom Cruise (Interview with a Vampire), veterans like Harrison Ford (Clear and Present Danger) or Arnold Schwarzenegger (True lies), upcoming box-office draws Keanu Reeves-Sandra Bullock (Speed), Brad Pitt (legends of the Fall) and Jim Carrey (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask andDumb and Dumber) found love from the audiences.
The year biggest box-office success was Disney’s The lion King, the last of the great traditional animation films, and even the foreign language film segment was peppered with what are now considered seminal classics. Wong Kar-wai finally released his long-in-the-making epic Ashes of Time, but while on a two-month vacation during its editing, ended up shooting and releasing Chunking Express, a film he made without a final script. The hyper kinetic cult favourite that is one of first films that Tarantino ‘brought’ to the West under his distribution company, Chunking Express traced two parallel story tracks set in different places and different times and was shot in chronological order with Kar-wai largely following his instincts more than anything else; he even developed one of the two stories in a single day! What’s better still, the year also saw Ang lee truly announce his arrival with Eat Drink Man Woman, Peter Jackson leave an impression with Heavenly Creatures (also Kate Winslet’s debut) and Danny Boyle burst on the scene with Shallow Grave.
Talking about debuts, 1994 was the year when Cate Blanchett (Police Rescue: The Movie), Cameron Diaz (The Mask), Jude law (Shopping), Ewan McGregor (Being Human), Natalie Portman (léon: The Professional), Mark Wahlberg (Renaissance Man), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (A Man of No Importance), liv Tyler (Silent Fall), Haley Joel Osment (Forrest Gump), Claire Danes (little Women), Jessica Alba (Camp Nowhere) and Scarlett Johansson (North) all made their first appearances.
Although it was hailed as the next great thing and instantly joined the inner circle of all-time greats, at the time of its release, Pulp Fiction never really dwarfed the other films that year. But it is one film whose veneration has only increased over years. In fact, it has become a film that has singularly, for good or worse, unfailingly inspired not just hundreds of films that followed but perhaps cinema in general.
A self-taught filmmaker whose nerdy knowledge was fed during the years he worked as a video store clerk, Tarantino was the modern god cinema was waiting for. Perhaps he was much more than a mere deity. He was an amalgamation of some of the greatest cinematic minds rolled into one and embodied by someone who could be fittingly described as a rock star. He was a director who did exactly what he desired, in the manner he deemed fit, couldn’t care a hoot or less for anyone, and on top of it became a face as recognisable as the stars that he was crazy about.
He was a filmic equivalent of a geeky genius who was accidentally discovered and because every filmmaker wanted to emulate him, it’s hardly surprising that much of cinema that followed, mainstream or otherwise, ended up resembling Pulp Fiction. Tarantino was a wily genius who allowed inspiration to permeate his work to such an extent that it became a near organic part of his oeuvre. So, while he could take Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Ringo lam’s City on Fire and come out with a Reservoir Dogs or let the fiction of Elmore leonard and films like noir cult Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and the three-story plot of Black Sabbath (1963) along with the imagery of Jean-luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) stimulate Pulp Fiction, others who followed him ended up mimicking Tarantino instead of paying homage to the originals. While Tarantino’s cinematic interest that ranged from the French New Wave to the Shaw Brothers, from Scorsese to Ringo lam, from Blaxploitation to avant-garde Scandinavian cinema and just about everything in between continued to inspire him to move on, the ones he ‘inspired’ ended hovering around Pulp Fiction. Guy Ritchie (Snatch, lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels), Joe Carnahan (Smoking Aces), Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects), Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn) and later day Tony Scott (Domino, Man on Fire) or Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros) and to a great extent Christopher Nolan (Following, Memento) are some examples that show a clear Tarantino/Pulp Fiction influence. While the demands of the trade could force, say a Guy Ritchie, to imagine Sherlock Holmes as though the Victorian sleuth escaped from a Tarantino soundstage, Pulp Fiction’s stylistic sway became more than apparent at a primal level. A year after the release of the picture, a British critic noted how four out of five films that he saw at a film school’s end of semester screening had “incorporated violent shoot-outs over a soundtrack of iconoclastic 70s pop hits, two climaxed with all the main characters shooting each other at once, and one had two hitmen discussing the idiosyncrasies of The Brady Bunch before offing their victim”. So much so that The New Yorker’s David Denby credited the film with initiating an ongoing, and seemingly never-ending, cycle of disordered cinematic narratives that have become as routine as brushing one’s teeth. Pulp Fiction’s consecration wasn’t limited to Hollywood or latin America and it, mayhap, could be single most influential film of the last two decades when it comes to Bollywood.
like Hollywood, Hindi cinema, too, has a handful of years that could be enshrined as the special ones. There’s 1957 with Mother India, Naya Daur, Pyaasa, Tumsa Nahin Dekha, Do Aankhen Barah Haath, Paying Guest, and Nau Do Gyarah, all releasing in a single year. With just two films — Sholay and Deewar — 1975 could ideally lay claim to being the greatest in Hindi cinema and the other releases only add to the assertion — Pratigya, Chupke Chupke, Chhoti Si Baat, Prem Kahani, Dharmatma, Rafoo Chakkar, Julie, Khel Khel Mein, Aandhi, Amanush, Dharam Karam, Mili, and Mausam. The year also saw the birth of the Indian mythology with Jai Santoshi Maa, a sleeper hit that introduced Goddess Santoshi Maa to Hindi cinema lexicon and the debut of Naseeruddin Shah (Nishant). Sholay redefined the term ‘box-office success’ and for almost two decades, no other film came close to dethroning the curry-western until Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994). like the Hollywood films of 1994, there is a clear demarcation between popular Hindi films before and after 1994. One of the things that stood out in the films of 1994 was the manner in which they brought a huge segment of viewers lost to video and cable back to the cinemas. With a strong emphasis on the concept of ‘family viewing’, Sooraj Barjatya withheld the video release for the first six months after Hum Aapke Hain Koun released and used state-of-the-art technology to keep a check on piracy. Additionally, Rajshri Productions handpicked theatres across the country that had met certain quality standards vis-à-vis sanitation, projection or sound etc for exhibiting the film. The year’s biggest hit eventually ended up being Hindi cinema’s biggest hit, and Hum Aapke Hain Koun continued to hold that distinction till 3 Idiots (2009). Seen against the releases of 1975, many of 1994’s releases might not have stood the test as well as the former but with a cult classic such as Andaz Apna Apna, one of the best biopics in the form of Bandit Queen, RD Burman’s swansong 1942 A love Story, and the penultimate paring of the two brightest sparks of parallel cinema, Naseeruddin Shah-Om Puri in Droh Kaal, there is a certain charm nonetheless in the year’s films. It was also the year that saw Amitabh Bachchan return briefly to the big screen in Insaniyat after a self-imposed three-year exile. With Krantiveer, popular Hindi cinema got yet another version of the leading man in Nana Patekar who combined the Salim-Javed esque angry young man with the every man of Basu Chatterjee and Shyam Benegal-Govind Nihalani. With a bevy of hits between them both — Akshay Kumar, a trilogy with Main Khiladi Tu Anari, Mohra and Yeh Dillagi, and Ajay Devgan, who was yet to lose the ‘a’ in his surname, (Dilwale, Suhaag, Vijaypath) joined the Khans as top box-offices draws and Govinda continued with ‘a-hit-a-year’ delivery scheme in the form of Raja Babu. The year also resonated with conspicuous absence of Divya Bharti, who had died a year earlier. The success of Mohra, Vijaypath and laadla, three films that originally featured Divya Bharti only showed how a promising career was cut short due to her accidental death. 1994 was also the last year in which one could see a clear disparity between the old Bollywood and new Bollywood as the very next year Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge created a divide between not just style or the kind of actors and technicians who worked at either ends, but also a mindset.
The top-10 grossing films of 1995, save Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge and to some extent Rangeela, are but a throwback to ‘old’ Bollywood — Karan Arjun, Coolie No 1, Sabse Bada Khiladi, Raja, Barsaat, Ram Jaane, and Naajayaz. Interestingly, unlike Hum Aapke Hain Koun or Andaz Apna Apna or Krantiveer, it was the post-Pulp Fiction newly crowned king of cinema who ended up influencing Hindi cinema most. Tsar Tarantino’s signature elements, such as the roundabout manner in which characters get down to business, the cheery banter surrounding any agenda, however serious it might be, the quirky repartee, the use of background music that is seemingly in conflict with the mood onscreen is visible across the films of not just the new Hindi cinema from the likes of a Ram Gopal Varma, Sanjay Gupta (Kaante, Shootout at Wadala) and Anurag Kashyap (Gangs of Wasseypur), but also the New New Hindi cinema of an Apoorva lakhia (Ek Ajnabee), a Rajkumar Gupta (Aamir, No One Killed Jessica), a Bejoy Nambiar (Shaitaan, David), an Abhinav Kashyap (Dabangg) and an Arbaaz Khan (Dabangg 2). From what one has been hearing even version 2.0 of the New Bollywood — Vasan Bala (Peddlers) and Amit Kumar (Monsoon Shootout) — seems to have been under the same influence.
On the 20th anniversary of Pulp Fiction at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Tarantino declared that the “cinema is dead”. Ironically, present-day Hollywood and Bollywood both resemble the late 1970s and 1980s more than ever before and yet the man who changed things believes that cinema as we once knew it is dead. Tarantino had said what he said in the context of 35 mm film being replaced by digital for not just making but also projection of films, but in any case, it’s a rather bold statement from the man who is credited for reviving cinema. Is there some hidden truth in what Tarantino saidIJ
Strangely Tarantino is going from strength to strength doing exactly what he was doing two decades ago, and the world as created by King Quentin is also continuing to reel under influence. While they aren’t complaining, he on the other hand chooses to announce the death of cinema as he knew once it and yet, his recent films — Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) — have been more retrograde than the previous and not surprisingly enjoyed greater success than their respective predecessors. Even though his wanton beatification by one and all might have unknowingly contributed to the death of certain elements of cinema, as he knew it, the filmmaker need not worry.
Films such as Richard linklater’s Boyhood (2014), that was shot over 12 years and follows the growth of its protagonist over a decade, or the steadfast commitment of filmmakers such as Chris Nolan to shoot on 35 mm film and avoid the temptations of 3D might just reinvent cinema like Tarantino did two decades ago. There’s still some life left in cinema as we knew it and from the looks of it, it isn’t bailing out yet.
The writer is popular columnist and the author of Dark Star: The loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (HarperCollins, 2014)