Nina Paley – the creator behind Sita Sings the Blues – reveals the real story behind the movie.
What drove you to create “Sita Sings the Blues”?
Nina: Sita Sings the Blues is a musical, animated personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana. The aspect of the story that I focus on is the relationship between Sita and Rama, who are gods incarnated as human beings, and even they can’t make their marriage work.
And then there’s my story. I’m just an ordinary human, who also can’t make her marriage work. And the way that it fails is uncannily similar to the way Rama and Sita’s [relationship fails]. Inexplicable yet so familiar. And the question that I asked and the question people still ask is,”Why”? Why did Rama reject Sita? Why did my husband reject me? We don’t know why, and we didn’t know 3,000 years ago. I like that there’s really no way to answer the question, that you have to accept that this is something that happens to a lot of humans.
Why make a feature movie out of the ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana?
Nina:: I was moved by the story and it seemed to speak so much to my life at the time, my problems at the time. It was cathartic to retell the story.
It was a very personal project from the beginning. Including the autobiographical bits emphasizes that. I didn’t set out to tell THE Ramayana, only MY Ramayana. I wanted to be very clear about my point of view, my biases.
Has your Rama, your ex-husband Dave, seen the movie? How does he feel about his broken marriage being displayed on the ‘big screen’ like that?
Nina:: He saw an almost-finished work-in-progress. I think he understands it’s my side of the story, from my point of view, about my feelings. I didn’t aim to speak for him, only for me. After viewing it he told a friend of mine he was “relieved.” I tried to focus on myself and my feelings; I still don’t understand why either of us behaved the way we did in real life, and I don’t think he knows either. I like the ambiguity of the Ramayana for that reason. It doesn’t explain why the characters behave as they do; only that they do.
How did you discover Annette Hanshaw’s music?
Nina:: I heard her voice for the first time while “sofa surfing” after my break-up. I was staying in the home of a record collector in New York. He had original Hanshaw 78’s on his shelf, a friend played ‘Mean to Me,’ and I was hooked. Her voice is so sweet and vulnerable and without bitterness, even as she sings of heartbreak and man-done-her-wrong. Also it comes from a completely different era, separate from both today and ancient India. Those old songs really show how the story of heartbreak in the Ramayana transcends time and culture.
You voiced the role of yourself, and that leads to the film’s most excruciating scene, in which your character asks your husband to take you back. Why did you include this scene?
Nina:: I wanted people to feel my pain. And believe me, that’s just a little taste of it. When this sort of thing happens to you, it’s so shameful, so humiliating. Which is why I included that scene of Sita sitting there on the banks of the river saying, “I must have committed a terrible sin in a previous life to deserve such suffering.” There’s always a sense that, if something bad happens to you, that there’s something really wrong with you. And I love that even Sita believes this, because she’s completely stainless, that’s the whole point of her character. I feel that airing this stuff out is the way to take the shame out of it. Plus, pain is funny!
Making the film allowed me to get in touch with my inner Sita. I didn’t know why I was feeling the way I was feeling, wanting this man who rejected me. A normal, self assured woman, I related so much to Sita and the Ramayana, and I felt the pain of the failed relationship could consume me if I wasn’t careful. Basically the pain was going to burn me. For me that’s a metaphor of pain. It can either burn you or it can fuel something.
You are a self-taught animator. How did you manage to learn all these techniques?
Nina: When I was 12 or 13, I borrowed a next-door neighbor’s Super 8 camera. I got a book called The Animation Book, by Kit Laybourne, and I read the book and I used the camera. So I had a little bit of experience, but I abandoned it when I was 14. And I didn’t touch animation again until I was 30 — 10 years ago. I picked up where I left off, with a Super 8 camera and clay and a stop-motion film called “Luv Is”.
And then I started dating an animator — who is actually now my ex-husband — and he had an animation table with animation paper. I had never used an animation table before — it’s amazing how much all this stuff has changed in the last 10 years. At work, he had access to a video line tester, so I did another little short film that way. In San Francisco, this band called Nik Phelps and the Sprocket Ensemble would do monthly performances of live music to animation. I did a Super 8 thing, Nik composed a score to it, and they were showing it. The next thing you know, I’m in this local indie-film world in San Francisco. They knew projectionists, so I met a projectionist who helped me find 35mm junk stock, and then I did scratching and drawing on 35mm junk stock. I bought a 16mm camera and shot my next clay film on 16. It just kept going.
Techies want to know: is it true that this whole move was rendered on your home computer? What software did you use?
Nina: I started on a G4 titanium laptop in 2002. I moved to a dual 1.8-GHz tower in 2005, moved again to a 2-by-3-GHz Intel tower December 2007, with which I did the final 1920 x 1080 rendering. “Sita” was animated primarily in Flash. I made some original watercolor paintings by hand, which I scanned and animated in After Effects. Reena Shah did the speaking voice of Sita and she also danced. I videotaped her and traced elements of the dance in Flash. That wasn’t an automatic program, it was all by hand.
I edited everything in Final Cut Pro, so everything became a QuickTime movie.
Why the choice to put Annette Hanshaw’s voice into Sita’s mouth?
Nina: It didn’t feel like a choice: it was the inspiration for the whole thing. I was going through my break-up, I was reading all these different versions of the Ramayana and I heard Annette Hanshaw’s songs for the first time. They just went to the same place, they spoke to the same part of me. I realized that they were telling the same story–that life is difficult and filled with love and heartbreak.
Why did you mix animation styles (the smooth cartoony style for the Hanshaw numbers, the shadow puppets with collage characters in the background, during the unscripted dialog, the fake miniature Mughal paintings, during the scripted dialog, the expressionistic rotoscoped scene just after the “intermission”)?
Nina: Fear of boredom, mostly. But also to hint at what a wealth of visual traditions are associated with the Ramayana. I barely scratched the surface.
The narration of the shadow puppets—how much of that was scripted?
Nina: None – it was completely unscripted, 100% real. Here’s how I got them all in the studio: I met Manish Acharya (Loins of Punjab Presents) through Manish Vij…I guess Manish V told Manish A to check out Sita, and then Manish A asked me to do animation for a Loins music video, and part of the payment was he’d let me record an interview. Aseem Chhabra had written about me and Sita and I bumped into him at the Loins of Punjab screening. I asked if he’d lend his voice to an interview and he said yes. He actually met Manish the day of the recording – he interviewed him that morning for an article. They sound like best friends who have known each other forever, and they’re great friends now, but they’d just met that morning. Bhavana Nagaulapally I met at a play reading of Anuvab Pal… Apparently, I stuck out like a sore thumb because I was the only white woman in the audience, and she asked, “are you Nina Paley?” She had a great voice, and I asked if she’d consent to the interview too. I didn’t know if she would – luckily she showed up, and was awesome, and the rest is history. They’re all from different regions of India and speak different mother tongues, and grew up on different versions of the story. So naturally they remember “the” Ramayana differently from one another. There is no one Ramayana. Their discussion makes this clear.
Why is there an “Intermission”?
Nina: I had been renting old American musicals while working on “Sita” and sure enough here in the middle of the film comes the word intermission. It is also an homage to Bollywood.
How has the film been received among Hindus in India and elsewhere?
Nina: Some criticize the film as too irreverent, and find the way Sita is portrayed offensive, with her narrow waist and big hips. It is inappropriate to others just because the film is a cartoon. Others feel that the film focuses too much on Sita rather then Rama. In the Ramayana, Sita is only a footnote in the story, but obviously my film is about Sita and her suffering.
There has been plenty of feedback. Much less negative than positive, but the negative things are more notable. And I get it both from the far right and the far left. The far right — they say that they’re Hindus but I think it’s not right to call them Hindus. They think nonviolence is bullshit: “Don’t think you can walk all over Hindus, we’ll violate your ass.” They send me things letting me know that.
On the far left, there are some very, very privileged people in academia who have reduced all the wondrous complexities of racial relations into, “White people are racist, and non-white people are all victims of white racism.” Without actually looking at the work, they’ve decided that any white person doing a project like this is by definition racist, and it’s an example of more neocolonialism. So politics makes strange bedfellows — they’re in bed with the Hindutva nationalists.