The Lost Craft of Song Picturisation

Vijay Anand could stage a five-minute song in one location with no cuts to spare. Nobody does this any more, and Hindi cinema is poorer for it.

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There is a specific skill that Hindi cinema invented, perfected between roughly 1957 and 1975, and then largely abandoned: staging a song so that it advances the plot, changes a relationship, and works as a piece of blocking you could film on a stage.

The modern default is the montage — a song laid over a travel sequence, or a set-piece shot on a stage with two hundred dancers and forty cuts a minute. Both are fine. Neither is the craft.

The reference case: 'Hothon Pe Aisi Baat'

Vijay Anand's Jewel Thief. Vyjayanthimala performs, Dev Anand watches, and the entire sequence is a manhunt — the villain is looking for a man with a deformed finger, and the choreography keeps putting hands in frame. The song is beautiful. It is also, simultaneously, the plot mechanism by which the identification happens.

That is the standard. The song is not a break from the film. The song is the fastest part of the film.

The other reference case: 'Waqt Ne Kiya'

Guru Dutt and V. K. Murthy in Kaagaz Ke Phool, using two beams of light in an empty studio to stage a reunion that never physically happens. The characters approach through light, not through movement. It is possibly the single most beautiful shot in Indian cinema and it exists because the studio had a hole in the roof and Murthy worked out he could bounce sunlight off two mirrors.

Why it went away

Three reasons, none of them villainous.

• Music rights fragmented. When songs became separately monetised assets promoted before the film, they had to work as standalone videos. A song that only makes sense at minute 78 is a bad standalone video.
• Shooting schedules compressed. The one-location, long-take picturisation is cheap in money and expensive in time. Modern schedules invert that.
• Editing grammar sped up. An audience trained on forty cuts a minute reads a held two-shot as a mistake. That's a real constraint, not a failure of nerve.

Who is still doing it

Sanjay Leela Bhansali, whatever else you think of him, still stages. 'Dola Re' in Devdas is a duel between two dancers with a plot function. Vishal Bhardwaj does it — 'Bismil' in Haider is a play-within-a-play staging an accusation, which is the most literal possible version of song-as-plot.

And Zoya Akhtar's Gully Boy uses performance as narrative because the film is about performance, which is a slightly different trick but from the same family.

The test you can apply yourself

Pause any song. Ask: if you cut this out, what information is lost? If the answer is 'none, the characters are in love before and after', it's a montage. If the answer is 'the audience no longer knows who the killer is, or that she has decided to leave him, or that he has stopped believing his own story' — that's picturisation, and someone did real work.

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Filed under Vijay Anand · Music · Guru Dutt · Craft. Written for The Bollywood 100.