The Cinematic Tableau

In an essay titled The Third Meaning, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes makes an ironic claim about the visual politics of cinema: the core of the identity of motion pictures, he argues, is best expressed through film stills.

In the arrested moment depicted in this kind of image, Barthes finds a range of meanings that are otherwise hard to put into words.

It seems counter-intuitive to assert that still images can help to decode the magic of motion pictures. But the film still is closely related to one of cinema’s most influential visual successors: the tableau.

It is only fitting, therefore, that film stills, capable as they are of reflecting one of the founding impulses of cinema, are also able to effectively illustrate its basic and instinctive appeal.

The tableau, understood in different ways by different artistic disciplines, appears in cinema in various guises. The collection of film stills at the Museum of Art and Photography offers an opportunity to map some of the routes and the tentative detours that the tableau has taken while making its way into Hindi cinema.

While the tableau has traveled to cinema in several different guises, its most direct movement into cinema is through the route of the tableau shot.

Indian film theorist and historian Ravi Vasudevan describes tableau shots as those that are presented frontally at a 180" plane to the camera, on the verge of complete stillness and inactivity, and loaded with meaning.

Despite the diversity in the ways in which the tableau has been interpreted cinematically, there has been a constant: it has consistently been associated with the depiction of a moment of stillness carefully composed so as to accumulate layers of significance.

Barthes, while elaborating on the nature of the tableau, links it to G. E. Lessings’s conceptualization of a “peripeteaia” or “pregnant moment”, a single instant in which “the present, the past and the future” can be read at a single glance.

While Barthes sees the tableau as the depiction of a moment in which the past, present and future coalesce, for Peter Brooks, a it is an image that effectively summarizes the present moment.

He maintains that a tableau is the depiction of a moment in which “characters' attitudes and gestures” are “compositionally arranged” to provide a “summary of the emotional situation”.

The tableau of Brooks’ elaboration is perfectly suited to the melodramatic mode of storytelling because it clearly depicts emotional and moral states of the characters, and obviously demarcates the ideological place in which each of them makes their stand. This quality of the tableau renders it invaluable in the Manichean world order of the early post-Independence Hindi melodrama.

In the early post-Independence era in India, the film still played a significant role in the advertisement and promotion of the film, representing its narrative in magazines and lobby cards.

Consequently, tableaux featuring pregnant moments or moments that summarized the film's narrative constituted a large proportion of the stills that circulated in public spaces.

According to American film historian Steven Jacobs, film stills that were clicked and circulated in the early 1900s were governed by the compulsion to “tell a story”, “have a suggestion of an intense situation” and “suggest amusing or exciting developments and sequences”. These compulsions meant that almost every film still that appeared in magazines or on lobby cards was a tableau of Barthes’ or Brooks’ imaginings: either a singular pregnant moment or a moment that summarized crucial developments.

Film theorists Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs find that the word tableau was initially used to refer to the board where coming attractions of a theater were announced. Given this context, it is fitting that the still appearing on the lobby card, which is an announcement of the attractions of a film, should share an affinity for the tableau.

Lobby Cards for Prithvi Vallabh (1943), Jhansi ki Rani (1953), and Waman Avtar (1955) hint at the attractions of the films, which include elaborate costumes and grand sets.

Tableaux on the lobby stills for Karigar (1958) and Shree 420 (1955) each illustrate spectacular song-and-dance sequences. Such sequences have been routinely regarded as the cornerstones of the attractions of popular Hindi films.

Film theorist Noel Burch traces the cinematic tableau to other forms of arts with which early cinema spectators were familiar. He maintains that the formulation of the tableau enabled filmmakers to hone the craft of the new medium in the mold of representational practices of already existing art forms, such as paintings and theater.

Cultural theorist and art critic Victor Burgin has traced the roots of the term tableau to the mid-sixteenth century art of “historical painting”, in which an artist was beholden to “show in a single instant that which took time to unfold”. Faced with such an expectation, the painter chose to depict an instant that had a “singularly privileged position within the total action”, a moment in which “all hangs in the balance”.

Burgin notes that the human form was regarded as the ultimate vessel for the painted depictions of these historical moments. The image resulting from this compulsion was a tableau that illustrated a significant historical moment being performed by human bodies.

In this context, it is unsurprising that this kind of tableau appears with glaring frequency in historical and mythological Hindi films.

These images depict crucial moments of history and myth being enacted by bodies imbued with cultural and social significance.

While the ideological roots of the cinematic tableau may be traced to the historical painting, its aesthetic characteristics are often traceable to contemporary artistic practices. Several film and art theorists, including Madhuja Mukherjee and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, have remarked upon the influence of Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma on cinema produced in the country.

Towards the end of the 19th century, Ravi Varma’s tableaux of goddesses and women had suffused popular visual culture in the form of affordable oleographs, calendar art and poster prints, and his work informed and defined the artistic taste of the country for several decades to come.

The attire and idealized body language of the women in his paintings is reflected in the renditions of pregnant moments in a range of different films.

Consider the filmic images of these actors, which resonate strongly with Ravi Verma’s aesthetic. The slanting glances, slightly titled faces and attires of the actors as they embody femininity are starkly reminiscent of Ravi Verma's subjects.

Occasionally, a Ravi Verma painting also finds its way into cinema as a tableau vivant, which literally translates to “living art”.

Originally referring to the practice of recreating an artwork (such as a painting or an etching) on stage, the tableau vivant also appears in cinema, and finds its way into the film’s promotional material. As characters embody paintings, they hold themselves still, and the moment acquires a range of meanings that transcends the medium of cinema, and resonates with several other artistic registers.

Apart from the tableau vivant, the tableau has traveled to cinema via theater in various other forms.

For instance, French philosopher Denis Diderot, quoted by Barthes in his elaboration of the nature of the cinematic tableau, states that the “perfect play is a succession of tableaux, that is, a gallery, an exhibition”. Films that adhere to Diderot’s dictum in their narrative structure can produce a profusion of tableaux that make for great film stills.

Jaagte Raho (1956), for instance, is emphatically episodic, documenting a parched migrant village worker’s encounters with various denizens of the city over the course of a single night as he pines for a glass of water. The lobby cards of this film feature one tableau after another, encapsulating the protagonist’s experiences, leading up to his final epiphany.

The history of the tableau in popular cinema is testament to the many ways in which cinematic grammar is deeply connected to the aesthetics of a diverse range of visual media, from calendar art to exquisite murals. Thus, at the heart of the conceptualization of the tableau in the domain of cinema is the understanding that no medium stands alone.

The cinematic tableau, when viewed as the successor of painting, theatre and other arts, appears to be an aesthetic commonality that binds a range of artistic practices.

Several tableaux from popular Hindi cinema have also moved outside the cinematic universe, shifting forms and finding their way into popular imagination in diverse incarnations.

As it makes its way into a film still, the tableau is akin to a photograph tucked away in a wallet: bearing the burden of representing an entire person, often valued over the entity represented within it, while eliding the fact that it is actually a carefully composed rendition of a singular aspect of their existence.