TBIP reports on a new experiment in filmmaking that is catching on

On November 4, 2012, a Sunday morning, Dr. Parvez Imam walked into Devi Art Foundation, in Gurgaon, for the first shoot of his collaborative video art project, to find that none of whom he had invited to participate in it had turned up. So he started shooting instead with the guards at the foundation, the manager of its cafeteria, and other staff who happened to be there. As the shoot progressed, Imam noticed that those who had finished playing their part were engaged in a heated discussion on how the film should play out. They were saying: “Nahin, galat kar di story (No, we took the story the wrong way). Idhar nahi, udhar honi chahiye thi. Arrey isne to aise kar diya, aise thodi jayegi story (It shouldn’t have gone here, it should have gone there. Now he’s made the story like this, but it isn’t how it’ll work)”. Imam, 45, a psychiatrist turned filmmaker, is fascinated by how, in the middle of his experiment, “the artists were becoming their own critics”. This is one of the things the People-Powered, Script-less Video Art Project tries to build on.

Imam’s film, supported by Sarai—a program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)—one of Delhi’s most reputed research institutes, is still being shot. It is one of three intriguing film collaborations that have emerged on the Indian cinematic horizon last year. The other two, which were completed and released in 2012, are The Owner, a collaboration between 25 directors (of which four were Indian) from 14 countries, and The Last Act, a whodunit made by 12 filmmakers from India.

“The basis of my project,” says Imam. “Is understanding how we can take filmmaking, which is thought of as such an elite thing, to literally anybody who wants to participate”. He shoots on the streets in Delhi and Gurgaon. He puts up a banner that says “Jan Sanchalith Video Film” in English and in Hindi and waits for people to come. Imam gave the film its first byte, starting it off with why he’s making it. Other initial scenes show the guards and staff at Devi Art Foundation weaving a story about a girl auditioning for a role and attending a film shoot. But the ‘story’ could go anywhere. Anyone can walk up and ask to be a part of the film, and become its narrator. Anyone from a lay child, who had said: “Main bhi karta hoon (I’ll do this as well)”, to a temple priest, a milkman from Faridabad, an auto-rickshaw driver or a security guard who was insistent on reciting a poem he remembered being taught in his village school. When people ask Imam for his opinion to see if their contribution fits in with the rest of the story, Imam consciously refrains from influencing ‘their’ film. “The politics of aesthetics (of movies today) is also that they come from the director and the director comes from a certain background,” he says. “So I’m also trying to let that be, so that it’s their aesthetics, their way of storytelling.”

***

The Owner was released on May 25, 2012. It was steered by Collabfeature, an international co-production film group founded by filmmakers Marty Shea, 35, and Ian Bonner, 34, in 2008, and run out of Shea’s tiny apartment in Detroit. The Owner is their first film. It chronicles the journey of a backpack as it is passed from person to person through 14 countries. People put things into it, and take items out too. Of the people who come across the backpack, some want to own it for various reasons, some try to deduce who its owner might be from the contents so they can send it back.

“I first had the idea back in college, where I was studying ‘auteur’ filmmakers who have a strong personal vision,” says Shea. “But I was also interested in music and I love the idea of each musician responding to the other, each contributing their own personality and vision to the song, so that the result is bigger than the sum of its parts.” How one musician got a melody and then the other improvised a beat and then another added the lyrics and a song was born. That got him thinking about how the concept of a band could apply to filmmaking: “How Ethan Coen would sit at the typewriter while Joel Coen paced around and how you can start to see their two distinct personalities in different scenes. The way Mike Leigh writes his films through improvising with his actors.” Shea says he felt like “anthology films had always existed”, but he “never saw one where I felt like there was real collaboration”.

Well known films such as Paris, je t’aime and New York, I Love You have brought together several directors to work on one film before. Yet each of these has been, in the end, a collection of distinct short film segments, not a feature length movie with a continuous narrative, a connected story.

Shea and Bonner began collabfeature.com as a one page website with a message board. They mailed other filmmakers and posted the link to their site on filmmaker forums. But after one enthusiastic response from a filmmaker, the emails were not replied to for days on end. “I remember thinking that the interest just wasn’t there,” says Shea. “Then slowly, people started joining the message board and the excitement started to build.” They didn’t know what their first film would be. “We just wanted to start a conversation about collaborative filmmaking,” Shea says. “Then we came up with the ‘backpack project’ in 2010 and invited the filmmakers to participate and to shoot on a no to low budget.” The Owner was a name the filmmakers chose for the film the ‘backpack project’ became— by consensus.

Two years later, collabfeature.com is powered by a web application—that Bonner built and is looking to patent—which allows registered filmmakers to interact with each other, provide feedback, vote and upload scripts and film footage. For The Owner filmmakers submitted a portfolio with their application to be a part of the collaboration, and, says Shea, “every applicant was reviewed by the already accepted filmmakers, making even the acceptance of new members a collaborative process.”

Beginning with the premise of a backpack that travels around the world, the filmmakers brainstormed ideas for their own segment of the film, ranging from four to five minutes, shot in their own countries. Finally they came up with an outline of a story that included all of the film segments. “A lot of it was dictated by geography,” says Shea. “European segments had to connect to each other, US cities and Indian cities had to also connect.” Everyone spoke English and all scripts and pitches were done in English, but ultimately every filmmaker shot their part of the film in their local language.

Every filmmaker fixed the budget for and funded their segments for The Owner themselves, without any official investor or financial partner. Only common and centralized expenses, such as those involving shipping the bag to different countries, hard drives, internet related and legal expenses, were covered by the project directors, Shea and Bonner. A point system was instituted to mark the participation of each collaborator and determine his or her final share in the film’s profits. John Versical, one of the filmmakers involved, says: “the points acted as an incentive to stay as involved as possible, even if it meant just logging into the discussion board a few times a week and providing feedback.”

Shea remarks that, through collabfeature.com’s centralized web application, he has “gotten to know many of my collaborators so well even though we haven’t met in person.”

Neha Raheja Thakker, 32, a Mumbai based architect turned filmmaker, was one of the Indians shooting a segment for The Owner. She says what was most exciting for her was the feedback she got at every stage of the process, on “the writing, the rough cuts, the sound… you always had this group to turn to”. “They wanted to make your product as good as their product,” she says. “It wasn’t about competing, it was about collaborating”.

However, she admits “a lot of disagreements came up at the rough cut stage and also because the duration of the project has been fairly long”. This led to some filmmakers dropping out of the project.

Asmit Pathare, 29, another Indian filmmaker shooting a segment for The Owner was disappointed because “It took almost 12 months for me to make my five minute segment. When I finally saw the output only 20 seconds of my segment was there”.

Pathare met filmmaker Anurag Kashyap while promoting The Owner and spoke to him about the film. “He was really excited,” says Pathare. “I think that thought stuck with Anurag. Even after that when I met him a couple of times at his place, he did mention that film to me.” Later in the year, Show House India, an event management company, put together The Last Act, produced by their subsidiary Show House Films. This was put together under an initiative called Large Short Films, funded by Show House India’s client Royal Stag Mega Movies, a brand that is subsidiary to the alcohol brand Royal Stag. Filmmakers Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra and Chakri Toleti were asked to mentor the project. Kashyap provided a plot outline for a murder mystery: a mangled dead body was to be found with 12 clues on it from 12 different cities. Each segment in each city would be filmed by a different director, making this a collaboration between 12 filmmakers. It was decided that the film would be premiered on December 12, 2012.

Kashyap also asked Pathare to direct one of the segments and to be Project Director for the entire film. Unlike in The Owner, however, here Pathare was the only point of contact for the other 11 directors, who had to sign a contract to not communicate with each other while they made their parts of the movie. Every step in the pre-production, shoots and post-production was co-ordinated by Pathare through individual phone calls to each director. When asked why the directors were prevented from talking to one another, Pathare says: “We needed to put that extra layer of challenge so that it would make it difficult for the filmmakers to make the film. If they still made the film, then that would be a big achievement.” Whether or not that makes much sense, the removal of the need for consensus every step of the way, while not aligning with an ideal vision of a collaboration, does seem to have sped things up. Unlike The Owner, which almost took two years to make, The Last Act was completed in about five months. It was launched, as planned, on ‘12.12.12’.

***

Any film is a collaborative venture. A large team of individuals work together to make a movie. And yet every film usually has one director, the proverbial captain of the ship, who steers the entire project to its final destination. So what happens when there are not one, but several directors? Both of the completed collaborations, The Owner and The Last Act play on this idea of quest. The premise of each movie was thought of so as to complement its form.

Yet a differing degree of control in each of these collaborations has affected the final film. In The Owner the filmmakers started with nothing but the idea of a backpack traversing the length and breadth of the world in search of its owner. This inanimate object is the only constant that is used to channel the viewer’s attention as he or she traverses through 25 segments, spread out over 14 countries. The backpack becomes an object to be coveted, an object of discord, of curiosity, evoking a variety of responses as it changes hands. The charm of The Owner lies in its motley mix of genres, styles and secondary characters. Every bit of the film showcases the style of a particular director and takes you on a whirlwind trip not only across the world, but also across cinematic sensibilities. As we follow the backpack’s journey in search of its owner, we realize that there might, in fact, not be such a person at all. The backpack becomes a metaphor for the movie, a receptacle for the ideas and experiments of different directors. The minor moments of dissonance cease to matter. The fast moving segments become a cinematic style in themselves.

In the case of The Last Act, the genre of the film was predetermined. This narrowed the range of directions it could go in. So, despite not being allowed to discuss their scripts with one another, 10 out of the 12 filmmakers ended up writing their segment around murder investigations conducted by the respective city’s police force, as opposed to those conducted by private detective agencies, or merely bystanders, perhaps, who could have gotten embroiled with the case somehow. Each of these were possibilities, even within the crime genre, which went untapped mostly. Yet, this could also perhaps be the reason why there is a stronger sense of uniformity and cohesion in the story lines and the style of the film’s 12 segments. Despite not having a central character the mystery is seen as unfolding through the eyes of the investigator in each city. To the credit of this collaboration, the detailing of the plot in each city is incredible, though this does also make it difficult to keep up with the film because of the number of things you need to remember as you go along. The final segment goes a long way in bringing the film together.

In sharp contrast, the style, content and form of the more fluid and freewheeling People-Powered, Script-less Video Art Project depends entirely on the frequently changing narrator of the story, the person speaking to the camera. Imam’s project may be smaller in scale, but it strives to go a step further than the other two by allowing for unpredictable and unique results from its collaborations, possibly because these collaborations are with amateurs, rather than professionals who have set ways of thinking about cinema. Each collaborator’s ideas, language and gestures are reflective of the part he or she plays in society. The camera remains a still spectator and this sharpens the focus on the narrator. Imam keeps coming back to talking about the awe and exclusivity commonly associated with the camera, which distances it from the natural. “Filmmaking is considered this huge exercise, some scary kind of thing which doesn’t happen anywhere and everywhere,” he says. “So the idea is to reverse and re-inverse all of that.”

Bombay, Bollywood, Book Launches and Other Bizarre Tales 

Seldom does one come across a subject whose name leaves you at a loss for a headline that will better it. Revenge Of The Naked Princess is one such.

Or not. The name of this book, on the subject tab of an email invite to its launch, has been abridged, by enthusiastic public relations personnel, to Revenge Of Naked Princess, emphasizing the weird, dropping an article, keeping it crisp. The invite reads “The launch will take place in the presence of Renowned Actors like Smita Jaykar, Anup Soni, Anshuman Jha and Spiritual Guru Dr Rajshri and Celebrity Author Ashwin Sanghi… at Crossword Book Store… Juhu… Mumbai… on 19th December, 2012.” The presence of a “Guru” at the launch of what the press release calls “India’s first novel on forced conversions” (by ex-journalist Oswald Pereira) is perhaps mandated. Dr. Rajshri has been summoned to grant the book spiritual, if not religious, legitimacy. But preceding her, in the list of distinguished invitees meant to lure recipients of the mail to the launch, are names of three “renowned actors” whom you will have to google. At the fag-end of the list is an author, who has been anointed a “Celebrity”, lest his name get lost in the crowd of luminaries.

The marked difference between an average Delhi book launch and an average Mumbai book launch is one of the many ways to consider the divide between the two cities.

In Delhi, other writers are invited to talk at an author’s book launch and the conversation, for better or worse, revolves around the subject of the book and writing in general. Of course, there is wine, smugness, snacks, gossip, literary incest and bitching concealed as self-serious debate but nothing in any of the innumerable Delhi book launches can match up to the sheer absurdity of the rare Mumbai book event.

To begin with, no event in Mumbai can possess a sense of self-worth unless attended by someone, anyone, from Bollywood. Here, even Shobha De, a celebrity in her own right, had to invite actor Manoj Bajpai to speak at the Mumbai launch of her book Sethji, on December 20, where he waxed eloquent about the first time he met her and wondered how despite belonging to “a certain section of the society” she could “delve so deeply” into the “caste system and caste conflict“. However not all authors can pull off having someone of Bajpai’s stature at their launch. And where “renowned actors” do not exist, they must be created.

***

Or substituted by characters who can hold their own against Bollywood. My earliest memory of a book launch in Mumbai is one I covered as a reporter for the city paper Mumbai Mirror on February 14, 2006. A book of Hindi love poems had been written by a journalist who had christened himself Mukesh Kumar ‘Masoom’ (Masoom, his pen name, means ‘innocent’). Hindi journalists in Mumbai aren’t as well connected as their counterparts in the English media, so Masoom had been unable to procure a Bollywood celebrity for his launch. Instead, he had invited a tabloid sensation called ‘Doosri Radha‘ (the second Radha) to launch his book of verse on Valentine’s Day. Radha is the consort of Krishna, a Hindu god. Doosri Radha is Devendra Kumar Panda, an ex-Inspector General of Police in UP who announced in 1991, while he was in service, that he had had a vision of Krishna who had said to him that he was his consort. Panda moved away from his family, wore women’s clothes and, much to the relief of the UP Police, claimed voluntary retirement. He next hit headlines when he declared that his organs were becoming “delicate and soft” and that he was metamorphosing into a woman.

Panda, wearing bangles, a large nose ring, a pink dupatta and yellow kurta and churidaar, took over Masoom’s book launch. He held forth on Karma, and on the fact that the UP government—which was delaying his pension, and which had charged him for breaching the police dress code—would soon be punished by his lord (Krishna). He denounced another ex-government employee from Jamshedpur in Bihar who, after watching Panda on TV, had said he was Panda’s ‘Krishna’ and quit his job, in turn, to dress like the god and play a flute. Panda got into arguments over such matters with journalists at the launch, and eventually began to swear at them. One enraged journalist shouted back saying: “Humnein hi to ise banaya hai, varna ye kuch nahin tha (We’re the ones who’ve made this man so big, otherwise he was nothing)”. Masoom, who hadn’t been able to speak about his book of love poetry yet, tried to calm Panda down by tapping him gently on his shoulder, at which Panda screamed abuses at Masoom till he fled the stage. He threatened to beat him to pulp if he ever touched him again, saying: “Only my lord has the right to touch me”. He added that Masoom, while inviting him there, had said that the event would be a “Krishna Mahotsav (festival)”.

***

“This reminds me of Doosri Radha,” says a writer whom I’ve accompanied to the launch of Talespin— a book of short stories by Sanjay Chopra, a pilot with Air India and husband of actor Tisca Chopra. I’d narrated the story to him only an hour ago. It is the evening of December 11 and we are at Olive, a posh Italian restaurant in the suburb of Bandra, Mumbai. The party has a smattering of Hindi film actors such as Perizaad Zorabian, Simone Singh, Boman Irani, Arshad Warsi and Gul Panag. Zorabian is compering the event. Singh and Irani have read from the book. Warsi comes up on stage towards the end, in a checked shirt that is half-unbuttoned to expose his chest, and a hand wrapped in a crepe bandage, to say that he had never thought that his friend, the author Sanjay Chopra, could write, but then Chopra had mailed him two of his stories one day and “Shit, I thought. This guy’s sensitive”.

What prompts the writer to make the comparison to Doosri Radha, possibly, is that after the readings, and the kind words, each actor has been mobbed by reporters asking questions that don’t seem to pertain to the book in any way. Panag speaks about writers in the movies and hundred years of Indian cinema. Irani talks about films and writing as well, and about the importance of the written word, and on whether he’s attending Vidya Balan’s wedding. He ends one interview saying: “Agar aapke paas koi bhi opinion hai, to aap writer ban sakte hain, agar aap bol sakte hain, to aap writer ban sakte hain. Agar aap nahin bhi bol sakte hain, toh bhi aap writer ban sakte hain (If you have any opinion whatsoever, you can be a writer. If you have a voice, you can be a writer. Even if you don’t have a voice, you can be a writer)”. Warsi is asked by a journalist whether all the ills of society can be blamed on cinema (he disagrees) and also what food he likes to eat. Among the more outrageous things he has tasted, he says, are raw frogs.

***

It is December 19, 2012. At Crossword Bookstore, Juhu, in the fiction section, actor Anshuman Jha (who played the protagonist in one of the segments of Dibakar Banerjee’s ensemble Love Sex Aur Dhokha) is reading a passage from Revenge Of The Naked Princess:

“Princess Darshana Kamya Kathodi jumped into the air like a wild cat in the jungle, twirled to a perpendicular position and kicked Brigadier Braganca with her bare, dark brown right foot. She aimed her kick at his groin with all the force her stringy, five-foot-two-inch frame could muster.

The speed and intensity of her attack was impeded a bit by the long and loose ‘ghagra’ that she wore. But the kick from the 18-year-old princess landed on its target with so much force that the six-foot-four-inch bulky Braganca fell on his back with a thud on the red polished stone floor of Princess Darshana’s bedroom.

As waves of pain coursed through his groin, Braganca screamed ‘Mama’ in agony… ”

Jha goes on for a couple of paragraphs more, then says: “This is entertaining writing. It grips you. (To the author of the book, Oswald Pereira) You’ve hooked me on to fiction. Thank you.” Jha also informs us, very helpfully, that the first piece of fiction he had read was Pereira’s previous book The Newsroom Mafia, a story of how the underworld exercised great influence over the media, released last year (before that, he says, he was only an “autobiography reader”).

Revenge Of The Naked Princess is a potboiler set in the middle of the 16th Century, when the King of Portugal, John III, ordered that civil and military bodies should assist the clergy in converting native Indians to Christianity. Upon his orders a conversion brigade wages war on a local tribe in the Yeoor Hills, now in Thane, and its princess.

“It was really from my heart,” says Pereira about the book. “One of the characters could be me.”

“It’s not easy to write about one’s own religion,” he goes on. “You face a lot of criticism. But I think, among my Christian friends, there were a lot of Christian friends who agreed that conversion was forced, that it was not a good thing to do. And others who felt this shouldn’t be written about.”

When one of the audience members asks Pereira whether it is wise to bring up such incidents from the past, after people have found their closure with such “dark tales” from history, he says: “You learn about the present only when you know about the past. We’re born over and over again. What happens in the past stays with you. I wanted to remind Christians about this, the conversions.”

A tricky conundrum— the present and the past, the past present. In the not so recent past, on the night of January 22, 1999, Missionary Graham Staines was set ablaze with his two sons while they were sleeping in their station wagon. In the still less recent past, in August 2008, riots against Christians broke out in Kandhamal, triggered by the killing of Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Lakshmananda Saraswati. At least 38 people were killed. Soon after, in September 2008, well over 20 churches were vandalized in Karnataka. None of these incidents are recalled at this launch; no questions are raised about the impact Pereira’s novel can possibly have: a book by a Christian revisiting crimes in the name of Christianity, sold to the masses at an easily affordable price of Rs 125, prone to being transformed into juicy propaganda material by Hindu chauvinists.

Instead, these gems.

On being asked about the difference between spirituality and religion, actress Smita Jaykar goes on to say: “I’m a Hindu, my hair-dresser’s a Christian and my make-up man’s a Muslim. We call ourselves Amar Akbar Anthony. Thankfully even they, though not so educated, don’t ever say I will not come to a Hindu temple, they know when Datta Jayanti is and when Shravan Mahina starts, even more than I know.”

Jha: “I was born in Allahabad, and there was a mosque right in front of my house. My uncle didn’t let me go there. He said: They won’t allow you inside. One day later I just walked in.”

Pereira validates these inane utterances by explaining, “If you read the book, the message is the peaceful co-existence of religions.”

“It’s about the guts of a writer,” says Jha, in turn, talking about Pereira and how he wrote this book without fear of opposition from his community. “If he wasn’t scared of the bhais back then (when he wrote The Newsroom Mafia) why should he be scared of anyone now?”

I’m still trying to remember the last time underworld dons attacked a fiction writer for writing about the mafia.

Thus spake two “renowned actors” we were invited to hear. The third, sadly, hasn’t turned up. But spiritual guru Dr. Rajshri does a good job of filling in. She begins by advertising that she has cured many diseases through Karma healing, and has also helped so many cancer patients, of course. She goes on to commend the ‘spirituality’ inherent in a chapter of the book, and to say that the difference between spirituality and religion is that while the latter is “materialistic”, the former is not. Also, before leaving the venue, she says to Pereira: “Now that I’ve met you I will read your book properly”.

That leaves us, finally, with the “Celebrity Author”. “One of the reasons I loved reading your book was because it’s the sort of stuff I love writing,” says Ashwin Sanghi. “When you don’t know what is fiction and what is fact.”

Understandably. Sanghi’s last book The Krishna Key, is a page-turner which after a series of wild historical conspiracy theories (warning: spoiler ahead) concludes in its climax, rather disappointingly, that a magical Hindu alchemist’s stone is lodged inside the dome of the Taj Mahal.

Seeds for this, as well as other ideas in this novel, can be found in the thoughts of Hindu revisionist writer P. N. Oak, founder of the Institute for Rewriting Indian History, who in his book Taj Mahal: The True Story laid down why he believed the Taj Mahal was actually a Shiva temple. Oak also went on to say the Vatican was a Hindu temple. And that the papacy was a Vedic priesthood. And that Christianity had actually evolved from ‘Krishna-Neeti’.

***

I had last thought of Oak on a pleasant Delhi winter morning in 2011, in the middle of a casual chat with historian Dr. G. S. Khwaja, at the lobby of Delhi’s India International Centre. Dr. Khwaja, who is Director of Epigraphy at the Archaeological Survey of India, Nagpur, was telling me how people wouldn’t stop writing letters to his office asking whether the Taj Mahal was actually a temple. As if that was the only thing worth resolving in the scheme of history. “Educated people!” he exclaimed, very distraught. “All they want to know is whether the Taj Mahal was a temple.”

***

But to be fair, Sanghi seems to be trying to strike a balance of fundamentalisms, of sorts, in his bestseller by providing for antagonists who are evil Hindu fanatics. Pereira seems to see no need for doing this.

“If you look at organized religions the world over, you will see they have common roots,” Sanghi continues. “Take the ‘A’ out of ‘Abraham’, and you will get ‘Brahma’. And while Abraham’s consort was called Sarah, Brahma’s consort was Sarah-swati.”

“Wow,” says Jaykar.

“You have one holy trinity that is Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh, and another which is the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” Sanghi says. “And if you put two triangles of the two trinities together you get the Star, of David.”

“Wow,” says Jaykar.

A journalist in the front row, who had asked Pereira a while back whether his novel, set in the 16th century, was autobiographical in any way (Pereira had denied this), stirs.

“So if you look at these things, you really wonder: what were the crusades for?” Sanghi goes on.

The journalist nods and says: “Politics.”

Jai Arjun Singh on Awtar Kaul, 1973 and a cinematic what-if

A favourite parlour game for the nerdish movie buff is the contemplation of great cinematic years. Internationally, obvious frontrunners include 1939—when a breathtaking number of high-quality films competed for hall space before the disruptive theatre of WWII took over—and 1959-60, when at least half a dozen countries seemed to have New Waves in progress and such varied directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Kon Ichikawa, Otto Preminger and Georges Franju did magnificent work. But looking at Hindi cinema through the lens of hindsight, it seems to me that something special was in the air in 1973.

This is not necessarily to say that numerous masterpieces were unveiled in those 12 months— it’s more that one feels things were on the brink; that new routes and possibilities were opening up, and much might have happened differently but for a single coin-flip. Amitabh Bachchan’s career-altering role in Zanjeer—a part he got after bigger stars backed out—birthed the defining screen personality of the decade to come. Raj Kapoor’s Bobby, the year’s biggest hit, created a fresh idiom for rebellious young love. The writers Salim-Javed, having created the angry young man Vijay, were just wrapping up a Western-inspired script about an armless thakur hiring two mercenaries to rid his village of a dacoit. Meanwhile, beyond the mainstream, the so-called Indian New Wave was in its ascendency: M S Sathyu made the elegiac Garam Hava and Shyam Benegal directed his first feature Ankur. And for a sense of what lay ahead, consider the stream of youngsters who entered the Film and Television Institute of India that year: Naseeruddin Shah, Saeed Mirza, Renu Saluja, Kundan Shah, Om Puri and Vinod Chopra among them.

One of the less-known gems of 1973 is a film titled 27 Down, produced by the Film Finance Corporation (later NFDC) and directed by Awtar Krishna Kaul. I confess shame-facedly to knowing almost nothing about it until a few weeks ago, except for the fact that Kaul had died in a drowning accident shortly after the film was completed. (It was his first and last feature.) But watching it on a restored DVD print by NFDC recently, I was certainly very intrigued.

“Phir koi pull hai kya? Shaayad pull hee hai.” (“Has another bridge come? Seems like it.”) The first words we hear in 27 Down are the subconscious musings of someone who knows trains and train journeys only too well, and who feels like he has spent his life crossing bridges without getting anywhere. Sanjay (M K Raina), the son of a railway employee, has to forgo his art studies when his father insists he return to the family profession. In one vividly shot and edited early sequence, we hear the father’s voice dispensing platitudes (“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”) while the son does things in contravention of this paternal advice— eating the “unhealthy” bhel-puri he has been cautioned about, walking about the streets of Bombay late at night. It’s as if these small, inconsequential acts of defiance are a part-compensation for the bigger battles he knows he is destined to lose. Now a conductor himself, he lives—literally and figuratively—on the tracks, and measures his life in train sounds and distances. His relationship with a young woman named Shalini (Raakhee, already a mainstream star but well-cast here) is also affected by the demands of conformity.

In the language of facile categories, this is an art film— a subdued, slow-paced work about a non-heroic life. Sanjay inhabits a very different universe from that of the other hopefuls, dreamers or malcontents of 1973: the two-fisted cop of Zanjeer, the teenage lovebirds quelling the odds in Bobby, the brothers reunited in a nightclub through the power of song in Yaadon Ki Baaraat. (In one scene in 27 Down, “Chura Liya Hai Tumne” can be heard playing on a radio, leading one to speculate that Sanjay might—in one of those bursts of filial rebellion—go to see a late-night show of Yaadon Ki Baarat.) There is no triumphal narrative in Kaul’s film, not even a hint of it; the dominant image is that of Sanjay feebly saying “Par, Anna… ” (“But, Anna… ”) as his father casually tells him what his future holds.

But if this is a movie about a man with no future (made, as it sadly turned out, by a man with no future), it certainly shows an understanding of the possibilities available to coming generations of movie-makers. It has a kinetic visual sense, for one thing: jump cuts are effectively used to mark the passage of time (while also ironically commenting on the stasis in Sanjay’s life); freeze-frames, abrupt zoom-ins and zoom-outs suggest the blurring of real life with desires or unreliable memories. There is an element of fabulism in a scene where Sanjay, watching Shalini’s silhouette as she changes behind a curtain, is reminded of the Aphrodite statue that fascinated him as a child. And for all the soberness of the content, there is a sense of playfulness too, as in the early scene where children play in train formation and a song goes “Chuk chuk chuk karti gaadi”.

At the same time, themes are sometimes spelt out in the style of a chamber drama; a couple of the conversations play like deliberately theatrical monologues rather than naturalistic talk. This directness and purity of form reminded me very much of the work of the great directors Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, which is not to say that 27 Down reaches the heights of the best films made by those men— it has a fragility that you’d expect from someone making his first feature, and there are a few awkward touches: such as the underlining of an emotional moment with a jarring music score. But there is much promise here, as well as signs of a versatile sensibility.

And so, to another of those parlour games: the ‘What If’. If Kaul had lived, what might his subsequent work have looked like?

In a way it’s silly to make such speculations based on a single movie. But on the limited evidence we have, I think Kaul might have found a goodly middle ground between the “arty” and the “commercial” film. (Incidentally, the only other movie credit he has on IMDB is as assistant on Merchant-Ivory’s Bombay Talkie, which was a meta-commentary on commercial movie-making.) He would also quite likely have brought a new dimension of interiority to 1970s and 80s cinema— with films centred on the human face, where we are encouraged to look at a person not because he is doing something interesting but because he is interesting.

27 Down explores a character’s inner life to a degree rare in Hindi cinema (even non-mainstream cinema). This isn’t just done through voice-over—that would be lazy filmmaking—it is achieved through an artful bringing together of elements: cinematography and shot juxtaposition, performance, the use of background sound (when Sanjay reflects on his unusual childhood, we hear an infant crying somewhere in the compartment he is in). A year later, something comparable was achieved in Basu Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha, about the inner turmoil of a woman caught between the idealistic memory of a past love and the apparent monotony of a present one. But among major filmmakers of the decade that followed, I can’t think of anyone who did this with regularity.

Then there is the fact that 27 Down is shot (beautifully) in black and white— not a commonly used medium in Hindi films of the time, or since. The decision may have been dictated by resource constraints, but I prefer to think it was deliberate: Kaul and his cinematographer Apurba Kishore Bir make the most of the form, composing stunning location shots of Varanasi and Bombay, of juddering trains and busy train stations in the gloaming— places that are simultaneously filled with crowds and suggestive of deep loneliness. Perhaps, given some artistic freedom, he would have shown some of his contemporaries how resonant black-and-white can be?

To speculate further: given Kaul’s apparent willingness to work with mainstream performers, I could even imagine him doing something really interesting with Bachchan somewhere down the road. This is not as improbable as it sounds: the Zanjeer legacy makes it easy to forget that in 1973 AB also did fine work in such low-key films such as Saudagar, which might have taken his career in a very different direction— and that he continued doing commercially unpromising films like Alaap and Manzil after becoming a superstar. Imagine one of his better roles—say, the guilt-wracked ship’s captain in Kaala Patthar, punishing himself for a moment of cowardice—shaped and performed without the over-expository trappings of commercial cinema: done with discerning silences and close-ups and fragmented interior dialogue rather than with fiery dialoguebaazi. (And in black and white! Bachchan in a good role in a really well-photographed B&W film is one of our great missing cinematic treasures.) I think both the actor and the director might have been up to the task.

Quite possibly, none of this would have come to pass— there have been enough cases of directors who faded away after their first films. But watch 27 Down and you’ll probably agree that Kaul was among Hindi cinema’s most promising unrealised talents. The only film he made was about a frustrated, circumscribed life, but in the best of all alternate universes he might have found a way to lay new tracks to the places where he really wanted to go.