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Cover Feature
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In the line of fire
An assassination story offers a rich context for a filmmaker – suspense, drama, action, morality and more. No wonder it has fascinated filmmakers and the result has been brilliantly and innovatively crafted gripping classics. Tareque Laskar examines the assassination plot as it unfolds on the silver screen
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 Shakespeare may have invented the word in the 16th Century, but it has served as a plot point since ages. Naturally, a subject like an assassination holds great sway over the cinematic medium, with some of the most memorable movies being made with one assassination or the other as a backdrop. An assassination holds intrigue, action, suspense and shenanigans in equal measure and is perfect fodder for a gripping script. And the conspiracy theories don’t hurt either. Look at “JFK”, Oliver Stone’s epic film starring Kevin Costner. The film which examined the JFK assassination through the perspective of a New Orleans District Attorney who discovers there’s more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story and had the tagline ‘The story that won’t go away’. The film, its editing style (it won an Oscar for best editing) puts it right up there on the top of classic movies that treated the subject of an assassination. Shedding light on filmmakers’ fascination for the subject, director Sudhir Mishra tells TSI, “It depends on what the assassination is. It is an event which has a past, which has a story, which can either be the beginning of something or the end of something. There is a dramatic convergence of people, a lot of it will be visual, and a lot of it will be non-verbal so a filmmaker can get interested in a visual way of telling stories. What attracts a filmmaker is an event in which you can say something without dialogues which offers great possibility for sound, for picture, it is an ideal cinematic event in all sorts of ways.” “JFK” fits the description perfectly. So does the Tom Cruise starrer “Valkyrie” which told the story of the plot to kill Adolf Hitler hatched (and then botched) by his own military officers led by the wily Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
Sudhir Mishra feels that an assassination film, “can either be trivial, which most of them are, or it can lead to something more interesting.” He continues, “The attraction would be that you can tell a story presuming that there is a possibility of doing something very interesting. There is a characterization there of both the assassin and the person who is assassinated; it can be explored, it can be put in the context of many things– that is the attraction for me personally. I like to tell a story which is tensed and exciting at the same time.” In fact, Hollywood’s tryst with the subject of assassination had mostly derived the excitement out of the post mortem of the event than the event itself. Gabriel Range’s “Death of A President” examined the hypothetical assassination of George W. Bush and its aftermath in a documentary style.
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 It is easy to rattle off the names of Hollywood flicks when it comes to assassination plots and conspiracies – “The Jackal”, “The Manchurian Candidate”, “Munich”. But there’s a curious lack of similar films in Bollywood. Yes, there have been an odd “Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara” or a “Hey Ram” but filmmakers tend to shy away from it. Ravi Chopra has a theory about that. He tells TSI that Bollywood doesn’t see much plot potential in an assassination “because it isn’t as such a real problem in India; outside (of India) a lot of presidents have been assassinated but in India, Rajiv Gandhi’s was one and not many of them have happened. He also concedes that it “is a serious subject and it takes away the music and dance aspect of our movies.”
Perhaps. Sudhir Mishra though holds a much stronger view. He says, “I think because assassination is a lot of time political and I think they’ve (Bollywood filmmakers) steered away from political films. Most of our filmmakers are a scared lot you know, with no point of view except money.” Mishra sees silver linings to the clouds of creative crimping though. “But now it is getting better. I can tell you 10 directors who are not afraid to experiment so now I think I can see a lot more films like that. Today, everybody is looking for different subject matters, different ways of telling stories. You’ll see a lot more films like that because there are a lot of directors with clearer points of view and have a lot more talent.”
As a cinematic canvas, the story of an assassination is a filmmaker’s dream come true considering the possibilities it offers and directors like Oliver Stone (“JFK”) and Steven Spielberg (“Munich”) have made terrific use of it. Even Santosh Sivan (“Terrorist”, which Sudhir Mishra cites as his favourite assassination movie) and Jhanu Baruah (“Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara”) have exhibited it here in India to great critical acclaim. In a complex world the word assassination acquires numerous hues as you have the CIA bumping off terrorist leaders, and terrorists looking for opportunities to pay back in kind. And as long as the dynamic mosaic of politics keeps evolving around the world, one of the oldest political power tools is sure to find more uses. It can only mean one thing – more fodder for celluloid.
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