MOMENT, META-MOMENT AND THE MINIATURE: NAINSUKH, THE ARTIST AND AMIT DUTTA’S FILM
Amrit Gangar _______________ [This is the pre-screening lecture-text given at the Rachana Sansad, College of Architecture, Mumbai, on 24 January 2017.] This is a beautiful moment indeed, beautiful because it connects me with yet another moment not in a distant past, but nonetheless in भूतकाल – in the sense of a past continuous, where भूत , वर्तमान and भविष्य keep coagulating! That was in far away Zurich, in Switzerland, where I had the opportunity to curate an Indian film program under a big umbrella event called Bollywood in Switzerland, which also had an exhibition around it at the city’s Museum of Design. My week-long stay there took me to the Museum Rietberg that has one of the biggest collections of Indian Pahari paintings. In that elegant museum, a graceful moment made me meet its director Dr. Eberhard Fischer, who welcomed me very warmly and took me around. During our conversation he asked me about the young film maker Amit Dutta and whether I knew him. Well, I did knew Amit Dutta. I said. But not very well, from his film institute days; in fact he was still studying at the Film & Television Institute of India in Pune. He also referred to Prof Suresh Chabria, whom I knew very well. He had been Amit’s professor at the FTII, and it was he who had first recommended Amit’s name to Eberhard Fischer to make a film on नैणसुख And how appropriately so – as we see it now! Amit was a brilliant student and undoubtedly promising to be a distinguished film maker. That pre-birth moment of the film नैणसुख (Nainsukh) to now, when she has grown into a 7-year old lady, (in fact over 15 years from the time she was conceived) – this is a momentous occasion for me, to be here, and talking about her. Cinema or cinematography to me is feminine, but she might turn androgynous off and on during my talk. I must thank the management of Rachana Sansad, Prof Rohit Shinkre, the Principal, Prof Gangadharan, my old friend and a comrade-in-cans for giving me this moment. Cinema has lost her Can-Yug, she is now on DCPs, pen drives, blu-rays, links and tubes. I also thank all of you who have gathered here to see an extraordinary film by Amit Dutta. Actually, it is to him that I owe my presence here today. From far away Palampur in the Himalayas, it was Amit who said this to me on the phone that in his absence, he wanted me to talk about the film in whatever manner I wanted to. I must thank him for reposing faith in me. I will also talk about him and his filmosophy in my own way. There is also my constant wrestling with the God of our times, Googleshwara, as he keeps challenging us all the time, while making things already known universally and all across the board, this God has blurred the difference between guru and shishya. But yes, it is a constant battle, particularly for teachers across the world on how to surprise this god and the shishya at the same time. If I am able to surprise you even a little during the course of my talk, I shall feel I haven’t wasted your time. One way, as I humbly believe, is to create or evoke a भाव or भाव जगत, the state of being and its universe, rather than search for meaning, because meanings keep changing and Googleshwara already has a huge museum of meanings for all of us to see. For me, Amit Dutta’s cinematography is an evocative bhava, his is the cinema of feelings, like music or painting, it touches our heart and enduringly so. Any ‘moment’ that endures, is a good moment. Also, any film that endures, is a good film. And any such film, I believe, defies synopsis. Often, I ask students to try and write a synopsis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror. Wanting always to comprehend films through conventional simplistic synopses, they find it impossible to synopsize Mirror. Amit Dutta’s oeuvre is largely synopsis-defying and yet extremely engaging because he is an extraordinary bhāva-sarjak or evocator, both in words and in images and sounds. I will later briefly talk about his recent Hindi novel called Kaljayi Kambakht, which, as Prof. B.N. Goswami has said, is like a दिव्य विमान , a divine aircraft – but more on that later. Invoking a prefix, an = उपसर्ग प्र and its illumination Amit Dutta likes the word प्रक्रिया (prakriya), the process. And that induces me to dwell for a bit on two prefixes – प्र and सं (pra and sam); these miniaturized letters called उपसर्ग and प्रत्यय, if wedded or welded to another word – a verb, a noun or an adjective – have the ability to achieve greater metamorphosis, they have the ability to imbue an expanded meaning – in motion. प्र is an engine. Look, what it does to the word योग (yoga), for instance. प्रयोग (prayoga) to me is a much richer word than the English ‘experiment’. Or what it does to गति (gati), just prefixing गति with प्र and turning it into प्रगति (pragati) pushes the motion forward, making it progressive. In a similar way, it turns simple क्रिया (kriya, performance, activity) into प्रक्रिया (prakriya), which could be both a complex and a forward process. Even in भूमीति (Bhoomiti), in Geometry प्र turns simple मेय (meya, measurable) into a प्रमेय (prameya, a theorem).मेय is also ज्ञेय, meaning discernible. Or what this does to the adjective शांत , it turns it into प्रशांत , which could be, ocean, the world’s largest and deepest ocean, the प्रशांत महासागर, the Pacific Ocean. I believe, Amit Dutta’s cinematography is an invocation to such महासागरú. And you will feel this in his film Nainsukh, as it inaugurates herself. So is the prefix सं (sam). Your own institution, for instance, has it – संसद (samsad or sansad) which is an assembly, a meeting. With Rachana
Infernal Encounters: Streets and Interpretation in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogy
Somak Mukherjee In the middle of 1971, when the city of Calcutta according to official figures were witnessing about 200 political killings a month, Mrinal Sen released Interview in some of the prominent movie theatres in Calcutta for commercial viewing, the most prominent of all: Globe, where it ran for three weeks. There was a private screening exclusively for the press before this, where the response was rather subdued, although some critics were quite intrigued by the novelty of the subject matter and the constant interplay between fact and fiction with a surrealistic treatment of the narrative. Public response, however, was overwhelmingly good. Sen claims in his biography that the admiring audience enthusiastically chased the cinematographer K K Mahajan, who was mobbed and subsequently rescued after begging for help in horror[i]. The film ran successfully for two weeks at Globe, one of the most prominent movie theatres in town. After the third week, with the waning enthusiasm, it was withdrawn. The public opinion too was polarized. Some praised the treatment and cinematography, but it received criticism from some quarters as well for being an “anti-social” film. The story, written by Ashish Burman, centred around a young unemployed man called Ranju and his futile attempts to seek a proper suit for an important job interview in a prestigious British company. Ranju, who comes from a lower middle class family with a widowed mother and a sister already has strong recommendation from a friend of his late father. His prospects of getting the job look very bright in the beginning but it goes downhill from there. When Ranju goes to the laundry shop to collect his prized suit (the only one he has) he finds the shop is shut due to a laundry workers’ indefinite strike. He manages to get another suit but even that one gets stolen on the bus. Finally, desperate Ranju goes appears in front of the stunned interview board ( The scene was shot in the IBM office in Calcutta, the American corporate giant had a vibrant marketing presence in the city even then. The interview board members played themselves, asking questions) wearing dhoti and kurta. In a quirky reference Ray’s classic Pratidwandi (The Adversary) here too a board member asks the protagonist “What is the biggest event of the decade?”. While Siddhartha’s serious and ideologically charged reply in Pratidwandi was “The Vietnam War”, here Ranju answers with a sheepish yet sincere smile “My interview, Sir!”. Ranju did not get the job. But this essay is not an exploration of individual anxieties and their transition into reckless abandon. Rather, I will try to concentrate on the spaces that Sen explores with K. K. Mahajan’s handheld camera roaming in the street of Calcutta inside public vehicles or through narrow lanes with garbage heaped on the side. Our first proper introduction with the protagonist too happens on the street:on a tramcar, to be precise. Tram was Calcutta’s most iconic and identifiable public transport during this era. The introduction was something revolutionary in Indian cinema, both formalistically and narrative wise: combining elements of Brechtian alienation, Cinema Verite style and effortless breaking of the fourth wall by the hero. This is what happens: Clip 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLD2zts6BIs We see that while the protagonist stands in the tram, the camera zooms on a magazine a female passenger is reading, and it displays a photo of Mullick himself. The young passenger recognizes Ranjit, annoying a fellow male passenger. Mullick comes forward, looks directly at the camera and says with a shy smile: “It is all my fault. You must be curious, so let me confess. It is indeed my photo. But I am not a star. By any means. My name is Ranjit Mullick, I live in Bhawanipur, and work for a weekly magazine. I go to the press, correct the proof and do other tasks. I have a very uneventful life, you know? Yet that is precisely what attracted Mrinal Sen..yes, yes, the filmmaker, you know? He said, ‘My camera will just chase right through the day’. (The camera shows Mahajan shooting the scene on the tram). I am not supposed to do anything special. I just have to be myself. I told Mrinal Sen that today is going to be something special. Today I have a chance to get a much better job. He said ‘fine!That would be really dramatic!” Just see how he is chasing me! To make profit exploiting my experience, of course!” After Ranju gets down from the tram the male passenger who was irritated moments ago, exclaims with genuine bemusement “You call it cinema? But it is my story—your story!”, but suddenly this celebration of everydayness is disrupted by sequences of street protests and demonstrations, many of them newsreel footages underscoring Sen’s ideological leaning towards documentary realism in his work. Deepankar Mukhopadhyay in his admirably well researched biography of Sen writes, “ Ranjit’s statement before the camera is the first example of Brechtian alienation in Indian cinema. But Sen has always insisted that he has never been influenced by Brecht, the only modern European dramatist who cast a deep impression on him happened to be Peter Weiss. What stands out in Interview is Sen’s attempt to contrast reality and surrealism”[ii] Now, apart from the obvious metavisual significance what I find most intriguing is not what or how of the action but rather, where it happens. Sen has a lifelong enchantment for a comment by Elio Vitorini, one of the foremost creative Marxists in Europe: The point is not to pocket the truth, but to chase the truth. This seemingly enigmatic statement, I feel, sums up one of the central paradoxes of the contingency of image: that is to say, what counts as an authentic interpretation of experience is often that depiction which is considered to be least vulnerable to the tests of subjectivity. Space and spatial dimension has the revelatory potential of stripping that safe interpretation off and opening it up to the possibilities
Nostalgia For The Light: The FTII Fiasco And A Cinema That Is Lost (1)
Parichay Patra With the appointment of an obscure actor as the director of the most prestigious film school in India, an outrage engulfs social media and the said school erupts into a protest in tandem with a number of other student movements that are going on in different parts of the country.[i] The obscure actor who goes by the name of Gajendra Chauhan happens to be a part of Indian B movie camp, primarily because of his participation in a handful of soft porn belonging to the pre-internet era.[ii] There is an element of moralism at work, a vice from which even the Indian left is not immune, as evident in the Facebook posts on Khuli Khidki (P. Chandrakumar, 1989) and other soft porn ventures involving Chauhan. There are more rational explanations for the outrage available, as Chauhan appeared in the role of the mythical Hindu king Yudhisthira in the well-known Mahabharata TV series (B. R. Chopra Productions, 1988-90). With a Hindutva force in power at the centre and its black shirts on loose,[iii] the appointment of Chauhan as the director has wider political connotations than we can initially assume. Yet there is another, a third explanation circulating on social media, something which has garnered more popular support from the Indian cinephiles than the other two. It talks about the glorious past of the school that once had Ritwik Ghatak as a teacher and produced almost the entire Indian New Wave, barring a few self-taught filmmakers like Mrinal Sen and Govindan Aravindan. As a cinephile, film society activist and a student of cinema, this is the point that troubles me most. Let me elucidate the reasons why I find it problematic. The entire Indian New Wave group that came out of FTII, consisting of Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and John Abraham, used to signify a different age of film production. The setting up of the film institute in Pune, the establishment of a national film archive, state’s encouragement in film society activism[iv]and investment in realizing an arthouse/alternative filmmaking practice are associated with each other as part of a statist project. The statist investment in cinema production created a furore in popular cinema industry, primarily because of the latter’s problematic negotiation(s) with the state. Bombay-based popular industry considered it as a premonition of an imminent nationalization and responded with various substantial changes in film form and aesthetics.[v] As opposed to the popular and middle cinema,[vi] the state-sponsored arthouse gradually secured a place in the wider cultural constellations of the 1970s. Obviously not all of them were state-sponsored,[vii] but the most daringly innovative aesthetes, Kaul and Shahani, were able to make films only because of the statist investment. The nation-state was a Soviet ally back then, and the film school-film society-cultural radicalism-state-sponsored cinema model followed its precedents in the East European nations, with FTII Pune keeping in trends with VGIK (Moscow), FAMU (Prague) and Łódź film school (Warsaw).[viii]The statist investment model itself was a transnational model and filmmakers themselves developed their transnational associations, with Shahani assisting Bresson and taking part in the 1968 uprising in Paris.[ix]As Shahani told me in a telephone conversation, Indian cinema was transnational in their days, it has been reduced to be merely global in the age of Bollywood. Indian New Wave’s liaison with the state began to wane soon with the changing perspective of the state and the evolving economic policies. Film industry journals and popular film magazines featured debates on various problems concerning the economic model of FFC/NFDC. Bharat Rungachary accused Mani Kaul of being more expensive than Manmohan Desai in the pages of Filmfare (Rungachary 1980). Jagdish Parikh, coming from a business management background, introduced corporatized policies during his four year chairmanship of FFC, arousing controversies concerning loan and/or subsidy (Parikh 1980). The final nail to the coffin is the economic liberalization, which resulted in massive changes in popular film forms, state policies, production-distribution-exhibition circuit and a rapid proliferation of the Indian diaspora worldwide, with the global Bollywood being a part of the emerging superpower’s cultural diplomacy. It is also simultaneous with the meteoric rise of the Hindu Right. The last major interview of Kumar Shahani that I could locate in the NFAI archive shows how sad Shahani was to find that none of his students can make films because of the unavailability of state-funding (Shahani 1992). Incidentally, but not coincidentally, the interview was published on 6 December 1992, a historic day in the history of modern India. Coming back to the present, what I want to consider as a problematic is the referencing of the New Wave, the nostalgia for a lost cinema in popular parlance. It is quite clear that a non-entity like Gajendra Chauhan should not be appointed as the FTII director, it defies the economic logic behind a film school that works as a supply-line for Bollywood. Hindi popular cinema generates a huge amount of revenue for the state and the state spends a miniscule part of it to subsidize film education. We wonder whether the Modi administration is going to represent itself as an incompetent one, one that fails to realize the significance of FTII in the domain of one of India’s largest industries. Modi’s affiliation to the PRC model of capitalism sounds hollow, PRC would never have appointed someone like Chauhan in Beijing Film Academy, a school that produced all the major fifth and sixth generation Chinese auteurs. But the economic logic hardly features in popular discussions on the FTII fiasco, it revolves around the binary of an art cinema of Ghatak/Kaul/Shahani pitted against the B movie of a Chauhan. Jeffrey Sconce, citing Pierre Bourdieu’s influential critique on taste preference and class privilege, considered B movies and cult films as ‘paracinema’ (Sconce 1995). The subjective and impressionistic judgement on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ cinema involves wider critical debate.[x] So the outrage over Chauhan’s inadequacy for being a B movie actor cannot avoid the risk of being elitist, especially since there are reasons more valid to oppose
Textile Strikes and the Dialectical Montage: Looking at Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai?
Mantra Mukim In one of the early scenes in the film, Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyun Aata hain?, we see Albert Pinto entering his house, and demanding a cup of tea. A harmless demand otherwise, becomes the first moment in the film where Albert voices his distrust of union politics, a distrust that sets his tea above and against his father’s association with the mill workers’ strike. Also present in the same scene, his father tries to justify the strike to his wife by pointing at inflation and low-wages. However ‘Strike-vrike’, as Albert brands it, makes it an event of complete banality which should not be seen as either radical or favorable. A garage-mechanic by profession, he cites his own non-participation in the strike at the workplace as a source of his upward mobility, which for him stands for knowing his upper-class clients by their first-names. As illusory as it sounds, the naivety with which Albert embraces it, is what drives his anger for the better half of the film. This obstinate anger is aimed at severing his class-affinities, his slice of reality. But before one tries to house Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s 1980 film, in the political context of Mill strikes, one needs to grapple with the complex history of the protest itself. H van Wersch’s work on the Bombay Textile Strike of 1982, is possibly one of the most comprehensive book on the subject. The lack of scholarly or artistic interest in the area contrasts sharply with other strikes like the miner’s strike in England (1984-5) which has already produced a vast body of literature. Thus, Mirza’s film, exploring what Marx would have called the ‘historical present’, adds to an otherwise unattended historiography of worker’s movement in India. And it is in order to contain this history that the film employs radically new techniques, like the montage and the vaudeville, something that I will discuss eventually. Anand Patwardhan’s twenty-two minute documentary Occupation and a recent feature film, City of Gold, are the other two representative ventures towards the Textile strikes. Textile Industry and its problems are almost as old as Bombay, or rather the city’s industrialized form. Under the aegis of the British East India Company, attempts were made to set up textile industry in Bombay but the initiative failed as it was impossible to induce a sufficient number of weavers to settle in Bombay which had not much to offer beyond swamps and stretches of marshy land. It was only after Surat lost the war to the Marathas in 1759, that Bombay became economically important. When the industries finally started to appear, in early nineteenth-century, Parsee Nanabhoy Davar set up the city’s first textile mill calling it Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company (1856).1 A far cry from this is the early Nineteen-eighties, where around two-fifty thousand workers went on strike demanding bonuses and better working conditions. Regarded as one of the largest industrial strikes in world history, this effort obviously had behind itself years of planned unionization and politics. ‘Meeting zyada, Kaam kam’, is the taunt used by an anxious manager in the film. The textile strike that rocked the trade union world in the eighties was for the workers an outcome of their pent up frustrations. Mirza too has to briefly work with the interview mode, in order to lay out the conditions that occasion the strike, and thus the film. These inter-generic moments are not rare in his cinema, Saleem Langde Par Mat Ro, a 1989 film, is a case in point. Nevertheless the film remains incomplete in its understanding of union politics. It shies away from the fissures that grip the union system itself. The performance of RMMS (Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh) has been mentioned time and again as one of the root causes of the strike. The RMMS became the sole representative of the textile workers under the Bombay Industrial Relations Act (BIR) dating back to 1946, a position it enjoyed due to the weakening of the communist union during the war. Congress’ role in the national independence struggle helped it to gain a certain monopoly as far as worker’s support was concerned. However, RMMS’s excessively formal structure gave way to a more aggressive, and unfortunately more individualist, unions like MGKU (Maharashtra General Kamgar Union), headed by Datta Samant. When textile workers struck work for a day in September 1981 there was no indication that this event, bearing the characteristic of a ritual, would in due time turn into the biggest strike the Indian subcontinent has ever witnessed. It is officially acknowledged that the textile strike lasted 18.5 months, or involved more than the 2.5 lakh textile workers. Albert Pinto came almost a year before the big strike, and thus it is just the ritualistic element of the strike that Albert is aware of, and that is what supposedly makes it unworthy of his attention. While workers around him, like his father, are registering their dissent, both by using RMMS and against it, Albert is content with the imported cars that he can borrow from the garage. Borrowed cars in his case also imply a borrowed voice. So not unlike the cars, Pinto uncritically borrows the vocabulary and cadence of the actual owners who, not surprisingly, belong to the class his father’s fighting against. The reason why the owners strike an easy relationship with Albert is that in him they find a suitable surrogate for their economic and moral ideals. The conversation that Mr. Briganza and Pinto share (at 58:00 to 60:00), tells us how Pinto is caught in an imitative act, where anger is the only a suitable medium for him, to float his anti-political stand and at the same time dominate Stella. As Wersch highlights in his book, the agitation was for proper bonus settlement and as before the prevailing expectation was that the unrest would subside after some positive result was achieved. But what changed in 1982 was Datta Samant, who declared that the fight would not just be for