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The New Artists

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Is the recent boom in video art just a passing fad? Or is it indicative of a trend that’s here to stay? Here is Girish Shahane’s guided tour of the scene.

 

While the use of video is not a new development in Indian art, it has recently gained such wide acceptability that it is unusual these days to find any large exhibition of contemporary art that does not feature work in that medium. Consider some of the exhibitions that have been mounted in major cities: At Colaba’s Chatterjee & Lal gallery, Bangalore-based Kiran Subbaiah produced a 43 minute epic called Narcissicon. It was scripted, photographed and directed by the artist himself, who played all the characters that appeared on screen, often two or three at a time.

Excerpt from Narcissicon, by Kiran Subbaiah:

 

At Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, the twenty-something Surabhi Saraf’s videos were composed of multi-image grids. Each small square within the grid showed the same shot of the artist going about some daily activity, like cooking or folding clothes. The catch was that, while the small squares played the same sequence, they did not play the same frame simultaneously. Carefully choreographed, and paired with specially designed soundtracks, Saraf’s grids shimmered and danced as different parts of the shot played across and down the grid.

FOLD by Surabhi Saraf:

 

At Chemould Prescott Road, Vishal K. Dar collaborated with Kaushik Bhaumik and Siddhartha Chatterjee on The Rise of the BROWNationals. One of the videos composed was of an inverted image of the Republic Day parade. The artists had intervened in a simple yet effective way with officially broadcast footage to question the militaristic emphasis of the annual ritual.

Vishal K. Dar’s The Rise of the BROWNationals | Girl on a Swing:

 

The Rise of the BROWNationals | The Carousel of Dharma:

 

Shine Sivan’s show at Gallery Maskara included a graphic video of the artist masturbating in a forest. It played behind a partition in a section of the gallery that had been strewn with leaves and branches to echo the landscape seen in the video.

Over in Delhi, The Skoda Prize show at the National Gallery of Modern Art, which I was involved in organizing, had the artist collective CAMP screening a video created for the UK’s Folkestone Triennial in 2011. CAMP had provided cameras to members of a volunteer coastguard unit based in that English town, asking them to film what they saw through telescopes. After crowd-sourcing the footage, CAMP edited it down to one hour. Everything from local bird species, to submarines, to the coast of France, appeared on screen, often in a moody haze, accompanied by commentaries filled with inimitable English humour.

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Saket opened a show of seven contemporary women artists in late January this year. One of those seven, Sonia Khurana, had interviewed her grandmother about memories of Partition, and combined this with archival footage and a personal voice-over analyzing the old woman’s recollections.

Video might now be a familiar medium used dexterously by Indian artists, but it arrived late on the scene. Indians raised in the late sixties and seventies, even those born into affluent households, didn’t grow up filming home movies on Super 8, the way so many of their counterparts in the US and Europe did. Celluloid, even 8 mm stock, was heavily taxed, and spare parts for cameras difficult to find. As a result, though artists like Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee and M. F. Husain were deeply interested in cinema, they didn’t use the medium frequently.

When portable video recorders arrived, they provided a cheaper option to capture moving images, and by the 1990s many Indians owned handycams. Artists who had been trained as painters, began experimenting with video as an extension of their practice. There was no market for such work locally, but galleries and museums abroad had an established tradition of exhibiting video. Indian video art was shown more often internationally than at home in the course of the 1990s. Now, of course, most human beings on the planet walk around with video recorders in their pockets or handbags. Little wonder that video has become an important medium through which Indian artists interpret their world.

There are no sharp lines demarcating video art from, say, experimental documentary, or short fiction. Works by Ashish Avikunthak and Kabir Mohanty, who call themselves film-makers, and usually shoot using 16 mm or 35 mm stock, have regularly been shown in galleries and museums. This aligns with the idea that anything can be art, provided it is labeled as such, or displayed in conditions normally associated with art viewing. Having said this, there are broad differences, based on the variant nature of the audience’s engagement, between gallery-based video, and fare available in auditoriums or on home screens.

Excerpt from Ashish Avikunthak’s Et Cetera:

 

Excerpt from Kabir Mohanty’s Song for an Ancient Land:

 

Since people walk in and out of galleries at any time, video art tends not to focus on narratives with clear beginnings, middles and ends; or on stories that require viewing to commence at a particular time and carry on for a set duration. Videos in galleries usually play in a continuous loop, and it doesn’t matter hugely at what point one enters. Secondly, to distinguish itself from auditorium or television-based work, video art often uses multiple screens (called channels in artspeak), or else multiple images within a single screen. Third, video is often integrated into installations which include sculptural, photographic or painted elements. All of these features can be found in the videos described at the beginning of this article.

Video art geared toward exhibition in galleries, or at least outside auditoriums, originated in the 1960s, with the work of artists like Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol. It took decades before Indians warmed to the medium, and in the 1990s it felt as if many Indian artists were experimenting with video without understanding the intrinsic properties of the medium. Nobody would make that claim now, when a number of artists regularly use video in sophisticated ways.

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which concluded this March after a three-month run, featured substantial works by three pioneers of Indian video art: Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, and Ranbir Kaleka. In the 1990s, Malani experimented with stop-frame animation to record her own drawings, and used those recordings in stage design. She later began combining animation with live action footage and making her videos part of large-scale installations. Her intent is usually overtly political, and she has been preoccupied with women’s rights; the India-Pakistan relationship (she was born in Sindh); nuclear weapons; and communal violence, particularly the Gujarat riots of 2002.

Remembering Toba Tek Singh (documentation), by Nalini Malani:

 

Nalini Malani’s Hamletmachine (documentation):

 

In Search of Vanished Blood (by Nalini Malani) trailer:

 

Vivan Sundaram’s entry into video began with a playful documentary about Canadian couples (real and fictional), but his work in the medium usually concerns his own physical installations. After making these landscape-like structures, Sundaram uses the camera to capture a constantly tracking aerial view, expanding the apparent scale of the sculpture in the process. He did something similar in Kochi, assembling rocks and shards of pottery from an archeological dig, and producing a multi-channel video of the piece that was projected onto the ground. Interestingly, both the physical installation and the video were displayed at the Biennale.

Ranbir Kaleka has made a few ‘pure’ videos, but is most strongly associated with a technique he invented that involves projecting a video onto a purpose-made painting. The interaction between the moving and static image creates a flickering, dreamlike visual texture. Kaleka incorporates personal memories, historical narratives, and myth, into his enigmatic and compelling creations.

CROSSINGS (Documentation), by Ranbir Kaleka:

 

Ranbir Kaleka’s SWEET UNEASE (Documentation):

 

The most important Indian artists to emerge over the past decade who consistently use video / film have been Amar Kanwar and the Raqs Media Collective. Unlike painters like Malani, Sundaram and Kaleka, who began exploring other media in the 1990s, Kanwar and the three members of Raqs have had formal training in film and video. While Kanwar and Raqs share a broadly left-wing worldview, and engage with critical political issues, their approaches are very different. Kanwar makes intensely personal, lyrical documentaries, while Raqs are intellectuals who cite historians, philosophers and political thinkers in the voice-overs to their videos. Raqs and Kanwar first came to prominence in the art world after being selected for the 2002 edition of documenta, the most prestigious exhibition in the contemporary art world, held once every five years in Kassel, Germany. Kanwar has since had the singular honour of being picked for the two subsequent editions of documenta as well. The work he displayed at the 2012 documenta, titled The Sovereign Forest, includes, as one of its components, a long documentary film, called The Scene of Crime, a love story of sorts. It is set in Orissa, where mining companies want to take over protected land, and the administration works with these firms to clamp down on dissent. The story, narrated by a woman whose partner has been taken away by the police, is told only through text cards, against a background of nature shots. Kanwar supplemented this with an installation that included a collection of indigenous crop seeds, broadening the environmentalist theme of The Scene of Crime. The Sovereign Forest had its first Indian showing at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

The kind of large-scale display represented by The Sovereign Forest is expensive to make, and difficult to store, should a collector choose to acquire it. Most such work is created on commission from an international biennial or survey exhibition, and acquired by museums, whether private or public. The market for video, particularly video installation, is very small in India, though that is still a step up from fifteen years ago, when it was non-existent. Since the National Gallery of Modern Art has not acquired any art for the past decade, artists are locally dependent on private collectors, aside from foreign grants and commissions. Lekha and Anupam Poddar, who run the Devi Art Foundation, were among the first Indian collectors to buy this kind of work. Over the past three years, their focus has shifted to West Asian contemporary art, and to Indian antiquities. Kiran Nadar is currently by far the largest collector in the country of video-based installation, and of contemporary art in general. Her museum currently has exhibition spaces in a Saket mall and within the HCL campus in Noida, and is seeking a permanent location where the collection can be consolidated.

During the boom in the art market between 2003 and 2008, particularly in the last phase in which contemporary art was in focus, private galleries began showing video frequently. It was a period when it seemed everything would sell, which encouraged experiment. Immediately after the financial crisis, there was a perceptible return within galleries to more conventional painting and sculpture, but it soon became clear that most young Indian artists were keen to work across media. Impelled by international trends, Indian video art is, in a way, running ahead of its market. The vast majority of collectors still want something that can hang on the wall and be a talking point at dinner. Video, particularly when it uses sound, cannot play that role. The relative lack of collector interest might be why very few Indian artists work exclusively with video.

Change, though, is bound to come. On a visit to Chennai, recently, I noticed the new Phoenix Market City mall had acquired a number of sculptures by contemporary artists and was also exhibiting video art on every floor. Chennai is the most conservative of India’s metropolises, and if the owners of Phoenix Market City (who are based in Bombay) feel their prospective customers would appreciate cutting-edge video, it could be an indication of a wider shift in perception taking place among art collectors across India.

 

Shilpi Satyajit

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Animation filmmaker Jayanti Sen learnt her craft from Satyajit Ray himself. She also edited the first anthology of essays on Ray’s graphic art and authored another more detailed book on the same subject. Here is her curation of 13 of his artworks, along with notes on what they represent.

 

When I look back and think of why I really undertook the project of authoring a full book on the graphics of Satyajit Ray, what comes to my mind foremost is the fact that, much before this book, I edited and compiled a collection of Bengali and English essays on this subject way back in 1995. That book was released at the opening of the first ever exhibition of Ray’s graphics in Kolkata, curated by Ray’s son—artist and filmmaker Sandip Ray—and coordinated by me, at the Oxford Bookstore Gallery. The driving force behind both ventures was Snehanshu Mukherjee, the architect responsible for the new look—that persists till today—of the Oxford Bookstore Gallery.

 

That book, a bi-lingual collection—penned by artists such as Paritosh Sen, Raghunath Goswamy, Purnendu Pattrea (then editor of Bengali journal Desh), Sagarmoy Ghosh (then editor of Anandamela, the Bengali children’s magazine), Debashish Bandyopadhyay from the Anandabazar Patrika (one of the most widely read Bengali newspapers) and a host of others—addressed various aspects of Ray’s graphic design aesthetic. The hugely enthusiastic response from readers for this book, titled The Art of Satyajit Ray/ Shilpi Satyajit (Bengali for ‘Satyajit, the Artist’), prompted me to think of a larger and more serious project on the subject. Thus began my journey towards creating Looking Beyond: Graphics of Satyajit Ray. En route, I delivered a lecture-demonstration on Ray’s Graphic Designs, also titled ‘Shilpi Satyajit’, at the Satyajit Ray – Jasimuddin Festival in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The enthusiastic response to that lecture was very encouraging and egged me on towards the completion of this project.

 

What I have tried to accomplish with this book is to make readers aware of Ray’s own journey, as an artist, from graphic designer to filmmaker. An aspect of Ray’s creativity, which often remains relatively overlooked, is his life and work as an ad-man. I have written in the past on Ray, O.C. Ganguly, Makhan Dutta Gupta, Dr. Ranen Ayan Datta, Raghunath Goswamy— all of whom worked under the great designer Annada Munshi to bring about an essentially Indian element to our advertising creations. Instead of being lame imitations of the West, our advertising created its own niche in the world of graphic art. Such contributions form a very important part of my book.

 

For a detailed analysis of Ray’s illustrations, book covers, cine posters—all aspects of his graphic design work—I conducted in-depth interviews with Sandip Ray, artist Sibsankar Bhattacharya and O.C. Ganguly, which provided me with valuable material and insight on the hows and whys of Ray’s art.

 

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I would now like to refer to some images from my book, displayed here, which will provide us with visual clues to navigate Ray’s vast body of artwork.

 

It is in my book that a logo design of Margo Soap, taken from the now extinct Bengali art journal Sundaram, has been republished for the first time. Ray was a fantastic calligrapher. He learnt from none other than the great artist Nandalal Bose. Here, Ray used thick brush lines to create this ornate logo.

 

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One little known fact is that, while Ray was working as an ad-man at D. J. Keymer and Co., Dilip Kumar Gupta, popularly known as D. K., established the Signet Press in 1943. Books published at the Signet Press marked new milestones in the history of Indian publishing. Ray was one of the principal artists entrusted by D. K. to decorate and design books published by Signet Press. D. K. also explored new territories in culture writing by bringing out a literary newsletter Tukro Katha, in which the then budding litterateurs Premendra Mitra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Buddhadeb Basu were written about. Discussions on Bengali literature as a whole, including poetry, was the most salient feature of Tukro Katha. It was in Tukro Katha that Ray wrote about his experience of shooting the film Aparajito, in Benares, or Varanasi, in a piece titled ‘Baranasir Diary’ (a diary from Varanasi). The illustration we see here shows us how dexterously Ray used ‘perspective’ (the technique used to represent a three-dimensional world, which is what the human eye sees normally, on a two dimensional surface) in a lot of his illustrations. Using thin croquil nib, he creates these sensitive lines depicting a scene in Varanasi. He was greatly inspired by the work of the famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. His own cinema influenced his illustrations too. This illustration has a singularly cinematic look about it, if we inspect it closely.

 

It was, in fact, the art of illustration that led Ray to become a filmmaker in the first place. When D. K. entrusted Ray with the design and illustrations for the abridged version of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s famous Bengali novel Pather Panchali, Aam Aantir Bhempu (Pather Panchali was actually published as a trilogy. Aam Aantir Bhempu, or ‘the bugle fashioned out of a mango seed’, was the second in the series), Ray thought of making a film out of the book.

 

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The book jacket of the translation of Jim Corbett’s book Man Eaters of Kumaon— Kumayuner Manushkheko Bagh, designed by Ray and published in 1950, is one of my favourite wrap-around book covers. Here he makes novel use of the idea of a tiger’s skin print for book cover. A bullet seems to have entered the book (and the skin) and gone out of its back. The difference in the size of the two holes—the one behind is a larger hole, being torn wider by the bullet (a bullet’s exit hole is always wider than that at the point of entry)—tells us a lot about Ray’s eye for detail. Also, the way he uses the striking colours of the tiger skin and the classic use of space— exploiting the format of a book cover as a ‘whole’ to create a visually arresting design, is remarkable.

 

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Ray, as a designer, looked around him to draw inspiration for his art. In the years he spent at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, under the guidance of stalwarts like Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinker Baij, he became acquainted with the beauty and sensitivity of classical and modernist Indian art per se. As a student he visited the Ajanta-Ellora caves and the Konark Sun Temple to absorb and assimilate the best of classical Indian art. It is also interesting to note that his companions during these journeys were art scholar Prithwish Neogy, Artist Dinkar Kaushik and the famous Tamil playwright, theatre director and art director Na. Muthuswamy. As Ray himself tells us, Neogy taught him how to ‘look’ at a picture. It is this essentially classical Indian influence that comes to the fore when we look at the book cover of Raj Kahini (The Royal Tale). He uses thick but sensitive brush lines to increase the feel of Indian miniature paintings from Rajputana, or Rajasthan, as Abanindranath Tagore writes about the tales of Rajput warriors in this book. This was a special attribute of not only Ray, but his contemporaries, such as Khaled Chowdhury, Raghunath Goswamy or Ranen Ayan Datta, as well. These artists evoked the essence of a book through its cover design. The reader immediately gets a feel of what he or she is about to encounter on opening a book.

 

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Through the book cover of Badshahi Angti (The Emperor’s Ring) designed in the late sixties, Ray introduced us to Feluda, the young detective he created in the line of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Since this is the first full-length novel in the series to be published in the form of a book (and not episodically in a magazine), Ray keeps the faces of the detective Feluda and his cousin and assistant Topshe in the foreground. The basic facial features of the two had been well illustrated by Ray, and the duo soon made their place in the hearts of children and adults alike through these illustrations as much as for the stories themselves. An interesting feature about this book cover is the way Ray uses perspective to depict the city-profile of Lucknow, where the story is set. We can see how he employs the technique of ‘foreshortening’ (used to create the illusion of an object or objects receding quickly into the distance, or background) for the horse-drawn carriage, the motorcars and the row of houses flanking the two sides of the road. This use of perspective brings to mind Satyajit Ray the still photographer, who had taken an enormous amount of photographs, besides sketching profusely, when he had gone on tours of Ajanta-Ellora or, in his later life, on his trips abroad where he was sent by his advertising firm D.J. Keymer and Co. It should also be known that it was common practice for Ray to create completely new designs and illustrations for his stories when they were published as books. Badshahi Angti was initially serialized in the pages of the children’s magazine Sandesh, for one whole year in 1966, while Ray was editing it. Sandesh, founded by Ray’s grandfather Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury way back in the early 1920s, was practically a family magazine for him. In its second phase Ray’s father Sukumar Ray edited it, but his untimely death led to the magazine’s demise. It was in 1961 that his friend, the poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay, gave Ray the idea of reviving Sandesh.

 

The point I’m trying to make is, even if Ray had already created and published an illustration to accompany his writing in Sandesh, he could easily take the liberty of changing or modifying it to better suit the pages of the book when the work was published as a whole.

 

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Ray also did the illustration for Priyamvada Devi’s Bengali story Panchulal. This is a very interesting work. Panchulal is based on the famous children’s story Pinocchio. For this sketch Ray draws liberally from the pat art and wood-cuts of Bengal. He uses thick brush lines reminiscent of the Kalighat pats. What I really love in this illustration is the exaggerated beard of the old man, drawn in the fashion of an animation still, and Panchulal climbing the beard to reach the old man. The difference in the scale and size of the man and the little Panchulal is another interesting touch. In fact Ray was an avid enthusiast of animation art. He encouraged me often to go to the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, to learn animation. So this particular illustration I always see with an animator’s eye, and I love it for the extremely beautiful brush strokes Ray uses to Indianize the foreign tale of Pinocchio, rooting it in Indian artistic traditions. Also, Ray uses here the style of drawing used by another great artist of his time, Makhan Dutta Gupta, though he also breaks away from his style in some places.

 

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Another famous Ray creation, which all his fans are very fond of, is the scientist Professor Shonku. When creating the character of Professor Shonku, Ray took cues from his own study of the sciences, and science fiction written throughout the world. But he used his own imagination finally to create a peculiar and very original fantasy. The elements that make up Professor Shonku are as fantastical as they are laced with humour. The stories lead to discoveries such as the ‘Anaihilin Pistol’ (that you can use to make someone you’re not pleased about having around just disappear), or a device to capture ghosts, or a time-machine. In this particular image, an illustration for the story Professor Shonku O Khoka (Professor Shonku and the Little Boy) what is most exciting is the wonderful interplay of light and shade. The filmmaker and cinematographer (he often handled his own camera) in Ray shows itself here. The story is about a child who is suddenly transformed into a highly knowledgeable person, uttering great scientific theories. In this illustration Ray uses very thin, lovely lines on paper-white to create the features of both Professor Shonku and the boy. The exquisite effect that we see in this illustration, due to its exploiting of both negative (the space around the subjects of the image) and positive space (the space used up by the subjects themselves), marks it as one of Ray’s best illustrations. Another point which I feel should be made about this illustration is the cinematic point-of-view we see here. The filmmaker Ray seems dominant within the sub-conscious (or was it consciously done?) of the illustrator Ray.

 

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Among other artistic creations, Ray also undertook the task of designing new typefaces in English. In the sixties a type foundry in Florida requested him to design these typefaces for them, one of which of which we see displayed here. He actually designed four typefaces, ‘Ray Roman’, ‘Holiday Script’, ‘Daphne’ and ‘Ray Bizarre’. Here we see the ‘Ray Bizarre’ typeface. Artist Paritosh Sen has written about how designing a typeface demands not just immaculate design skills but also enormous reserves of patience. The artist/ designer comes to a conclusive design after trying out innumerable options. As I mentioned earlier, Ray honed his calligraphic skills, guided by Nandalal Bose, when he was a student at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. And he believed in experimenting widely when designing a letter, or a full logo, for a product or film. This naturally reminds me of the fantastic logos he designed for his own films, such as Nayak or Kanchenjungha or Seemabaddha. Also, the experiment with just three Bengali letters, year after year, for each issue of the Bengali journal Ekshan, edited by Nirmalya Acharya and Soumitra Chattopadhyay. Or the logos he designed for West Bengal’s film complex Nandan,or for Patha Bhavan school. Even the Sandesh title designs could be cited here. Ray had said in an interview (carried in its entirety in Looking Beyond: Graphics of Satyajit Ray) to veteran journalist Nirmal Dhar that if he had the time he would have designed Bengali typefaces too.

 

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1961 was the year of Rabindranath Tagore’s Birth Centenary, and Ray designed a lot in this year, including the page from the Tagore Centenary Year Calendar, sponsored and published by India Tube Ltd., that can be seen above. For this picture, Ray put together intriguing visual elements, that he took from Tagore’s autobiography Jeebon Smriti, within a circular image. The young Tagore used to learn wrestling, and so the young boy is shown clinched to a wrestler at the centre of the image. The artist’s eye for detail can be seen in the dog sitting in the foreground or clothes on a clothesline, and dumbbells of sorts, called Mugur in Bengali, painted in the background. This is an important image in Ray’s career as a graphic designer, because it is an image where both the painter and the filmmaker in him emerge, almost as one. The way he uses flowing lines to outline his figures, and his figure-drawing (the drawing of the human form) in general, is very accomplished. Also, seen as a whole, it has a cinematic quality to it: the scale and the size of each object and person, as he has painted them, varies, as the camera-eye, or the Kino-Eye, may have seen the scene. The dynamism of the imagery, a moment of movement frozen for eternity, would appeal, again, especially to an animator, and so it does to me. The image reminds one of his documentary film on Rabindranath Tagore which he had made in the same year.

 

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The illustration for Baksha Rahasya (The Mystery of the Box), also a detective novel in the Feluda series, is yet another example of how cinematic Ray’s illustrations were. The view of a man typing out a manuscript and the detective duo—Feluda and his assistant and cousin Topshe—smaller in size, in yet another skillful use of foreshortening, creates a great sense of depth within the illustration which seems to have been thought of in terms of seeing the scene through the eyes of the movie camera. Also the typewriter is drawn in wonderful detail, with all its elements etched out clearly. Ray uses thin as well as thick lines of the pen to bring out details such as the man’s hair and the outline of his profile. Another important aspect of this illustration is the way he uses paper white to create an impression of volume, within a human body bound by lines. This illustration is the original, drawn for the Feluda novel Baksha Rahasya published in the Pujo (Durga Puja) Issue of the Bengali magazine Desh, and we can see the instructions given by Ray to the block-maker in red, in the left hand corner. Also notice how he has sketched the folds of the man’s shirt, within the outline of his profile. The artists who Ray learnt from taught him that outlines, by themselves, are dead things. He learnt from his Mastermoshai (teacher) Nandalal Bose how to catch the rhythm of life within the outlines, so the figure comes alive to our mind’s eye via even a line drawing.

 

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The poster design created by Ray for the film Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God, 1979)—dimensions: 30 by 40 inches—is another interesting example of how he exploited both positive and negative spaces within a format. Here, paper white is the colour of the lettering, with black in the background. Notice the incorporation of a pistol that is being fired within the title-design. Joi Baba Felunath is, once again, a crime-thriller-cum-adventure woven around the detective Feluda. So, to prepare his audience for this visual treat, he brings in just one potent visual element and nothing more. Also fascinating is the use of colour, how he exploits the contrast between black, red and white to demonstrate sparks and the effect of firing a pistol. Yet it gives nothing away of the plot at all, stoking curiosity about what the black space may comprise. The way Ray uses lettering in this poster makes me think of how excellent it would have been if he had designed Bengali type-faces too.

 

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One of the books that haunted Ray for years, and which he finally made into a film of the same name in 1984, was Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). I was fortunate enough to be present at the shooting of this film, as an observer in his unit, and the experience of seeing the great master at work is unparalleled.

 

The film is about the heroine Bimala’s (played by Swatilekha Sengupta) coming out of the zenana-mahal to the outside world and her entire experience of falling in love with the revolutionary Sandip (played by Soumitra Chattopadhyay). This is a novel set against the freedom struggle for India’s Independence, especially the violent or ‘terrorist’ segment of it. The poster of the film was designed by Ray and executed and finished by his artist son Sandip Ray. Its dimensions are 30 by 40 inches. The symbolic flames of the freedom struggle, probably felt to be burning throughout the country back when the novel was set, are depicted within the logo where flames form the outline of a Bengali vowel. What appeals to me most is the silhouetted figure of Bimala, and her elongated shadow, against the doorway. Ray epitomizes the ‘coming out’ of Bimala from her world inside the house through this image. What is especially clever is the way Ray uses the stained glass in the arch of the doorway; immediately setting the story in the late-Victorian era, around the period in which Tagore set his story.

 

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The costume design by Ray for the four ministers, as well as the Clerk, or Peshkar, of the Diamond King’s Court for the film Hirak Rajar Deshe (Kingdom of Diamonds, 1980) is a very interesting example of how Ray pre-designed almost every visual detail of his film. He has drawn the four ministers’ figures complete with the colour-scheme of their costumes, including their head-gear. Another interesting feature of this visual scanned from his own kheror khata, or red notebook, is that he had attached fabric or textile pieces to be used for the actual costumes, so that the person making the costumes would have an idea of exactly what Ray had in mind when he designed them. This is also telling of what Ray could achieve when he did colour illustrations. They are his ‘film graphics’, in a way, and give us a clear picture of what the characters in the final film will look like.

 

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The entire task of creating this book has enriched the visual designer and animator in me, creating a sense of what graphic design can be at its best, when executed by a true maestro.

 

I see this book as a homage to a maestro I have seen and exchanged words and ideas with very closely over the last ten years of his life. One hopes too that the book, with many more images, including works by great masters like Nandalal Bose and Annada Munshi, besides those by Ray himself, will be a feast for the eyes— a visual treat.

 

Images excerpted from Looking Beyond: Graphics of Satyajit Ray by Jayanti Sen, courtesy of Roli Books. You can purchase the book here

“I want real people in the films.”

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33 year old Samira Makhmalbaf, clad in black, sits on a plastic chair, patiently greeting many people who have lined up to talk to her. Someone hands her a canvas, a portrait of her in charcoal. She smiles. Her quiet, gentle demeanour belies the many laurels her work has won world over.

The eldest of the three Makhmalbaf siblings, Iranian director and screenwriter Samira is the first in her family to follow in the footsteps of her father, renowned filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Yet today she is a force to be reckoned with on her own steam.

At 17, she was the youngest director to present her feature film, ‘The Apple’, in the Un Certain Regard section at the Festival de Cannes. This was her first feature. Films that followed, ‘The Blackboard’ and ‘At Five in the Afternoon’, also competed at Cannes, winning the Jury Prize in 2000 and 2003 respectively. ‘At Five in the Afternoon’ was the first feature film shot in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Samira has been a member of the Jury at Cannes too, as well as of that at the Venice International Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, the Moscow International Film Festival, the Locarno Film Festival and the Montreal World Film Festival. She is said to be a part of the ‘New Wave’ of Iranian cinema.

 

What was it like to grow up around your father? To grow up acting in his films and working so closely with him, even when you worked on your own films? What influence has he had on your personal journey as a filmmaker? Do you consciously think about distinguishing your work from his when you make movies?

I can say the first thing that my father gave me was the love of cinema, because there are a lot of filmmakers in the world but I don’t think that all their children are making films, or that they love cinema this much, or that they ‘continue’ cinema (as a legacy). I love my father a lot, and I saw his passion for cinema, and I wanted to discover cinema. And I remember when I was five years old, when I saw his film screened on the big screen, for me it was like a miracle. It was the best thing I knew.

 

Which film was it?

It was The Peddler. For me it was this miracle and I wanted to do the same thing. Also his personality… I think even if he was not a filmmaker he would inspire me in many ways as a human being. It is possible to just watch him and gain. Watch him searching for peace, and making the world a better world. Because, I think, his cinema is not just about making films. Cinema is not, for him, just an entertainment. So I think I have learned that from him. Also, he became my teacher, because I left school at the age of 15 and then he taught cinema to me. And then, our relationship is actually like four relationships: he is my father, he is my teacher, he is my friend and he is my colleague. These are different roles. And I can say he has been my biggest teacher, for the longest time, and if I have some influence of his, I’m proud of that. But whether my cinema is different from his or not, all I can say is that I think that as human beings we are different in many aspects. I am Samira and he is Mohsen. But ultimately it is for the audience to gauge from watching my films.

 

You were the subject of your brother Maysam’s documentary (How Samira Made The Blackboard) and your sister Hana also initially started off (Joy of Madness) by shooting you casting for your film (At Five in the Afternoon). What was it like being on that side of the camera? Being the subject…

Actually I just kept doing my job. I was very focused on the making and I was not conscious about being shot myself, about How Samira Made The Blackboard. I was doing what I had to do. Because I don’t make films like a very professional person who treats filmmaking like an industry. For me, making a film is like a very big belief in what I do. It’s a very big passion. And I believe it’s going to change something for at least one person in the world. So, in that moment, even though it is hard or difficult, as making films is a challenge, I forget everything. I forget myself.

But what I remember about Hana’s film, which started with me casting for mine, but which is a completely different film… what I remember is that, once or twice, I was very aware of her filming me. Because, you see, this was the first time after the fall of the Taliban, in Afghanistan. I was making a film there and women were not ready for that and they were scared of it— so you were very aware of what was happening around you. And you can see the real face of Afghanistan through my sister’s film because she was very young, just 14 years old, and her camera was not something very special. So sometimes they didn’t notice her and sometimes they would be surprised at how she didn’t listen to me. And thank god she didn’t listen to me (when I suggested to her that it may not be a good idea) and she made this film.

How Samira Made The Black Board is from when I was 18. I was in the festival with my first film The Apple and it was a big question for people. They always asked me, “Oh! You are a woman. You come from Iran. You are young.” You know, sometimes they said, “You are small. How can you make a film?” Very quickly after that, it came to my mind, “Okay. A filmmaker should be an old, big man, even European.” I wanted to make the film The Apple but it so happened that I became a symbol of women, young women, who can make films. And once you’ve made a film then you break this cliché and after that it’s easier. Because then people can think that, “Okay, if one can do that, others can do it as well.” And I think for my brother also it was something interesting to look at in my filmmaking, and to see how the process of it is. So, for that, he made the film.

 

How Samira Made The Blackboard:

 

 

The Apple:

 

 

At Five in the Afternoon:

 

It’s interesting that you say that, because the kind of films you make are very political. Their themes are very political. So when you make such films, do you feel as if a political role has been thrust upon you? You may not think of yourself as a spokesperson in any way but do you feel that people, especially Iranians, expect you to represent them in a particular way?

I feel my films of course have some political dimension and layer as well, because of living in Iran. Because politics is interfering with our lives in every single moment. If we want to think of something, the politicians and rules have to decide. They decide whether we can make this film or not— especially in Iran. Also they try and decide what we believe or, on some days, what we eat or what we drink, to whom we talk to… and all these things. So it is a case of politics interfering in our life. So when we talk about a human story, it also becomes political. And, of course, as a filmmaker, one can talk about every subject one wants to talk about. But for me, the first important thing is not politics, it’s human issues. Because, I think, if we take a relationship between two humans, and if we focus on that—say the relationship between two friends, or a husband and wife—if we focus on that and if it’s correct, if it’s good, if it’s humanistic and if there is peace in there, then it becomes peaceful and good in the larger view of things. So if we don’t find democracy at a place you will not find democracy even in the human relationships there. So they ask me, “You are Iranian? You are a woman?” I think before being a woman, Iranian, young, old, being born at this moment, or later or before, I’m a human. So I try to tell the story of that. The main subjects of my films are human issues. Of course, they’re talking about one’s culture as well, and they’re also talking about politics.

 

Besides the content of your films, is there a politics to your aesthetics, your form, as well? 

Of course. It’s an art, but I believe beauty and art can save the world. I’m an artist and, for me, creating art and beautiful things is one of the first things I care about. How to tell a story, how to picture scenes myself, how are the songs and the music of the film… I think a film is two things: what you want to say, and how you tell that. Both are important. I don’t think they’re very different. Content and form come together. The rhythm of a film is the film itself. The way you talk about it is exactly what you say. And, as I told you, my films are humanistic and also political. They are not just political. Of course, I also talk about the relationship between concepts such as ‘power’ and ‘the nation’. But where does power come from? From human relationships.

 

You use non-actors in your films. Do you do so to bring about a certain sense of realism?

Yes, I always work with non-professional actors in the films and I love it. I make films about real people. My inspiration comes from reality. So I want real people in the films. It’s difficult but if you can be patient and if you know what to do, it can be a miracle and magic. Because their reality and their imagination also come into the film. Their soul also, their story also, comes into the film.

 

How difficult is it, because they are not actors?

It is difficult and it is challenging but if you know what you need, then the result is great. And I have to say there are some techniques I use. It takes a lot of trust and faith and love. When I search for my actors I search for someone whose soul is similar to the soul of my character and then I don’t tell them the whole story. I just give them the general idea, but I don’t let them know every detail of what is happening.

 

Do they read the script?

No, I just tell them the general idea. And many times the whole script is actually written only after editing because something or the other changes while making the film. As they (the actors) come into the film, their reality, their real life or some part of their person, affects the film. Sometimes I explain things to them, sometimes I try to make them imitate me and sometimes I evoke something in them because I know that if I tell him or her a particular thing then he or she is going to show that character. So these are the things I do.

 

You mix real stories and fiction, which emerges from your imagination, in your films. How do you balance the two? 

About imagination and reality? I think that, for me, art is where reality and imagination make love together and there is this miracle that happens where you can’t tell what is real and what is imagined, where are the metaphors and where you are speaking directly. People see themselves in the film, but it doesn’t end there. It’s like in surrealism. I like the surrealism not of (Salvador) Dali, which is completely imagination, but (Rene) Magritte’s surrealism, in which there is some reality and at the same time there are one or two elements that are not real and you don’t know where the border between the two lies. Here is the window, you see that it’s real. But in the picture, in the painting, where the clouds come in, there is a little bit of surrealism, which I like. And this imagination comes from the first idea and also from the imagination of the character as well.

 

How do you think films are going to bring about change in Iran? Because you make films, your whole family makes films, but there is strict censorship within the country and your films are banned— so people can’t see them. So how do you think films can bring about a change? Can they at all?

I’ll answer this generally, not only about Iran. Humans in the world are suffering from lots of pain and much of it is because of the way we think. And cinema has the power to change the way we think and that is one of the reasons I am in cinema. And, also, I think cinema is like a mirror; you put in front of society and society and culture can see itself and if they find something wrong they can change it. So yes, I believe cinema can change the world for the better.

 

Do you think people in Iran are aware of the significance their cinema has across the world?

I think so, yes. And, especially, I can see that through my father’s films because it was after the (Islamic) Revolution, because he was thinking of the progress after the Revolution and everything. And artists are most sensitive to these changes. They think and they bring up what is happening in society. If there is pain, they feel that. If there is some beauty, they see that. Especially after the Revolution, we have good art cinema because of many reasons. Because of not having Hollywood in Iran and also because of censorship which puts a lot of pressures on filmmakers and artists. In another way it makes them stronger to search for what they want to say through cinema. To search themselves and our culture. So they (the filmmakers) went to poetry. And I think when there is some darkness, sometimes, you can find light and if you can find the light in the darkness that is very important.

 

Also Read: “Even our name is banned in Iran.” Samira’s sister Hana Makhmalbaf on her films, her father, her family and her politics.

 

“Even our name is banned in Iran.”

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Hana Makhmalbaf, 24, wears her conviction on her sleeve quite comfortably. Her ‘manto’, or Iranian overcoat, is a constant reminder of her homeland and, consequently, the suffering of her countrymen. And yet, she is equally interested in places and people outside of her country’s borders. Her films reflect the emphasis she places on looking at people of various nationalities as “humans first”.

Born in a family of filmmakers, daughter of acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Hana’s career in filmmaking began early. Some would say too early. At the age of seven, she acted in her father’s film ‘A Moment of Innocence’. When she was eight she started studying films at the fabled Makhmalbaf Film School. The same year she made her first short film, ‘The Day My Aunt Was Ill’. Her documentary, ‘Joy of Madness’, made when she was 14, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo Filmex, 2003. Her first feature, ‘Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame’, was also critically lauded, winning the Special Jury Prize and the TVE La Otra Mirada Award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. The film also won the Crystal Bear for Best Feature Film and the Peace Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 2009, Hana filmed the protests in the run-up to the Presidential elections in Iran and went on to make the docu-fiction ‘Green Days’.

 

What was it like growing up in the Makhmalbaf family. You are all filmmakers. What is it like, with all of you working around films? Do you discuss your work often?

Yes I was born in a family of filmmakers. My father is a filmmaker. My mother was always helping him make films. So most of the time, in my family, we’re talking about cinema. Even when I was a child. Even my games were about cinema. So it was always like that.

 

What kind of games?

I remember, for example, when I was 8 years old I made a film. The name was The Day My Aunt Was Ill, which was kind of a game because my family, they left me at my aunt’s house. So I started directing my cousins and it became a film because it was, kind of, all the games I knew.

 

How much of an influence has your father been in your personal journey as a filmmaker?

I was born in this family. I’ve lived with him for 24 years. I worked with him. He was my teacher. He has been my favourite filmmaker. I became a lover of cinema because of my love for him. Sometimes when I talk, I think it’s him inside my head talking. But of course, everyone has their own way of… I have been so influenced by him but it’s not like I am totally him. It’s like two different people, but of course I learned a lot from him.

 

When you are making your own film, do you consciously work towards achieving your own style?

It’s not that you decide to have your own style. I’m a different person. I don’t everyday decide to look like Hana, but it’s how I have been created. It’s me. I didn’t decide for a different face from my father but it is different. So my character, the way I make a film, the way I write, the way I talk, they are all different but there are some similarities at the same time. It’s not something you decide. Say, you give the same script to me, I’ll make it differently, my father will make another film from the same script and my sister (Samira) will make another. Because we are different. For example, I have grown up in a family with my sister (Samira) and brother (Maysam), we have all learnt the same classes, we have lived in the same atmosphere, but my sister, my brother and me we are completely different people. My sister is much more philosophical. My brother is more technical, more ‘new generation’. I am somewhat in the middle of both of them.

 

Did you study at the Makhmalbaf Film School? What is the style of filmmaking that is taught? I have read that it is different from what normal film schools teach. How is it different?

It was different. It doesn’t exist anymore. It was there for six, seven years. There were three kinds of classes in our school. The first group of classes was on how to live better, because my father believes that a good filmmaker is a person who can live alone for a long time and can live well. In those classes there were cooking, riding, bicycling, swimming— everything to make ourselves stronger. Like, I remember, my mom couldn’t bicycle at all on the first day. After the seventh day, she bicycled 52 km around an island. So a filmmaker should be strong because he or she has to stand on his or her knees from 5 am to 6 pm. We don’t sleep. So it is something to make us strong.

The second set of classes was all towards becoming a better human being; because being a filmmaker, it’s not just to make films, it’s to make films that change the world, it’s to be a better human. So those kinds of classes we had, like philosophy classes, psychology classes— it was also to find subjects and ideas from these classes. We had sociology and also we had Sufism, which I remember was in the beginning of these classes. We started to learn that these people (the Sufis), they had nothing. For example, they were forsaking everything they had. And then, at the end of the class, we were even giving away our own books, to learn how to give away.

So the third kind of classes, they were about cinema. We learnt everything about the technical parts of cinema, analyzing cinema, editing, photography, cinematography, being a DOP (Director of Photography), everything which is involved.

 

Do you think this style of learning filmmaking is something that can be taken out from amongst the family and given to others to learn as well?

Actually when my father started this film school, he asked permission from the government of Iran to allow him to open the school publicly. But they said, the government said, “One Makhmalbaf is enough for the whole country, we don’t need one hundred like him.” But, anyway, some of our friends, some of our family, and our relatives started with us. But they were such difficult classes. We were working, sometimes, for 16 hours per day, we were studying for 16 hours per day. I remember I was 10 years old… I was in the philosophy class eight hours a day and everyone was telling my dad, “She doesn’t understand it.” My dad was saying, “Even if she gets 20 percent of this class, or 10 percent, at this age… if she gets it, it will stay here (indicates her head) like the structure of her mind. But if she studies it later, even if she gets 100 percent, it will only be a part of her mind.” So it was so difficult, the classes. Some of the students left, later. Some of them attended only some classes, like scriptwriting— and they became scriptwriters. Some of them attended composition class and became photographers. A few students came along with us (her and her family), to be filmmakers, and are now filmmakers, like Mohammed Ahmadi and some other friends. But the first rule that my dad put for this ‘university’ was that no matter what you do, it doesn’t matter, the only rule was that everything you want to do, even swimming, you have to do it eight hours per day minimum and for a minimum of one month. So even if you didn’t know how to swim in the beginning, if you did it for eight hours a day for one month, after one month you were a trained swimmer. So you became professional. That was the only rule that we were following.

 

The first film (The Day My Aunt Was Ill) you made was when you were eight. What were you thinking when you came up with the idea? Did you have a conscious thought?

Filmmaking for me is not like a job. It’s not like a business. It’s love or passion. And when I was eight years old of course it wasn’t the way cinema is now for me. It was a pure love. But for that, I remember, the main idea came from a photo that I saw in an exhibition. There were a bunch of children painting on the floor and the photo was taken from up, from a top angle while the children were painting. And the next day, my parents, they left me at my aunt’s house to visit some festival… I don’t remember. And then my aunt got ill and she went to the hospital and we were with my grandfather. So we started to play and the idea I gave was this painting. But little by little, my cousins that were there as well—my brother was my cinematographer—they started to become jealous of each other. So because I was influenced by films from my dad’s kind of cinema, I said let’s bring it all in front of camera and, as you can see in the film, I’m directing them in front of the camera and the ‘behind-the-scene’ and the ‘scene’ itself is mixed, and it’s shot that way because my brother was shooting all of us.

 

You shot the making of your sister Samira’s film.

I made a film called Joy of Madness. It’s a documentary film about her casting in Afghanistan. It was the casting of At Five in the Afternoon. But actually, though it was supposed to be a behind-the-scenes, it turned out in another way because, when she was trying to cast people, for one month everybody was afraid of her, everybody there didn’t want to act in the film. They were afraid of cinema, they were afraid of everything— their burqa, the Taliban, everybody. So I decided to change the subject of the film to the fear of Afghan women in general.

 

Because of the acclaim you get as a family of filmmakers, and for your own work, do you feel that somewhere you are representatives of your country politically, outside of the country?

It depends on what film I’m making. If it’s on Iran, of course I’m representative of Iranian people. But before anything else, I think I’m representative of human beings— whatever pain they have that I’m talking about. Then I’m representative of that. Of course, I will never forget my people in my country and the suffering they have. I always wear my manto, even when I’m outside of Iran, not to forget their pain. But I think we have to take off these borders that we put mentally for ourselves and think of the human being first and then think of women… then anything else that comes after.

 

But do you feel, when you go around making your film, that somewhere people expect you to explain the politics of Iran to them? Be a representative of that side of Iran to the world outside?

Actually I have made Green Days which is a docu-fiction film on the election in Iran. It was about exactly the same problem because, some of the people— they wanted to vote but they weren’t political people. American people, Indian people, they go to vote and none of them get killed for what they voted for. But people, normal people, very ordinary people, they went to vote and then the next day they got killed. They weren’t political but they got killed because of political reasons. That’s why in my country, everything at a point became political. The government brought politics inside people’s houses and it’s not something you can forget. You have to manage to live within it every day. Even the religion is political, is something that the government puts on you. Even my clothes… it’s something (clothes) that the government puts on people. So yeah.

 

Personally, what are you trying to explore as a filmmaker?

Everything you do in life, you are exploring it and going deeper and deeper. At first it’s a question for yourself, and then it becomes an idea, then it becomes the script, then it becomes the film. But when you go all the way back, it was a question that started it, and you want to put this question clearly in front of the society. That’s why you start to make that film.

For example, Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame— it was a question for me at the beginning: What will happen to these children who are all in front of us? Then I was going and staying with my mother, who was a scriptwriter. Staying in the middle of Afghanistan in Bamiyan city. Then, little by little, I was seeing what was happening and that was the journey you can see in the film. This thing that you see in the film is the journey that I went through and that is the fruit of all the exploration. (The film is the story of a five year old Afghan girl attempting to attend school. It is set in the Bamiyan valley where the statues of the Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.)

 

A scene from Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame:

 

Are you working on anything right now?

I edited a short film of my dad’s and I produced a film for him. But making a film, as I said, is not a business for me. So I don’t make anything unless it touches me. It has to be something that I want to say. There is a pain that I feel and I say, “Oh my god I want to say this, and I know I can say it.” So I’m looking for that pain that I want to show to the world.

 

Iranian cinema has become very prominent in the world. How aware do you think the people of Iran are, generally speaking, of the significance their cinema?

Actually, 30 years ago, before the (Islamic) Revolution, we were making about 70 movies a year. Because of the Hollywood cinema in our country, because of the competition between Iranian cinema and Hollywood cinema, Iranian cinema was losing out, because people wanted to watch those (Hollywood) films. Then, after the Revolution, they banned the Hollywood films. Then Iranian cinema had to make its own films for its own people. So again the industry produced almost 70 films per year. And when the films started going around the world because of the New Wave in Iranian cinema, the poetic realism that was inside them, Iranian cinema won some two thousand awards, one hundred of them being won by just my family. All the Iranian people, they were interested in this even though they weren’t very interested in artistic cinema. They were saying, “Let’s see what we are proud of. Let’s see why we are attracting attention.” So they started watching such films and then they realized, later on, what this cinema was.

 

A lot of these films, including your family’s films, are banned in Iran, or censored. How do you see filmmakers combating that? How do you get those films across to your own people?

Eight years ago, eight films from my family were banned and six years ago all them were banned. Everything. Even our name is banned in Iran. But all our films are in the black market and they are available in the best quality. For example, my last film Green Days, the day it was shown at the Venice Film Festival, on its premiere, I decided to show it on BBC Persia to the Iranian people as a gift, so they could see it at the same time as the world premiere, on BBC Persia. So that’s the other way at this point. And the black market. Because of the people’s interest they go and look for it and find it.

 

A scene from Green Days:

 

Also Read: “I want real people in the films.” Hana’s sister Samira Makhmalbaf on her films, her process, her philosophy and her family.

 

 

filmflam

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filmflam is a monthly column on the most exciting things to do with the movies online: photographs, art, writing, blogs, websites, trailers, films, tutorials, archival material. Our custom-made curation of cinematic coolth.  

 

Of Clouds, Stars and… Holy Ryan Gosling, Batman!

 

There’s a new Meghe Dhaka Tara in town. Alas, Ritwik Ghatak’s masterpiece has not been given the Criterion treatment just yet. Instead, director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee has taken on the life and themes of the great filmmaker and shuffled them into a sort of biopic-via-salute, making lives harder for DVD libraries everywhere by using the name of Ghatak’s best-known film as the title of his own. (Here’s the trailer). The results aren’t exceptional but decidedly thought-provoking: it tries to be I’m Not There but ends up Across The Universe, minus the songs. Either way, big ups to Saswata Chatterjee (yes, Bob Biswas himself) who plays Ritwik compellingly, even though he looks nothing like the iconic master.

 

For more on Ghatak, here’s Ramesh Sharma’s vintage Doordarshan documentary on the director, and here’s an interesting look at the way he shot automobiles in Ajantrik, one of his most compelling films. A few of his other features can be found in full on YouTube, and so it is to you I present — with a request to take the afternoon off, draw the blinds and silence the phone…

 

Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973)

 

Subarnarekha (1965)

 

and, one of my all-time favourite films, Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974)

 

Marvellous.

 

~

 

One of the most overwhelming cinematic experiences I had in a movie theatre this year came with Pacific Rim, a gargantuan summer blockbuster that dwarfed IMAX screens and made me feel as tall—and as thrilled—as when I was knee-high. But then Guillermo del Toro has a knack for reaching elbow-deep into our nightmares and plucking out something particularly squelchy. How did he get that way? This spectacular New Yorker profile attempts to find out, and unearths a man, a little boy and a monstermaker we should all be grateful for.

 

~

 

Speaking of monsters, the most fascinating film-related list I’ve encountered recently (and that includes Stanley Kubrick’s own ranked set of top ten films of all-time) is this jaw-dropping collection of visual effects shots, cherry-picked by men in the trade of razing cities to the ground and making alien eyeballs bounce:

http://www.empireonline.com/features/cinemas-greatest-vfx-shots.

It’s a helluva selection, accompanied by the clips in question, and what stand out most are the surprises: Fritz Lang and Michael Powell make it there along with Ray Harryhausen and Steven Spielberg.

 

~

 

Spielberg, in turn, has famously doomsayed an end for the blockbuster-era, saying that several will come a cropper and that a paradigm shift is in order. His buddy George Lucas, who made movies so popular he made millions off their lunchboxes, agrees. And we’re told Lincoln was “this close” to becoming an HBO series. Here’s that report, but then here’s another fantastic director who doesn’t think Spielberg’s all that brilliant— then again, how many would hold up when compared to Kubrick? Anyway, here’s Terry Gilliam dissing Schindler’s List:

http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/terry_gilliam_on_filmmakers.html

 

~

 

So there’s going to be a new Superman movie, and Batman’s going to be in it. Finally, that logo from I Am Legend can come in handy and the two most-mismatched combatants in history can have a go at each other. Alas, the film is being made by that guttersnipe Zack Snyder, murderer of true believers everywhere. Fan speculation has begun on who should next play Batman with names like the almighty Ryan Gosling being tossed around.
But what will the plot of the new movie be? Snyder might have the massivest Frank Miller boner around, but studios aren’t going to let Superman turn old and get clobbered this soon. If only they’d adapt Andrew Kevin Walker’s Asylum—a script which could be buffed into a truly solid superhero movie; here’s the full script PDF—but that’s just wishful thinking considering it’s coming to us from the makers of Man of Steel. The possibilities of DC Comics’ Big Two mixing it up, however, are manifold and awesome and, most frequently,very very twisted. Hee.

 

Either way, those caped lads need to bring out their A-game. Because, clearly, Iron Man can do everything.

Eye of the Beholder: Anjum Hasan

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A quick Q and A with writer and poet Anjum Hasan.

 

Your first film-related obsession?

Dead Poets Society. A whole film about poetry, wow!

 

One thing you miss about the way in which you saw movies as a child?

The complete immersion. Not being able to tell the difference, and not caring for the difference, between a classic and a tearjerker, a bad film and a good one.

                                        

The worst book to film adaptation?

Lolita. Both the versions. I don’t think it’s possible for film to really capture Humbert Humbert’s poet’s eye or, indeed, his dirty mind!

 

If you were to adapt a film to a book, it would be…

Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. The spiritual trauma of the characters would lend itself excellently to reams of anguished Dostoevskian prose.

 

A sequence/ character/ plot in any of your books that might be inspired by cinema (by the medium itself or a particular film)?

I love the way Guillermo Arriaga writes films (Amores Perros, Babel, 21 Grams)— how unrelated events slowly and ineluctably collide, and how the fates always have the upper hand. I tried his technique in my story ‘Saturday Night’ in my recent short fiction collection Difficult Pleasures.

 

Do you read film reviews? What good are they?

I think Baradwaj Rangan, Pradeep Sebastian and Jai Arjun Singh are excellent film critics whose reviews are always a pleasure to read as of themselves and not just as pointers to which films to watch or avoid.

 

In a movie version of your life who would play you? Who would you have liked to play you?

I would have liked to play myself but I don’t act and, for better or for worse, my life is not a movie!

 

What book of yours could be made into a film?

I think all the fiction. The poems might be harder though there have been attempts to make those into films too.

 

Who would you like it to be directed by?

The documentary filmmaker Nishtha Jain. She’s one of the few film artists around.

 

Who would you cast as who (you could name any or all characters)?

I would leave that to Nishtha. I don’t know anything about casting!

 

One male actor you’ve always loved?

Matti Pellonpää, the deadpan, underdog hero of so many Aki Kaurismäki films.

 

One actress you absolutely adore?

Kajol.

 

What fictional characters would you like to see both of the above play?

Pellonpää as Hamlet. And Kajol as Madame Bovary.

 

One writer whose biopic would definitely be A-Rated?

Hunter S. Thompson.

 

A writer whose biopic you want to see?

Qurratulain Hyder. To see her life on screen would be to rediscover a whole lost aristocratic North Indian world.

 

One non-fiction title that could make for a good film?

William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal. I would love to see how the Delhi looked through Mughal eyes.

 

One thing that the novel can do which a film can’t?

A novel can tell you what a person is thinking and how different that sometimes is from what she is saying.

 

One thing the film can do that a novel can’t?

A film can make you jump out your skin.

 

A film that made you very happy?

Juno. I love talky American films.

 

A film that made you cry?

Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever. And whenever Shah Rukh Khan cries, I cry, no matter how much I’m laughing at myself with the other half of my head.

 

A film you keep re-watching?

David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive.

 

A film you would recommend for its dialogues?

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

 

A film every writer must see?

The Shining— however bad your writer’s block is, it can’t be as bad as this!

 

Your favourite film on writing/ a writer?

An Angel at my Table— about the New Zealander writer Janet Frame.

 

If you ever made a film it would it be…

…a complete flop because I think in words not images.

 

A film script you would like to read?

The Big Lebowski. Another talky American film, perhaps one of the best.

 

A film you wish you had written?

Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana.

 

One underrated film?

Mahesh Bhatt’s Saaransh.

 

One highly rated film that did not work for you?

Love, Sex aur Dhokha.

 

Name one male and one female character from the movies who you could imagine having an interesting conversation with?

The Wizard of Oz, maybe. And Alice in Wonderland!

 

Anjum Hasan is the author of the short fiction collection Difficult Pleasures, the novels Neti, Neti and Lunatic In My Head, as well as the book of poems Street On The Hill. Hasan has published poems, short fiction, essays and reviews in various anthologies and journals. She is also Books Editor at The Caravan, a journal of politics and culture.

Moving Images from the Ghetto

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The story of ‘Chhota Dharavi’ and its unique cinematic culture. 

 

In the early afternoon in Orlem, Malad, a few construction workers are walking home for lunch. Children in white and blue uniforms are on their way back from school. Amidst the regular sounds of traffic one can hear snatches of conversation in Tamil. Along this road are small eateries with giant sizzling griddles set up at their entrances; churning out dosas. Up ahead is a tiny building with a banner announcing it to be Velankanni Church, a replica of the famous basilica of Our Lady of Good Health located in a small town called Vailankanni in the Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu. Along with Hindi and English, the signboards on shops have the squiggly lines of Tamil letters. This street could be anywhere in Tamil Nadu, except it is not. Orlem, Malad, is a small lower middle-class neighbourhood in the Western suburbs of Mumbai. On Google Maps, Orlem is yet another mass of tiny grey squares that the arterial Link Road, linking, as its name suggests, some of Mumbai’s largest suburbs, melts into at some point. Walking along the path that turns off Link Road, the grey clusters reveal themselves to be a densely packed colony with many narrow lanes lined with small shops, and one-room houses stacked one on top of the other.

 

On one such lane stands Mahesh Video Centre, run by 37 year old Mahesh Chelladurai Nader. Approximately 40 years ago, it was set up by his father Jeyaraj Chellaya Nader. Although his family hails from Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu, Mahesh was born and brought up in Orlem. He saw the colony grow from a largely desolate area to the densely packed community that it is today. A new film poster is going up on the outside wall of his theatre. People stop by to see which film is going to play in the evening. The man putting up the poster pats Akshay Kumar’s face into place. Khiladi 786 at 6:30 pm. At his theatre, Mahesh usually screens Hindi and Bhojpuri films to cater to his usual audience: migrant labourers from Uttar Pradesh—or the bhaiyya log as they are called in these parts—who live and work in the area. The theatre is a large room with a six by eight feet projection screen at one end. At a time, an audience of up to 40 people can seat themselves on the two rows of wooden benches in this theater. The wall outside the theatre is plastered with posters of the films playing at various times. “This is the oldest video parlour in the area,” Mahesh claims. Every once in a while, he also screens cricket matches. On these rare occasions, the bhaiyya log and the anna log (the Tamilians) sit in together. A match is on today. India is playing Pakistan in the third match of the One Day International series. Arun Kumar, 22, a young call centre employee and frequent patron of the theatre, stands outside, bored. “They won’t play a film till the match is over,” he says.

 

Kumar walks down to Kishore Stores to buy a cigarette. Standing a mere 20 metres away, Kishore Stores is run by Ravi Raman and his older brother V. S. Ponpandi. The hole in the wall selling tobacco and candy leads into a video parlour of its own. Ponpandi, 55, came from Madurai to Bombay when he was 16. He first worked in a steel company near Borivali station and lived in Kajupada in Borivali East for a while before coming to Orlem. “We heard that our people are here, so we came here.” Ponpandi started Kishore Stores to cater to the settlement’s need for Tamil entertainment. “We thought there is no cable here and our people are here, so we could show them Tamil films.”

 

In a tacit agreement with Mahesh Video Centre, Kishore Stores shows only Tamil films, switching occasionally to a Telugu or Malayalam film when they are running low. But, he says, he never screens new films running in the multiplexes or big theatres. Instead, he waits for the ‘master print’ to come out. In the parlance of video parlours, a ‘master print’ is a legal, non-pirated DVD of a film.

 

Their theatre is a room behind the store. Ravi, 35, manages the store out front and monitors the film playing on the five by six feet screen through a hole in the back of his store. While he claims his theatre can accommodate 50 people, it is a smaller space with around 20 plastic chairs. Appu, 25, a frequent viewer at Kishore Stores, works at a construction site nearby and comes to catch a film whenever he can. When asked if he frequents Mahesh’s video parlour as well, he says: “They (Bollywood) copy everything from us, then why watch them?”

 

Ponpandi of Kishore Stores also helped Padma Theatre set up its business. Padma Theatre is on a parallel street further down the road, a little removed from these two video parlours. The lane leading to it is very narrow, barely allowing for two people to walk side by side. The video parlour is named after the owner Chinna Durai’s wife. The owner’s family rented their business out to a man named Thirumani, 32, a short, stocky man with paan stained lips and a red tilak on his forehead, and went back to their village in Tamil Nadu. Thirumani has been running the theatre for about a year now. At Padma, films are screened in two rooms, each seating 20 to 25 people. It shows both Tamil and Telugu films. With a business-like demeanor, Thirumani insists on shaking hands at the beginning and end of every meeting but when it comes to talking about the running of his business he is wary. “I show only master prints, never the films running in theatres,” he says. “We have to be careful because if they (the multiplexes) hear about it, there will be raids.” He is not as concerned about the legality of his business as he is about riling up the big guys who run multiplexes.

 

***

 

Ravi may have an understanding with Mahesh Video Centre about the kind of films each one runs but he quashes claims that it is older than Kishore Stores, insisting theirs is the oldest video parlour in the area. He remembers how in the early years the area was deserted, like a “jungle”. “From the main road, there was one narrow path that came till here and only one person could walk on it at a time. In the beginning there was nothing here. We would go to the Somwar (Monday) Market near Chincholi Bunder.” Or they would frequent the Tamil stores in Dharavi—Mumbai’s vast and famous slumland that is known for its Tamil ghetto—for masalas, magazines, film DVDs and food. “There was only vada pav in this area. Now there are three to four South (Indian) hotels.” Shops in the area provide for everything Tamil. Kishore Stores alone sells four to five different Tamil magazines. Pointing to the string of plastic packets of a popular South Indian fried snack called murukku in his store, he says, “Now we get everything here.”

 

According to Mahesh, the first group of Tamil migrants came to Orlem around 30 years ago when they were rehabilitated from Sion-Koliwada, a locality that lies on the fringes of Dharavi. They were resettled, says Mahesh, because of “road cutting”, or the construction of a road that would require the partial or complete demolition of their houses, which stood in its way. Once the migrants settled here, the community grew rapidly. While the address on the signboards of the stores read Jay Janta Nagar, Orlem, Appu says the area is also known as ‘Chhota Dharavi’ or ‘Small Dharavi’. “Ask anyone in the area,” he says. “People know this is Chhota Dharavi.” A.M. Kennedy, 42, another Tamil migrant who owns a DVD store on this street, which sells the latest Tamil and Hindi film releases, vehemently disagrees. “That’s not at all right,” he says. “This is Orlem.” Kennedy himself does not live in this cluster but in “an apartment building on the main road”. At least, that’s how he tries to distinguish himself from the inhabitants of the area. Perhaps, for similar reasons, for the fear of being equated with those living or working in slums—at the bottom of the city’s food chain—or for the fear of being viewed as someone who still lives in a ‘ghetto’, Kennedy is adamant about “Orlem” not being called Chhota Dharavi. Yet, his objections notwithstanding, the title seems to have stuck and the analogy is not completely off the mark either. Urban researchers Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, who have worked in Dharavi for several years say that the fishing village of Koliwada is one of the oldest parts of Dharavi, and Tamil migrants were one of the first to settle there. Some of these settlers, twice-migrants now, eventually moved to Orlem.

 

All three video parlour owners insist that their viewership also includes families of the neighbourhood, but their assertions do not check out. Women and children are hardly to be seen in these rooms crowded with men. Since the advent of TV and the internet in the neighbourhood the numbers of those frequenting the video parlours have been considerably reduced. Families in the neighbourhood say they now go to Cinemax, a multiplex that is part of a chain, not far off, to watch movies. The video parlours’ audience comprises mostly labourers like Appu from the nearby construction sites who come to catch a film during their breaks from work, or young men of the neighbourhood like Arun Kumar, who works night shifts at his call centre and has free time during the day. Laxmi, 39, a housewife who lives in a one-room house close by, says that the parlours are “for men” and not family places. Her family watches films on TV or goes out to the multiplexes. A huge Rajinikanth fan, Ravi, despite owning a video parlour, himself goes to PVR Goregaon, another multiplex, to watch the star’s latest films. Muthukumaran, 26, who works the ticket counter at Padma Theatre, watches the films of his favourite actor Vijay at whichever multiplex it is being screened at in the city, sometimes travelling for hours to as far as South Mumbai, the area known as ‘town’, to catch them. The larger-than-life world of Tamil cinema may not bring back memories of their life in Tamil Nadu, but it forges a bond between disparate lives. For most of these migrants, the state is now more an idea of home than home itself. It is this sense of place and identity that they seek to recreate. The video parlours have been an integral part of this recreation of a community— far away from its place of origin.

 

Despite the many years behind them, the struggle for survival now haunts the parlours. Thirumani admits that he can barely make ends meet and is just about managing to pay rent. Ravi insists that dividing the language market between them has meant that his business is not affected by Mahesh’s. But the crowds of people inside and outside Mahesh’s theatre are significantly higher than those at Kishore Stores and Padma Theatre. This is partly due to the vada pav seller and the tea seller who have set up station there, who serve customers on the street and in the theatres. But that is not the only reason. In a bid to survive Mahesh has adapted, creating other avenues to expand and stabilize his business. He has rented out the room next to his ticket counter to let someone run the Rajshree Lottery (an internet-based lottery scheme that is licensed out by the Arunachal Pradesh state government) there. Also, his screenings of cricket matches draw customers who would not usually go to the video parlour to watch films. A few months ago, Mahesh Video Centre switched to paying for non-pirated film prints provided by United Mediaworks (UMW) which seeks to provide small video theatres with legal prints of new releases. When asked why he switched, Mahesh says there was no particular reason. He just wanted to try it. But he is happy about the decision. The difference, he says, is in the quality of the films and also the quicker access he gets to newer films. While earlier he would have to wait a few months for the DVDs of a film, now UMW lets him get his hands on a new film within two weeks of its release. Despite the hike in ticket price, from Rs 10 a ticket to Rs 20, patrons continue to flock to his theatre. The switch has also eased his worries about raids, although he claims he was “never worried in the first place”. The migrants of Orlem are used to living on the edge.

 

TBIP Take

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Ship of Theseus has a marked tendency: denouement by landscape.

 

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

 

The protagonist of the first segment, the photographer Aaliya, finds some sense of content sitting on a bridge over a mountain stream. In the second segment the protagonist, the Jain monk Maitreya, finds the passage to death much harder than he imagined. After nights of suffering and delirium we are signalled his decision to seek medical help (and a greater decision to return to the world) through a screen filled with lush, green fields. The wind passes through the plants and the breath of self-preservation returns to Maitreya. The protagonist of the last segment, stockbroker Navin, is accused by his activist grandmother of deliberately turning his back to the beauty and grief the world can offer. The widening of his horizons are all signalled by landscape: the cramped spaces of a Mumbai slum, the desolation of rural Sweden, the cramped spaces of a Swedish flat filled with young immigrants. When he returns to Bombay, the narrative loops like the ribbons of a Christmas gift and offers us all three protagonists in Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum at a special screening. Aaliya, Maitreya and Navin sit alongside five other organ recipients. They all received their respective organs: eye, kidney and liver from a man who had been an amateur cave explorer. They are now seated to watch some of his footage from the caves. And for the first time (well, almost— the repetitive halo light effect over characters’ heads also was painful), I found myself thinking: Oh no. And indeed a few seconds later we are heading deep into the caves with the shadow of the dead explorer holding up his camera. Denouement by landscape.

 

The landscapes are splendid. One can only feel enormous satisfaction from a screen filled with windmills and Quixote-ish monks in white or the rapid Gandhi-in-old-news-footage speed of Maitreya as he walks through a Bombay so beautiful it makes you feel a little bit drunk. But even the splendid landscapes can’t really disguise the on-the-nose plotting, the too-easy deployment of paradox. The blind photographer gets her vision back but is convinced that her post-op photos are not as good as the ones before. The Jain monk is fighting a case against animal testing in drugs and falls ill. How can he now consume the drugs that will make him better?

 

The last segment—the widening of Navin’s horizons—resists this neatness a bit. He is politically conservative but not a prude. He helps his grandmother pee into a bedpan with brisk efficiency. What makes Navin charge along to help Shankar who had his kidney stolen— particularly after he realizes that the kidney within him is not Shankar’s? Why does he decide to go to Sweden? The film doesn’t tell you and by now you are a tiny bit grateful it doesn’t. (Navin does have a wee bit of that do-the-right-thing going and who is to say when it hits people?) What did baffle me in this segment is the choice of a comic resolution for the other ethical crisis in this film.

 

While the monk and the photographer are given whole sequences to deal with the betrayals of their bodies and minds, the labourer Shankar’s decision to keep the money the white man has offered is easy, quick, a punch line. Navin in Sweden is stumped in his desire to begin a legal crusade on Shankar’s behalf. Navin’s friend Mannu is stuck between the narrow walls of the chawl— doing a close imitation of the Biblical admonishment that a rich man is as likely to enter heaven as a camel is to pass through the eye of the needle. Shankar is a variation of the old, hoary tradition of the comic servant. As Kantaben is ha-ha astonished by the homoerotic antics of the boys of Kal Ho Na Ho, Shankar is ha-ha fed up with middle-class justice. Unlike even P. K. Dubey of Monsoon Wedding who is allowed pensiveness and Delhi skylines, there are no widening, meaning-filled landscapes for Shankar.

 

*****

 

The ‘art objects within art objects’ can often be tricky. You are told that the heroine of the book is a fantastic poet. You read the poem offered and you are embarrassed for the character and the novelist. How can you believe the novelist anymore? When characters in movies are artists I brace myself for embarrassment. Watch out for bad water colours and pulsing Pollocks.

 

First films and student films have a terrible inclination to pick sex workers and artists as their protagonists. What a pleasant surprise then to see in Ship of Theseus the reasonably interesting work Aaliya produces and her actual artistic dilemma: Should I stage my work? If I just press a button to record unstaged life, am I an artist? While not the most tortuous or original of dilemmas, it is still better than the ridiculous simulacrum of artistic lives cinema usually offers. Once I made the mistake of watching Frida with a leftie from Kolkata. The moment when Frida slides with a Salma Hayek slither into Trotsky’s lap was when my friend lost her mind and left the room.

 

This same friend also lost her mind when a visiting software engineer flirtatiously said to her: “Oh, you are studying philosophy? My favourite philosopher is Ayn Rand.” The ‘philosophical discussions’ of Ship of Theseus do have the charming adolescent enthusiasms of an 18-year-old Ayn Rand lover. It is disguised by framing it as conversations between Maitreya and his quasi disciple, the school-boyish lawyer. I decided that the filmmaker’s way of telling us that Maitreya is a truly great man was his forbearance in not swatting at him and saying: “This ain’t moot court, bro.”

 

*****

 

On the subject of Aaliya’s work, Bombay is home to a whole school of blind photographers trained by photographer Partho Bhowmik. Bhowmik was inspired, he told me once, by Evgen Bavcar whose elaborate, costumed and plumed work Aaliya was sure to have liked.

 

From the Land of 5

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Nirupama Dutt recommends Punjabi films you must watch, and tells you why.

 

 

Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan (English title: Alms for a Blind Horse), directed by  Gurvinder Singh and produced by the National Film Development Corporation of India, has proved to be a breakthrough in Punjabi cinema. Released in 2011, this is the first Punjabi film from India to have travelled to several international festivals. It premiered in the ‘Orizzonti’ section at the 68th Venice International Film Festival. It bagged one of the Black Pearl Awards (the $ 50,000 Special Jury Award) at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. It has also been shown also at the 55th BFI (British Film Institute) London Film Festival and the 16th Busan International Film Festival. And it won awards for Best Direction and Best Cinematography at the 59th National Film Awards, as well as the award for the Best Feature Film in Punjabi. Anhey Ghorhey…, based on a 1976 novel by the Jnanpith Award-winning Punjabi novelist Gurdial Singh, is set in a Dalit village near Bathinda. It begins at the point where an old man’s house, on the outskirts of the village, has been demolished to make way for a factory (the landlord, who owns the village plots the contract farmers derive their livelihood from, has sold them to an industrialist). At dawn, the elders of the village, march silently to the spot to offer their condolences. The old man’s son is a cycle-rickshaw puller in a nearby town and is involved in a strike which turns violent. In such a setting, Anhey Ghorhey… follows a day in the life of a family. Through slow and studied camera work (by debutant cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul), stunning compositions, and the portrayal of villagers by non-actors whose weather-beaten faces tell stories of years of suppression—more with silences than with dialogue—the film takes an unbiased look at the struggles of the landlord, and the Dalit labourers in the farms and in the cities. Although it has won much critical acclaim, this was not a film the masses could relate to. Possible reasons for this could be the poor quality of average Punjabi films and also the stark offbeat treatment by Gurvinder, who had acclaimed Indian filmmaker Mani Kaul as a mentor, whom he dedicates the film to.

 

 

 

 

Khamosh Pani (English title: Silent Waters), made in 2003 and directed by Sabiha Sumar, is another offbeat Punjabi film from Pakistan that is a Franco-German production. The film tackles issues like religious fundamentalism as well as the plight of women in Pakistan. Set in 1979, during the dictatorial regime of Zia-ul-Haq, the film tells the story of a widow Ayesha and her son Salim who live in the village of Charkhi, in Pakistan’s Punjab. The peace of the village is shattered by the arrival of two radicals seeking recruits for the jehad and, while many of the village elders are cynical about their cause, they find supporters among the young. Salim is increasingly drawn towards religious bigotry and, despite his mother’s discouragement, joins the fundamentalists. Tensions are further heightened by a state sanctioned visit from Sikh pilgrims which unveils a long-held secret. Yet, despite all its twists and turns, Khamosh Pani refrains from over-dramatization and delves into myriad issues with great subtlety and poignancy. The film contains an excellent performance from Kirron Kher as the protagonist. Khamosh Pani won the Golden Leopard, the top prize at the 56th Locarno International Film Festival held in Switzerland. Also, Kher received the Bronze Leopard for Best Actress.

 

 

 

Marhi Da Deeva (The Last Flicker) was a 1989 film made by Surinder Singh and based on Gurdial Singh’s classic 1964 novel of the same name. This was the first Punjabi novel to feature a Dalit labourer as protagonist. The Dalit protagonist Jagseer’s story is set in the late fifties, the post-Nehruvian phase of independent India, which saw many dreams die. Within a decade of freedom, there was a great deal of disillusionment with the professed model of socialism. Jagseer’s despondency symbolizes the mood of the nation. Hailed as the first Punjabi novel of social realism, widely translated in Indian and foreign languages, Marhi Da Deeva—which literally translates into ‘the lamp at the grave’—remains till date the most discussed and debated work in Punjabi literature. The novelist’s triumph lies in bringing to centre-stage a low-caste oppressed man and telling his story in so humane a manner that it becomes a part of the collective psyche. The film remains faithful to the narrative in the book and forwards its ambitions. The cast includes some well known names like Raj Babbar (who plays the protagonist), Deepti Naval, Parikshit Sahni and Pankaj Kapur in important roles. The film’s music was composed by Mahinderjit Singh. Marhi Da Deeva also received the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Punjabi.

 

 

 

Chann Pardesi, directed by Chitrarth Singh, was a unique Punjabi film released in 1980. Unique, because it won critical acclaim (and the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Punjabi) and was also a commercial success. Unfortunately, the fine standards set by it could not be met by the shaky post-Partition Punjabi film industry. The star cast includes names like Raj Babbar, Om Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Amrish Puri, Rama Vij and Rajni Sharma. The plot of the film, a saga spanning two generations, revolves around recurring Punjabi film themes of love, revenge and separation, culminating in penance, and a final coming together of key characters. Shot in rural Punjab, it had songs set to lilting, folksy music by Surinder Kohli.

 

 

 

Nanak Naam Jahaz Hai is another National Award-winning film directed by Ram Maheshwari and released in 1969. It stars Prithviraj Kapoor, I.S. Johar, Nishi and Vimi. This was the first major Punjabi ‘hit’ in post-independent India. The film is a family drama with an underlying devotional theme. The plot revolves around a family in, a newly independent India, that gets divided and eventually reconciles. Its music, by S. Mohinder, with playback singing by Shamshad Begum, Asha Bhosle, Manna Dey and Mohammad Rafi, is popular to this day. The film has shots of some of the most prominent gurdwaras in India. When the film was released, Punjabi Sikhs were rapturous. They distributed prasad in the cinema halls and women covered their heads on occasion while watching the film. Nanak Naam Jahaz Hai spawned several films in the religious genre, such as Mann Jeete Jag Jeet, Dukh Bhanjan Tera Naam and Nanak Dukhiya Sab Sansar. However, the response to the first remains unbeaten till date.